Arizona has outraged the nation with a new immigration law that obligates authorities to check the documents of anyone they believe is in the country illegally, based on a "reasonable suspicion" during a "lawful" stop. Some accuse lawmakers and the 70 percent of Arizonans who support the bill of acting like Nazis, or of turning Arizona into an apartheid state. But spend some time in Arizona, and you may come to see why so many Arizonans want this.

 It's terrifying to live next door to homes filled with human traffickers, drug smugglers, AK-47s, pit bulls, and desperate laborers stuffed 30 to a room, shoes removed to hinder escape. During a month's reporting with police and other law-enforcement agents in Arizona last year, I met many scared people. One man who lived next to a "drop house" for Mexican workers slept with two guns under his bed, his children not allowed to play in the backyard. The sound of gunshots was not uncommon. "Four years ago this neighborhood was poodles and old ladies," he said, too frightened to give his name. "Now it's absolutely insane." That morning, authorities had raided the drop house. When the neighbor told me how his kids had been evacuated behind riot shields, he began to cry.

A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.

Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.  [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.

“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy — one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel. 

In the footnotes of a speech U.S. Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke would have given to the House Financial Services Committee on Feb. 10, lies a unique and startling disclosure.

Hosted on the Federal Reserve's own servers, the written testimony of the bank's chairman explains in plain text what expanding the Fed's powers will do.

"The Federal Reserve believes it is possible that, ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system," footnote number nine, at the bottom of the page, explains without additional qualification.

Before proceeding, let's establish some general baselines of actual federal government spending against which to compare what we do know about American perceptions. The above pie chart, taken from Wikipedia, breaks down spending into more than two dozen programs or cabinet agencies. But we can simplify this a bit by collapsing the eight largest chunks/wedges into three main categories:

1. Welfare for seniors, 34 percent: Social Security and Medicare wedges.

2. Defense, 22 percent (Defense and Homeland Security).
3. Welfare for everyone else, 20 percent ( Medicaid, Unemployment Insurance and Health & Human Services.)
4. Interest, 9 percent (Interest).

First of all, Americans tend to think we spend too much on what they call "welfare," but which in fact limited mostly to category 3 above--welfare for non-seniors. A Kaiser survey conducted a while back (1995) clearly indicates a high level of suspicion toward "welfare" spending, but when asked to clarify respondents clearly meant programs like food stamps, TANF programs (formerly AFDC), Medicaid and public housing. Indeed, although about 90 percent of Americans viewed housing, AFDC and food stamps as welfare, only 30 percent defined Medicare and just 15 percent deemed Social Security "welfare." 

About 40 percent of Americans cited two of the following four items as being one of the government's top two expenditures: foreign aid (41%), welfare (40%), interest (40%) and defense (37%). Only if Americans defined welfare as inclusive of Social Security and Medicare would these views be accurate--with welfare thusly combined and defined easily ranking #1, and in which case defense would rank #2.

We may not be able to stop them, but we can join them. We the people need to play the bankers' game ourselves. Even corporate giants such as General Motors and WalMart have now gotten into the banking game and are easing their credit problems by forming their own banks.

In President Obama's July 17 weekly address, he repeated his call for a public option in health care, in order to "increase competition and keep insurance companies honest" and to "put an end to the worst practices of the insurance industry." The same call needs to be made for a public option in banking. In some countries, publicly-owned banks have operated alongside privately-owned banks for decades; and in those countries, the current crisis has served to show that public banks generally do a better job of serving the people and protecting their interests than their private counterparts.

A bank charter brings with it the privilege of creating "credit" simply as an accounting entry on the bank's books. The flaw in the private banking scheme is that banks create the principal portion of their loans but not the interest, which is continually drawn off the top as profit. New borrowers must continually be found to take out new loans to create this extra profit, making private banking effectively a pyramid scheme; and like any pyramid scheme, it has mathematical limits. Today, those limits appear to have been reached. Personal and national debts have gotten so large relative to incomes that it is no longer possible to maintain the fiction of solvency. We soon won't have the money even to pay the interest on our existing debts, let alone to incur new ones. Public banking does not suffer from that flaw, because interest is not drawn out of the system but is returned to the public coffers. Public banking is thus mathematically sound and sustainable.