Archives for 2014

Is Obama like Lincoln?

Is Obama similar to Abe Lincoln?

lincoln-obama

If Obama comes out with an executive order to help a marginalized and highly oppressed portion of our society gain legal status to live in the US, then, yes, he will be.

On January 1, 1863 Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order to free Slaves in Confederate held lands. It did not free all the slaves.  This executive order was issued without Congress voting on it, and gave slaves the right to create their own destinies, free from the fear that they could be captured and returned to previous owners.

The people who wanted the white man to always have dominion over the inferior black man, were very hateful and vocal about their anger over this issue. So much so that Lincoln would later be killed by one such person.

This is very similar to what Obama will be introducing in the next few days. His executive order is expected to give some 5 million undocumented immigrants (not all of them) permission to live within our borders without fear of being captured and sent back to their former country.

Let us also not forget that Abe Lincoln was a Republican, which should make the loud, hateful Republicans pause, but of course, it does not. Anything that Barack Obama wants, these guys want the opposite–even if it’s in their own best interest. Their hate can  be read in every immigration article’s comment section online.

So let’s hope our  Conservative lawmakers and their supporters don’t get their panties in a bunch over what will inevitably be another step in our country’s racial evolution. History truly does repeat itself. This has already happened, and it is happening again.

Get over it.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez- the Children’s Champion

Thank God for Senators like Luis Gutierrez.

Not many people have come to champion the needs of children, as they do not vote, so the political capital one would spend on such an endeavor could be seen to weaken their standing among peers. But that matters not for people like Rep. Gutierrez. He came to the Senate with love in his heart and a gleam in his eye that says, “I will stand for those who cannot defend themselves, and anyone who picks on children, especially an hour before going on recess when no defense could even be fielded, is a coward.”

The Republican base has spoken on how it intends to deal with DREAMers, the children caught between their illegal status and their desire to do the right thing; they choose to vilify them.

This is like calling a rape victim the criminal, or a robbery victim an outlaw. These things do not make sense to a logical person, but hate, the real kind of hate, the kind that knows not how to discriminate between right and wrong because of a preconceived  idea of what type of person is allowed to be right or wrong, this kind of hate has no logic and therefore cannot be reasoned with.

So it should go without saying this type of hater needs to be removed from places of influence.

When the Catholic priests began getting complaints that certain ministers were using their position of influence to victimize children, at first the church pretended not to hear the call, after all, children cannot be reliable witnesses and can therefore be ignored. It was only years later, when the few victims turned into seas of angry young men and women who had been victimized, not just by the priests, but by the church itself for turning a blind eye on their plight, they could not avoid responding in the way they should have so many years before.

This is the way it is today, as millions of children are being victimized by the society that should be looking out for them, protecting them, and giving them every opportunity to make their circumstances right. This, unfortunately, is not happening, and we continue to elect those who will demonize the children who where brought here in their youth, and many, who know only this country. The responsibility for the victimization can now only fall onto us, the American voter, for we are not only keeping those high priests of our legal system in power, but actually electing even more of them.

So when we hear from heros like Rep. Gutierrez, we need to stand up and say, “we are with you.” and heed his call, back up his position and give him the political capitol it takes to protect those child victims. Without men like Gutierrez,  I fear for all children the of the world.

No Illeagles

Anderson Cooper says it all in this very short video about how highly uneducated people probably shouldn’t weigh in on important topics, especially ones they can’t even spell correctly.

In a World. . . where Republicans rule supreme.

Where Democrats don’t have much say in government and are left to sit on the sidelines and complain about what could have been.

 

A young man gets shot by someone who bought a gun and some ammo at recent gun show and robbed him of his cell phone and wallet. The hospital bill is in the tens of thousands of dollars, even though he was released that same day, because the Affordable Health Care Act was repealed and Medicare has been gutted to barely care for some of the necessities of senior citizens who cannot afford their own private medical insurance.

He goes home and fixes the same thing he eats every day—Ramen noodles. Sometimes, for a special occasion, he will add a few Ketchup packets he boosts from the fast food restaurant he started working at, ever since all the immigrants got deported, creating a vacuum in the economy and causing chain layoffs as companies lost people who could afford their products. Job choices are slim since many other college graduates have flooded the foodservice, hospitality, homecare and other menial job markets.

This bright, intelligent, 26 year old man is thinking it might not be too late to join the military, the only healthy industry left after the Republican dominated government cut all the “parasitic social services” in order to create tax breaks for the rich and reduce spending to balance the budget, not to mention motivate those people “addicted to government subsidies.” Balancing the budget was supposed to be the main goal, but with all the other problems with the economy and the new wars breaking out with the Russians, Chinese, Chechens, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians, Afghans and those pesky Pakistanis. America understands it’s hard to think about the budget at times like these, so they will wait until times are better and they can afford to focus on such things. Until then they will support an ever growing military budget and still find room to blame our overspending on the few remaining social programs that are struggling for survival.

A woman he met at a party a few weeks ago comes to his home and informs him she’s pregnant, having lost any access to birth control services she previously used, and since abortion is outlawed, they must have the baby. They both struggle to figure out how they are going to be able to support their child, let alone each other.

The day is not a total loss as they are both invited to a going away party for two of the young woman’s gay friends who are leaving for Europe, where Gay relationships are not so harshly punished and they will even be able to get married and enjoy family benefits. They are both excited at the prospect of possibly scoring some food at the party, or at least a few beers.

At the party, the main discussion makes its way to the usual topic of late; life in America and how it changed so much in just a few years.

With his wallet gone, he’s without a license, so he won’t be able to vote in next week’s elections. Everyone at the party agrees they would vote for someone other than a Republican, except they keep producing these great video promos that play all the time and really convince everybody that things will get better and we, as a society, are returning to a better, more “pure” America, just like in the good ol’ days.

Everyone can hardly wait.

Berlin Wall vs American border wall

Here are some examples of how similar the Berlin Wall is strikingly similar to our American border fence with Mexico.

Caution: contains some graphic images

 

 

An American Iron Curtain

We are creating an American Iron Curtain

US Mexico border fence with barbed wire

When I was a boy growing up in the sixties and seventies, the only places we got our news was radio, TV & the newspaper. Being young, I wasn’t much on reading because I was having a difficult time learning the language. English is not the easiest language in the world to learn. Some of the rules still don’t make much sense, so, as a kid, I mainly just stuck with TV, and even then I wasn’t much interested in the news. Grown-up TV was scary.

The John F. Kennedy assassination, then the Bobby Kennedy assasination, Martin Luther King & Malcolm X murdered too, the Vietnam war, Watergate, the civil rights riots, the Black Painters.

And that was just in this country.

The news coming out of Russia was even scarier. People who disagreed with the government disappeared, the KGB was out to get everyone, The Gulag or forced labor and torture camps sounded like hell on earth,  their highly censored media, and severely restricted travel and career paths. Our freedoms were as countless as the stars at night and you could thank heaven for growing up in this wonderful country.

For a long time (all throughout the Cold War) it seemed as if our whole national identity revolved around how superior we were to the Soviet Union, the number 2 world power at the time. We compared ourselves to Russia in almost everything: who had the most gold medals in the olympics, the first man in space, the first satellite in orbit, the first man on the moon, the most nuclear weapons. . . and of course, we compared our cultures; we had freedom– they didn’t.

In America, you could go anywhere you wish, freely, and without restriction.  In the USSR,  you needed travel papers before leaving your state, or entering another. In the USSR if you were born into a farmer’s family, you would grow up to be a farmer too. In America you could grow up to be whatever you wanted to be.

In America our society thrived on diversity. We imported some of the best minds from around the globe and became a super power because of it. In the USSR their lack of diversity, and their rigid control of everything, kept growth, innovation, and prosperity to a minimum.

berlinwall

In the USSR there were very scary structures like the Berlin wall, that symbolized their leader’s fear of freedom and transparency.

This wall served two physical purposes:

  1. To keep their own people in,
  2. To keep meddling westerners and their ideas out.

The wall had social, emotional, psychological and philosophical effects on those living on both sides of the border too. Families were separated, many people were unable to return to their jobs or their homes, and the desire to leave grew more intense for those who found themselves trapped within.

In the USA we can come and go as we see fit. The world is our playground.

iron-curtain-europeIn the sixties and seventies we were told, in school and in the news, that people trying to get in or out through the Berlin wall were shot and killed by guards in towers. They had bright search lights to find people trying to get in or out in the dark of night. The images we were shown were cold and loveless and this wall, as well as all the other walls set up to segregate the west from the USSR, were given a cold and loveless name, “The Iron Curtain.” Just the sound of it coming out of the TV was enough to create nightmares in your dark and silent room at night. This was definitely something we would never do to our people.  This wall was evil, and so were the controlling ideologies behind it.

It was something that should be stopped.

Growing up in the USA may have given me a slightly biased point of view regarding much of what we were told and shown, but many of the facts were quite visible; such as the Berlin Wall itself, its guard towers, search lights, and armed guards, barbed wire, dogs, minefields. A lot of thought, time, energy and money went into the creating and maintaining of this security system.

Today I find the news equally as disturbing as when I was a child. Millions of Americans are living nightmares that we are creating for ourselves. We are building a fence between our country and Mexico for many of the same reasons the Russians did in East Germany and all along the Soviet Union’s borders with NATO countries. Today we are deploying more than just armed border agents, some dogs and a big fence. We also have ground sensors, spotlights, double walls separated by many yards of open space, barbed wire, and even drones. There is talk of sending the National Guard to the border. The techniques of the past with the weapons of today.

We are spending more per year on border security than in any other single government agency. We aim to keep people out of our more prosperous nation and protect ourselves from the percieved negative influences of Mexico and beyond.

us-iron-curtain

We, too, are dividing families and communities that once moved freely back and forth from Mexico to the US and back again. Many migrant workers who used to come north during harvest season and go back home to Mexico when the harvesting is done, are now forced to either stay here in the US for fear of not being able to return to work when the picking seasons start up again, or stay in Mexico and search for new places to live and new means of sustaining the family.

Going back to the early sixties and seventies and the Berlin wall, even with all of the money and effort and labor that went into that fortification, it was far from 100% effective. It is said there were around 2,000 people who escaped through the wall. There were always people looking for ways to get something in, or smuggle something out. It is estimated that around 200 people were killed trying to escape.

So far, aside from the anonymous postings of hateful cowards, few people have publicly said they were in favor of shooting people trying to immigrate to the United States like they did in Germany and in various other countries in the Soviet bloc. “Joe the Plumber”  is a notable exception, and some so-called Patriots on the Mexico-American border. Herman Cain spoke of electrifying the border fence, but he quickly back-pedaled when called on it.

Someone should tell Joe, Herman, and all those “Patriot” nuts at the border that the Berlin wall has come down. It was viewed as a testament to the failure of Communism as well as the relentless attraction of Democracy, a sign that all men seek freedom and self-determination as a meaningful and important part of human nature that cannot be separated from us by any man made object.

President Ronald Reagan gave a speech shortly before the wall was taken down. He criticized the wall and pushed for its destruction. In that speech was a simple philosophy behind such idea:

“We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.”

6/12/87 President Ronald Reagan

That would also mean it would be analogous to say prohibiting human liberty would be anathema to world peace, too.

Are the anti-immigration reform people opposed to World Peace, because a good part of their platform doesn’t seem to support that idea very much.

The old Soviet Union is far from the only country that tried and failed to overly control it’s citizens. There are many other examples of a failed fortified stance against immigration/emigration.

Every day there are news reports of security breaches in the Israel-Gaza wall, the Egypt-Gaza wall, and once in a while someone infiltrates or escapes from North Korea.

No wall ever built has been 100% effective at keeping people in or out.

berlin-wall-soldier

The great wall of China, arguably the largest, longest living, and most expensive border security barrier ever built, failed to keep many invaders out. It is a living testament for the entire world that erecting barriers to keep people out of one area or another does not work, and it stands as proof positive that you can spend all the money you want and take centuries to build something, but you still won’t prevent the entry of people who are determined to get in. Not even the walls and moats surrounding relatively tiny pieces of real estate, such as castles and forts kept people out who were highly motivated to get in. We have tried for aeons to fence things off and keep people out or keep them in. Prisons have escapees. Alcatraz was hugely successful, having a strong current and  hundreds of yards of bay surrounding their fences and guard towers, yet a few people escaped from there too.

Even if we were to figure out how to build an Alcatraz like system all along the 2000 miles of border between the US and Mexico, and even if we had the money to build it, that is not the only access point that is vulnerable to people wanting in or out of our country. We have airports, shipping ports, thousands of miles of coastlands, as well as our border to the north with Canada, and our Hawaiian Islands as well as the thousands of Islands in and around our country. It would take generations of Americans working full-time and many trillions of tax dollars to fortify all of our access points. It would take untold billions of dollars to install security systems capable of monitoring every person’s movement, and billions to install devices on each citizen or visitor within our country to ensure they have a right to be here.

Which brings up a very important question: What would a 100% secure America look like? Prison? East Germany? The Gaza strip? Israel? Would you want your children to grow up in a place like this? Would you want to live in even a colorful, sunshiny prison? Where would we vacation, on a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by high fences with concertina wire and armed guards in towers with spotlights at night?

If the old USSR isn’t a good enough reminder for us that isolation is a nation killer, we will surely follow in their footsteps, walling off our nation and isolating ourselves from much of the outside world, stifling innovation, killing our economy and relegating us to the land “formerly known as the USA.” We will have to watch as a new super power emerges to lead us into the 21st or 22nd century.

Is this the legacy we want to leave behind?

us-medico-border-barbed-wire

Do we want to be known as the generation that lead to the end of our status as the leader of the free world?

If you would like to prevent this from happening, please enter your email address and become a part of the movement that seeks to end this un-American ideal. Join me and the thousands of other people working to ensure we leave a healthy, vibrant country to our children and grandchildren. They will thank us for it.

 

“Doing nothing” is not a political strategy- it’s a STRIKE

When the Republicans take on the position that doing nothing is the way to proceed on immigration, I have to think it’s not a political strategy, it’s more like a strike.

When workers walk out on a job and refuse to do any work until certain terms are met, that is called a strike–look it up–yet this is the strategy the Republicans are taking on immigration reform. Their terms? They didn’t say, but according to the Conservative Read, Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, said there’s:

“overwhelming support for doing nothing this year.”

gop-strike2

That’s it. According to the huge amount of press this has garnered, the Republicans are not going to move on immigration reform “this year” because:

  • Obama can’t be trusted to enforce whatever laws they do come up with.
  • This is not a good time to do this right now, with mid-term elections coming up.
  • If immigrants got to vote, they would vote Democratic because the Republicans have done such a great job of alienating immigrants, they would lose any hope for a presidential hopeful for years.
  • The Tea Party would have a fit and call for the removal of any Republican that helped get this problem resolved.

None of the above have anything to do with the American people or the problem of having 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the country. American citizens and the undocumented immigrants are the ones who suffer and pay the price for this problem, lingering year after year. We are also the ones who pay the lawmaker’s salaries and who give them their jobs.

I think they’ve forgotten who they work for.

Refusing to pass legislation because they are afraid the president won’t enforce the law has got to have their  head examined. The Obama administration has deported more people than any other president in history, including the all past Republican presidents.

That’s not enforcement?

The argument that this is not the right time to bring up this subject is absurd. When is it EVER a great time to bring up this issue? Immigration reform is a polarizing and highly contentious topic, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be put off until later, it should mean it needs to be dealt with as soon as possible.

Immigrants voting is just a fact of life.

“Every month fifty thousand hispanics turn 18 and become eligible to vote.”

This should be the motivating factor to champion this issue, not aggravate it.

The problem seems to be that the Republicans fear the Tea Party because they are a very vocal and active group.

What would happen if WE became very vocal and active?

What would happen if WE bombarded their phone lines and filled up their email boxes with angry messages telling them if they didn’t get back to work, they wouldn’t have a job when their seat came up for election?

If it works for the Tea Party, it should work for us.

Click on this link for your congressman’s contact info and let them know what YOU want from them.

It really is up to you, if you want it to be. Or, you could just sit by the sidelines and watch as others get their way.

Congress– lead or get out of the way

Merriam Webster defines leadership as:

: a position as a leader of a group, organization, etc.

: the time when a person holds the position of leader

: the power or ability to lead other people

 Taken into the context of our US Congress today, we can see the definition to be true as a POSITION, meaning, they do hold that position, and the TIME, they are our leaders today, and the POWER, they do have to power to enact laws and to fix our societies problems. We elected them to do just that, so they do have the power to do so. The ABILITY is the only thing in question at the moment. So far this congress has been the most useless bunch of humans ever gathered at Washington to date. If they have the ability to lead, they are not proving it to anyone.

The definition goes on to say:

Full Definition of LEADERSHIP

:  the office or position of a leader
:  capacity to lead
:  leaders <the party leadership>

 

Here again we see the OFFICE or POSITION to be true. Our Congressmen are in a position of leadership by virtue of having been elected to that office by the people.

The CAPACITY to lead is baffling. I assume you cannot be a leader if you don’t have the capacity to lead, but with the lack of action calls this capacity into question. How can you prove a capacity if you don’t do anything?

Which gets us to the ACT or an INSTANCE of leading. Here we see our Congressmen are clearly striking out, failing to act on immigration for the umpteenth year in a row, failing to enact the DREAM Act even though half of the committee were Republicans and half were Democrats. You would have thought that if the committee could reach a consensus, they could have convinced their party to the merits of why they came up with the proposal they did. Instead, the Democrats voted for it to pass the Senate, but the Republicans refused to bring the bill to the floor and the lawmakers that were a part of the committee that created it were suddenly off the radar. Silent. It appeared they were in hiding.

The last definition only restates the name and doesn’t do anything to define the term beyond what the first one did.

So there we have it, by definition, Congress are leaders in name and position and potential power only. They have NOT shown any action that would define them as leaders in the true sense of the word.

And Democrats– Just because you presented the House with a bill, that doesn’t mean you can just sit back and say, “look, we gave them a bill and they are doing nothing with it. Waaaaaah!”  Where is your LEADERSHIP? Why aren’t you screaming bloody murder for all the hard work you put into the bill is going to waste? Why aren’t you putting pressure on the GOP to get off their asses and do something? Democrats may not be evil, but they sure are pathetic.

Leaders who do nothing. What kind of leadership is that?

Rick Perry– Immigration Zero

Texas Governor Rick Perry is sending the National Guard to help stop refugee children from reaching our borders.

So, let me get this straight, he’s using an army of 1000 National Guard troops to stop little children who are escaping drugs, gangs, exploitation and death, and sending them back to the horror they are escaping. And he’d like to rewrite a law that allows them to come here–a law approved and passed by a Republican president.

So this makes him a good person? How? What on earth could be going through is mind?

Would he like to stand there and slap every little kid in the face for even thinking about coming here and escaping death too?

How far can the Republican party sink?

And the Democrats. . .

Where are the screaming and energized politicians voicing their strong opposition, ridiculing them for such poor judgement? Silent too eh? With leaders like these, America is in a world of shit. What more can be said?

At least Nancy Pelocy has the cajones to stand up against this ugly threat.

Jon Stewart- Immigration Hero

Jon Stewart puts the child immigrant crisis into perspective like only a comedian can. Too bad our politicians don’t understand the problem half as well.