An Idiot’s National Emergency

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It’s not proper form to open a blog post by calling a sitting president an idiot who knows not what he talks or tweets about. Even so, the conclusion is inescapable. 

President Donald Trump is an idiot, at least when it comes to navigating politics, but then this is basically de rigueur in America. As a nation, we know very little about the rest of the world or for that matter our own country, and that includes the real number of criminals, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and terrorists crossing the border. 

I live in Las Cruces, New Mexico, less than fifty miles from the US-Mexico border. There is far less crime here than in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco (the liberal troika). I lived in Chicago in the late 1990s, and I can say the murder rate there at that time was far worse than anything happening along the border. 

Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute posted an article recently breaking down the numbers. It doesn’t look good for the president and his zombified MAGA supporters. 

“First, the crime rate in the 23 counties along the U.S. border with Mexico is below that of counties in the United States that do not lie along the Mexican border,” Nowrasteh writes. “Violent and property crime rates are both slightly lower along the border, but the homicide rate along the border is a whopping 34 percent below the homicide rate in non-border counties. If the entire United States had a homicide rate as low as that along the border in 2017, then there would have been about 5,720 fewer homicides nationwide that year.”

He points out that illegal immigrants “apprehended along the border have a low criminal conviction rate… The most serious offense of ‘homicide, manslaughter’ accounted for 0.04 percent of all convictions of apprehended illegal immigrants from FY2015 through August 31, 2018.”

Nowrasteh points out

“resident illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated or convicted of crimes than native-born Americans. The estimated nationwide illegal immigrant incarceration rate in 2016 was 47 percent below that of native-born Americans, including those in immigration detention. 

If dangerous drug smugglers, cartel assassins, gang members, and other violent individuals (including nonexistent terrorists) were in fact a serious issue, there would be scores of Border Patrol agents killed in the line of duty. 

“Border Patrol agents are unlikely to be murdered while on the job. If there was a national emergency on the border, we should at least expect that that would be reflected in a murder rate of Border Patrol agents killed in the line of duty. From 2003 through the end of 2018, six Border Patrol agents were murdered on the job. All of those are tragic, but that amounts to a murder rate of about 2 per 100,000 agents per year during that time. That’s far below the national murder-rate of about 5.1 per 100,000 per year during the same time.”

Trump rants about gang violence, but as Cato notes “gang apprehensions by Border Patrol agents in the Fiscal Year 2018 (through August 31st), account for about 0.2 percent of all apprehensions.  One must take these statistics with a grain of salt, but there is no obvious large-scale crossing of gang members along the border.”

Trump’s claim about terrorists crossing the border is pure, unadulterated bunkum.

“The perceived threat of terrorists crossing the border with Mexico has been a major justification for beefing up security, but there is little justification for it.  Those most worried about terrorists infiltrating along the border cannot point to any attack, any conviction for planning an attack, or any plot planned by an illegal immigrant who crossed the border with Mexico from 1975 through the end of 2017.”

In short, Trump’s justification for imposing a national emergency is based on hyperbole, similar to the exaggerations and lies told following the attacks of 9/11. 

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead writes that Trump’s national emergency “is not about illegal immigration or porous borders or who will pay to build that wall. This is about unadulterated power and the rise of an ‘emergency state’ that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.” 

He believes the “seeds of this present madness were sown more than a decade ago when George W. Bush stealthily issued two presidential directives that granted the president the power to unilaterally declare a national emergency.” 

For Trump, the border wall is all about his legacy and his grossly overinflated ego. The border wall remains his number one issue, never mind it is a mirage in the desert that disappears when reality is factored in. 

Trump built casinos and developed real estate, but when it comes to politics—and especially foreign policy—he is an ignoramus. Donald Trump is certainly unfit for the job. He will eventually be either voted or thrown out of office and the “swamp,” the “deep state” of insiders and corporate interests will find another smooth-talker like Obama to mollify an uninformed and ignorant public. 

The real national emergency is an unsustainable national debt. This avalanche will ultimately bury the American people alive and make the largely imaginary situation on the border look like a fender-bender by way of comparison. 

Finally, if Trump and his CFR-Goldman Sachs handlers really wanted to stop people crossing the border, they would forbid illegal immigrants from recieving welfare handouts and other goodies (including the unearned “right” to vote for Democrats). 

Additionally, his administration—now replete with neocons like Bolton, Abrams, and Pompeo—will make the flight of Central Americans far worse. 

They plan to take down both Venezuela and Nicaragua. The violence-wracked “Northern Triangle”—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—was made possible by US intervention in the region. The “civil wars” in El Salvador and Guatemala were fueled by the US. It organized and trained death squads and staged a coup in Guatemala. Honduras was destabilized by US support for the Contras. Reagan’s “freedom fighters” killed untold numbers in its effort to destroy the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. 

It is entirely possible Trump knows virtually nothing about this, along with most of the rest of the country, which remains locked in a “civil war” of its own, artificially produced in classic Hegelian fashion to distract you from real issues—a national debt of crushing proportion and the scourge of wars engineered to never end and feed an obese military-industrial-surveillance complex. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Daily Dot


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