The Republican Party is on a naked warpath of rape and pillage, not only demanding spending cuts for social programs that benefit the poor and working classes, but even campaigning for more multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the rich, all the while holding the economy of the entire world hostage over this stupid debt ceiling shell game.  On the face of it, this is totally unimaginable.  If the Republican party is gunning for slashing essential social spending (images of assault rifles are deliberately conjured for rhetorical effect), while, at the same time, pushing for yet more trillion dollar tax cuts to benefit that precious 1% (this is on top of Trump’s famous tax giveaways to the rich, his only notable accomplishment in office, apart from stuffing the Supreme Court with conservative toadies), not to mention spending more on military black holes than the next ten nations combined, why on earth would anyone other than that 1% vote for them??

     Of course the National Debt is way out of control and cannot long continue its explosive trajectory.  However, the way to balance the equation is to increase revenues by taxing the obscenely wealthy Americans who have been plundering this country since the beginning.  As I have explained before, spending money promotes prosperity, as long as the money spent is for good and useful purposes, like health, education, scientific research, and so on.  Spending on military budgets, by contrast, has a purely negative effect on overall prosperity.  Other negative spending projects include political campaigns, blasting rockets into outer space for joy riders, and waging endless wars.  Some projects may appear to promote prosperity, like fossil fuel development, only they carry the unfortunate downside of destroying the planet.  That’s today’s lecture, Economics 101.

     So why would anyone vote for the Republicans, other than that famous 1%? I gave the game away in the title ~ it is a conspiracy.  In order for the Republicans to get away with their rapacious piracy of the accumulated wealth of the country, including generations yet unborn saddled with that $31 trillion national debt, they have bundled some other issues onto their platform for wider appeal.  Apart from the abortion business, which I really cannot understand, the principle rider to their outrageous program of fiscal piracy is the issue of Racism.  This is the ugly truth behind the Republican Conspiracy.  

     Racism is a very serious problem throughout the world, but it is such a sensitive issue that only card-carrying wingnuts like Donald Trump are willing to come out of their racism closet and tell it like it is.  Trump famously announced that he didn’t want any more immigrants from shit-hole countries like Haiti ~ he wanted to see more immigrants from countries like Norway.  It doesn’t get much more blatant than that.  The problem is that a lot of people all over the world share Trump’s view, whether they are willing to admit it or not.  Frankly, the Norwegians are some of the prettiest people on the planet, while the Haitians are Black and ugly.  (Of course I speak in general terms.  There are plenty of very ugly White people, and plenty of attractive Blacks.)

     Everyone has heard of the Great Replacement Theory, but when it is refuted, the refutation works because what they refute is not really the issue or the theory at all.  They call it a deliberate conspiracy to replace the White population of the earth with Black and Brown people.  Of course this is nonsense, and easy to refute ~ it is not a deliberate conspiracy.  But the actual circumstances on the ground show a relentless demographic trend away from White majorities everywhere, and increasing populations of the Black and Brown.  Many European countries are declining in population, and the ones that aren’t declining are only able to keep up their population numbers by a constant influx of (Black and Brown) immigrants.  The White population of the United States, for example, will soon become a minority of the population.  

     I can give a few examples of the concerns people have over race ~ there has been a perceived problem of Black and Brown people moving into “White” neighborhoods, causing more of the White people to leave, and more Black and Brown people to move in, as the declining property values make these areas more affordable to the less affluent Black and Brown populations.  I saw something similar happen when I was a child and my father was the Methodist minister for an inner city church with an aging and declining membership.  My father was always very progressive and thought that segregated churches were all wrong ~ churches, at the very least, ought to be places where everyone were welcome.  So he invited some Black people to attend his church, assuring them that they would be welcome.  Not all of his parishioners agreed.  I remember one wealthy old woman, who personally contributed 10% of the church’s entire annual budget, who told my father that she thought “this country belongs to the White race.”  My father replied, “I think this country belongs to God,” an answer to which there could be no rebuttal.  Well, I moved away, off to college, and happened to return again to that city some years later, only to discover that my father’s old church had become entirely Black ~ there were no more remaining White members of the church at all.  I was startled by that.  I didn’t think that that had been what my father intended.  

     Here is another little anecdote.  At one time I was talking with some Black folks in a friendly way, and one man was telling the story of his hard life.  At one point he mentioned that he came from a large family ~ he was one of ten children.  I was a bit startled at that, but then he went on to tell me that both his parents also came from large families ~ his mother was one of ten children, and his father was also one of ten children.  I was surprised at the coincidence of the number ten, and I wondered if that were simply a rounded-off way of meaning “many.” Some brothers die in youth, either from illness, difficult circumstances, gang murder, murder by White police officers, succumbing to the ravages of despair and drugs, incarceration, or other problems, so rounding off the number of siblings as “ten” just gives a general idea of the family size.  But it doesn’t take a professor of mathematics to realize the demographic consequences if those family sizes are common.  

     Nor does it take a rabid racist, foaming at the mouth, to feel some dismay at the ongoing demographic changes taking place world-wide.  Plenty of otherwise reasonable people, with no particular animosity to Black, Brown, Red, Yellow, or Rainbow people, find themselves backed into a corner where they are unhappy with this demographic evolution, and don’t know what to think about it.  

     This is not just a problem that occurs only in the United States ~ all over the world there is rising opposition to endless immigrants overflowing their own countries and seeking to resettle somewhere else, where they are less and less welcome.  When minorities remain minorities, there is little opposition to them.  When the first Black faces started showing up in Europe, they were welcomed as novelties, and everyone wanted to befriend them and invite them to dinner.  

     Mark Twain has a very funny story (The Grateful Poodle, from About Magnanimous-Incident Literature) about a man who finds a stray dog with a broken leg, and he brings him to his home and feeds him and tends his injury until he is well enough to go on his way.  A few days later, the man hears some scratching at his door, and he finds the same dog with another dog in tow, who also has a broken leg.  Thus far, Mark Twain retells that charming story that he found somewhere, only now he adds to it the sequel ~ after feeding and tending those two dogs and returning them to the world, four more dogs showed up a day or two later, followed quickly by eight more, and then dogs by the dozen were arriving every day, until the poor old man finally had to make his escape and leave his home to the dogs.  

     So, pulling these threads together, Americans are voting for Republicans, and are willing to endure their fiscal piracy because they have the not-unfounded belief that the Republicans in office will restrict immigration, and will also do whatever they can to obstruct and oppose Blacks and Browns (and Queer folk too, while we are at it) from voting, or even trying to live their lives in peace.  

     So if that is the problem, what is the solution? Perhaps there will be no peace until racist issues are acknowledged and addressed.  Hitler’s methods of “eugenics” are no longer politically acceptable in polite society, but it may be possible to find some gentler way to influence demographic trends.  I had the idea that social programs that encourage the birth of children to the poor are only exacerbating the problem.  When poor single mothers pump out babies as fast as they can in order to increase their stipends, this is not an effective way to address the problem of poverty.  Certainly single mothers should be allowed social assistance, but perhaps the stipend should be a fixed amount, regardless of how many children they have.  Another idea is to implement a “baby tax” whereby every pregnant woman would have to pay a tax before she were licensed to deliver her child.  In this way, poor women and families would be less likely to have children.  Of course, this is a very crude way to influence demographic evolution, but, in the long view, it would have a measurable “eugenic” effect on the population going forward, since money is an example of a universal abstraction which distills a great many issues at once.  Obviously there will be plenty of exceptions, and innumerable creative geniuses will never have the chance to be born, but, overall, crude though it is, financial standing is a measure, in very general terms, of elevated levels of preference or talent.  Of course, there will also be gangsters and villains who will be able to pass on their genes to their progeny, but I can’t think of any other possible lever of influence that is as neutral or effective as the economic barrier to limit excessive fecundity.

     The problem isn’t going away ~ it is only going to get increasingly worse and worse, but so is everything else on this God forsaken planet of ours.  Perhaps the problem will turn out to be entirely moot anyway ~ perhaps the future of this planet will not be between the Whites and the Blacks or Browns, but between the cockroaches and the ants.  For what it’s worth, I put my money on the ants to inherit what’s left of the earth.