Universal Basic Income

In the United States today there are a total of about 125 million households. These people range from unemployed high school dropouts to billionaires with Ivy League education, and everywhere in the middle. 15% of these people live below the poverty line, which depending on the nature of the household ranges from about $10,000 to $26,000. umich They live all over the country, even though there are various places which have higher rates of poverty than others. The poorest counties in the United States are primarily located in South Dakota (primarily Indian country), across the Old Confederacy, and Appalachia with a few exceptions. wiki The clustering of poor counties vs. rich counties makes a poverty trap of the lack of jobs and few other opportunities cluster in regions, as can be easily seen using this map in detail.

Poverty is also highly correlated with race, with African Americans and Native Americans extremely disadvantaged when it comes to opportunities their families can provide which white people (like myself) frequently take for granted. wiki African Americans and Native Americans are left behind significantly at $38,806 for Native Americans and $35,341 for African Americans while White Americans are make an average of $54,857. Alaska Natives are particularly disadvantaged at an average household income of $17,843. This gap is so wide the number of people who are able to jump the gap and get into college is significantly lower for minorities versus their white and Asian American peers.

This only exacerbates the inequality we see in the United States today, keeping the racial inequality gap particularly wide.

This is clearly a problem, and we need to have a system which works for all people. The perpetual poverty in communities destroys lives and those of us who have had the opportunity to get educated have an ethical imperative to expand the opportunities we have had to our fellow Americans as much as we can.

Solutions to poverty obviously start with ensuring that education is available for all people, which could easily be done by expanding Pell Grants to people from low-income households. There will be a disproportionate number of minorities who receive the program because of centuries of discrimination. Past college however there is another idea which has caught my attention over the last year or two which would quickly remedy the issue of low income, and that is Universal Basic Income.

The idea is simple, every household receives a certain amount of money every year which they can use however they want or need. With 125 million households, the cost of $20,000 per household would cost us $2.5 trillion total. Even with my tax code as I refer back to often, this will still leave the government with a surplus of money, particularly when taking into account the programs that will no longer be necessary, like Social Security, Food stamps, etc. and the reduced burden on state governments for providing many different programs to support people. This also includes the negative income tax which will reward work for middle class families as opposed to taxing it, and still give the government hundreds of billions of dollars as a surplus to help cut the debt in good times or just give people an extra refund once we stop paying interest on bonds. I have already roughly calculated the effects here based on data from the Census bureau. It is an extension/modification of the tax code I shared a while ago.

Coming back to the original point, which is regional and racial inequality, this is a very easy way to quickly address the issue of poverty in these communities. With money to spend it will be worth it to create businesses where there will be an influx of money to spend, and this will create jobs and get local economies growing. No American will live in poverty, since $20,000 is close to the federal poverty line anyways, and we will be a better nation overall. Inequality will be reduced, which is correlated to numerous social ills, such as gun violence, health in general, school segregation leads to slower economic growth overall, and overall economic instability. Parliament of Australia Improving America's health will significantly lower government health expenditure which is a ticking time bomb.

If someone knows they are going to get their UBI no matter if they work and then they work as well, they are probably still going to go out since they can use that money for whatever they want, plus under my full plan low and middle income households will actually get a negative income tax which will create an even bigger incentive for people to work. Since I am not taxing people at low income levels the total earned income will increase no matter how much you work. This study of UBI basically explains as well as possible why UBI is not going to have a significant impact on employment.

The issue is that since I am not changing the amount of income you get from working for how much you get, there will never be a point where the UBI alone will make you worse off than working less (since the tax rate is exogenous, the real question is whether at the margin people will make more money if they work an extra hour, as long as the answer is yes, which it always is under this plan, they will work the extra hour. This is why people still work in practically every country in the world which starts to tax people for the first dollar they make. If people stopped working when they start getting taxed than nobody would work in any country today, which is obviously not true. We need to look at the margin to find the reality and under UBI and my tax plan without UBI the marginal income for an extra hour of work is always positive, so most people will work more, in fact the only people who will pay anything are already making millions of dollars) This is why I agree with Ed Dolan that UBI is not going to significantly reduce the amount of work done in an economy.

There is no reason for us not to do this, given the low costs and very large potential benefits. Before you declare it as socialism, remember that one of the greatest advocates of cash as social welfare was Milton Friedman. America needs to have a serious discussion about Universal Basic Income today, and we need to start doing it soon. This is something everyone could get behind.

Poverty in America

There has been a lot of talk recently about the rise of the sharing economy, with attention focused on young people making low wages (no dispute here) and other factors that people pick out. Our national poverty rate is currently around 14.5%, which is down from where it was in 2013, when it was 15%.

None of this article is to claim that poverty is not a real issue, it is. The issue however regards accurately representing the issue and not distorting it into something it is not to a point where it is distorted from reality and people no longer understand the real issue at play. This is very dangerous for social justice work because than we won't understand where the real issues are that we need to target, and we will inefficiently spend our time and money compared to the potential good we could achieve. In order to solve a problem completely and quickly you must understand it as fully as possible. To explain where the poverty is and its roots is the purpose of this blog post.

Historically speaking, America's poverty rate has bounced between 11 and 15% since 1965. Despite all of the talk, we have not seen a massive increase of poverty relative to our population. This is important to remember when p

Compared to other countries around the world, we are on par with Germany and the United Kingdom.

One of the biggest factors of poverty in America is how concentrated poverty is among people of color. Over 27% of African Americans and over 25% of Hispanics live in poverty, which is on par with Iraq and Costa Rice (albeit below Italy). White Americans on the other hand are only around 9%, similar to Canada.

If we want to eliminate poverty in America, it will require a heavy focus on helping people of color.

Issues that create this combination include discrimination in schools, which includes higher discipline rates for children of color versus their white peers in terms of things like suspension starting in preschool, meaning they miss school more and don't get a high quality education. (Civil Rights.org) We need to implement programs to reduce the over-punishment against students of color and provide funds for schools to provide a more equal opportunity to all students which simply does not exist today. This will help it so more students of color can graduate and get into college. There is a massive difference between the unemployment rates of adults of color based on their education level. NY Times The solution to the lack of resources would actually be very easy economically by the federal government providing them so we stop tying school funding to local poverty. Fighting over discipline is a more complicated issue and at this point in time I'm not sure what strategy would be effective. There are some plans on the books to enforce teacher pay equity (controlling for other factors of course) but neither Bush nor Obama have pushed hard to enforce these laws.

Other issues regard access to employment, such as where to get a job you need to have good credit (which is almost impossible to get if you have no income and you don't already have a good rating), and particularly discrimination by police forces, border control, and other law enforcement agencies which perpetuates inequality across America. The entire report by The Leadership Conference is worth reading here.

A final warning about studying poverty was well written by an author on Slate warning that how we measure who is in poverty can give wildly different results. If we don't include assistance, the poverty line is shockingly high. If we include assistance from the government and other groups, which are technically a form of income, the number of people living under the international poverty line falls almost to 0. This is a good warning when it comes to reading numbers and the many ways these numbers can be made to be larger or smaller, and why authors like me need to be clear about how we calculate such information. Using the same methods international researchers use to measure poverty in third-world countries falls to 0. Absolute poverty does not exist in America like in many parts of Africa in particular. Relative poverty however remains a major issue.

What sorts of proposals are on the table for reducing poverty?

1. Ensure a fair criminal justice system which will help reduce the amount of time that people are out of work and increase employment opportunities.
2. As I go on about at length above, we need to end discrimination in education and make it so that the quality of a child's education is independent of their area's property values (which are tied to income and overall economic well being)
3. We can provide a universal minimum income to raise all families to a certain level.

There are of course many other ideas, but these three are the ones that immediately come to mind for me and should make a significant dent in our poverty rate.

References:
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2013/figure4.pdf poverty over time
https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2013/table3.pdf snapshot of who is in poverty as of 2013
http://www.civilrights.org/publications/reports/cerd-report-falling-further-behind/discrimination-in-education.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/

Vote like your life depended on it

The Guardian published an article today by an African American claiming that he won't be voting in American elections anymore because there is racism in our system.

The problem with this article is that he is taking the worst route. Let's say we have a system for ranking parties on their social values from liberal (+10) to conservative (-10) and you look at your ballot and you have one party which ranks as a -1 and another which ranks as a -5. As long as your personal ideological score is -2.5 or higher you are always better off voting for the liberal party. Sure, you might not get everything you want and there will be more progress to be made, but you need to recognize that you can start to push the election system back to where you want it to be whether it be 2.5 or 10.

In economics we have a concept known as the Production Possibilities Frontier. The concept is that when making decisions there are factors that I cannot change. If I am a firm deciding how much I want to produce in the short run I need to work with the fixed capital (buildings, machines, etc.) that I have. I might want to have 10 factories, but it doesn't matter if I only have 5 in making my immediate decision of my next step. The same applies in political science. I might want to have a party which will smash the legacy of slavery into the dustbin of history overnight and bring equality of opportunity to all Americans next year making us a completely egalitarian land, but in the short run this is irrelevant if I don't have that utopian party. More than that, even if a utopian party existed it would take more than one election cycle at this point in history to eliminate the inequities. This does not mean I should not stop fighting for this honorable goal, and by voting for the better of two options I am doing just that.

We are faced with a situation today where the Republican Party denies global warming, denies that issue of police violence, does not recognize the barriers to people making a life for themselves and is directly in the hands of the Koch Brothers and similar individuals. The Democratic Party also takes money from corporate elites (for similar reasons as to why people need to vote even if neither party is absolutely perfect) but also takes a lot of money from unions and are brought into this system from the start which has so many inequities. They have made progress with social welfare programs which disproportionately benefit minorities along with more direct legislation like affirmative action while Republicans have only moved us backwards.

This article makes a major fallacy in that he is looking at the system as it stands today when judging Democratic politicians and not how the system has changed under such individuals. He brings up Governor Martin O'Malley and claims he has no right to talk about criminal justice reform because Maryland still has major incarceration problems. This is however a major mistake for two reasons: 1. The Governor (pr President) may not, cannot, and has not unilaterally decide to overturn decades of law at the stroke of a pen. Such action requires the legislature. To do so without them would completely undermine the Federal constitution or constitution of any state. 2. Our system by design makes it incredibly difficult to get legislation through. These are both extremely good things. While I agree it would be nice to simply overturn legislation because it is immoral (which is what the courts have done in many instances eg Brown v. Board) it would come at a horrible cost because a Republican President could dismantle Social Security at the whiff of a pen. Our system is designed to be inefficient so that we can't have one politician undo the progress that has been made, which is the flip side of what would definitely happen if O'Malley could simply completely overturn the racism of Maryland's long-standing institutions. (it was a slave state after all before the Civil War) What has frequently happened in State legislatures and Congress is that the President will frequently propose legislation which is then significantly diluted by Congress, on both sides of the aisle. The most striking recent example is the Affordable Care Act which stands as a testament to this balance. On the flip side we also have the Americans With Disabilities Act which was vetoed by President George H.W. Bush but was fortunately overriden by Congress. His simple analysis of this issue gives him the wrong results and makes me wonder how much he really understands of how our government works.

This existence of a system set up for deadlock is not empty promises as he goes on about but instead a protection against us from things like C-51 which passed easily in Canada, and is a complete erosion of Canadian Civil Liberties by Stephen Harper.

He is correct however that grassroots activism is a useful tactic in getting politicians to listen, but it will only work in the end if they use their political leverage to force the politicians to respond. If they then just get more Republicans elected to state legislatures in the Deep South you can bet that they will not respond to such movements. Changing the guard and replacing the legislature like he mentions happened in Reconstruction however is a fundamentally different scenario.

History teaches us that we need to use our voices and need to vote to make a significant difference. If the Quakers had abstained in 1860 in protest for James Buchanan's racism Stephen Douglas would have become President and nothing would have changed. That is however not happened with the Civil War, 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and Reconstruction which lasted until people stopped voting for liberal Republican candidates and Hayes was elected ending Reconstruction. It was disengagement which ended reconstruction, and postponed the healing of our country. I have no reason to believe another Republican President is going to make our country better relative to a Democratic President, even in the now unlikely chance that person is Hillary Clinton.

So, fine, don't vote if you want to. But when you don't vote you are in effect increasing the margin of victory for the worst party and shooting the civil rights movement in the foot. This makes it so they will move us even further from where we want to go which is what happened in 2000 when people didn't vote for President and we got our worst President in history (judging based on the changes he made from where we started and where we ended up).

I maybe white, but my Quaker ancestors did not get the 13th amendment passed simply through the Underground Railroad (my great-grandfather's hometown of Richmond, Indiana was one of the most important hubs in the network), but we got it done in the end because we had strong people in Congress such as Thaddeus Stevens and President Lincoln who got the job done. I continue to do what I can to make this country a better place every day. That is the only way we have ever made the world better in a way that is very difficult if not impossible to simply revert in 4 or 8 years. This author's choosing not to vote only shoots our movement in the foot and is giving up on centuries of very hard work which I find personally insulting. This is why I find the author's giving up on our country's future so absolutely despicable.

Liberalism and Racism

In response to: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/how-liberalism-and-racism-are-wed/?_r=0

The first thing is that the author is confusing liberalism as a philosophical concept of Locke, Mill, and Rawls with the reality of the United States' law enforcement system. The act of stereotyping people based on their color of their skin is not a liberal idea, and the act of the stereotyping that these groups do is not condoned but actually condemned in the writings of these great philosophers.

The call for equality and universal protection for all is an ideal, and is something that social activists (myself included) have pushed for for hundreds of years. The beauty of this ideology is that opposed to the major alternatives (particularly Marxism, and Realism in International Relations) it sees a possibility of a world where people can work together and cooperate as opposed to fight by becoming more dependent on one another so they want other people to do better.

In a classroom setting, let's take the two fundamentally opposed views. In the liberal view there will be different students working together in order to learn the material. If one student doesn't understand the material they will help their classmates with the concept so that everyone in the classroom can learn together and when one individual falls behind the rest of the class can lift that person back up to where the others are, and then if that individual moves ahead in an area they can then help their classmates again understand the concept so that their overall average knowledge will be better than the alternatives. This is the view proposed by Locke, Mill, and Rawls among other great liberals.

Marxism is the major alternative. Marxism, put very simply is the theory that history can be defined as the conflict between two different classes (when Marx was writing there was no middle class) stretching back to the beginning of agriculture. In the same classroom example we will see the students who pick concepts up easiest and understand the material better are the bourgeoise and the other students are the proletariat. Marx's diagnosis then is not for the bourgeoise to lift up the proletariat but for the proletariat to start a revolution and tear down the bourgeoise students, an example of which in the real world is the vicious bullying that can occur in classrooms at all ages.

In this way, local police departments that are acting are seen as not acting within the framework of liberalism but within the framework of Marxism which sees that there must always be conflict between the two classes! Liberalism and Marxism should be seen as ideals, and the systems which claim to be one or the other may have certain aspects in places but not others of these very large schools of thought.

Another common mistake that this individual in this article is making is reading everything that the authors say as being literal. I am working through Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan right now (I finished the first book and am slowly working through the second among all the other things I am working on and reading) as a hobby and at some point through the book the way he was talking about what he was saying I realized that it is not a literal work but actually sarcastic. The parts of The Prince I have read as part of some classes has made it clear to me as well that Macchiavelli was writing in a time where outright saying "Liberty for all mankind" as Locke would do 200 years later would have gotten him killed. But living under the de Medici family who allowed more expressive art than any other state in Europe at the time gave him the freedom he needed to write in a sarcastic manner saying everything that a tyrant would do that careful readers will realize through important snippets is an act in absurdity. Today with modern liberal philosophers starting with Thomas Paine and further expanding with John Stuart Mill we see these philosophers take these ideas which were manifesting under Locke and bring out the central premise of these three earlier philosopher and bring them to their natural conclusion.

One cannot read moral philosophy of this era as literal and must be careful to look for sarcasm and particular turns of phrase which are there to disguise their heretical work (for the era) from the intellectually and morally impoverished minds of the monarchs of the era but the true meaning of these texts are written to come out to intellectuals so their ideas can expand in those circles. This is the case until American Independence.

When it comes to John Locke's authorship of the Fundamentals of the Constitutions of Carolina were written in 1669 when he was 37 years old. He didn't start writing his great philosophical tracts until 1689, a full 20 years later. To me this shows that in 20 years he grew as a philosopher and seeing the contradictions between his earlier views and later views that he appears to have changed his mind. This can also be seen in his religious views which started in Calvinism when he was young but by the 1690s he was clearly a deist or Arian. Locke's life (as this author should know) did not live a stagnant life where he was born and by the age of 18 had all of his liberal views figured out and never changed, but evolved substantially over his adult life. Would John Locke have written that Constitution as it was with his major change of moral and religious opinions if it had been done in the 1690s? Given his complete turnaround of almost every issue I suspect he wouldn't have.
Was he racist as a 37 year old? Yes. Was he racist in his 60s? His writings heavily suggest that he grew out of it.

In short, I found this article to be extremely flawed in numerous aspects as I have outlined and doesn't have the type of philosophical underpinnings in the writings (with the one exception of a writing Locke wrote 20 years before he started his philosophical work) needed to condemn an entire school of thought. Reading later liberal philosophers, the most important of which she completely ignores shows that this is a very weak case and a misrepresentation of a major school of thought.

Beware the pigs

In the 1880s the British South Africa Company moved into what is modern day Zimbabwe and got a concession from the King for mining rights in the region in 1888. The British started to enslave Zimbabweans and established settlements of Englishmen. The natives no longer had any sovereignty and over the next 60 years until the 1950s they were in a feudal system. The colonial era saw the resources of the people of Africa be stolen by the colonial powers. This ended when the Africans grew tired of their colonial oppressors and formed independence movements to have more rights. In 1963 Rhodesia gained independence along with other African nations in that era, after which they were led by Ian Smith until 1979. Rhodesia was set up so there were separate voter rolls for people based on property (not indifferent from the United States when we were founded where you had to own land to vote) which effectively gave the landed white settlers most of the political power despite being a minority. In this era the government reserved a majority of seats in Parliament for whites and made it almost impossible for African political parties to get enough power to represent the majority. The way Rhodesia was set up was being decreed as racist by the rest of the world. (Source: Wikipedia) Of course, we can't blame Ian Smith completely because he was merely a figurehead of a massive governmental organization which was nominally democratic for those who had land, and was outspoken on supporting Mandela while the United States and Israel maintained good relations with the Apartheid regime, and he had started to work to try to bring majority rule to Rhodesia before 1979. It is easy to demonize him given that he was president of a country with minority rule (and while I started writing this article I found myself falling into the same trap given similarities between him and other African leaders who led for such long periods of time) but it is important to look at an individual with the context of his time and place and the power dynamics at play to diagnose the entire system as being racist and not blaming everything on the head of state when there is a congress or parliament with considerable power.

In 1979 however Mugabe came to power, under the guise of freeing Zimbabweans from their white oppressors. He promised progress and change, but his economic reforms quickly turned the country into one of the poorest and most backwards in the entire world. He has established a one-party rule where anyone who speaks against his regime is arrested or killed, frequently landing near the bottom of the rankings of all freedom indexes. He did not become as so many hoped a figure for freedom for all Africans and has frequently committed crimes against other tribes, and the white minority who are for the most part disenfranchised and have left Zimbabwe as refugees. He tries to portray himself as black empowerment and given how Africans have been abused for so many generations many see this as a good thing, but no one chooses the color of their skin and even though it isn't in the order we usually think of when it comes to racist regimes Mugabe is indeed a racist and continues to pursue policies which have made Zimbabwe a backwards state for all Zimbabweans, including targeting certain tribes of natives disspelling any notion of him being a freedom fighter for Africans.

This is in comparison to South Africa where after the truly brutal racist regime that lasted almost 50 years Nelson Mandela rose to lead South Africa to become the most economically advanced nation in Africa whose speed of economic development is close to that of China. He did this not by looking at it in terms of an us vs. them mentality but as a real liberal tried to bring all South Africans to a place where they could leave peacefully without creating a refugee crisis. They are now the freest nation in Africa for native Africans and all people compared to all other nations on the continent. The rights of people in nations in Africa where they didn't look for a multilateral liberty-based approach but instead a Marxist relativist approach where it is seen as a conflict between different classes (which were deeply aligned with people's ancestry being either European or African for the most part) have not improved since decolonization and their standard of living is the worst in the world.

When trying to advance rights for one group of people, be it Africans in Africa, women across the world, homosexuals, transsexuals, and other groups it is paramount to not turn it into an us vs. them mentality but attempt to make the value of all men being created equal a reality. A rising tide raises all boats.

Freedom in the world does not have a limited quantity and the amount of freedom in a society goes up and down over time. When one person gets the ability to speak freely this does not mean another person cannot publish their thoughts as much. My writing this blog without my government cracking down on me if I say something they do not like does not prevent another person from writing a blog of their own. This is how the world works and the great thinkers of liberalism, John Locke, America's founding fathers, and John Stuart Mill all understood this. When Europe passed the Schengen treaty the average amount of freedom in the world increased, but the amount of freedom that Americans had did not decrease because the border between Germany and Poland was opened. This is also of course what happened in Animal Farm by George Orwell who noticed this in the USSR and ended with one of the greatest quotes of modern literature, "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." which is applicable in Zimbabwe.

When expanding the rights of one group we need to ensure that we don't also make it harder for one group to have what they deserve. When we continue to expand rights for African Americans across the United States so that those who live in poor communities (because not all African Americans are poor) have police services that respect them we need to deal with the problem directly by implementing laws that hold police accountable for their actions so that they keep their actions within the law which doesn't always happen which is a great shame on our entire nation. Decreasing the quality of police in majority-white areas will not make people in majority-African American areas more free, in fact I would expect it would have the opposite effect. We need to write laws that directly address the issue along with caveats which will inevitably occur so that we can have programs that work effectively.

If we don't we will end up being no better than Robert Mugabe who talked about a Zimbabwe where Africans would be free only to turn back on his progress and make it worse for all Zimbabweans. We must be true liberals and focus on the rights as the end goal and divorce ourselves from the notion of one group always being the oppressor and one group always being the oppressed, because roles can and at times have switched in brutal fashion. When we realize this we can have freedom.

How to Eliminate Them

Are you a country with a new majority that recently immigrated to find work? Are there people there that are pesky with their strange languages, religions, and cultures you don't want to understand? There is a 3000 year old Indo-Aryan patented 100% satisfaction guaranteed method to eliminate those pesky Thems from society so you may live in luxury.

Step 1 Isolation
Hopefully you have some land you don't want so that you can place Them on it to keep them different from your society. We can't have our children learning about their culture for that would mean integration, the devil's work. This will make sure that you can improve your lifestyle without having to share power with Them.

Step 2 Seperation
You need to be the good leader, and you care about them, their land (infertile as it is) is their land now (they only just moved onto it.) so they should be able to govern themselves. They may not have citizenship because that will give them a voice in your democratic government. They cannot be allowed to travel and under no circumstances may they vote in your elections. This will ensure satisfaction and only a small pesky minority will be discontented and will be easily silenced as you choose without press coverage. There may be no visiting their conditions because they are going to live in poverty for not being part of your master race.

Step 3 Crack down
Why do they need so much land? Their population is rapidly diminishing. It would be acceptable to take some of it off their hands to mine and get resources.

For extra security no one is allowed to visit the homelands because that would only bother the masses. They must be allowed to live in peace.

Does this sound familiar? It should. The United States used this method in the 1800s and South Africa before 1994. It worked beautifully for a while. Any nation that looks similar should be analysed thoroughly to determine that it isn't committing this crime against humanity. Look past whatever the history of the ruling ethnic group is because any group is capable of committing this grave crime.

This is satire. I believe this system is the most cruel and despotic of all systems, but wanted to make it clear in a way on what the values are, separating it from any current biases we all have towards or against any one ethnic group.

Israel

Israel is a great country. There are people of many ethnicities with Israeli citizenship. There is freedom of religion. There is freedom of speech and many different freedoms for all of her citizens.

However, the Gaza Strip and many parts of the West Bank do not have the same rights as Israel. They are led by terrorist organizations that do not have the good of the people in mind. By having citizenship for Muslims difficult, possible, but difficult to achieve most good citizens of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank cannot fulfill the requirements to become citizens of Israel. If there is to be peace, I think that everyone who has lived in Israel and Palestine since they were born or the creation of Israel should be offered citizenship without any other qualifications. This would take away a major recruitment tool from the terrorists Hamas and Hezbollah which would diffuse the situation. Israel will not fall if they do this because Jews are now the majority of the land. They would become like South Africa or the United States where there are many different ethnic groups coexisting with equal rights for all.

I believe Israel to be a good country. I believe that all peoples should have equal rights. I also believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a good Document to determine the most important rights. Peace is possible.

Them

"They did it again those no-good, ungodly, sinning Thems. Can you believe as a good Christian American what They did? They want to take Our jobs, leaving Us out on the street. They are going to marry and then rape Our women, They are going to take over Our government, and to top it off They are going to become the leading class leaving Us to the dogs. They are going to be elected President. They are already in Congress. If you ask me, I think we should deport Them all. Send Them back to where They came from I say, and if We want Their land We will take it and They will have less because They are not God-fearing. Not only that but They have already taken over entire cities, entire states that We used to control. They don't even speak the same language as Us with all of Their culture's nonsense words that We don't use. For the sake of Humanity, They must be destroyed."
~ Leader of the West Secure Klan Inc.

Sound familiar? Good, you read your history. Sound familiar? Good, you have been watching the news.

On the NPR Firing of Juan Williams.

There has been a lot of controversy over the past few days about the firing of Juan Williams after saying, "But when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb, and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous." [source] This is scapegoating. There are one and a half billion Muslims in the world. Muslims follow the Quran today like Christians followed the Bible 600 years ago, and that means that women will wear headscarves. The terrorists are definitely a small minority of Muslims, and saying this shows him to be explosive and not clear-thinking. If an African-American said a similar thing about European-Americans in the 1960s because the person thought that they would be a member of the KKK, they would become inaccurate immediately because it shows an unclear method of thinking and explosiveness. If I was a news station manager I wouldn't want to have someone who is saying inflammatory things on my station because it would be giving the wrong message and I would want people with a clear head on my airwaves so that I would be 1) as accurate as possible and 2) giving non-hateful messages. Because of this, I must support NPR in their decision to have people with time slots be clear and respectful towards everyone. It once was called cultural respect.

Another thing is that NPR is being accused of bias. I disagree with this. NPR does have radio shows that appear to obviously have liberal bias to many people, like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and it is an immensely popular radio show, but people know it is biased, and people listen to it for a good laugh at anybody political. When you listen to them they will bash any politician. Hardly liberal bias, they will poke fun at anyone, from Obama to Limbaugh. That is the only radio show on NPR that is consistently accused of having bias (for a somewhat understandable reason). They have the BBC on the air, and when they air their own news, they will interview people from pro-choice to pro-life and sometimes have a debate between the two side. This is hardly bias at all because they have interviews with not just someone who is hired to give a conservative or liberal spin on it, the people are from groups like Focus on the Family, Westboro Baptist Church, Republican Congresspeople, AND people from PFLAG, Freedom to Marry, and Democratic Congresspeople, ALL IN THE SAME HOUR, SOMETIMES THE SAME TIMESLOT! Now if that is biased, there is no neutrality. This movement applies to all other issues. The people they bring on believe strongly in their cause, are the best speakers for the movements, and are not interrupted. I disagree completely with this accusation.

These two arguments tell me that the far right is just looking for anything to bash other people on, no matter what. They need to cool their jets and start thinking before they say that someone who is saying something incredibly racist is right. That FOX is hiring him now after showing how unstable he is makes me distrust their method for hiring people.

Things I want to see.

I want to see the Right-wing talking heads respond to three propositions

1. Mississippi has just outlawed marriage between black and white people.
2. Protesters march on building of Church in Atheist community.
3. Tax officers in Beverly hills are stopping white people for hopes of getting the money they lost.

Wouldn't that just be entertaining or what? Terrible, yes, entertaining, definitely.