Why the passion to destroy lives?

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It takes only two things to keep people in chains: The ignorance of the oppressed and the treachery of their leaders..

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These excerpts from an article in the Chicago Tribune  have me puzzled.

Maybe you have the answers.

Legal hurdle looms for fast deportations

Battles brew over immigrants’ right to hearing before ouster

By David G. Savage, Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s plan for putting hundreds of thousands of recent immigrants in the country illegally on a fast track for deportation is likely to trigger the next major legal battle over immigration enforcement.

These are people — men, women, and children — people just like you and me. The vast, and I mean VAST majority are good people, hard-working people, people who lead orderly lives, trying to build a better world for themselves and their children.

They are the very people who historically have built melting-pot America.

So why is there now a great passion to destroy their innocent lives by shipping these people out of the country?

Judges have put on hold the president’s temporary ban on travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries. That executive order, as originally proposed, could have affected tens of thousands of travelers and U.S. visa holders.

Why would America want to ban U.S. visa holders? We can’t even use the “criminals” excuse.

But the administration’s efforts to step up immigration enforcement and streamline deportation — outlined in memos from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly — could affect far more people, including potentially most of the estimated 11 million immigrants living illegally in the United States.

Why do we want to injure 11 million lives.  What is the need?

One part of that effort — the expanded use of what the law refers to as expedited removal — is almost certain to face a constitutional challenge in the courts.

Noncitizens living in the country illegally can be arrested and held for deportation, but they have had a right to a full hearing before an immigration judge before they can be removed from the U.S.

At such a hearing, they may rely on the help of a lawyer and can argue they have family and work ties here. If a ruling goes against them, they may appeal in the immigration courts and in federal court. The process typically takes years.

In his Feb. 20 memo, however, Kelly complained the immigration courts were clogged and the removal process was too cumbersome, and he called for a new approach.

“The surge of illegal immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed” the system, he said. “There are more than 534,000 cases currently pending on immigration courts dockets nationwide — a record high.” In some areas, he said, it takes “as long as five years” for a case to be heard by an immigration judge.

Not only is the process life destroying, but it clogs up our courts and costs a great deal of money. So is it all worth the time, effort and cost?

To speed up deportations, Kelly proposed to use expedited removal, with no hearings before a judge, for those immigrants who cannot prove they “have been continuously present in the United States for a two-year period” prior to their arrest. The new procedures would not be limited to border areas and could be used to deport immigrants living in the interior of the country.

Kelly said the law since 1996 has authorized the government to “remove aliens expeditiously,” and he said his agents “shall make full use of these authorities.”

The American Immigration Council said this approach means a Homeland Security agent “operates as prosecutor and judge and often arrests an individual and orders him or her deported on the same day. With limited exceptions, the government takes the position that noncitizens subject to expedited removal have no right to appeal.”

Is this what we want in America — Homeland Security agents wandering the country, having the power of life or death over millions of people? Has anyone considered the consequences of allowing agents absolute power?

Given the truth that “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” does America wish to create a squad of absolutely corrupted goons extracting “favors” from otherwise innocent people?

What does America gain from such cruelty? Is this what “makes America great, again?”

The Supreme Court has repeatedly cited the Fifth Amendment, which says, “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

Because the language refers to “no person,” and not “no citizen,” its protections cover “even one whose presence in this country is unlawful, involuntary or transitory,” the court said unanimously in 1976.

Doesn’t it seem odd that the same people who are so protective of the Second Amendment, wanting even mentally disabled people to carry life-taking weapons, care so little about the Fifth Amendment that saves lives?

What is the motive?

Jessica Vaughan, policy director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reducing the level of immigration to the U.S., said the administration is following the law.

No, not just following the law. It’s more like enthusiastically and zealously bending the law in an effort to destroy as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.

Why? What is the goal?

Cornell law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr: “These executive orders will eventually impact millions of more people. And we will be litigating this for years.”

Trump conducts a photo op of him casually signing an order;  then he goes on with his glittering life, while millions of people see their lives shattered. Is this what America is all about?

Oh, I’ve heard the excuses.  One goes something like this:

“My parents came here legally. Why should these people be allowed to come here illegally.”

All that means is, “I was lucky. Why should these people be lucky, too?”

And then there’s Trump’s:

“These people are criminals and rapists.”

A typical Trump lie. (Does the man ever tell the truth?) The fact is these immigrants are less likely to be criminals than the population at large, and the comparatively few who are real criminals can be deported without objection.  But why deport the innocent ones?

And then, the ever-popular:

“These people are here illegally, which makes them criminals.”

No, that doesn’t make them criminals. It’s a “gotcha” excuse to call them criminals.

Imagine this: A police officer is beating a girl with his nightstick. She covers her head, so the officer he beat her because she resisted arrest. She’s a criminal, but the officer invented an excuse for beating her.

And finally, thoroughly debunked:

“They’re taking jobs and using resources without paying taxes.”

Actually, they’re consumers who create jobs by buying stuff, and contrary to popular myth, they do pay taxes.

So what is the real reason for the rush to destroy lives?  Why have we become so mean-spirited and uncaring?

I have a hypothesis about this. See if you agree.

1. Millions of guns have gone into millions of hands, and now even mentally challenged people can get killing machines.  As a result, there are far more killings of innocent people.
2. We have witnessed the terrorist actions of “9/11,” “Oklahoma City,” “Boston Marathon,” “Pulse nightclub,” and so many others.
3. The atomic bomb and the “doomsday” clocks have made life seem more tenuous.
4. Social media have reduced “in-person” contact, which dehumanizes those we don’t know intimately.

So we have developed a “fortress” mentality.  Every stranger seems to be a threat. Everyone not exactly like us is to be feared. We want to get them all away from us.

We reject those who look, talk, or pray differently;  we feel no compassion for them. In fact, we hate them and want to punish them scaring us by their presence.

And into this mix of anger and dread come the opportunist scare-mongers, who gain power by telling us our lives hang by a thread, and they alone can save us. 

They tell us that hatred and bigotry are justified by circumstance, so we need not feel guilty about our lack of morality. We are told hurting innocent men, women, and children is wise if it can chase away the danger — a danger that exists primarily in the tales told by the scare mongers.

My hypothesis is that Donald Trump is a coward, a little man whose daddy saved him from numerous failures, a boy who sneaked his way out of the military, a man who hides behind his gold plate and towers, and who now wants us to be cowards, too.

He wants us to shiver behind a massive wall of shame. He wants us to destroy the people who scare him, while we arm ourselves against the bogeymen he has created.

It takes more courage to be open and welcoming than to be remote and hidden. Leaders are more popular during wars, because the people want a strong person to shelter them from their fears.

Knowing this, would-be tyrants frighten us by inventing enemies and then claiming to protect us from the enemies they invented.

I  had been puzzled about why we seem to have this great passion to injure people that have done us no harm — why we are so mean-spirited these days.

Now you know my hypothesis.

What’s yours?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

Monetary Sovereignty

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ECONOMICS LAWS

•Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.

•Any monetarily NON-sovereign government — be it city, county, state or nation — that runs an ongoing trade deficit, eventually will run out of money.

•The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes..

•No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth.

•Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia.

•A growing economy requires a growing supply of money (GDP = Federal Spending + Non-federal Spending + Net Exports)

•Deficit spending grows the supply of money

•The limit to federal deficit spending is an inflation that cannot be cured with interest rate control. The limit to non-federal deficit spending is the ability to borrow.

•Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.

•Progressives think the purpose of government is to protect the poor and powerless from the rich and powerful. Conservatives think the purpose of government is to protect the rich and powerful from the poor and powerless.

•The single most important problem in economics is the Gap between the rich and the rest.

•Austerity is the government’s method for widening the Gap between the rich and the rest.

•Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.

•Everything in economics devolves to motive, and the motive is the Gap between the rich and the rest..

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY