Solving Illegal Immigration

 

Illegal immigration has become, in this moment of American history, THE existential question upon which this nation will either sink or swim. This is similar to what happened around the issue of slavery in an earlier time, decades of letting an unrestrained problem get worse has now triggered a time of severe law enforcement. That vigorous law enforcement effort has provoked, in turn, a passionate response of protest and riot verging into insurrection. As a result the distinct possibility of civil war looms once again on our national horizon.

Before we march further along this hate and anger filled path, absorbing a possibly deadly blow to our body politic, we should step back and realize that peaceful and equitable solutions are available to us. The thing is, the only way we can get to those peaceful solutions is by identifying, confronting, and overcoming the actual bad actors in this illegal immigration mess. To get directly to it, those bad actors are two groups of rich and powerful people: Commercial interests which employ massive numbers of illegal aliens, and international criminal cartels which profit from the trafficking of both drugs and humans.

Both of those groups are politically entrenched and immensely wealthy, so they will be formidable foes. But taking them on them is the only way we can solve this illegal immigration mess, and preserve our nation.

Up to this point in the second Trump administration, the one bright side to the vigorous enforcement effort has been to reduce border crossings to near zero. Enacting and vigorously enforcing laws against illegal employment will be the key factor in maintaining a closed border and ultimately solving this mess. We simply have to turn off the jobs magnet which is attracting the workers.

The illegal employers don't want that to happen, and use devious means to oppose it. Rather than having an open debate, they instead raise a cry insisting on absolutely no form of amnesty to any illegals. This strategy at first blush seems to work against their interests, but by insisting on the impossible perfect they prevent us from ever achieving the feasible good.

To get to the heart of the issue, what we have to do is modify our hard headed, absolutely NO AMNESTY stance with some realistic compassion. This plan necessarily contains some fine nuance (it can't be a repeat of the 1986 debacle), which will be explained in a bit, but first let's look at how unrealistic, and fictional, the NO AMNESTY stance is.

As a conservative guess, there are probably at least 30 million illegal residents here today. They mostly have close attachments, via children (citizens who will remain citizens even if birthright citizenship is ended. No Ex Post Facto laws allowed, remember?), in-laws, and friends. So, at a minimum we are talking about a deportation process that will have traumatic effect on 50 or more million people. That is a lot of potential voters in the 2026 midterms.

Look at how things have actually been going. Yes, it appears that a million or so illegal immigrants have been detained and or deported, and once again, the border has been closed. That is a good start.

But most of the deportees have been the despicable criminals and gang members nobody wanted in the first place, along with those self deportees who were probably intending to leave soon anyway. In other words, they were the low hanging fruit. Even with all that going for the deportation process, the administration has still had to resort to multiple deployments of the National Guard to assist ICE, and the almost unheard of deployment of American combat forces on American soil.

To get from one million to 30 million, we will have to double that effort, and then double it again, and then double it again, and then double it again, and then double it yet again. Even now, many of the immigrant's home countries refuse to repatriate them, so we shunt them to third countries. That will work only in the short term and in small numbers. In large numbers, dumping unemployed foreigners into other nations will result in criminal gangs running amok in those countries, which will then also refuse to receive them.

It is hard to see how we can continue, let alone accelerate, down this path without resorting to martial law. So if we do continue down this path, a path dictated by a policy of “no form of amnesty allowed,” we probably will end up in either low intensity civil war, or authoritarian government control, or most probably both..

All of that will likely follow if we stick to the hard headed, absolutely NO AMNESTY approach. Or rather, our false version of that approach because let's be real here, that NO AMNESTY thing is a fiction to begin with. There is no intention of applying that hard headed logic to all the illegal employers. If NO AMNESTY were applied to illegal employers today, almost all the meat packing, construction and agri-business concerns would quickly be put out of business. Not only would they lose most of their workers, but they would be fined into bankruptcy, that is if we were serious about NO AMNESTY to law breakers.

Many will shout, “Whoa up and hold on there sport. A strict application of the law to deprive billionaires of some of their millions of dollars is a bridge too far, a tragedy too great to consider.” They will say this while smugly asserting that ruining the lives of millions of weak and defenseless workers is perfectly alright. This is extreme scapegoating in action.

So that NO AMNESTY thing will, in the fine tradition of American euphemism and equivocation, fall apart in the wink and nod, backroom dealings of the good old boy network. We all suspect that's how it will end, after we witness a time of highly publicized brutal enforcement. When immigration enforcement starts hitting the bottom line of some big campaign donors, the vigor of law enforcement will suddenly peter out, and things will go back to how they used to be. The problem of illegal immigration will remain unsolved. That is the way it has gone before, and that is how things will probably go this time, if we let them.

The pivotal issue to consider in defeating these bad actors is the rule of law, and how greatly it can benefit working people. This is THE issue that corrupt politicians (by definition) and corporate greedmeisters (by inclination) want to ignore.

As an example, think about how ignoring the rule of law effects workers in just one kind of job; janitorial work. It used to be that janitors were paid by the hour as employees, with benefits, overtime, vacations, insurance and such. These days that work is mostly subcontracted out,(largely to illegals) so the worker has no benefits and is expected to pay their own taxes. It’s still very low paid work, averaging little more than ten to fifteen dollars an hour, and the worker, as stated, is expected to pay their own taxes out of that. Hiring practices are similar in other trades, such as construction and landscaping.

Most of the illegal workers, classified as subcontractors, simply don’t pay their taxes, which maximizes their take home pay, allowing them to pay for their own benefits, if they want. Many choose instead to subsidize that pay by fraudulently relying on government services, like emergency room health care and food stamps. The only way for an American to compete for those jobs is to settle for taking home, after taxes, less than seven to ten dollars an hour, or to take the risk of not paying the taxes.

If the IRS comes after the illegal worker for back taxes, they can go underground, get a new phony ID, take a temporary deportation, or maybe just take their savings and depart for home. On the other hand, if the IRS comes after the American worker, they’re in a lot of trouble, with almost no place to hide. So the situation is that if the American is going to compete with the illegal, they tend to move to a marginalized legal status, effectively working under the table, just like the illegals. That’s how it is working today, how it has always worked when the law is being ignored, and how it will always work. Lawlessness always begets more lawlessness.

Now consider how this microcosm plays out when repeated millions of times over many years. Basically, if the rule of law continues to be ignored, (and if we allow it to continue it will only get worse) the status of illegal workers, both in this nation and abroad, will stay the same or slowly get worse, and the status of American workers (in terms of wages, protections, security, etc) will, over the course of years, be brought down to that level. This has been happening for decades now, and is a major factor in the widening disparity between rich and poor in this nation.

On the other hand, if we insist on the rule of law, requiring our government to do the will of the people and forcing businesses to obey the law, the status of the American workers (wages, benefits, and all that) will stay the same as today, and probably tend to slowly improve. The status of the low skill foreign workers, in this nation and abroad, will slowly be brought up to that level. Thus, many of the economic issues facing the masses will improve if we reject illegality and instead embrace the rule of law. Solving the illegal immigration problem by compassionately returning to the rule of law will benefit all working people, in this and other countries, and only minimally reduce the wealth of the already wealthy.

So it is easy to see why those bad actors want the border open and immigration law unenforced. The cartels obviously want an unending stream of illegal border crossings to disguise their trafficking schemes. Even more, the large illegal employers want the illegals to stay here, continue working for them, and remain illegal. All they have to do to keep this gravy train rolling, whenever the American people periodically rise up to demand an end to this mess, is to raise a howl for NO AMNESTY, demanding that the perfect remain the enemy of the good.

Up to now their plan has always worked. We are always left with this three way choice. Either keep going on this path, and risk civil war. Or get even tougher, avoid civil war by becoming an armed camp and engaging in genocidal levels of enforcement. Or, what is most probable, let it go back to the way it was before Trump tried to fix it. None of those choices is acceptable, so this time, let's look at a better alternative.

The alternative solution will first of all have to be based on keeping the border tightly closed. The first step has to be that everyone who comes into this country comes in through the front door, in compliance with our laws, whatever we decide those laws will be. That border closure must be maintained for as long as the border exists.

The next stage in the plan is to establish some date certain, in the near future, at which time all illegal employees, and their employers, are required to identify all illegal workers. This requirement will also be applied to anyone accessing government services. At that time each person will be assigned a provisional green card, with bio-metric data attached and downloaded to a data base. After that date, any worker or client without such a card, and a file in the data base, is subject to immediate deportation and the employer is subject to a fine, if not criminal prosecution if they have tried to evade this system.

Enforcement of these new immigration laws will, contrary to those defending illegal employment, be an easy task. Simply attach hefty fines to every instance of illegal employment, and make half the fine money payable, as a bounty, to those who report it. That approach would make enforcement very easy, and profoundly cost effective. In fact, that way of doing it would be so effective that it would actually threaten the economic well being of many big corporations.

Then the real world benefits of this policy would come to the fore. Rather than allowing themselves to go broke, the big corporate illegal employers would be forced to make their arguments regarding those foreign workers in transparent public debate, and not just in smoke filled back rooms. When the big business folks have to make their arguments public, we will probably soon discover that in some fields, such as agriculture and meat processing, we really do need some foreign workers, and then we would have an honest basis for establishing a fair guest worker program.

Concurrent with the assignment of a provisional green card to every illegal resident, each of them, when identified, will be entered into and subjected to a vetting process. The metrics of this vetting process will have already been established and made transparent to the public. These protocols will be designed to determine who deserves to gain permanent green card status.

These protocols will be based on things like time in country, legal record, work history, character references from friends and employers, record of family use or abuse of government services, and things like that. That way, a person who has been here twenty years, worked hard, paid their bills and kept their nose clean will be relatively assured, even before entering into the process, of gaining a permanent green card. That way, much opposition to the plan will be dissipated.

On the other hand, those who engaged in criminality, or who lived on the edge of the law, or were illegitimately brought in during Biden's open border fiasco, or who came here to game our system and take advantage of our compassion, will be filtered out.

While that vetting process is being carried out, all employees, legal or illegal, will, for the first time, have equal legal status. That means minimum wage, safety, and worker benefits laws will be in force. That alone will make it to where native born Americans will once again be able to compete for jobs in those fields. As the vetting process continues, many of the foreign born illegal workers will get deported, and even more native born workers will take their place.

Once again it must be emphasized that a closed border will have to be a permanent fact for this plan to work. From this point forward there will be no new illegal workers coming in. That will be the big difference compared to what happened in 1986.

With all those factors in place, over the course of just a few years, with our economy expanding as expected, the formerly illegal workers will be absorbed into an open, free and fair market. The problem of illegal immigration will largely be solved, and the rule of law restored. Some corporations will have slightly reduced profits, and the international criminal cartels will have much less influence. Most of us will be okay with those outcomes.

Then we can have full employment, with a dignified, legally protected and decent life for all workers. Our nation will be stronger, more inclusive, more united, and more peaceful. Isn't that an agenda we can all support?

We've Got to Get on Our Own Side

Our nation and our world are swirling in the chaos of seemingly innumerable scandals and emergencies. From the bombing of Iran, last year and next week? Tomorrow?, to the gargantuan fraud scandals that are just emerging, to ICE round ups, to the deportation of criminals and terrorists, to the deportation of upstanding family builders, to whatever the US is doing in Greenland, to Gaza, to Ukraine, to Iran's revolution, to what we just did in Venezuela, to American citizens being shot for demonstrating/ obstructing law enforcement, and a lot more issues that limited space doesn't allow to be mentioned here.

In all of these we find ourselves involved in passionate controversy. The worst part is that even though we have all this information technology at our fingertips, the truth, or at least the truth we can agree on, is almost impossible to find. Because of that we are in a time of deep and worsening division.

Here in America, the division is so stark that many are calling for a national divorce, or some kind of chaotic change in government. It is all so unnecessary because if we take the time to look at the situation with an honest eye, we can see a way to unity and national revival. However, if we do look at it with an honest eye, we will see that those on both the left and the right, Democrat and Republican, have been bamboozled. We have bought into some massive lies, lies which are going to destroy our nation if we don't reject them.

The attack on Venezuela of January 2, 2026 has raised questions about those lies; about our government, and how our Constitution is to be used. The response has been, besides the global celebration of Venezuelans, to object that President Trump should have gained congressional authorization prior to launching an attack. The first counter response is to warn that many in congress can't be trusted to keep such an operation secret, and so the President was justified in going it alone. Both sides of this argument, and the deeper arguments which follow, have some merit. We will focus on them now, because they reveal how all the whole raft of divisive issues are connected..

The legal issues come down to two clauses in Article 1, section 8 of the Constitution, wherein Congress is given specific powers. In clause 11, Congress is given the power to declare war. Those on the left say that Trump should have been bound by this clause, and that Congress should have declared war before he launched the operation to arrest Maduro. Those on the right say President Trump, as commander in chief, has the power to conduct legal and small scale operations on his own say so. What's more, they have a lot of legal precedents to back them on this, among which are American “gun boat” diplomacy of the late 1800's, Clinton's bombing of Bosnia, Obama's droning of multiple human targets, and the overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya.

With all those undeclared precedents in mind, take another look at that congressional power to declare war. That power was last exercised properly at the beginning of World War II. Since then it has been violated on a regular basis by both Republican and Democrat administrations. Korea and Vietnam are glaring examples, but even the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with their Authorizations of the use of Military Force, fell far short of having proper declarations of war, even though war was definitely conducted in those nations. So squawking loudly about how Trump's actions are an unprecedented violation of the Constitution misses the real point.

The real point is that both sides are wrong, because all those unauthorized actions should be challenged for another reason, The more pertinent clause of section 8 that should guide us is clause 10, just prior to clause 11, which says, “The Congress shall have power: To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offenses against the law of nations.” That clause obviously covers piracy, trafficking in both narcotics and humans, and international terrorism. It does not, however, give the President Cart Blanche, but rather gives to Congress the all important power of definition. So when the subject comes up that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, it is the Congress, not the President, who is to make that call.

The way it could, and should, work is that Congress should debate the issues of foreign governments and organizations that threaten our national security. If the threat is dire enough, war should be declared. If the threat is low level, but still a threat, Congress should define who is really the bad guy, and how they should be punished. The President should then be authorized to carry out any punishment the Congress decrees. While the debate would be in public, any operational details, such as specific targets, timing and etc could be kept secret. That way, the enemy would not know when or how we are coming.

If such debates were held in public, transparent for the most part to the world, our adversaries would know that we are coming. Just having the debate might work to change their behavior and prevent war. What's more, once Congress did define some bad actor as a terrorist, or some foreign government as a violator of the laws of nations, the world would know that we, as a nation were united in our resolve, and that we mean business.

The big obstacle to our operating in that constitutional mode, and the first point of this essay, is those same unfaithful legislators mentioned earlier. Not trusting some legislators to keep national secrets is a real concern, but the situation is worse than that. Some congresspeople can't be trusted to seek the national good while debating in congress. Some of them seem to be pursuing the interests of other nations, or the dominance of some alien ideology.

Faithless legislators greatly hobble our nation. Take, for an example, how we should have dealt with Iran's growing nuclear capabilities. Even though that nation was clearly in violation, for more than twenty years, of the international treaty on nuclear non proliferation, we couldn't, due to the unfaithful legislators, do any constitutional thing about it. We should have used, Art 1, sec 8, clause 10, and given standing authorization for the president to act, forcefully if necessary, to prevent the terrorist regime in Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, some faithless left wing congress people would have vehemently opposed that, and due to the current hyper partisan spirit in congress, the Democrats, in lock step fashion, would have prevented that kind of constructive use of our Constitution. With that authority in hand, Trump might not have ever needed to bomb them.

Faithless legislators like that should be restrained by the threat of losing their seats in the next election. Too often, however, the unfaithful congress people are representing the wishes of their constituents back home. That then is the real crux of our problem, and one it is high time we addressed. There are a lot of people, in a lot of different groups, that don't really care for America to survive as a free and self governing nation.

All of those groups, left and right, singly and collectively, poison our national debate about the law and the Constitution; what it means, and how it should be used. For the most part, these groups use the Constitution as a cynical tool to wreak national destruction. When it suits their purpose, they embrace the most minuscule points, applying wrong headed readings of it to current issues. When it doesn't suit their purpose, they are happily capable of ignoring wholesale constitutional violations. They thus render our foundational national document into a kind of suicide pact, useful only when it degrades the national well being.

This latest incident in Venezuela shows that in action. Those on the left, which now includes Globalists, Marxists and radical Moslems, are deeply and touchingly concerned that every jot and tittle of their Constitutional misreading be adhered to in this case. On the other hand, when Clinton was bombing Bosnia, or Obama was droning wedding parties in Afghanistan, not a peep was heard from them.

This constitutional malfeasance is practiced by both left and right, Democrats and Republicans. What's more, the worst examples of this malfeasance are not minuscule, but extend to huge issues which touch every aspect of national life.

On the left, the biggest issue is how they ignore the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt, FDR, effectively repealed the Tenth Amendment in the 1930's. They will respond that the Supreme Court approved it (even though the Court was politically coerced due to FDR's court packing scheme), so in this case, the Court's word is final. This is unlike the way they receive court rulings that favor Donald Trump, such as SCOTUS approving his War Powers stance, or supporting his programs to deport illegal aliens, or the overthrowing of Roe v Wade. In those cases the court ruling is definitely up for debate, and not final.

Things aren't much different on the right. They might celebrate Trump's court victories, but their own fealty to the Constitution is suspect, especially when such doctrines as corporate personhood are scrutinized. Yes, they can point to favorable court rulings which support that odious doctrine, just as the left ignores the court approved neutering of the Tenth Amendment. What they can't point to, however, is where the doctrine of corporate personhood exists in the Constitution, or how it conforms to the vision of government the founders handed us.

Leaving the legalistic wranglings around these issues for later, the point remains that many in our nation use our Constitution as a kind of suicide pact. Then the real problem, once again, comes down to these faithless legislators, and the millions of our fellow citizens who vote for them. Simply put, there are too many Americans these days who are not sure that the United States of America is a good idea anymore, or that it ever really was.

When we see that as the real problem, the awkward misuse of the Constitution makes sense. Far too many folks in this country have an agenda other than truly working toward a more perfect union. Some are out and out Marxist globalists (Progressives and Secular fundamentalists). Some are religious zealots, ranging from fundamentalist Moslems to Christian Nationalists, and some are racists, of various stripes, that believe in their own racial group's supremacy. All of them are deluded with the notion that America was always and still is a flawed nation, not really worthy of continued existence. They foolishly think that we should just let the republic go; that anything would be better.

It is easy enough to see why some, if not most, modern Americans have come to doubt that this country should continue. From day one, we have not lived up to our lofty ideals. It isn't that our system failed, but rather that we failed our system. We claimed all men are created equal, but we didn't extend equal rights to all men. At first we kept those just for wealthy White men; and then, after some reforms, to just White men; and then, after a brutal, probably inevitable war to end slavery, nominally extended rights to all men, even Black men, that were citizens. Then we eventually included Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans, along with every ethnicity of women. So while we began with great flaws, over time we have at least been trying to perfect the union, to mend its' every flaw.

Along the way, however, while we were distracted and not being informed about it, we lost the essence of our original system. First, some powerful interests got effective control of the free press, what is today known as the media. Then, while we weren't looking or being warned about it due to that corrupted media, those same elitist interests (who never did want a nation dedicated to liberty and justice for all) got the Supreme Court to declare that corporations are persons. That really changed the basic structure of our government, because the founders, with the intention of preventing corporate monopolies, had set it up to where the states could regulate corporations. After the court made that ruling in 1886, states could no longer keep the corporations on the short leash of community control. Interstate monopolies and trusts soon thereafter (in the 1890's) came to dominate our national life. to the detriment of us all.

After that there were a couple of other massive changes to our system, which even though they were done by constitutional amendments in the 19teens, worked to scuttle the original political dynamic initiated by the founders. Those were the 16^th and 17^th Amendments, which established a federal tax directly on individuals, and set up direct election of senators. The first erected a horrifyingly unbalanced tax structure, making individuals answer, as individuals, to a distant, all powerful, and unaccountable government. The second muffled most of the voices of the states in the halls of the national legislature. Those combined moves actually reduced the influence that individuals could have on the federal government just as they gave that same federal government the power to insert itself into the most intimate details of our personal lives. The Founders would have rolled over in their graves.

A later unconstitutional usurpation of powers by the feds from the states occurred under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930's. During that decade, and in response to what he termed a national crisis, FDR moved many of the functions of government from the states and localities to the federal government. He effectively, as stated earlier, repealed the Tenth Amendment. Not only was that agenda initiated in that decade, but since then, with LBJ's Great Society and such, we have continued down that path, amalgamating almost all powers of government at that same, federal, national level.

These days almost all the functions of government, from education to healthcare to welfare to infrastructure to jobs, business, and environmental controls, functions which used to be under the responsibility and power of local communities, have been taken over by the federal government. It is then no wonder folks have come to doubt the goodness of America. We haven't lived in America for a long time, a much longer time than the lifespans of any still breathing.. We have been in a different country, a false America, for so long that the blessings, and the very feel, of liberty have been lost to our hearts and minds.

Think about how these changes (and there are others) explain so much of what has gone wrong in our nation, and how the truth of this cuts in all directions. A government which enables corporate excess and monopolies has resulted in many of us hating and fearing capitalism. That is a tragedy because the type of small scale, petite capitalism the founders embraced, and empowered the states to regulate, served the people well, and would not have led to these excesses.

Likewise, big, over-centralized government has both taken from us control of corporations, and created huge unaccountable bureaucracies which rule over the minutia of our lives. This over-centralized government has created a real dread of tyranny in the hearts of many. Ultimately, those who of us dread corporate excess have been divided from and set in battle against those of us who dread the ravages of big government tyranny. Thus our great national division is driven by our elite rulers.

Further, and most importantly, taking the powers of self government from us in our local communities has removed from us the greatest blessing of liberty which the American system previously provided. That great blessing is the kind of vibrant, involved citizenry that our system, with powers and responsibilities held in local communities, was intended to generate, and which it did generate until real liberty was lost to us.

The long term solution, not to get bogged down in specifics, is for us to think small, in terms of both government and business. We must stop thinking that big, central systems are the best, or only, way to go.

That is the gist of the problem. We know, and don't much trust, those around us. But then we turn around and place great trust in strangers, people we don't know at all, who live at a great distance and over whom we have no control. Why do we think such elites are better people who can be trusted? It is a kind of blind idolatry which we exercise toward both government and business elites, and it serves us very poorly.

We must regain the wisdom, the determination, that all government is dangerous. With that determination, we must come to see that the smaller and closer to the people a government is, the more likely we are to be able to keep it under control. The same principle holds true for business, smaller and decentralized is safer, more accountable and generally better for us than bigger and more centralized.

By de-centralizing government, empowering local and state governments, we will be able to de-centralize corporations. This would empower us to put the corporate (and technological) beasts back on a healthy short leash of community control, while retaining a system of free enterprise. That would give us the ability to deal with all the other challenges mentioned earlier, from environmental concerns to run away militarism (which has always been the illegitimate child of over-centralized capitalism).

On the other hand, giving in to the temptation to throw it all up as a bad effort, to abandon the American experiment, would just land us deeper into the clutches of the elitists bent on our enslavement. Any moves to break up, destroy, or divorce ourselves as a nation will almost undoubtedly make it easier for those same forces of bigness, that same nebulous elitism, to gain even more power over us.

When we ponder getting back to the Constitution in this country we ought to recognize that it's probably about the only time human beings, on a mass scale, ever got government right. But that is definitely not because it was mostly cooked up by just a bunch of White guys

It is true that they were the ones most involved, but the important thing to notice is that they were in a desperate bind. They were obliged to use all the (formidable) education they collectively possessed. and combine that with all the knowledge they could garner, and use all that to conceive of some form of government that would be stable enough to keep the British from eventually hanging them.

In the course of nobly and courageously protecting their own interests, the Founders accidentally stumbled upon something better than they knew. In September 1787, they knew that any government they produced would have to pass muster with the most politically astute people the world had yet seen. So they made it up the best they could, and gave the people more real power than many of them were comfortable with. Even the Founders didn't realize how powerful a popular tool it would prove to be.

In a lot of ways, our decline has been inevitable. It is just the way that nations, and republics especially, go. The thing is, and why we should strive so hard to revive our system, is that ours truly was a unique experiment in government, one that proved itself to be very empowering for the common people, and really did work to elevate the moral consciousness of the masses.

Before we allow this tremendous gift to drift away forever, we ought to realize that for all its flaws, it was still the best system of government humans have ever stumbled upon. If we choose to, our revolutionary fervor, which is legitimate and growing, could be diverted into not burning this system down in favor of some untried and probably ill intended fraud, but rather into putting our good system back together better than ever, truly empowering we the people to renew our quest to establish liberty and justice for all.

The most important question to ask is; Where are we going into the future? The alternatives to American self government that are on offer, from some kind of theocracy to some kind of totalitarian socialism, while they might be attractive to this generation of Americans, are attractive only because they, and we, all of us, have forgotten the great promise and reality of the American experiment in popular self government. We need to remember and re-imagine how well our system can work, and how well it can accommodate our diversity and our differences without causing us to devolve into mutual hatred and hostility.

What's more, we must realize that those corrupt elitist interests who deformed and mutilated our system into being repugnant are waiting in the wings to take complete control if we let them. Just throwing up our hands in frustration, just chucking it all, will play into their agenda.

There is an old saying, “Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.” This means that when one goes to clean up a big mess, don't lose sight of what is truly precious. Don't dispose of that precious baby while getting rid of the messy, objectionable crud that has gotten attached to it.

Getting rid of our precious system of free popular self government in favor of some corrupt and corruptible elitist system would be far worse than just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would, in fact, amount to throwing out the precious baby of Liberty, and retaining what we have come to loathe, the filthy, crud filled bathwater of oppressive elitist corruption. So not only should we not throw the baby out with the bathwater, we definitely should not make the greatest mistake of all time; that of throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater.