It’s being called the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in the country. A bill requiring police to determine if a person is in the U.S. legally is expected to be signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.
Immigration advocate Isabel Garcia says the bill “legalizes racial profiling.” The author of the bill, state Senator Russell Pearce, says illegal is not a race – it’s a crime. Under the bill, police would be required to question anyone they suspect of being undocumented. The bill also targets those who hire illegal immigrant day laborers or knowingly transport them. Immigration advocates fear the Arizona legislation will set a precedent for other states.
I’m not sure whether it is a coincidence, an orchestrated campaign, or a meme that is gaining traction, but three sobering commentaries on America‘s diminishing fortunes have popped up over the past few days:
The United States government is effectively bankrupt. Washington no longer can afford to micromanage the world. International social engineering is a dubious venture under the best of circumstances. It is folly to attempt while drowning in red ink.
Traditional military threats against America have largely disappeared. There’s no more SovietUnion and Warsaw Pact, Maoist China is distant history and Washington is allied with virtually every industrialized state. As Colin Powell famously put it while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs: “I’m running out of enemies. . . . I’m down to Kim Il-Sung and Castro.” However, the United States continues to act as the globe’s 911 number.
Unfortunately, a hyperactive foreign policy requires a big military. America accounts for roughly half of global military outlays. In real terms Washington spends more on “defense” today than it during the Cold War, Korean War and Vietnam War.
U.S. military expenditures are extraordinary by any measure. My Cato Institute colleagues Chris Preble and Charles Zakaib recently compared American and European military outlays. U.S. expenditures have been trending upward and now approach five percent of GDP. In contrast, European outlays have consistently fallen as a percentage of GDP, to an average of less than two percent.
The difference is even starker when comparing per capita GDP military expenditures. The U.S. is around $2,200. Most European states fall well below $1,000. Adding in non-Pentagon defense spending—Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Department of Energy (nuclear weapons)—yields American military outlays of $835.1 billion in 2008, which represented 5.9 percent of GDP and $2,700 per capita.
Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations worries that the increased financial obligations (forget unrealistic estimates about cutting the deficit) resulting from health-care legislation will preclude maintaining such oversize expenditures in the future, thereby threatening America’s “global standing.” He asks: Who will “police the sea lanes, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combat terrorism, respond to genocide and other unconscionable human rights violations, and deter rogue states from aggression?”
Of course, nobody is threatening to close the sea lanes these days. Washington has found it hard to stop nuclear proliferation without initiating war, yet promiscuous U.S. military intervention creates a powerful incentive for nations to seek nuclear weapons. Armored divisions and carrier groups aren’t useful in confronting terrorists. Iraq demonstrates how the brutality of war often is more inhumane than the depredations of dictators. And there are lots of other nations capable of deterring rogue states.
The United States should not attempt to do everything even if it could afford to do so. But it can’t. When it comes to the federal Treasury, there’s nothing there. If Uncle Sam was a real person, he would declare bankruptcy.
The following is Tenth Amendment Center approved legislation to nullify federal overreach into the health care industry. Activists, we encourage you to send this to your state senators and representatives—and ask them to introduce this legislation in your state.
An Act to render null and void certain unconstitutional laws enacted by the Congress of the United States, taking control over thehealth insurance industry and mandating that individuals purchase health insurance under threat of penalty.
SECTION 1. The legislature of the State of ____________ finds that:
1. The People of the several states comprising the United States of America created the federal government to be their agent for certain enumerated purposes, and nothing more.
2. The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution defines the total scope of federal power as being that which has been delegated by the people of the several states to the federal government, and all power not delegated to the federal government in the Constitution of the United States is reserved to the states respectively, or to the people themselves.
3. The assumption of power that the federal government has made by enacting the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” interferes with the right of the People of the State of _____________ to regulate health care as they see fit, and makes a mockery of James Madison’s assurance in Federalist #45 that the “powers delegated” to the Federal Government are “few and defined”, while those of the States are “numerous and indefinite.”
I first saw Katherine in Aaron Russo’s From Freedom to Fascism. I will never forget my excitement at seeing someone this capable, intelligent and fearless take on large corporations and government’s use of RFID chips, clearly explaining the invasive and disturbing applications.
An amazing set of written testimony was given to the panel on Lehman’s collapse that you all need to read has been filed by Bill Black.
Read this:
Lehman’s principal source of (fictional) income and real losses was making (and selling) what the trade accurately called “liar’s loans” through its subsidiary, Aurora. (The bland euphemism for liar’s loans was “Alt-A.”) Liar’s loans are “criminogenic” (they create epidemics of mortgage fraud) because they create strong incentives to provide false information on loan applications. The FBI began warning publicly about the epidemic of mortgage fraud in 2004 (CNN). Liar’s loans also produce intense “adverse selection” – even the borrowers who are not fraudulent will tend to be the least creditworthy. The combination of these two perverse incentives means that liar’s loans, in economics jargon, have a deeply “negative expected value” to the lender. In English, that means that the average dollar lent on a liar’s loan creates a loss ranging from 50 – 85 cents.
The value of Lehman’s Alt-A mortgage holdings fell 60 percent during the past six months to $5.9 billion, the firm reported last week.1
Gambling against the casino creates a negative expected value, but making liar’s loans creates inevitable, catastrophic losses.
Is it over? Oh hell no.
That loss, however, may not be recognized for many years – particularly if the liar’s loans become so large that they help hyper-inflate a financial bubble. In the near-term, making massive amounts of liar’s losses loans creates a mathematical guarantee of producing record (albeit fictional) accounting income. (As long as the bubble inflates, the liar’s loans can be refinanced – creating additional fictional income and delaying (but increasing) the eventual loss.
And what are we doing right now with our still existing banks?
We have issued official guidance that they do not need to mark theircommercial real estate exposures to the market so long as they are receiving income from them, even if the lies (valuation) are known.
This is EXACTLY IDENTICAL to making liar’s loans to buy houses “which are perfectly ok so long as the people can make the (initial) payments”!
In his latest statements, President Obama has expressively warned Iran against an imminent nuclear strike. The surprising remarks by the politician who snatched the Nobel Peace Prize for his conciliatory stance in recent years, violated the UN Charter and astounded public opinion.
“The continued presence of all options on the table”; this is the disappointing message which a Nobel Peace Prize laureate dispatches internationally. In his latest interview with CBS news, American President Barack Obama refused to rule out the possibility of a military strike against Iran by harking back to the famous catchphrase of former U.S. President George W. Bush who once devised, regarding Iran’s nuclear program, the popular sentence of “all options are on the table”.
Putting the quality and quantity of these options aside, the very “table” on which the options should be placed is as well a matter of controversy. Who is in the position to decide the destiny of Iran’s nuclear program? Which table is the U.S. President referring to? What’s wrong with Iran’s nuclear program in lieu of which a 70-million nation should go on with crippling sanctions, continued threats of military strike, isolation and economic embargo? What’s the definite answer to the simple question that “why should the U.S., France and Israel possess nuclear weapons”? Which one is more offensive and violent? Iran’s nuclear program which has been demonstrated again and again that does not have anything to do with military purposes, or the adventurous, aggressive trajectory Washington and its European allies have begun to go across?
RUSH: I played golf yesterday afternoon with some guys that are for all intents and purposes Wall Street guys. They don’t live on Wall Street or work there but they’re in the financial business. And they said, “Rush, a dirty little secret, this debt’s never going to get paid down. It’s gotten to the point where everybody knows we can’t pay it down. There’s no way to pay this debt down.” There’s no way California is going to retire its debt. There’s no way California is going to make up for the unfunded or underfunded pensions, and one of the reasons is it’s precisely because it’s so big. It’s gotten so big on purpose there’s not even a pretense of paying it down. The only thing that has to happen is for leaders to appear responsible in managing it. And they said, “Rush, how do you appear responsible in managing debt? You do it by raising taxes.” This will get the approval of leftists around the world, other governmental leaders, the ChiComs and others, people who hold our debt, they’ll be happy when they see we’re trying to manage it and deal with it, after they’ve run it up to the point of stealing the wealth of future generations three and four generations down the road.
I said to them, “I understand what you’re saying, but this is all going to collapse at some point, it’s unsustainable. You’re talking about tax increases of the sort that are going to prevent economic growth. Look at Greece, look at a lot of these European Union nations. At some point it does come due. At some point the debt has to be paid down. At least you have to get started paying it down. If the attitude is it’s so big everybody knows we’ll never pay it down, that you’ll never even start, then we’ve got even more problems than I thought we had.” Then we got around to talking about Goldman Sachs. And, you know, it’s amazing. These are very, very smart guys, brilliant, but they were hearing for the first time my theory that this whole thing was organized, with Goldman probably involved in it. I mean, here’s Obama seeking another pillar in his agenda, financial regulatory reform, he’s gotta demonize Wall Street. The Democrats are out saying, Van Hollen and the others are out saying that is their plan going into the November elections. They’re going to demonize Wall Street again. They’re gonna blame the Bush policies again for being responsible for where we are economically right now.
COWS
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow.
THE CONSTITUTION
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq … Why don’t we just give them ours?
It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we’re not using it anymore.
THE 10 COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments posted in a government building is this
–you cannot post ‘Thou Shalt Not Steal’ ‘Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery’ and ‘Thou Shall Not Lie’
in a building full of politicians ….
it creates a hostile work environment.
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