Playing Out Illegal Immigration

Comprehensive immigration reform is a hot topic being pushed by Democrat President Barack Obama and the leadership of the Republican Party. Democrats are hoping to turn this issue into a major vote getting drive in 2014 and beyond. Republicans, for some reason, have leaders that believe that they must do the same thing and pass comprehensive immigration reform in order to survive. Big business, and the Chamber of Commerce for example, are putting pressure on Republicans to cave in and pass immigration reform. Businesses for some reason seem to think that cheap labor is the result of immigration reform. Perhaps they naively believe that once these illegal aliens are recognized by our country they will come out of the shadows and be content to make the small wages that they get paid today as illegal workers. They need to wake up!

Democrats always have the next round played out in every political battle. They are never content to accept the status quo or a victory as the final answer. Immigration reform is no different. A blind man could see that the next bludgeon to hit Republicans following comprehensive immigration reform would significantly hurt any business that uses illegal alien labor. Democrats would claim, in a monolithic voice, that Republicans and conservatives should no longer exploit these new “Americans” and their wages should be equalto any other American. So farms that use migrant labor now to pick their crops, and rely upon cheap labor, would instantly find themselves forced to pay minimum wage or higher. And what does that mean America?

The jobs that “Americans won’t do”, they would do if wages were high enough. Now we’re going to recognize between 12 and 20+ million people, put them on a path to citizenship, and immediately be forced to pay them minimum wage. They will compete for essential entry-level jobs like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King with American teenagers. The end result will harm Americans at the expense of those who might have allegiances to other countries, but who Democrats anoint as Americans.

Open your eyes and look for their next move following amnesty. Look for the second and third order effects of Democrat sponsored policies. There is always another progressive bludgeon waiting for Republicans!

Conflicting Arguments, Obamacare vs Comprehensive Immigration Reform

I’ve written about the Progressive/Democrat tactic of making claims about the intent of their policies and avoiding any analysis of the second or third order affects of them.  I’ve also discussed the hypocritical nature of so many of their policies.  The President and his Democrat Obamacare supporters have now blended these two deceptive tactics in defending two different policies.  First, not even Mr. Fantastic could bend himself into the pretzels needed by Democrats defending Obamacare.

The latest effort involves the recent CBO report, that stated Obamacare would reduce 2.3 million full time job equivalents from the US economy.  That means that Obamacare will shrink our economy.  Our GDP, which Democrats and big spending Republicans need to support their massive spending will be smaller, weaker and provide fewer taxes.  Bad news for America!  Democrats responded with the ludicrous explanation that cutting American workers’ hours is a good thing.  Less work is a blessing, since work is too difficult, and Americans need less work and more free time.  Americans, they say, are too productive.  Tell that to somebody that’s trying to pay their mortgage, rent, heating or water bill.  Tell them that less money is a blessing!  Here’s where the Democrats take a completely opposite position on immigration reform.

Democrats claim that comprehensive immigration reform is needed so that the illegal community can come out of the shadows and work.  They will do the work that Americans won’t do, so Democrats say.  Reform is needed to let these people, who only want to get to work and provide for their families the opportunity to put in long hours in the fields to do so.  Work for them, is a blessing.  Hard work is what we are keeping them from doing with our “unfair” immigration laws.  Make them legal so that they can work.  Why is it fair to make illegal immigrants work long and hard hours, but it’s oppressive to allow American citizens to do the same?

In order to connect these dots I guess Democrats would need to tell these immigrants to stop working full time hours once they come out of the shadows, for then work would be as bad as they say it is for Americans?  Perhaps Democrats are just intent on oppressing immigrants?

All fantasy aside, both Democrat arguments are nothing but smoke screens to hide their real goals.  Obamacare is only an interim step to government controlled healthcare, with emphasis on CONTROL.  Immigration reform is nothing but an effort to get more Democrat voters.

The Fallacy of Unemployment Insurance Benefits

President Obama and prominent democrats are once again pushing an increase to unemployment benefits. They even label them as “emergency” payments while at the same time telling us that the economy is rebounding and growing stronger. One of the left’s claims to sell the program extension, a clear fallacy of unemployment insurance benefits, is that it would create jobs.

Saying that paying unemployment benefits creates jobs is like saying digging a hole creates dirt!dirt_pile

Money that goes out to one person in unemployment payments first gets taken from another as a tax. The tax creates a hole in their bank account just as digging creates a hole in the ground. Leftist economic illiteracy claims that the payments create jobs as each person spends their unemployment checks, bringing revenue to businesses such as heating companies and grocery stores.

What’s missed, either through ignorance or deception, is that the person who got taxed no longer has their own money to spend on heat or groceries, negating every unemployment check dollar. In reality, it’s far more likely that the extension of benefits costs the economy jobs due to government inefficiency, but it most certainly doesn’t create any.

Making Mountains out of Mole Hills and Mole Hills out of Mountains

One of the key progressive tactics is to create straw men issues out of tiny or non-existent issues, fabricating “mountains out of mole hills”, while at the same time downplaying real crises and ignoring them, in effect turning real mountains into mole hills. In many cases, the left completely makes up the mountain out of whole cloth, Republican “War on Women?” Please! What better way to show this strategy than to list some examples, all to the detriment of our country, by the way.

Mountains out of Mole Hills:

  • Republicans out to kill the elderly, indigent, women and children (yet death panels and abortions are democrat’s designs)
  • Class warfare (self-fulfilling prophecy) – The wealthy are rich because the steal from the poor. The Poor have no wealth because the rich keep it all. Income inequality.
  • Coconut oil is bad for you –We no longer use it to make popcorn, but contrary to claims it has been proven to have many positive effects such as reducing the impacts of Alzheimers .
  • Salt will kill you –Latest studies say this is way over blown.
  • Debt reduction/Balanced Budget – Any movement in this direction destroys the country, evil Republicans, “women and minorities hardest hit”.
  • Voter ID laws exist to disenfranchise the minority vote In fact they are essential to keep our elections honest, no dead people need show up to vote.
  • Comprehensive Immigration Reform Only 3% of Americans think this is a top priority.
  • White Privilege Itself a racist screed, taught across the progressive educational spectrum. Do progressives feel guilty because the Democrat Party has such a racist history?
  • The Population Bomb, we’ll soon be forced to eat the bodies of our dead!

The above list is just a drop in the bucket, but hopefully makes the point. Be on the lookout for this tactic from the left! I’d be interested to hear what other examples you can list to further the cataloging of progressives crying wolf and making mountains out of mole hills to create national, and often global, panic in order to advance their agenda.

Mole Hills out of Mountains:

  • Hillary Clinton, the DNC and the Obama Administration’s actual involvementwith the Russians. Uranium One Sale, $145M to the Clinton Foundation, Hired Russians to make up dirt on Donald Trump.
  • IRS Harassment of Conservative Groups, Tea Party
  • Benghazi (Avoidable murders of 4 Patriotic Americans)
  • The Loss of the Middle East to Terrorism
  • Fast and Furious
  • US’s crushing deficit
    • Long term liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, etc.
    • Increasing magnitude of paying back debt as % of budget (OMB projections are that the annual cost of interest on the National Debt will exceed the Defense Budget in approximately 2020).
    • Impacts on future generations (What we are doing is enslaving them to massive taxation)
  • Obamacare – Hardly a day goes by without another story coming out detailing the harm ObamaCare’s implementation is having on our country: Death Panels, Rapidly rising costs, Single Payer Government Controlled end state.
  • Democratic Party’s history of radical racism
  • Crushing impacts of Big Government regulations on free trade, free enterprise, and US economy.
  • War on Christianity– Even the Pope is concerned, (Army warns against Christians, Tea Party), Latest, 90,000 Christians Killed in 2017 for their Faith
  • Drug Violence spilling over from Mexico
  • Unions killing industries, public sector unions killing local, state, federal budgets
  • High taxes- Damaging US businesses, forcing capital offshore, Americans renouncing their US citizenship (look at the impacts of high taxes – New York, California, vs Texas
  • Banning of Gulf Oil Drilling (despite federal judicial rulings to the contrary)
  • Voter fraud
  • Failing US education system– From K-12 and into Universities (nearly 8 out of 10 NY City high school graduates can’t read).
  • Opposite of contrived GOP “war on women”, true war on women in the Islamic world.
  • “Clean Energy”
  • Crony Capitalism (gov’t choosing winners and losers).
  • Cost of College Education
  • Failure in War on Poverty

These two lists are in no way meant to be comprehensive. Sadly, there are far more examples that pop up every week.

Chess Vs Othello, Critical Strategies of Right vs Left

I would like to propose a prism, or a tool, through which to view the activities going on in Washington, across the country and even across international organizations such as the UN. This prism is intended to force a very different perspective on how to assess what’s going on by providing a model which bins activities, laws, etc. into understandable strategic buckets. Organizations develop and use strategies to achieve their ends. Strategies serve as the blueprint for how organizations conduct their business, both near and long-term, fight to triumph over competitors, and act as flight plans for how they intend to get from where they are to where they want to be. Political parties, and even religious movements, are no different.

As I witness what’s going on in the United States, and internationally, there are two major competing strategies at play. In order to highlight those two strategies, I will discuss them using reference to analogous strategy board games, which constitute the model mentioned above. The first game is chess.

Chess Board

Chess Board

Let me say up front that I love the game of chess and hold it in high regard, but that is irrelevant in the context of this discussion. Chess is a Western game, and I would submit is analogous to how the Republican Party, its pundits, and organizations affiliated with it, approach politics, problems and solutions both at home and abroad.

Many people are familiar with chess and how it’s played, but for those that are not, please follow this link for a more in-depth discussion on the rules. Simply stated the goal within chess is to check mate your opponent’s king in order to win. Along the way, players attempt to eliminate as many of their opponent’s pieces from the board as required in order to checkmate their opponent’s king. It often makes sense in chess to sacrifice one of piece in order to take a more valuable piece, or perhaps several, from one’s opponent. Chess, then, is essentially a linear mindset game where players trade piece for piece, blow for blow, in an effort to weaken one’s opponent to the point where they can no longer protect their king.

Othello Board

Othello Board

The second game is Othello. I would submit Othello is analogous to to the strategy employed by the Democratic Party, its pundits, and organizations affiliated with it, approach politics, problems and solutions in the United States, as do a number of international actors. According to Wikipedia, Othello has its origins in China, as a simplified version of “Go”. As is the case with chess, follow this link for a more detailed explanation of the game.

In a quick synopsis, Othello begins with only four pieces on the board, whereas chess begins with every piece. Each player takes turns placing one piece at a time on the board, eventually filling it up. Unlike chess, where players remove their opponent’s pieces, in Othello the strategy is to sandwich an opponent’s pieces between two of one’s own, which then turns all of those sandwiched pieces into your own color, effectively converting them from enemies to allies. This game requires a much different strategic mindset than chess, as the game becomes ever more complicated as the board fills up. The complexity, of available moves decreases in chess as the board is cleared of pieces.

For those that have not played both games, you should! A few matches will serve to accentuate the applicability of these two games as surrogates, or models, for competing strategic mindsets in play today and in the recent past.

The purpose of discussing these two games is to show the differences in thought and the diversions of strategy between the Republican and Democratic parties, and show the advantage one has over the other. Imagine a chess match where two opposing players were using different rules, one player according to the standard rules of chess, the other was using Othello-based rules. Each time the player using chess rules captured an opponent’s piece; it would be removed from the board. In contrast, when the player using Othello-based rules captured a piece, they would replace it with one of their own color and continue the game. It wouldn’t take long before an overwhelming advantage developed that would make the Othello player nearly unbeatable.

That appears to be the situation that exists in the United States today politically. So long as the Republican Party and affiliated organizations play by a Western mindset and a chess like rulebook they will be at significant disadvantage to any organization, democratic or otherwise, that is playing by Othello rules.

A few examples will help highlight these distinctions and I hope provide a very different lens through which to assess political activities, successes and failures. This model also suggests long-term strategies and means of successfully countering an Othello-based strategy.

An obvious example of a chess strategy applied to the Electoral College and presidential politics involves focus on battleground states. Until a few years ago, the battleground states consisted largely of states like Iowa and Ohio, while states like Florida and Virginia were as solidly Republican as California and New York are solidly Democrat.

The chess strategy of the Republican Party has focused on fighting it out for the battleground states. In doing so they have conceded a large portion of the electoral votes to the Democrat candidate, no matter who they are. The Othello strategy of the Democrats has focused on turning pieces (states) that were once solidly red, solidly Republican, like Florida and Virginia, into battleground states, and their eventual intent is to turn them into solid blue Democrat states. In effect they are turning Republican pieces into Democrat pieces and winning the electoral game in the process.

There is discussion in the media today about Texas ever slowly creeping toward a purple state. This follows the Othello strategy. One has to wonder why there is no discussion of any blue states being discussed as turning purple and possibly read. The answer is the Republican chess mentality, which would dictate protecting your own pieces not changing those of your opponent. Instead, the Republican Party needs to adopt an Othello-based strategy to win turning blue states into purple and eventually red in addition to protecting red states and fighting for the battleground states. This may seem like a difficult task, and perhaps it is, but it is precisely what the Democrat party has been doing for years. The alternative is to continue to play chessand lose!

An addendum to the electoral discussion above includes the ongoing immigration debate. Politico had an article titled “Immigration reform could be bonanza for Democrats”, which argues that approving the immigration bill would in ten years, lock in the electoral college for Democrats for the next generation. This is untenable for the Republican Party. An Othello-based strategy would suggest that any immigration bill must require a solution to this voting block. It might suggest that as a penalty for violating US immigration laws, none of the 11 million illegal immigrants can ever vote. They can never become US citizens either. They can stay and work, but never get the rights of US citizens. If they don’t like the deal, then they are free to leave. The result would solve all the professed problems used by progressives to drive the immigration debate in the first place, without compromising the US electoral process.

Another quick example involves our children. A chess-based strategy for child rearing would suggest raising your own children, and instilling them with your values, which would result, all other things being equal, in political status quo. An Othello-based strategy would attempt to change that balance, which is precisely what occurs when the education system indoctrinates instead of teaches. The latest move requires five-year-olds to attend universal preschool. There can only be one reason, to change the political future by converting would-be republican minded children into liberal-minded adults.

There a many other examples of these two strategies, which I will highlight over time. I’d be interested to hear comments on my theory, and where you see them in play.

Update of Recent Othello Strategies In Play: