Money That Is Not Money

     One proof that we Americans are not like any people anywhere is that we do not consider the income tax money that we send to Washington money. It is deducted from our paychecks and transferred to the Bureau of Internal Revenue and that’s it. We don’t think of it as money gone. Instead, for us it is money that was never there and so it seems like nothing has been taken from us. The reason that citizens of nation-states consider tax money sent to their central government real money is that they can not conceive of the money not being spent on them. It is real money and they want it returned to them either directly or as some type of necessary public activity financed by their government. The US federal government does what it wishes with the money of Americans, not what Americans wish and as a result we never expect it to give us back money directly. It spends 5 trillion dollars publically every year. Its spending benefits us universally and rarely affects us directly and concretely. If you suggest to an American dealing with a problem like the financing of education or of hospitals in his state that the Federal Government has plenty of money and should finance such necessities, you always get a blank expression and silence. The person you make the suggestion to tells you by his silence  that you don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re talking about real money coming to Americans from Washington for some necessary public service. No law forces Washington to make such money available. It’s like you’re suggesting that money be plucked out of the air. The money you’re talking about is for Americans like air. It’s there all around us but it feels like it’s not there.

   Washington has 5 trillion dollars a year to spend and it spreads it around lavishly both nationally and internationally. No American considers Washington’s money real unless for some reason some of it falls into his/her hand and then it feels so real it’s magical, like manna falling from the sky. Naturally, sending so much money regularly to Washington produces a permanent feeding frenzy there to grab and swallow some free cash. The problem is that Congress must dole out its huge treasure to federal agencies and through them to state governments, private corporations and individuals legally. The feeding frenzy must be satisfied by cautiously selecting among so many open mouths those that can be stuffed in a manner that seems purposeful. So much money is available that the skimpy sort of corruption practiced in nation-states seems like child’s play unworthy of Washingtonians awash in money that Congress can easily slip into pockets by countless votes that make the payoffs perfectly legal. Our business is to send money to Washington and Congress’s business is to award it. Since Congress has power to regulate all American commerce and never stoops to the commerce of granting money directly to average citizens, why should we Americans care what it does with money that is not our money?

   Some Americans bitterly hate Washington’s power and want passionately to lessen it. They are wrong. Washington’s power should be increased. It should collect even more money, trillions more, by admitting more states to its union of states and by spending increased tax revenues globally anywhere it wishes on anything it wishes. Hopefully, it will spend its added treasure to solve worldwide problems like global warming and environmental destruction, problems that can not be handled successfully except by some super, world government. Washington is not a state. It has important sovereign powers in select areas like war, diplomacy and commerce but it is essentially a collection of powerful public corporations located not in a state but in a district. People all over the globe already send money to Washington in the form of loans. They know a good thing. Washington pays them interest, cash on the barrelhead, and spends their money on projects that America and the world need. Since 2008 it gathered and spent 8 trillion dollars to bust America and the world out of a deep recession. States around the globe should make Washington their central government and get in on the bonanza directly. The region around ancient Babylon was so fertile it produced 3 crops a year. Its inhabitants spent  every day dancing. Washington’s financial fertility seeds America and the world with money. It’s fertility should be increased by larger tax revenues so it can make the whole world start, economically speaking, dancing.

Daniel McNeill’s play,The Body Is A Legal Drug, will have 7 performances during the Midtown International Theater Festival in New York in July and August at the Davenport Theatre 354 West 45th Street. 212-956-0948.

tickets $20.00 : https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/27845

Loving the one your’re with can come back to haunt you. A new comedy about

finding your true identity.

Performances: July 18 2:30 pm. July 20 6:30 pm. July 24 6:30 pm. July 26 7:00 pm. July 28 8:30 pm. July 31 8:00 pm. August 2 3:30 pm.

Sovereignty Is Old-fashioned

Sovereignty grows out of the need to destroy the power of men to do evil. In a territory where men are free to do evil, absolute sovereignty is absolutely necessary. Sovereign power also establishes borders around  communities to keep evil men from foreign territories out. Communities fight wars with one another. Winning communities grow larger. Empires or nation-states develop and find ways to unite their peoples with common languages and common religions. But in the global postmodern world, sovereign central governments of nation-states can no longer secure civil peace and produce just economic progress by remaining isolated. Nation-states such as Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria and Libya are being torn apart by various armed groups. Greece, Spain, and Portugal are in danger because their businesses and financial institutions can not produce the practices necessary to aid their governments to assure security by creating prosperity. Britain, France, Germany and Italy have complex and intelligent institutions of government best suited to the past. They all need an outside super government with the legal power to force them to govern themselves democratically and without corruption. They need an outside super army to secure their states militarily and a super central bank and a supreme court to backup their financial and judicial systems. No state that stands completely alone as in times past can function properly. A state must reach beyond the limits of its government’s sovereignty and equip itself with the advanced political, technological, financial, judicial and educational systems necessary to infiltrate intelligently into its native systems influences of all sorts penetrating it from all over the globe.

Daniel McNeill’s play,The Body Is A Legal Drug, will have 7 performances during the Midtown International Theater Festival in New York in July at the Davenport Theatre 354 West 45th Street. 212-956-0948.

The famous writer, Nathan Mauer, married four times to women, marries a man but behavior  in his macho past disrupts his happy new identity. A comedy about the difficulties of living with any identity permanently.

tickets $20.00 : https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/27845

Millennials And Political Being

   In the 1950s I used to drink in bars in Davis Square. One night after the bars closed, a friend helped someone in a fight. Afterwards the guy he fought came after him with two friends while I and another friend were with him having coffee. There were heated arguments and we almost ended six of us in another fight. That’s how it was then in Davis Square. All working-class. A lot of drinking. Fights. Davis Square has now a subway connecting it to Harvard Square. The working class has been replaced by educated millennials. I went to Davis Square after being away many years and into a Starbucks full of young people sitting around with their devices. Some students. Educated young people. I realized looking them over that they came from everywhere and they had no idea what Davis Square was like 50 years ago. When I was back outside in Davis Square, I confessed to myself that 50 years ago I knew nothing about Davis Square’s past either and for that matter I knew very little then, like the millennials in Starbucks, about America’s past. Anyone from anywhere is free to find out who they are on their own. But there is such a thing as a common political being. We have a public side to our being that has become what it is for definite historical reasons. I realized looking at the millennials that day that they do not care even slightly that they live in a union of 50 states or that their freedom to come from anyone of our 50 states and live in Davis Square with full rights as citizens of the state of Massachusetts provides them with a free and magnanimous political being that is astounding. I do care but their indifference is not their fault because it is the result of more than a hundred years of untruthful writings about American history. It took me many years of searching to discover my true political identity as an American. I and the millennials in Starbucks live in a union of sovereign states and our central government in Washington is not a state. It is astounding but true. It composes our political being whether we care about it or not.
Daniel McNeill

Hegelian Heroes in America

   We know that Hegel’s rationalized “universal spirit”, his Absolute,  is supposed to be directing world history, that Kierkegaard fought for the authenticity of individual existential experience against Hegel’s rational knowledge, and that Sartre tried to synthesize the contributions of the two philosophers in his grand historical-philosophical work, La Critique De La Raison Dialectique. But for us, dealing with the present onslaught in our history of globalization, is Hegel’s “universalism” so bad? In our thoroughly rationalized world is there any possibility anymore of genuine “existential” experience? In American society our public words and behavior must now be ruled by universal standards. Hegel believed that certain great men like Napoleon and Caesar embodied in their actions history’s “universal spirit”. They were hegelian heroes because they made the universal particular. We Americans have become hegelian heroes. We have every race of people living among us and immigrants speaking all languages and practicing all religions from everywhere in the world. Particular nations give their people distinct individual characteristics that we Americans must respect and accept when they decide to live among us. They can still be particular but we must act universally in our relations with them. I live in a New England town on the ocean that was founded nearly 400 years ago by English colonists and has been English-speaking all those years but when I go jogging along the ocean and pass people speaking Russian, I know I am radically different. An alarm goes off in my mind warning me that my actions must be universal as well as individual. It is my duty as an American not to be only particular. The Russians I pass and all the other immigrants think we Americans are odd. They came to America expecting particular people and they found universal people. They are right. We are odd but, on the other hand, if all peoples do not change and become universal like us, is there any hope for humanity? Everyone talks about human rights but no human right is only particular. All of them must be universal before they can be particular. Should people expect to enjoy universal rights if their minds are not able when necessary to think in a universal mode? Recently I heard on Italian television a woman arguing passionately that poor immigrants trying to reach Italy have a universal right to be saved and brought to land by the Italian navy but they have no right to live in Italy and must leave. Italy is a particular place. Italians, according to her, should not want their Italy also to be anyone’s Italy because then Italy would be universal and no longer Italy. It would be America. Italians would begin living as though universal human rights belong to all people in spite of their particularities and that the right to live and work in any state in the world with full democratic rights and full citizenship simply because a person decides to live in a certain state should be a universal right. Italians would decide like Americans that Hegel was right and Kierkegaard was wrong, States and individuals can no longer live existentially. Hegel’s “universal spirit” is directing history and states and individuals should help it accomplish its divine work.

Daniel McNeill’s play,The Body Is A Legal Drug, will have 7 performances during the Midtown International Theater Festival in New York in July at the Davenport Theatre 354 West 45th Street. 212-956-0948.

The famous writer, Nathan Mauer, married four times to women, marries a man but behavior  in his macho past disrupts his happy new identity. A comedy about the difficulties of living with any identity permanently.

tickets $20.00 : https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/27845

History's End

   Two unions of states, the United States and the Soviet Union, fought in the Cold War to gain the exclusive power to manipulate history. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 degenerated Russia and the other 14 member states of the Soviet Union back into the lowly status of  mere nation-states. The US, for better or for worse, won the war and continues to manipulate history. It interferes in events worldwide on the principle that if a nation-state faces history alone, history will try to wound it. In the past, tribes, small states, nation-states, empires were all victims of history. They could not control history and so history punished them. Times have changed. The main weapon that the United States uses to control history is the placement of its military worldwide to support the globalization of corporations originating in any of its own 50 states or in any of the nation-states in its orbit. Anyone who wants to escape history and play seriously in the economic game worldwide is, in one form or another, an American. Any corporation or business with investments outside its state of origin is a member of a united states of the world ruled by Washington. Nation-states are more independent of Washington than ancient Gaul and ancient Greece were independent of Rome but it is a question only of degree and the bottom line is that no state is ever again going to be fully independent. North Korea is holding out but Cuba has just fallen into Washington’s arms. Egypt and Israel strut their stuff as independent states but they receive billions of dollars yearly from Washington for whatever services they render the new Rome. The unassailable virtue of Russia and Iran is a lonely virtue with their economic life vitiated by Washington’s economic sanctions. Washington has more money and a larger military than any state has ever dreamed of and it is itself not a state. Tolstoy wrote that the world and its treasures are booty for the bold. Washington referees the worldwide rush for booty. Logic and the heart dictate that for the good of the world Washington’s power should be opposed, but the only realistic and good option is for the world to join Washington and use Washington’s great power for the good of the world. How? By joining states worldwide to the present 50 states of America. By transforming the United States of America to the United States of the World. We need men to come from all over the world to run the government in Washington for our world’s interests. If most of the states of the world joined the American union of states, Washington would have no need any longer to manipulate history because history as it has been known on our planet in the past would be at an end.

Daniel McNeill’s play,The Body Is A Legal Drug, will have 7 performances during the Midtown International Theater Festival in New York in July at the Davenport Theatre 354 West 45th Street. 212-956-0948.

The famous writer, Nathan Mauer, married four times to women, marries a man but behavior  in his macho past disrupts his happy new identity. A comedy about the difficulties of living with any identity permanently.

tickets $20.00 : https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/27845