Copyright © 2006 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org. May be copied or reposted for non-commercial use, with attribution to author and website. (30 March 2006; updated 3 April 2006; minor edits 13 July 2006)
Contents
Miscellany 22: US Government: Ship of Fools?; The Broken US Health-Care System.. 1
Miscellany: Commentary on Recent Events and Reading. 1
US Government: Ship of Fools?. 1
The Broken US Health-Care System.. 11
I am currently doing some consulting in Timor-Leste. The only English-language channel I get in my hotel room is the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). Most of the news on that channel is international, but it always includes items of interest from the US.
A couple of days ago the BBC presented a snippet showing a half million people demonstrating in Los Angeles to prevent the deportation of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens currently in the US. The commentator reported that one US lawmaker suggested that if we take all the benefits away from the illegal aliens, such as jobs and social services, then they would surely leave.
On hearing this statement, my initial reaction was that it was perhaps the most stupid statement that I have ever heard. No respectable sovereign nation acts this way in addressing an invasion. A sovereign nation does not have to restrict opportunities to illegal invaders, in the hope that they will leave. Quite the contrary, it simply jails them or deports them or kills them. It does not have to cajole them into leaving. They leave because the country insists that they leave. The country does not beg them to leave, or try to motivate them to leave of their own accord, or try to “de-motivate” them from staying. It forces them to leave.
This absurd situation, in which the US government adamantly refuses to repel an invasion by ten to twenty million alien invaders, is but one more reflection of the fact that the US is a failed state. Any state that does not defend its borders and does not defend itself from mass alien invasion is moribund.
Defense of the country from invasion was a primary concern of the US Founding Fathers. The US Constitution requires the US president to defend the country from invasion. In his oath of office, the US president swears to defend the Constitution of the United States. Article I, Section 8, states, “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” Article IV, Section 4, states, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” The Constitution is very explicit: it is the president’s sworn duty to protect the country from invasion.
By allowing the presence of large numbers of illegal aliens in the US, President George Bush and his several predecessors – every president from Eisenhower – have blatantly violated their oath of office. They are clearly guilty of gross dereliction of duty, and of high treason.
It is not just the US president who is guilty of treason, but any US government official who takes an oath to uphold or defend the US Constitution, and then chooses to ignore the alien invasion.
Virtually all of our nation’s leaders are ignoring their duty to repel the alien invasion, and they are complicit in the President’s treachery. It is remarkable that the US electorate does not take them to task. This is but another reflection of the fact that the country has lost its moral strength – not just at the top, but throughout the population.
In the Second World War, American citizens and leaders knew how to defend the country. When Japan invaded, they took firm action against Japan. They were not afraid to round up Japanese living in the US and place them in concentration camps. They were not afraid to fight Japanese soldiers, and to drop nuclear bombs on Japanese cities.
My friend, Colonel Bob, was a US Marine in World War II. He fought on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima Island. He killed Japanese soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. His unit suffered a casualty rate of over 100 percent. Bob knew that in order to defend your country, you must be willing to kill for it. Being willing to die for it is not sufficient. Any coward can die for his country, and that will not make any difference at all. It takes a brave man to kill for his convictions – and his family, culture, and way of life.
The generation of World War II knew what to do. They did what all successful, vibrant cultures have done since the dawn of time. They had a relatively homogeneous country with a dominant European-derived (white Protestant) culture, consisting of 150 million people, and they defended it to the death by killing their enemies. After 50 years of mass immigration from diverse cultures, after 50 years of welcoming, inclusiveness, tolerance, and multiculturalism, our country – including both its leaders and the general population – has lost its bearings, its sense of purpose and destiny, its sense of being a “people,” and its common sense. The US is now a hodge-podge mongrel-nation collection of 300 million culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse people with no dominant cultural majority, an assemblage of people that is no longer a “people,” and who no longer know what to do to defend themselves from destruction. Through mass immigration, the US generations since World War II have systematically and willfully destroyed the culture and country of their fathers. Through mass immigration, they have committed cultural suicide. They have squandered their birthright, the legacy of the Founding Fathers and their parents. They have lost the Republic.
As Will Durant observed, a great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. America has destroyed itself from within, and the time is nigh for it to be conquered from without.
If the US wishes to repel the current alien invasion, it must kill the invaders. It is that simple. All it takes is the will. It can be done in a week (with perhaps another week to pass a law making illegal invasion a capital crime). Begging the invaders or coaxing them to go home has not worked and it will not work. I wrote on this topic quite some time ago. Here is a short segment from my book, Can America Survive? (published in 1999):
“The $100 Solution to the Immigration Problem. The immigration problem in the US could be solved in about a week, at the cost of about one hundred dollars. How: simply make illegal immigration a capital crime. All that is required is a coil of rope for a noose and some wood for a gallows. Then, each afternoon, hang an illegal immigrant, in public. For maximum effect, the hanging could be in the original British way, with no broken neck, so that the condemned wriggles and writhes. Very quickly, illegal immigrants would “get the message,” and go back home.
“Will this be done? Of course not. Americans are now too squeamish to lose lives or take lives, even in war. (See The Economist, January 22, 1999, p. 28 for further discussion of this development.) This proposal would in fact save many American lives. Illegal immigrants are criminals. The federal prisons are flooded with them. Even if it is assumed that the murder rate for the illegal immigrant population is the same as for the general population (currently about 8 per 100,000 per year), they are responsible for about 400 murders per year (8 x 5 million / 100,000 = 400) [this book was written when there were an estimated 5 million illegal aliens in the country]. That is more than one a day. Even if an illegal immigrant is hanged every day for a year, that is only 365 executions a year. By doing this, and getting rid of the illegal immigrants, the lives of 400 Americans would be saved, every year. Ask any mother whose child has been killed by illegal immigrants whether she thinks illegal immigration should be a capital crime.
“There are other ways in which immigration could be stemmed. Exile any businessman who hires an illegal alien to the alien’s country of origin. Require anyone who sponsors an immigrant for citizenship to trade places with that person, and to emigrate to his country.
“The preceding examples may seem extreme and convulsive, but the eventual result of uncontrolled immigration – civil war – is also convulsive, and on a much grander scale.
“The alien invasion is a war against America, but America is not fighting back. In the words of Malcolm X, it is necessary to fight back “by any means necessary” if it is desired to win.”
The title to this piece is, “US Government: Ship of Fools?” On the surface, it would appear so. No other country in the world has allowed itself to be overrun by illegal aliens to the degree that the US has (but a few other countries such as Canada and Australia, are competing for the honor). But the US could rid itself of the illegal aliens in a week, if it would simply start to kill them, as is normally done in any other invasion. It is very clear, however, as I have discussed numerous times before, that the US government does not wish to repel the alien invaders at all. They are good for the economy. They generate more wealth for the oligarchs who own and control the US. The plutocrats who do the oligarchs’ bidding are not about to do anything to rid the country of this invasion. Instead, they are now proposing to grant them citizenship, just as they did for the millions of illegal aliens in the 1980s.
So are our leaders a “ship of fools”? No, they are greedy men, who will sacrifice anything for money. In 1950, the population of the US was about 150 million. Now, because of mass immigration, it is 300 million. This massive increase in population has caused tremendous overcrowding, degradation of our environment, dissolution of culture, and a general reduction in the quality of life for the middle class. All of this was done with the motive of making more money. Increases in immigration mean more economic activity – the building of homes, roads, schools, hospitals, stores, factories, and everything else that people buy. The fact that it also degrades our environment is not a consideration to the wealthy elite.
Our country is in the grip of a fascist dictatorship. (A fascist state is one in which government and business interests operate together above other considerations. See my article “Is America Fascist?” for more on this topic.) Recent proposals by US senators to grant citizenship to 12 million alien invaders, rather than kill them or deport them, shows how extreme – and hopeless – the situation has become.
One of the strongest forces in the move to destroy US culture and environment by mass immigration is Senator Ted Kennedy, who was a principal sponsor of the Immigration Act of 1965, which opened the floodgates of America to massive numbers of people from all cultures. Our government will do anything that generates economic activity to pretend to “fight” illegal immigration, but it will not do anything that is effective in preventing it. On a recent issue of the CBS television program, “Face the Nation,” Kennedy commented, "We have spent $20 billion on chains and fences and border guards and dogs in the southern border over the last 10 years, and it doesn't work. What we need is a comprehensive approach. I think President Bush understands it." Kennedy’s approach is to continue mass immigration, and to make illegal aliens citizens. Kennedy’s plan has been and continues to be to weaken or destroy American white Protestant culture via mass immigration, and he does not care that the US environment is being degraded, and that the United States will be destroyed as a culture and a nation, are concomitant results.
When Senator Kennedy claims that building a multibillion-dollar fence along the US-Mexican border will not work to stop illegal immigration, he is quite right. We have already built expensive fences, and they do nothing to prevent more illegal immigration or get rid of illegal immigrants who are already here. It is obvious that they will never accomplish this, as long as the illegal aliens know that if they walk around, or tunnel under, or sail around, or fly over the fence, they will be we welcomed. So why are our legislators so quick to propose to build a multibillion-dollar high-tech fence, when it is obvious to everyone that, without the will to keep illegal aliens out, this has been and would be a complete waste of effort? Well, as I have remarked before, our government will take any action that is ostensibly oriented to reducing immigration, as long as it does not work. And they will enthusiastically support any action that costs a lot of money (and does nothing), since that helps the economy. A multi-billion dollar fence would do nothing to stop immigration, and it would be a boon for the construction industry (which already is a major recipient of the economic activity generated by mass immigration). So of course it will be proposed – it satisfies our government’s two key requirements for any anti-immigration ploy: it generates economic activity, and it doesn’t work to stop immigration.
If our government really wanted to stop illegal immigration, it could simply erect a five-foot fence consisting of a single strand of wire, and a notice that anyone who crosses that line will be shot – and back it up with machine guns to kill trespassers. But it does not want to stop illegal immigration. It does not want to stop immigration of any kind – illegal or legal. It processes legal immigrants as fast as it possibly can – a million a year! That is 2,740 immigrants a day! The rate of illegal immigration is about two million a year – 5,880 per day. Total immigration is about three million a year – about 8,219 per day. Our government is set upon a course to destroy the US environment and European-derived culture as fast as it possibly can, and no anti-illegal immigration laws are ever going to be allowed that might hinder achievement of that goal. One reason why some legislators are reluctant to consider legislation to stem illegal immigration is that they know that the government wants a high level of immigration, period – legal or illegal, and that pretending to “fight” illegal immigration is an insincere sham. Simply converting illegal aliens to legal immigrants is the impetus behind Bush’s amnesty (“guest worker”) program. Simply make all of the illegal immigration legal, and the annoying problem of illegal immigration is solved – without causing any harm to the government’s plan to flood the country with more and more immigrants of whatever legal status.
Our government’s failure to secure its borders from invasion is but one indicator of its desire to destroy the country’s environment, European-derived culture, and the economic well-being of America’s middle class. The greatest symbol of our leaders’ betrayal of the country is, of course, its program of granting 50,000 resident visas every year on a random basis to anyone in the world. US citizenship is valued so little by our government that it is given away as a free gift in a lottery, to anyone. It was never the intent of the Founding Fathers that US citizenship would be granted to anyone, free. It was never their intent that US citizenship would be granted free to any baby born on US soil – birthright citizenship was reserved for US citizens only, not for any Mexican whore who might sneak across the border and bear a child on US soil.
The US gives away 50,000 resident visas by lottery every year! A town of 50,000 people is a lot of people. When I was a boy, I lived in three towns of population 50,000 – Kingston, Ontario, Lakeland, Florida, and Spartanburg, South Carolina. A town of this size covers an area of about ten miles in diameter, or about 80 square miles – it is a nice-sized town for a boy, since he can easily walk across it or ride across it on his bicycle. A square mile is 640 acres. 80 square miles is 51,200 acres. Each immigrant to the US hence destroys about an acre of natural land. It might be one thing if immigrants lived on rocky, sterile soil, and did nothing to ruin the environment. But human beings always seek out the most pristine natural places. If you visited the fertile Napa Valley in California in 1960 and return today, you will find housing developments where once there were vineyards on prime agricultural land. The Ogallala Aquifer, which covered vast portions of America’s middle, has just about been destroyed, irrigating land to produce food for America’s legions of unnecessary immigrants. Britain is now in the process of destroying land in East Anglia that has been farmed since Roman times, in order to build homes, schools, factories, and roads for its immigrants. Mass immigration is nothing more than a mortal infection on the natural land. The famous essay, “Humans as Cancer” is right on the mark.
For many of the nation’s oligarchs and plutocrats, the motivation for promoting mass immigration and massive international free trade was simply the wealth that it generates. This is referred to as the “politics of greed.” For people like Kennedy (and the others who worked for the Immigration Act of 1965), who promote mass immigration as a means of weakening white Protestant culture in the US even though it jeopardizes their own security in the long run, the motivation is different. This is referred to as the “politics of envy.” Take your choice – greed or envy. In the end, the nation is just as dead.
I mentioned above that my initial reaction to the assertion that “we should make life unpleasant for the alien invaders and perhaps they will leave,” was that it was a very stupid statement. It does appear stupid, like the assertion that aliens are needed “to do jobs that Americans refuse to do.” But stupid is not the right word. The US government does not want the people to leave, since they generate wealth for the oligarchs, and so it is taking no actions that will ultimately cause them to leave. In its extreme absurdity – that a nation would propose to repel a mass alien invasion simply by making life uncomfortable for the invaders – the statement reflects stunningly how committed the US government is to keeping the alien invaders here. Instead of promptly expelling them, and sending a clear message to all other would-be invaders that if they invade the US they will face certain death, our government is promoting actions to allow them to stay and become US citizens. My initial reaction was inappropriate. I should have said that this statement was one of the outrageous statements that I have ever heard. Our leaders are not stupid. They are greedy and venal, and they have betrayed the trust of the Founding Fathers of this Republic, but they are not stupid. They know exactly how the alien invasion could be ended, but they have no intention of doing so, because they want the money that mass immigration represents, or the change in power that the culture-destroying effects of mass immigration brings about.
Our leaders and our government have not only failed to defend the country from invasion, they are welcoming the invaders and proposing to make them US citizens. These invaders are rapidly replacing the former owners of America. How long will the US citizenry tolerate such treachery from its leaders? For the past half-century, America’s leaders have been selling it down the river. Because of our government’s policies of open borders, mass immigration, and massive international free trade, the country is no longer secure. The US environment and the quality of life for middle-class Americans have been seriously eroded, and our “national security” is a sham.
The US nation is, as every nation is, a compact between its citizens and its government. It is a society that obeys the rule of law. But when the elected officials will no longer enforce or even support the laws, such as the fundamental Constitutional requirement to defend the country from invasion, then the government has abrogated the contract. The US government of the last several decades has betrayed the American people, the Founding Fathers, and the Republic. When the elected government will no longer enforce or support the fundamental laws to which the citizens agreed, the force binding the nation together no longer exists. By abrogating the Constitution, the government has abrogated the basis in law in which it existed. It no longer has either a moral or a legal authority for its existence, and it is time to abolish that government.
A half-century ago, most US (and Canadian) citizens paid for their medical costs as they were incurred. Gradually, the system was changed, so that much of the cost of medical care was paid for by private medical insurance or government programs. Private firms were encouraged to provide this insurance to their employees as a “fringe benefit,” and the Medicaid and Medicare programs provided medical care to the indigent and elderly. In the 1950s, US medical schools, with the support of the government and the American Medical Association, initiated a systematic restriction on the numbers of physicians to be graduated from university medical programs each year.
When I was a child in the 1940s, a physician might earn $15,000 per year – a good salary, but not many, many times what other skilled technical people earned. When my first child was born in 1960, the physician’s fee was $125.00, and the cost of the hospital room was about the same as that of staying in a good hotel. As I mentioned, most people could afford to pay for their own medical costs. The situation is now drastically changed. The cost of medical services has risen dramatically. The cost of medical insurance has risen commensurately, to the point where it now costs a family about $1,000 per month, or about $12,000 per year, for a medical insurance policy, if you can get one at all.
Because of the US government’s policy of massive international free trade, US firms must compete with foreign firms whose labor costs are much less. They can no longer afford to be providing $12,000 worth of medical insurance to each of their employees, and so many US firms have dropped medical insurance coverage for their employees. Today, one-third of all Americans are not covered by medical insurance, either because their firm does not carry it or because they cannot afford it or do not qualify for it.
Because of America’s policies of restricting access to medical schools, promoting medical insurance, providing high-cost medical treatment though government programs (Medicare and Medicaid), and promoting extremely expensive modalities of care (e.g., organ transplants, high-tech diagnosis and treatment, expensive drugs), many Americans now cannot afford any medical care at all. On the other hand, because of the policy of restricting the supply of physicians, the salaries of physicians have skyrocketed. A physician in many US cities will make over a million dollars a year. This is many times what other people with similar training, experience and intelligence make. An experimental physicist with as many or more years of technical training, for example, will be lucky to make $100,000 per year. As an example of how costly things are, I recently underwent a fifteen-minute procedure in an eye doctor’s office, for which I was charged over $5,000.
The median family income in the US is about $44,000 per year. The cost of a typical family medical insurance plan is about $12,000. That means that, under our insurance-based system of medical care in the US, an average family is expected to spend more than one-fourth of its income for medical care. But most families are healthy! They need medical insurance only to guard against catastrophic illnesses or events, which, under our current system of medical care, can easily ruin them financially and socially. This is an outrageous situation, in which an average family is expected to pay over one-quarter of its income for medical care. It is even more outrageous when one considers that the patients may be paying a salary of a million dollars a year to their physician. The extreme situation, in which an average American can no longer afford medical care unless his employer or the government pays for it, has been brought about solely because of his government’s policies: of restricting the supply of physicians; of setting up large government health-care programs that remunerate them excessively; of promoting private medical insurance and then promoting massive international free trade to make it impossible for employers to continue to provide it; of promoting, through massive subsidization of medical research and medical treatment, the development of a health-care system that involves such high cost that an average citizen cannot afford to pay for his own medical costs, or even afford health-care insurance.
The US government will be quick to point out that US medical care is the finest in the world. It may be – if you can afford it. (Actually, I read reports that medical care in the US is not substantially better than in other industrial countries, if you look at the results – the health and longevity of its citizens.) But practically no one, unless he is lucky enough to be insured by his employer or the government, can afford it! It is a system designed by the country’s oligarchs and plutocrats to take a massive portion of each family’s income and use it to provide great wealth to medical equipment makers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, health-care facilities, physicians and other health care providers. It is indeed the finest system in the world – for generating wealth for the nation’s wealthy elite.
The American health care system is the most massively subsidized social service system in the world. Next to military defense, it represents the largest sector of the government budget. In the past, some people criticized modest subsidies to agriculture, which were an attempt to preserve a way of life, as being economically inefficient. The current massive transfer of wealth to the medical establishment is obscene by comparison. This system of exotic, high-cost, high-tech care does not improve the health of the general population over that of a modest system of public health and basic medical care. It serves only to enrich the country’s wealthy elite.
The US system of health care is in fact a grotesque income-transfer program – but one in which income is transferred from the poor to the rich! It is a massive welfare program for physicians, other health-care providers, and medical suppliers (drug and equipment makers), paid for by ordinary citizens through employer health-insurance plans or by government medical programs. It provides little or no care to many US citizens, and care that is no better than basic public health and medical care – but at vastly greater cost – to those who are fortunate enough to be covered by it. As a scheme to transfer income from America’s middle class (via high insurance premiums and high taxes) to the wealthy medical establishment, it is a smashing success. As a public health and medical care system, it is a dismal failure. The US system of health care is, in fact, completely broken.
FndID(92)
FndTitle(Miscellany 22: US Government: Ship of Fools?; The Broken US Health-Care System)
FndDescription(Miscellany 22: US Government: Ship of Fools?; The Broken US Health-Care System)
FndKeywords(foolish US government; decline of US culture; broken US health-care system)