COINTELPRO 2.0

"Any people that would give up liberty for a little temporary safety deserves neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin

This blog is a response to the blog entitled "Fear and Distraction > Truth and Transparency" by a Texans Gov't blog. In short the post highlights a history in America of the government using a tragedy to push an agenda on to a sometimes eager population. Increasingly governments cite "national security" as reason to not tell its citizen what they deserve to know. Highlighted by the mention of the Stock Act, Patriot Act and Executive Order 9066 we should be warning ourselves about what Congress will attempt to pass to make us safer in their eyes in the wake of the Boston bombings. Just yesterday (5-10-13) I was watching C-SPAN and the House was having a hearing about national security in terms of the Boston bombings and in what ways they can be better prepared for this type of acts of terrorism. Repeatedly it was suggested that the FBI and Homeland Security should have done something or looked into one of the brothers for having visited his home country in 2011. This may sound harmless in the wake of the bombings but the government already listens to our phone calls, monitors our internet, and text messages. There will never be way to stop terrorism, it is not possible. The closest the government can come to stopping terrorism is by increasingly limiting the rights of people that live within its borders. Do we really need more laws after Boston? Is it not already illegal to kill people or to use bombs on people? This blog post has wonderfully illustrated the unfortunate history of a government that has enacted laws that were not successful and merely inconvenienced our citizen

Rhetoric vs. Reality

“Debt is one person’s liability, but another person’s asset.” – Paul Krugman

                USA Today’s Columnist Duncan Black makes the case in his piece “Unemployment, Not Deficit, Hurting the Economy” that what is truly hurting the economy is not the debt but, the slow rate at which the U.S. is moving back to full employment. He makes these claims in the face of the so-called “deficit hawks” whom believe that our only path back to economic prosperity is by way of deficit reduction, either through spending cuts or revenue increases (depending on which ideologue pundit is asked). Anyone that watches any given news network whether it be Fox News, Msnbc, or Cnn is sure to hear that high unemployment is a problem in this country. However, more likely than not, these news programs convey that the national debt is a much more pressing issue.

                In his editorial, Black highlights one significant contradiction in terms of congressional rhetoric versus action. The “deficit hawks” when presented with the opportunity to cut spending dramatically, thereby reducing the deficit, tend to back-off and claim they are actually against spending cuts and furthermore blame the opposition party for the impending cuts. Twice now, with respects to the “FiscalCliff” and “The Sequester”, both parties have decried these dramatic spending cuts and tax increases that would ultimately reduce the nation’s debt in a significant way. Black, as a liberal, is in favor of congress’ new found opposition to austerity. In fact, he seems to have joined the ranks of many economists and financial institutes that have proclaimed our nation’s biggest problem is unemployment and the best way to combat this problem is through government spending and investment. This thought process might seem counter-intuitive to anyone that watches the mainstream media but, rest assured it is backed up by a mountain of evidence (One of the more vocal proponents of government spendingis Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman who best explains this seemingly counter-intuitive assertion).

                Black’s entire editorial is an open ended question posed to the congressional “deficit hawks”. He wants to know why their actions don’t match the rhetoric. I personally align myself with the proponents of more government spending. As a student of economics I have come to discover that economics is merely the study of thousands of real time experiments conducted on both a local and global scale. There is much evidence that suggests the best way to get out of a recession is by way of government spending. As evidence to this hypothesis, I cite our nation’s spending during the Great Depression, our minor recessions since, and also the austerity Europe and the UK have implemented that has caused those country’s economies to face a double dip recession. In a world where my spending is your income and your spending is my income, how can we possibly save to prosperity?

Nothing Human is Alien to Me

“Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.” - Christopher Hitchens


This is an article called "House Republicans debate legal status for immigrants" found in the LA TIMES about a hot button issue that I hold particularly dear to myself. The House which is ruled by a large republican majority is beginning to discuss a way to fix our immigration problem. 11 million undocumented workers are estimated to live in The United States. It has been a problem hotly debated for over 30 years. The Republican Party's platform for a long time has been one of "self-deportation" ( making conditions in The United States so unbearable for undocumented people that they leave) constructing fencing, and deporting all undocumented immigrants. It is safe to say they are not the party of immigration. The Democratic Party has by large voiced their support for facilitating immigration to The United States. However, even when democrats have held the presidency and both the house and the senate not much has been done for immigration (In fact President Obama's administration has increased the number of deportations). This inaction on real policy is failure to the millions of people that call this country home yet are forced to live in secrecy. Unfortunately it seems that The Republican Party, whom lost the previous election with horrible latino support, seems to have realized that the players of the game have changed and will continue to change with demographics leading to a much larger latino population in the future. It would seem the republicans covet the latino vote rather than being true believers of facilitating immigration to this country. However, as previously stated, The United States has been very inactive in bringing about real change on this front. I suppose every day is a new day but, you won't catch me holding my breathe.