'This lawsuit seeks to enjoin Defendants’ ongoing pattern and practice of flouting the Constitution and federal law in connection with ongoing immigration raids in the Los Angeles area. '
Or copy and paste this link:
https://www.aclusocal.org/sites/default/files/vasquez_perdomo_v_noem_-_first_amended_petition_and_complaint.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawLeGM9leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF5WEFocnl2OTNlQVhXY0d2AR5XyOabTPSRJQ4PVgzO1SAY1TORHUZd4v7mZPGzToXiUKy-GH7ITdWYBkLG_Q_aem_QHB14oVSU8zPuq1qOYxt7Q
From Robert Reich:
' Friends, During a three-hour interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan some months ago, Elon Musk revealed the core of the ideology animating the richest person in the world.
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” Musk said, adding that liberals and progressives are “exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
Musk pointed to California’s move to provide medical insurance even to undocumented people who qualify for its low-income Medi-Cal program.
“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,” Musk continued. Empathy has been “weaponized.” '
Elon Musk has a colossal misunderstanding of basic macroeconomies when he suggests that there is "...a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response...”
When you ignore the 'empathy response' and assume that economics is a zero sum game, then you create a situation whereby you are constantly chasing a bigger share of a smaller and smaller pie.
The actions you might take to chase that bigger share would probably involve taking away some income from as many as possible in order to increase your riches. You might weaken labor unions so that they cannot get higher wages for workers, eliminate the minimum wage so that people will work for very low wages, do away with public government funded medical care and stop or reduce pensions for elderly and disabled people. That might grow your wealth in the short run but in the long run your income and wealth will shrink since fewer and fewer people can afford to buy the stuff you sell.
All these follow from the classical economic, free market school of economics which argues that any interference in market dynamics lowers welfare for everyone. In that belief system any introduction of empathy means changing some market outcomes to favor some people disadvantaged by market forces. I won't introduce the concept of market failures here since it is a long discussion but I will suggest that those free market principles require that competition exist in order for those principles to work.
We can assume safely that national governments which enact the 'empathy response' in a national economy means that more people will better off with higher incomes and better living standards, which means that more people will spend more money to buy more and better stuff and that the economy will grow.
See the Circular Flow of Money In The Economy illustration below:
Copied with permission from: College Macroeconomic Textbook for Undergraduates Kindle Edition; by Mike P. McKeever (Author)
And it follows that if you are a rich person with a high income, you derive most of your income and wealth from people buying the stuff you sell. And it further follows that the incomes of everyone including especially those of rich people, will rise.
See also Dispositional Greed Scales from the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research (TIBER) .
Article Excerpt: 'Greed is the insatiable desire for more. It applies to any valuable thing, such as money, goods, friends, love, or sex. The experience of greed combines a feeling of dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs with a longing for something better or more (Seuntjens, Zeelenberg, Breugelmans, et al., 2015). Greed is seen as an important motivation in economics and is thought to have been an important cause of the financial crisis and fraud (e.g., Mussel et al. 2018). Pathological personality traits (Sekhar et al., 2020) and the dark triad have been positively associated with greed (Veselka et al., 2014) and greed has been found to be a cause of unethical behaviors that lead people to take more than they are entitled to (Seuntjens et al., 2019).'
So then, the empathy response actually makes rich people even richer. One would think that otherwise intelligent people would understand that basic relationship.
Of course, there are some people who accumulate wealth through government contracts and are thereby not inconvenienced every day by market forces. Even those folks, however, will face the consequences of lower general incomes for everyone since the government contracts revenues are paid from income taxes on taxpayers. As wages for most people decline then the income tax revenue to the government will also decline making it more difficult for the government to enter into those contracts. So far, entitled government contractors have encouraged the government to borrow money in order to pay for government deficits, some part of which are caused by those self-same contracts combined with a decline in individual household incomes and lower income tax payments. But resolving that issue will be painful; for all sectors of the population as we saw in the Greek example of a few years ago.
Some Europeans call today's GOP the American Fascist Party.
It seems like an appropriate name. Most Republicans seem to have abandoned the GOP to join the Fascist trump cult.
Be that as it may, the real question is whether or not the new party is Evil.
Evil is a large philosophical question and I'm not sure there is enough agreement around to denigrate an entire party with that designation.
But, the is some agreement on designating some acts and policies as Evil regardless of who creates them.
The question arises: What is an Evil act and why is it Evil?
We need a definition of Evil, then, to look at Evil acts. I think it's fair to use the definition of Evil as the one that was developed after World War 2 at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi officials, many of whom were executed after those trials.
According to army psychologist Captain G. M. Gilbert, who was assigned to watch the Nuremburg trials after WW 2, Evil is a lack of empathy. Without empathy people can think that other people do not have human attributes and are little better than plants, rocks or livestock. That is to say, the Nazi's treated people like inanimate cut outs who felt no emotions and were thus able to be manipulated and abused without consequences.
In today's American Fascist Party, party leaders like Steve Miller and Donald Trump may gain support from some voters by treating immigrants to the United States as less than human. They may calculate that deporting immigrants without due process will gain them fear in the population and possible votes from supporters. Whatever consequences befall the deportee or his family are of no consequence since the people deported do not possess humanity.
Clearly, some acts by the American Fascist Party are Evil in nature.
I will leave to others the judgment of whether or not that means that the entire American Fascist Party is evil or whether the individual Party leaders are evil people.
