Obama must be impeached before it is too late

The title of this post might seem to be a little sensationalist, perhaps even over-the-top.  I assure you that it is not.

Obama is far from the powerless hapless lame-duck president that the corporate press portrays him as.  Obama is almost completely unrestrained by either law or by consideration for his fellow citizens.  Obama is increasingly acting in a lawless manner, he is starting to realize that he can just ignore the laws, do whatever he pleases, and justify himself with transparent word-games or legal sleight-of-hand.  He is opening the borders of the United States to a massive invasion by the overpopulated third world.  Two more years of this and it is likely that a population explosion will have been initiated that no change of government could stop (look up ‘demographic momentum’ on Wikipedia).  The United States will then become just another overpopulated third-world sweatshop of poverty and misery, like India or Pakistan.  And that will be that.

Often in politics the pendulum swings back and forth.  There is an era when the oligarchs rule, and workers are poor, and then there is a reaction, the oligarchs are restrained and workers do better, until eventually the oligarchs ascend again.  Yes this sort of cycle often happens in societies.  Unless it doesn’t.  Sometimes the pendulum swings to one side and it doesn’t come back.  This looks to be one of those times.

Don’t worry about Ebola, or the Islamic caliphate, or the budget deficit, or gay marriage, or any of that.  Not that these things aren’t of consequence, but when someone is threatening to shoot you in the head you don’t waste your time worrying about an overdue cable-TV bill.  Worry about a billion people and more jammed into the United States.  Worry about wages reduced to a dollar an hour or less.  Worry about water shortages, and food shortages, and rampant homelessness.  Worry about cities falling apart, about the national unity fractured into squabbling ethnic racist enclaves.  Worry about hopelessness and despair without end.  Worry about becoming part of the third world.

In Joseph Heller’s book “Catch 22”, there is what he calls “Catch 22B”, which goes, that the people in power can do anything that you can’t stop them from doing.  Obama is starting to really feel this.

It started out with small  things, like administrative changes to Obamacare.  But now, as he realizes that he can do absolutely anything and nobody will stop him, he is getting ready to go for all of it.  So for example: Obama has completely opened the southern border of the United States to illegal immigrants.  He claims that he has to because of some law stating that unaccompanied minors not from Mexico cannot be turned away.  However, most of the people he is letting in are either adults or accompanied children.  The law is not making him do anything.  He’s using that as a fig leaf for what is essentially lawless behavior.

So now Obama is planning to let in 100,000 Haitian nationals and give them work permits and residency.  He will likely claim that there is some law somewhere that allows or requires him to do so, but the reality is that he’s just doing it on his own because nobody can stop him.

We hear that after the midterm elections Obama is planning on giving green cards and grants of permanent residency to effectively an unlimited number of illegal immigrants.  He will claim that somewhere in the vast corpus of federal law there is some loophole that gives him the authority to do this, but again, this is basically lawless.

The rumors come thick and fast.  Obama will change numerical caps on immigration to count, not people, but heads of households.  He will grant automatic refugee status to anyone coming from a poor country.  He will administratively refuse to respect the already too-generous limits on the importation of foreign workers via H1B and other visas (Indeed, he may be doing this now.  How could we know?).  And so on and so forth. 

If someone steals your car, there are police who will arrest them.  If the mayor of a city embezzles funds or otherwise abuses their office, there are higher authorities that can censure them.  If the chief executive of the United States decides to ignore the law, there is no higher authority.  Obama can do anything he wants to at all.  Sure, he will be unpopular.  You think he cares?  He has two years to commit the United States to an irreversible population explosion.  That might be just long enough.

The utter contempt which Obama holds for the American people becomes clearer with every day.  A deadly disease may perhaps be making inroads into the United States – and he’s off to golf with his rich buddies.  His soirees in New York city wining and dining with billionaires causes the average New Yorker to sit for hours in horrible gridlock – and he jokes about it.  ‘Traffic jams?  I didn’t have any problems with the traffic!  <laughter>  Pass the champagne.’  He’s never going to have to face the voters again, and he don’t need no steenkin’ Congress to enact his agenda. 

The only recourse to a president that is refusing to uphold the law is impeachment.  It’s a shame that Bill Clinton being impeached over the Monica Lewinsky affair has trivialized the concept (although that impeachment did inadvertently prevent Bill Clinton from ending Social Security – but I digress).  It’s also a shame that the Republicans started to mutter about impeachment over relatively minor things: that has perversely somewhat immunized Obama from the threat. But we are not talking about lying about oral sex, or changing obscure details in the health insurance laws.  We are, really and truly, talking about treason.  We are talking about failing to uphold the single most important function of government, which is to defend the nation from foreign invasion.  This is what impeachment is for.

One wonders, if Obama was impeached, what if he said “f*ck you?”   What would we do about that?  What if he had the justice department arrest any senators likely to vote against him for obscure campaign finance law violations?  Perhaps that is impossible now.  Perhaps it will be impossible in two years. But the thing is, the longer you tolerate lawless behavior, the less the law is respected, until a day comes that the law as written has no force at all.  At that point the law is only what the rich and powerful say that it is.  And unless you yourself are rich and powerful, you won’t enjoy it.

You might say that impeachment is unthinkable.  If so, then that is because everyone says it is.  The way to make impeachment thinkable, is to keep raising the issue and act as if it is indeed thinkable.  If enough people do so, then it will be. 

Remember, impeachment does not require that the president be guilty of any crime.  It is enough that the American people feel that he is not doing what they want done.  Obama's current four year term was not granted to him by divine right.  Obama is - or he should be - nothing more than a temporarily appointed manager of the executive branch.  If the American people decide, for whatever reason, that Obama is not defending their interests, then impeaching him should be as straightforward as firing a manager who fails to follow instructions.

Of course, if Obama is impeached we will end up with Joe ‘the senator from Mastercard’ Biden, who is just as vile a grifter as Obama though less eloquent.  (However, that might be a good thing.  Better a stupid enemy than a smart one).  But the example would likely restrain Biden, as well as embolden Congress to be more assertive in defending the national interest.  In any event, one problem at a time. 

A foolish politeness is the hobgoblin of sheep and other domestic animals.  To be led to the slaughter with nary a complaint because you are worried about seeming cranky is base masochism.  If you are an American citizen, you are urged to personally call your elected representatives, and demand that Obama’s lawless open-borders immigration policies be stopped, by impeachment if necessary.  You are also urged to never vote for anyone in favor of open borders – and that very much includes people like John McCain and Marco Rubio, who will pose as immigration restrictionists when the election is coming, and then turn around and knife the American worker in the back when it is politically safe for them to do so.

Nobody can read minds.  If a politician says that he has changed his mind about an issue are they lying, or telling the truth?  One can only say that the surest way to predict if a politician will betray you is if they have betrayed you in the past.

Two years to go until Obama retires to his gated community.  Increasingly this looks like  two years too many.

Obama is letting diseases enter the United States not out of incompetence, but because he has other priorities.

Barack Obama has refused to prevent foreign nationals from places where the Ebola virus are endemic entering the United States.  It has recently been in the news that a Liberian National flew here, lied about his contact with Ebola, and came here likely to get free medical care courtesy of the US taxpayer.  In the process he ran up a hell of a medical bill, and has already spread the disease to US citizens.

It should be noted that African countries from Kenya to South Africa to Nigeria etc. have closed off travel from countries with endemic Ebola, and it seems to be working.  So African countries close their borders to disease to protect their citizens, but the US border remains wide open.  How's that for a kick in the head?

But it gets better.  Recent news has it that Obama has been actually speeding up the process of giving entry visas to people who want to come here from Liberia!  There are also reports that Obama is considering setting up programs where anyone sick with Ebola can come to the United States for treatment - and of course they will doubtless be able to bring  along their family members, all of whom will be allowed to stay permanently...

I hope that the Ebola virus does not spread widely throughout the United States, but that is the extent of the US government’s plan.  Hope.  (Hey, now Obama’s campaign slogan is finally starting to make sense!)  Maybe Ebola won’t be as contagious in a first world setting as some fear, and all those millions of African refugees swarming into this country won’t set off a pandemic.  Or maybe they will.  I guess we will all find out.

Similarly, the enterovirus D68 has until recently been rare in the United States.  However, it's been endemic in Central America.  

http://www.virologyj.com/content/10/1/305

This virus only became significant in the United States after Obama started accepting tens of thousands of accompanied (yes, accompanied, thank you very much) illegal immigrant children from Central America and placing them in schools all across the United States and exempting them from any health screenings.  

Now the federal government could dispel the suspicion that it caused this outbreak of D68 in a second, by showing us a map of places where the illegal immigrant children have been placed and the sites of D68 outbreak foci.  But they won't.  Which sure suggests that they have something to hide.  (Or that they just don’t care what the American people think – that fits as well, I must admit).

Even if you believe that the United States somehow needs to accept the surplus populations of Central America, that doesn't mean that you can't do health screenings.  But that would take some effort and time set up.  Which would, at least temporarily, slow down the rate at which these foreign nationals can enter the United States.  Which would slow down the rate at which wages for the many are pushed down, and profits for the few raised up.  Which is the entire story.

The post-1970 change in the previously restrictive US immigration policy has so far increased the population of the United States by about 80 million more than it otherwise would be, and has significantly reduced wages and increased profits.  However, we have a long way to go to before we reach the levels of impoverishment seen in places like India.  It would really take a population of over a billion to drive the United States down to that level.  That's the plan. 

So people fleeing the ebola epidemic in Liberia are allowed in.  People fleeing the poverty and violence that come from too-rapid population growth are all allowed in.  Guest workers skilled and unskilled are all allowed in - along with their families, and they are allowed to stay permanently.  Women fleeing sexual harassment at the hands of male family members - and said abusive males will also be allowed to follow them here as well (to avoid splitting up families, you know).  People who win US citizenship as a lottery prize.  Gang members.  Physicists.  Sinners.  Saints.  The healthy.  The sick.  Muslim fanatics that hate America.  Russian hockey players.  The point is to just jam in as many people as possible as fast as possible by as many means as possible.  It's all about the numbers.  

The faster you can jam in more people, the faster wages will fall and profits will rise.  It will also accelerate the point of no return, where even if the American people regain control of their government, the population will be so large that permanent poverty will be locked in place.  

Obama is allowing people carrying diseases for which Americans have neither innate immunity nor vaccinations into the country en masse.  That is a fact.  However it works out, this is certainly a great risk to the health of US citizens.  He is not doing this because he is incompetent or stupid.  He’s not doing it because he hates Americans and wants them to die.  He’s doing it because the rich want open borders and they want Obama to dump as many people into the labor market as fast as possible.  Any bad side effects of this are just the cost of business.  Nothing personal.

When white slaveowners in the ante-bellum American south imported black slaves from Africa, it wasn’t because they hated blacks.  It was because they wanted the easy profits that come from cheap labor.  I mean, without imported slaves, the plantation lifestyle would have been impossible – instead, you would have had middle-class family-owned farms like in the Midwest (and look how badly that turned out).

Now when slaves were shipped from Africa, the mortality rates on the voyages were often atrociously high.  But the slaveship captains were neither stupid nor needlessly cruel: it was all about maximizing profits.  Suppose that, for a given ship and amount of supplies, if you ship 300 slaves, 100 of them die, and 200 survive.  On the other hand, suppose that you ship 100 slaves, and all of them survive.  Well, 200 is more than 100.  That’s it.  Nothing personal.

The terrorists of the 9/11 attacks on the United States were mostly illegal immigrants from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.  Such an attack could never have occurred a decade or two before, when the laws against illegal immigration were actually enforced.  In fact, some of the illegal immigrant terrorists only got on the planes because they had been issued valid US driver’s licenses!  Now I don’t think that George W. Bush wanted terrorists to attack the United States.  It’s just that he had other priorities. 

You might ask, but what if the rich themselves, or their children, get sick?  Good question. 

First, the rich live in gated communities far from the teeming masses, and you can bet the federal government won’t force their children’s schools to accept medically unscreened illegal immigrants.  They fly on private planes from private terminals – no mass exposure there.  And if they do still manage to get sick they will get the best medical care, no questions asked.  

If the policies of the rich make things really bad, the rich can always take their loot and move to some nice safe country with enforced borders.  Kind of like the cruise ship captain that let his boat founder and then was the first into the life rafts.

But if some of the rich themselves do succumb to a disease that they allowed to spread, well, if that risk is the cost of remaining rich then it’s a choice the rich will make.

I am reminded of the following section from Joseph Heller’s book Catch 22.  Nately had been shot while on a bombing mission with Yossarian, and when Yossarian opened the medical kit, he found that it was empty: Milo Minderbinder had stolen the supplies and left behind paper shares of stock in his syndicate.

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.

Yossarian: What difference does that make? He's dead.

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his family will get it.

Yossarian: He didn't have time to have a family.

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his parents will get it.

Yossarian: They don't need it, they're rich.

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then they'll understand.

You may think this view of the rich is unrealistically harsh, even cartoonish.  I assure you that it is not.  Consider.  In the ante-bellum American south rich planters maintained people in brutal abject slavery for the sole purpose of lowering their labor costs.  They fought a bloody war to maintain their slavery-dependent profits.  Many of them sacrificed their own sons in this cause. 

Think about that as you read the headlines about Ebola and enterovirus D68 and Dengue fever and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis and Chagas and Yellow Fever and Chikungunya and scabies and all the other diseases that are, all of a sudden,  ‘mysteriously’ becoming more common in the United States….

But keep your eye on the prize.  Obama knows that the main event is not Ebola, but the numbers.  In India today there are half a billion people suffering from chronic malnutrition, they live lives that are as miserable as any slave laborer, but with effectively no hope of rescue.  This didn't occur because of Ebola.  This occurred because the Indian government encouraged people to have far more children than they could afford to support.  And whether the hordes of third world refugees that Obama is allowing to enter the Untied States do or do not significantly increase diseases here, they absolutely WILL increase the numbers, which will eventually crush the average American down to the level of India.  

Do not fear Ebola.  Obama's allowing Ebola to enter the United States is more of a warning, a symbol of his total disrespect for the American people.  The main thing is the numbers.  Think on the hopeless misery of the people living in India and Pakistan and Egypt etc.etc.  It can happen here.  And if Obama and his plutocrat sugar daddies get their way, it will.

The Coming Dark Age

At the end of World War II, the global population was a little over two billion.  That was the most that had ever lived on the earth, but the fruits of the industrial revolution were coming on line – especially chemical fertilizer – and this number could have been easily maintained in comfort.  By today the world could have been, not a utopia, but as close to paradise as fallible humans could ever have hoped for.  There should today be effectively no poverty, no wars, and no conflicts or hatreds between different people: when there is plenty to go around, and everyone has a good paying job, old ethnic tensions eventually melt away.  We could be heading out to the stars.

But as John Maynard Keynes famously warned at the end of his magnum opus the “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, that rosy prospect could only come about if population growth was moderated.  Sometime in the 1960’s, the rich gradually decided that they didn’t want a paradise.  At least not for other people.  A world that is uniformly rich would be one where labor was king: the only rich would be people of unique talent or energy, and most rich are talentless parasitic rentiers who could not run the night shift at a gas station.   So little by little the rich used their influence and donations to wear away at the old consensus that excessive population growth created poverty; little by little the rich enacted policies that were aimed at growing populations to ensure that wages stayed low, and blocked any honest discussion of policies that might have restrained population growth in other lands.  And now the global population is about seven billion and growing rapidly.  The industrial revolution was not a secret to unlimited wealth, but a one-time-only shot, and barring some fundamental miracle like cheap practical fusion power its productive abilities are basically tapped out.  The possibility of a golden age is now effectively ended.  The loss of the potential that we had at the end of WWII is by far the greatest tragedy and the greatest crime ever perpetrated against humanity, certainly to date and perhaps for all of history ever.

As of this writing it is finally being acknowledged that we are in trouble: food production is not keeping up with population growth.  Oh, usually it is poor weather that is blamed: but poor weather is only a problem when populations push up against the limit, a bad year’s harvest is never an issue when food production per capita is many times subsistence.  Sometimes population growth will be mentioned, but it is always publicly treated as an act of god or a law of physics, beyond any human control.  Never is it mentioned that this oncoming catastrophe is the direct result of deliberate human policy.

We increasingly hear cries in the press that agricultural scientists must somehow double crop yields “one more time”, or a disaster will strike.  But why must we double crop yields?  Why have we placed ourselves on a course where we need to gamble on this, when it is currently far from certain that it is achievable with the time and resources available?  And if we do double crop yields one more time, what is to prevent population from continuing to be forced ever higher?  There is a long track record of past increases in crop yields being promised to end hunger – but all that happened was that it fueled a population explosion.  Why not plan on stabilizing population now, instead of putting it off yet another generation, when most likely it will not in fact stabilize, just as putting it off in the past has done?  Why not work for a world that starts to get better today, than take a wild gamble that maybe we can keep ever more people alive in misery for the next few generations and somehow a miracle will happen a hundred years from now?

And there is that tired old chestnut that we need to increase living standards before people will stop having large numbers of children.  The historical record should by now be crystal clear: if people wait until they are rich before limiting their family sizes, they will wait a very long time indeed…. FIRST comes low fertility rates, THEN maybe comes prosperity.

What’s done is done.  As mentioned previously, there is a momentum effect to population growth, and short of widespread chronic malnutrition (happening in India) there is no realistic prospect of slowing population growth for the foreseeable future (and a population that has been stabilized because of a lack of food is NOT a good thing).  All we can do now is the best we can, and hope that the industrial revolution has one more rabbit to pull out of its hat.  So why bother to rehash the past?  First, for the sake of truth and justice.  What’s happening now didn’t have to happen.  It was deliberately created.  Those people and governments that acted to maximize population growth, the economists who insisted that population growth was irrelevant, should be held accountable.  But also for practical reasons.  As things get worse, it is possible that governments will suddenly get religion and impose frantic and harsh population control measures.  The elites don’t really believe that more people are always better, they believe that they have the right to control populations, to breed people in large numbers when that suits them, and to cull them when it does not.  But if, somehow, we pass the current crisis, and wages look to maybe move up a bit, suddenly the siren cry of the “labor shortage” will be heard again and moves made to yet again maximize the growth of the herd.  We must acknowledge what happened, or we will be unable to resist being treated like domestic animals yet again.

No matter how bad the odds we must always try our best: perhaps things will work out.  The only real certainty is that things won’t get better unless we try.  But the odds are clearly against us: we are likely heading into a new Dark Age.

The coming Dark Age will not be dark for the rich, for them it will be a new age of gold (at least as long as they don’t perish in peasant revolutions.  Think Emperor Valens).  The rest of us will slowly adapt to ever increasing poverty.  We will not run out of food: we will just get poorer.  A lot poorer.  Society-wide progress will stop, both because there will not be any spare capital to create it, and because, if somehow some meager increase is eked out, it will be swallowed up by ever more people.  The climate may collapse and population fall; or agriculture may continue to improve for a bit and population increase; it doesn’t matter because in either case the population will be pressing at the limits.  Corruption will become a way of life, for when people cannot make a decent living (or indeed, any living) through honest work they will jump at any chance to cheat the system, and who could blame them?

Normally when we talk about corruption we think of government employees demanding bribes, and this is part of it, but there are other forms of corruption that are even worse.  Academics falsify results; journalists report only what they are told to report; inspectors certify defective equipment or tainted food; leaders are surrounded only by sycophants; police become criminals; the rule of law is replaced by the rule of the strong or connected.   The labor of a genius can be had for a bowl of rice, yet standards in most professions actually fall as nepotism replaces meritocracy.  One might imagine a vicious circle where corruption creates poverty which creates corruption, but the cycle can only be broken with prosperity: lecturing poor people about the need to behave honorably is useless and insulting.

The equalizer of nuclear weapons may eliminate the traditional vulnerability of third-world societies to external invasion, so the main challenge of governments will be keeping order given on the one hand weak and corrupt security forces, and on the other, a desperate but weak and disorganized populace.  Nevertheless, centralized states have a hard time dealing with endemic poverty, and the trend will be towards chaos and local warlordism.

The coming Dark Age, like the Dark Age before it, will not be simple or uniform.  Some societies, steeped in poverty for millennia, will hardly notice.  Others may avoid being dragged down, defend their borders and quietly go on minding their own civilizations.  Perhaps some areas will collapse into barbarism, and the rich will recreate Constantinople, shifting their vast wealth into the global equivalent of a walled villa.  There will still somehow manage to be some progress, and the occasional work of art or magnificent building.  Life, for those that are not dead, will continue in some form or another.  But the main structure of what is commonly called “Western Civilization” will have ended.  The fall will be slow and uneven but the main trajectory is now all but inevitable. 

Welcome to the Coming Dark Age