Bush & Martin Are Socialists At Heart?

[Morgan]

This topic is directed to BOTH pro and anti Bush posters.

Bottom line is that I'm getting increasingly more worried about what I perceive to be the "real"one world government globalization neo-con Bush peeking through the veneer of a conservative Republican package.This fear may make some of you cheer, but for others, if my concern is well placed, would mean a death knell for conservative philosophy having any legitimate place anywhere in the world.

1. At first I became alarmed with Bush's out of control domestic spending- his entitlement hand outs would make many Democrats blush. Bush is acting more like an FDR than a Reagan.

2. Secondly, his regime change of Saddam is becoming more worrisome . No SirRiff, don't get excited, I'm not about to agree with you that it was about oil. Quite the opposite. At first I thought it was about national security and having a footprint in the ME. But the more I hear Bush gush about the Iraqis and their new found freedom, I'm almost thinking he's putting the needs of the Iraqis before the needs of Americans...like he's on a mission to free the poor and down trodden to bring them into the family of man.

Then there's Bush's promise of $15 BILLION to Africa for AIDS, while very nice, is bizarre coming at a time that the US is running one of the biggest deficits ever. Also, there's no strategic benefit to the American taxpayers to pay out all this money to Africa. I could see maybe a couple of million focused on the purchase of AIDS drugs for a year as a form of extra US humanitarian aid to what it already ponies out, but come on, folks, $15 BILLION is somewhat EXCESSIVE. But I'm starting to believe that Bush has a noblesse oblige mindset to help the world at large, albeit with American taxpayers' dollars.

3. Thirdly, this amnesty guest worker plan is sheer garbage. Sorry, Craig, I disagree with you. It has no merit whatsoever. The Europeans have tried it and it's a failed plan. Even the Americans have it in place now with regards to agricultural workers and in no way has it stemmed the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Unlike Reagan who tried this plan in 1986 and had built in safe guards to try to enforce the borders after amnesty, Bush said nothing about enforcement in his speech this week. He did not even refer to illegals as people who are felons but rather he talked in heart felt terms of bringing these felons out of the shadows and giving them dignity. This pure and unadulterated noblesse oblige. Many illegals cause an enormous toll on Americans economically and socially. To grant de facto amnesty to 8-14 MILLION illegals is COMPASSION and IDEOLOGY, nothing else. Just check out the research done by the Center of Immigration Studies. The backgrounder article by Steven Camorata is chilling.

Centre for Immigration Studies

To say it's a crafty plan to buy the Republican party Hispanic votes is also a stretch. Hispanics are historically a predictable Democrat Party voting bloc, that is when Hispanics actually vote. So it's not crafty at all. Bush is basically ensuring that a Democrat Party dynasty will run the USA in the future.

In fact, rather then wooing Hispanic votes to the Republican Party, it may be that Bush is purposely alienating the conservative base of the Republican Party, thereby creating a fracture like what the Red Tories under Joe Clark did so that Americans will be in the same position as Canadians...having to choose from varying shades of left wing political parties, the Republicans representing a "progressive" party rather than a conservative party.

4. Fourthly, the Kumbayah refrain that Bush is singing with Vincente Fox and Paul Martin at the Monterrey conference about a "borderless" North/South American economy is downright scary. But how can you have no borders if all countries have different health care plans? Answer, you have the US implement universal health care, so workers can float around at will. But in this cozy picture, the US citizens have the most to lose...choice and high quality health that they pay for through private insurance, PPO's. It would be a one way street of Mexican workers going up to the USA or Canada to a lesser degree to ttake advantage of arguably the best of the best physicians in the world.

Coincidently, on the heels of Bush's Kumbayah and amnesty proposal to 14 Million illegals, comes a report from the U.S. Institute of Medicine that the USA needs to implement socialized medicine no later than 2010.Republican Dole supports universal health care and Bush's Health Minister Tommy Thompson says that a deadline of 2010 is unrealistic but he does not rule out the recommendation at all.

Institute of Medicine says USA needs to adopt universal health care by 2010

In addition to covering everyone, health insurance should be continuous, affordable for individuals and families and sustainable for society, the study said.

Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole, who attended a news conference on the report, praised the goal of universal coverage, but said a partisan effort that was set on one approach would be doomed to failure. "If properly framed, the lack of coverage...can be one of the big, big issues in this election," Dole said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said universal coverage by 2010 is "not realistic." The Bush administration last year proposed spending up to $89 billion in health care tax credits to help those who do not have employer-based coverage, but the Republican-led Congress took no action.

Thompson said the president would have more to say about the uninsured in next week's State of the Union address.  The Census Bureau said a decline in workplace-based coverage was the main reason for the increase in uninsured between 2001 and 2002.

5. Fifthly, Bush is getting real chummy with Paul Martin, whose Svengali is none other than Maurice Strong, billionaire turned socialist, one world governance cheerleader. In doing further research on Strong this morning what do I stumble across but a National Review article from 1997 on Strong in which some of Strong's famous pals are listed, and guess who intervened on Strong's behalf so he could run the infamous Rio Conference...none other than George Bush Sr. Maurice Strong's heavy weight US political connections which include George Bush, Sr.

6. Sixthly, I stumbled across Laurence Auster, a writer who contributes to National Review but also runs his own political news blog called "View From the Right" whose posts got me to re-think my image of Bush as a true conservative . It was Auster who caused me to look at the amnesty proposal as a conscious ploy to alienate conservatives.

Please read the LINKS AND READER COMMENTS in his post about signals that Bush may be a left wing Trojan Horse within the Republican Party. Unnerving. Arguments for seeing Bush as a good liberal at heart Jan.14/04

What I am suggesting is that Bush’s January 7th immigration announcement was nothing less than a conscious declaration of war against those remaining elements within the Republican party and the conservative movement that still show any resistance to the open borders ideology and the destruction of the historic American nation. If this interpretation is correct, then the wave of outrage that Bush’s announcement has unleashed will not discomfort Bush and his strategist Karl Rove in the slightest. They were expecting it and desiring it.

AND

Irving Kristol's article reveals the true meaning of Neo-conservative, annotated by Laurence Auster

The Neo-Conservative Persuation by Irving Kristol

I'd like to hear all your reactions to my concerns, both from left and right. Am I being too paranoid or are you now thinking further about all or some of the points I brought out?

[righturnonred]

1. Bush's Entitlement spending:

Yes, Bush's high level of domestic spending on entitlement programs, most notably the expansion of Medicare, is politcal pandering. But let's not forget that that Congress spends, not the president, and if this were a Dem president, spending would easily be three fold of what it is now. The size of those programs were kept, by the Republican's, with in the realm of quasi responsible.

2. Regime Change (savior of the downtrodden):

I don't see it, Bush becoming a bleeding heart that is. I think that he is, among other things, highlighing the human rights argument as one of the justifications for the war. I think he see's the importance of showing the world and the Iraqis that he cares genuinely about creating a successful, relatively prosperous Iraq. He's is trying to send the message that this will not be an American hit and run operation but that we are invested in the long haul.

15 billion for AIDS money to Africa: Karl Rove talking, poltical pandering, huge waste of money that will not realize any politcal benifits whatsoever. Bad.

3. Amnesty:

Frankely, I don't know what the hell is going on here. The more I listen to both sides, the more I become unsure as to the validity of Bush's plan. Bottom line, I am highly skeptical of any immigration reform because of the highly unlikely prospect of actually having the borders sealed in a real and effective way. My immigration reform plan would look like this, very simple:

a. Seal both the northern and southern borders with the national gaurd. Bring millitary survailance technologies to the fight to provide a high tech electronic barrier. (siesmic sensors etc.)

b. No active sweep for illiegals currently in the US, but when they are encountered, throw them out. (enforce current immigration laws).

c. Establish heavy fines for businesses who employ illegal workers.

d. Abolish the birth right for the children of illegals.

e. Create a guest worker program to satisfy the legitimate demand for mexican labor.

I think the suggestion that the Bush team is deliberatly attempting to fracture the Republican party to drive out the "xenophobes" is pretty outlandish. It's far more likely that Bush knows this proposal will go nowhere and is simply trying to remove the possiblity of this issue becoming relevant in the election. Basically so he can say,"look, at least I tried."

4. Bush a Socialist?:

Not likely. He's trying to get cooperation for Martinski and Fox on the immigration issue. If Bush has to put his arm around these jokers to do it than so be it. Fox is the one actually proposing "open borders". outragous.

Univeral Healtcare:

I haven't heard those comments before but it certainly doesn't look good. Simple tort reform would solve much of the problem. Insurance rates would fall immediatly.

Overall, I think what we're seeing here is classic Bush strategery.

[Morgan]

Righturnonred,

Thanks for your reply. Maybe you're right. Maybe Bush is just using political strategy, but sadly for America, Bush cannot just posture, he needs to ultimately deliver both to Vincente Fox and to the Hispanic community he is courting. Bush's current proposal will not work and will even exacerbate the existing mess.

Your suggestions for immigration reform sound similar to what I thought I'd do if I were in Bush's position, that is, until I read the following article which made me realize that the illegals issue is far too deep and complex a problem for a guest worker program to work even if you try to implement your points a-d first. There has to be major and genuine untangling of the mess that has developed in law enforcement, law and justice, immigrant advocacy, INS, border control, and political opportunists.

Every poster, whether you are Canadian or American, should read this article full text -it's long but it's powerful. It shows what happens when immigration runs amok and politicians are too self-serving to fix it. A borderless economy would be a disaster for Canada and the US, if Vincente Fox has his way, with the problems as they exist today. Fyi, a Gallup Poll showed that a significant majority of Americans were opposed to Bush's plan and the Border Patrol Council said Bush's plan was disasterous, a "slap in the face,"would encourage more illegal immigration and create a huge INS bureaucracy.

The article was published ironically in the same week that Bush announced his proposal. The research was done by the Manhattan Institute, a reputable neo-con organization which one would expect would have been on the same page with a fellow neo-con President.. Guess this Institute did not know about Bush's proposal in advance or vice versa.

The problems of illegal immigration are not simple to fix, Heather Macdonald, City Journal, Winter 2004

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration statusIn Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking.

Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities. Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave.

“We can’t even talk about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy.

Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company.

And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law. Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling.

Some examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia, the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.

And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor).

The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims.

The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence.

But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage.

Long ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years in jail).But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.

The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking up precious INS detention space.

But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available.

In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.

Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the country indefinitely.

Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.”

For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period.Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers.

The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught.

The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls.

But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak.

That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban.

Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them.

To find an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it a boon to money launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven.”Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California assemblywoman Sarah Reyes.

An immigration agent says that people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid.But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 18-year-old Mexican. Such pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it.

“Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.