The United English-speaking States of the World 2

Suppose a girl born in Vancouver Canada with parents immigrants from China reads James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. Can she claim as an English-speaking person that this great novel written by an Irishman is her native literature? It seems to me she can  because as English-speaking by birth she has the same cultural identity as for example an English-speaking Australian whose great grandparents were both English. Whatever identity we have as English-speakers it is a solid identity. We need to do something to assert its reality. We are already citizens of one English-speaking state out  of 70 and we need to see that the political unity of the 70 is crucial to our cultural, political and economic well being in a new globalized world. Some of the best minds in the UK are advising the young in Britain to emigrate because the solid British identity of the past is gone crushed by globalism and excessive immigration. The Prime Minister of Canada, Trudeau, has said that a Canadian no longer has a national identity. Well, the children of immigrants to Canada and Britain and to all the other English -speaking states do have a solid cultural identity. We as well as they all speak English as our native language, the language of great writers and thinkers from the four countries of the UK as well as from the United States, Canada and everywhere else that people learn English natively. Just a few years ago I taught in an urban high school where the majority of my students were not white Americans and had all possible skin colors. They had an identity already that had nothing to do with national identity except that being born in one of the 50 English-speaking states of America made them English speakers. They could already communicate with one another as easily as can all English-speaking persons. English speaking has nothing to do with Chauvinism. It opens people to one another in a way that nothing they may ever experience  can ever change. They know who they are when they talk in the same language to others of any race from any country who also discover who they are by receiving an identity by speaking English natively.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings,Baseball Metaphysics, books and e-books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall

The United English-speaking States of the World 1

England united by military force Britain and Ireland and with a secure  base at home proceeded to conquer and rule one quarter of the globe. The sovereignty of England was the fatal flaw that ruined the continuation of the British Empire. England, the state of England, has not been a separate national state for over 400 years, but the sovereignty of England, of the English element in Britain, has been a power fiercely guarded by the English down to our time. The King or Queen are sovereign. They are the power behind Parliament. The power behind the royal sovereign has always been the English. The royalty combined with the English  equals the sovereignty of the English element in Britain over Britain. The British Empire was lost for a variety of reasons but the main reason was that sovereignty could not be transferred to its many conquered dominions. It remained always in London as though permanently closed and guarded in a castle completely isolated from the rest of the world’

   But one thing does remain from the British Empire: 70 English-speaking states scattered geographically from the north of Scotland to the south of Australia. The amazing thing about them is that none of them are completely sovereign. The 10 provinces of Canada are under the sovereign power of a parliament in Ottawa itself under a representative of the queen. The 50 states of America have constitutionally limited sovereignty as does the government in Washington. The governments of New Zealand and the 6 states of Australia are under the sovereignty of the crown in Britain. The three states of Britain, England, Wales and Scotland, are not fully sovereign because they are also under a parliament exercising the sovereignty of the crown.The Republic of Ireland appears to be the only English-speaking state fully sovereign although it is subject to the European Union government in Brussels.

   We are now in a postnational period of history. If nationalism no longer works and the 70 English-speaking states are not fully sovereign nations because they were all once parts of the British Empire, why should they not be politically unified in a great global union of states all speaking the same language and all with common political and legal customs? One principle of such a union would be that they be united again by a central government, as they  once were during the British Empire. The other principle would be that they yield to a central government a few of their sovereign powers which they once yielded completely during the British Empire which kept total sovereignty for itself locked up tight in London.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall

   

A Stumbling Federal Government

The terrible pains Trump is inflicting on immigrants fleeing poverty forces us because of the incompetent actions of the Federal Government to consider something also terrible. The Federal Government is not only incapable of governing Americans (which all of us know already in our heart of hearts), it is also losing the sense of being a world leader for the world’s good. The loss of this role means that our whole American political system is now in jeopardy. Why? Because from the Civil War until Trump the Federal Government worked well because it supported 50 American states and states throughout the world. Now it is beginning to lose control of itself and nothing could be more dangerous for the future of the world, and for America’s future, than a stumbling government in Washington that no longer knows where it is going.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com
The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at: amazon.com/author/graceisall

The New Italian and British Empires

Point 5 of the 29 points of the contract for the new government of Italy agreed to by its two leaders DiMaio and Salvini is a new radical step towards a revolutionary new role for all states. It sets up a “bank for investments” that finances “initiatives of public and strategic national interests” and supplies “credit for companies operating in developing Countries”. This is what China is already doing globally on a massive scale. The Chinese government itself is creating the capital and investing it globally through companies under its direct control. If China can do it, any state can do it. And if we read the trends correctly, every state now must do it. Why should Italy not use its banks and tax collections to create capital for profitable investments worldwide that benefit Italians? Why should not the American state I live in, Massachusetts, do the same? Up till now, the game of looking everywhere for profitable investments has been exclusively under the control of private individuals directing corporations. Point 5 looks like a game changer for Italy. Remember when Italy under Mussolini found it profitable to invade Ethiopia? That game is over. China has already invaded Ethiopia with investments using capital created by its government. Italy’s government can now do the same. It can fund enterprises run by Italians and send them off worldwide looking for profits for Italians. The only problem is that Italy or Massachusetts, as states in unions of states, do not have their own currency like China and their money supplies can not easily be increased to create new capital for investment. This means that neither Italy nor Massachusetts can be major players in the new game like China unless they are given the power by the central governments of their unions to freely create and invest new capital. This also means among other things that Britain, the UK, with its own currency and the freedom to act in its own interest by its brexit from the European Union may be the only honcho that can fight meaningfully with the Chinese for the new empires of the future created by state-supplied capital. The political leaders of the UK are in a position to create a new British Empire by providing their citizens with state-created capital to invest globally rather than as in the past by invading foreign states using gunships.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall

How Richard Nixon Saved Communism

Richard Nixon won a seat in Congress in 1948 by denouncing the communist threat in California where there were very few communists. His hatred of communism came across to us as sincere even though we all knew that America was so diverse with so many governments that communism would never succeed here. As President during the last years of the Vietnam War, history gave him a chance to kill communists. His massive bombing of Cambodia killed a lot of them. Then in 1972 he spied a chance to kill a whole communist system. He visited China and opened it up to capitalism and free enterprise. Massive cheap Chinese labor and industrial technologies imported or stolen from developed economies was the knife needed to lop off the head of the red menace. We are now almost 50 years into Nixon’s anti communist foreign policy in China and a capitalistic tool invented in America is now being used successfully by the communist Chinese government to buy up corporations globally. Tricky Dick Nixon gave China along with free enterprise the trick America used to produce gigantic economic growth: keep increasing the country's money supply even though the new capital created is not based on some prior real collateral value.. The trick worked. America advanced titanically by using money created freely based on nothing to finance production that justified the free expansion of the money supply by producing real wealth by real industrial output. Every foreign nation received the American capital-raising trick as a working part of free-enterprise capitalism by relating the value of its currency to the dollar. Everyone could create all the money they wished as long as they were willing to take the consequences if they used it badly. While China created a money supply only for its local national business enterprises who cared how they created it or who controlled the use of the new supplies of capital?  Corporations develop in advanced economies with new money based on nothing but that’s okay. That’s how the trick works. That’s how capitalism frees businessmen to be creative and along with their economic freedom political freedoms are supposed to follow. So let’s ask a simple question: how does a Chinese businessman, Mr. X, buy a technologically-advanced German manufacturing business for say 55 million euros? Has Mr. X climbed his way up the free enterprise competitive ladder so successfully that he has 55 million (speaking figuratively) in his pockets? Well, the story of how Mr. X got such deep pockets is long and complicated but the answer is true and short, no. His pockets are full because behind him is a chain of financial organizations and interconnected agencies that are difficult to pin down exactly but do in fact go back at some point directly to the dictatorial communist government that tricky Dick majestically adorned with capitalism and free enterprise. It’s still capitalism but free enterprise is out the window because the playing field is no longer level if corporations must compete without government aid to acquire fresh capital while a powerful central Chinese communist government can effortlessly create all the capital it needs and ship it all over the globe where there are enormous opportunities for any organization with a lot of capital to create a lot more by buying up technologically-advanced local corporations.State capitalism on a grand scale was first tried in Germany under Hitler. It showed the world that capitalism works fine when a central government creates most of the capital and distributes it to its carefully selected subordinates. Political freedom is out the window in China along with President Nixon’s naive belief that free enterprise was enough to defeat a tyrannical communist political system.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

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A Penitential Pilgrimage For Washington Politicians

We Americans are the only people who ever created instead of one state a union of 50 states. 50 states! Think of it! Fifty! 5 0! 50! We created a politically united society that is a revolutionary economic developmental system. The only reason the system has not gone on roaring towards the future with money coming out our ears is our chickenshit politicians in Washington. They do little with the trillions we send them to support economic development for us Americans. Their laziness, stupidity, cowardice and greed is rooted in the 19th-century idea that only free-enterprise capitalism should be the American way of doing business. This means in practice that the trillions in federal tax money that flows into their hands must not be used to invest in business enterprises. They need to go on a pilgrimage to a holy site as penance for this sinful outdated blasphemy against reality. Let them all get on a ship in Los Angeles and cruise down (at our expense of course) the Pacific to the entrance to the Panama Canal, The canal belongs to us but they (our friends in Washington) decided to own it and run it in a foreign state and give the government of the state an annual share of the profits. Washington maintains foreign states throughout the globe with its billions in aid, its military and its diplomats (and CIA, spies, global technologies etc.etc.) following the spartan rule that 50 states is enough. No more American states! Why create more states for the American union that would give new opportunities to all Americans if instead you can create here and there globally well-run-American-controlled-and-or-influenced states like Panama? And at the same time why not let this foreign policy help out one of our buddy states like China? Well, the holy site for our Washington guys and gals on their penitential cruise (big cabins and 3 lavish meals a day to make it not too penitential) is on the shore just a mile or so inside the Panama Canal (our canal). Our Chinese buddies made a deal with the Panamanian political bigwigs to lease enough land long-term for a monumental gigantic operation for unloading their container cargo ships with several huge cranes rising majestically high into the sky costing many many millions of dollars. And they’re no cheap chickens our pals the Chinese: a $1billion project to build a new deepwater port and another container terminal near the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal has begun. There’s development for you! No fooling around! Invest massively in any state anywhere in the world that our lazy cowardly Washington dudes have made secure politically and economically using our money, our military, our diplomats, our Cia etc.etc.. But would our Washingtonians simply enjoy the cruise and not feel penitential when they view the massive Chinese site already up on the Pacific end of the canal which obviously has nothing to do with free enterprise and is clearly the result of state-run capitalism exploiting the Washington-dominated free-enterprise worldwide capitalistic system? Could they possibly believe that some Chinese individual fought his way up the economic ladder and then urged on by the doctrine of free enterprise ( it worked in the 19th century but doesn’t work now for the general good without some government support) invested the millions he earned by individual effort far across the ocean in Panama? Le doute est permis. When I passed this gigantic Chinese site on our canal, I thought, wow, if only someone in our union of states, the greatest most fabulous wealth-creating economic non-state development system ever created on the globe by humanity in the whole history of the world, wow, if only other Americans could see with their eyes what our pals the Chinese are doing globally to benefit their people, they might, who knows?, begin pestering Washington to get our fantastic state-developing system ( between 1790 and 1959 Congress admitted 37 new states) rolling again by admitting new states. Although, of course, 50 is already a lot of states.The Russians once had 15 and did nothing to develop them. The Europeans have 28 and take in new states whenever they feel like it but they don’t develop them either. Wow did we once take in and develop states! Westering, to move to a new state for more opportunities was once the dream of every true American! Washington killed the dream by not admitting any new states since Hawaii in 1959! Hm. Even just a few new foreign states admitted to our union would mean using again but now  worldwide the greatest most fabulous wealth-creating economic non-state development system ever created on the globe by humanity in the whole history of the world. Hm.

Daniel McNeill

The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, The United States of the World, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

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World Unity 42

     Everyone believes that democracy is the best form of government and that everyone should live in a democratic state. But the terrible disruptions of civil peace going on all over the globe demand more than democratic governments with democratic leaders. We need holy democratic leaders, saintly leaders, men who will not take any action with the power voted to them by their fellow citizens unless it is good, honest, pure, moral and in the best interest of all. Down with all leaders who are merely pragmatic! We need leaders who really believe that every human being has universal rights that must be supported and respected and that humanity possesses a divine purpose for living on earth. It is an illusion to believe that because the bourgeoisie took control of states in the 19th century and used governments exclusively to make laws to support their selfish economic goals that humanity is condemned forever to suffer dominated by greedy and selfish leaders who never consult the grace to do good that God put in their soul. Peoples in the past created communities inspired by their sense of the divine. Ancient Egypt was a divine empire. Ancient philosophers believed the business of governing was a divine vocation. Moses's laws tried to make moral goodness the basis of his community. Saint Augustine in his great book, The City Of God, the Civitas Dei, claims that in world history two states exist side by side, the civitas dei and the civitas terrena, the heavenly city of God composed of the good and the earthly city composed of the unredeemed. Nation-states in our time do have nasty, difficult, practical problems to deal with but that should never be an excuse for leaders acting corruptly and immorally. A government like our government in Washington with its trillions of dollars in revenue and its freedom as a central government from the day-to-day tasks of state governments should never act selfishly and immorally. Washington should become in our 21st century a central world international government of a worldwide union of states with saintly leaders gathered from all over our globe promoting with their great power Saint Augustine’s civitas dei.
Daniel McNeill

The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, The United States of the World, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:

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World Unity 41

    In Hegel’s great work, The Philosophy Of History, the German philosopher not only claims that world history has a divine purpose but also that the divine development going on is perfectly rational. Absolute Spirit expresses itself throughout history in a variety of forms. The universal aim of spirit at work in history is human freedom. The oriental world knew only the freedom of one man, as for example the pharaoh in Egypt. The Greek and Roman world knew only the freedom of some men, since slavery was instituted. The Protestant Germanic states of Hegel’s time, the early nineteenth century, finally realize the freedom of all. “The essential being,” Hegel wrote, “is the union of the subjective with the rational will: it is the moral whole, the state, which is that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom.” Since Hegel’s time, states in Europe providing a form for the realization of their citizens’ freedom have also been forced tragically to provide armies as a vehicle for their citizens to kill citizens from foreign states in grand battles and two world wars. The history of Europe after Hegel showed clearly that if Absolute Spirit was going to produce human freedom it would have to take some form other than the European nation-state. Hegel  looked beyond the political realities of his time to America. He suggested that the full burden of history’s march towards humanity’s freedom could not be born by Europe alone. “America is therefore the land of the future,” he wrote in The Philosophy Of History, “where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history will reveal itself.” American political experience agrees completely with Hegel’s notion that only the state can be the form where freedom can and should be exercised. But American experience also proves that the freedom of all individuals can not be exercised fully in a state that possesses full national sovereignty. A fully sovereign state always puts full power and full freedom in the hands of a minority of its citizens. Such power can be reduced and spread around throughout a population to free all citizens only if the political power of a state is not absolute. A state can be “the moral whole” and “that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom” without being a fully sovereign state if it can become a member state of a just union of states with a central government  with the legal power clearly stated in a Constitution to force states to support freedom for all their citizens. The American Federal Government has already lightened history’s burden by assuming some of the sovereign power of 50 states but it has not lessened their sovereign power to govern themselves democratically and provide for their citizens a moral whole where they can live freely.
Daniel McNeill 

The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, The United States of the World, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at: amazon.com/author/graceisall

World Unity 40

    We propose that the states of the world unite with the fifty American states to become each a state of the United States of the World. The structure of this union already exists and has been growing and developing for over two hundred years. The United States of North America and the Pacific Ocean do not form and have never formed a nation. Its people come from all the nations and empires of the world and speak, or their ancestors have spoken, most languages in the world. According to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Americans have double citizenship. They are citizens of the United States and citizens of the state where they choose to live. They can go to any state of their union and become established with full rights of citizenship simply by deciding to live there. They vote for representatives to two governments, one in Washington in the District of Columbia, and one in the state of their choice. We must begin to understand that our real interests are local and global at the same time and that we must make a global revolution to free ourselves fully and to reach our full human potential. But before any more quiet, rational arguments like these for our desired revolution, let’s release some revolutionary cries. Down with the blindness in the world that does not see and does not wish to see that real democracy is alive and fruitful in each of our 50 states! Down with the fiction that absolute sovereignty is necessary to ensure freedom in a state! Down with sovereign and absolute power in the hands of one person or one group  making all laws for millions of people! Two strong, democratic governments each with limited sovereign powers are better than one government with all the power! Sovereign and absolute power often exists to make corrupt riches possible for the person or group that has such power! A criminal is brought to justice in a court of law so it is also reasonable to put any law created by any government in a court to be judged according to the universal rights of humanity written in a constitution and superior to all the laws of all the governments in a union of states! Down with the idea that our union of 50 sovereign states must be uniquely American! It is open to all states of the world! The Congress in Washington has an absolute right written in the US Constitution to accept any new state into our union as it has already done 37 times since 1791! Join us you citizens of sovereign states so that we may free one another by all of us having two democratic governments, one local, our state with limited sovereignty, the other global in Washington DC, a central government that is not a state, that is not located in a state, and that possesses sovereign powers more strictly limited by the US Constitution than the sovereign powers of our states.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 39

    We are a union of states that the Civil War transformed into a nation that then became a de facto world government. This triangle with the angles union, nation, world leader should give us Americans a triple identity. If we try to be only the citizens of a nation, we betray the Constitution which has not bestowed upon the federal government enough powers to make it the head of a nation. We neither can think of ourselves as being only citizens of one of our 50 states without betraying our loyalty to the federal government which is the unifying power of our economic, judicial and political systems. Since the Second World War our government in Washington has been manipulating foreign states for its own interests and also for the good goals of all of humanity. We are morally obligated to identify ourselves at least in part with the upsurge of our central government towards the global unification of all the peoples of the world. We believe ourselves a nation like other nations at our economic and moral peril as long as our central government continues operating all over the globe towards the goals of universal worldwide peace and unity and universal human rights for all peoples.

   Our government recognizes no national frontiers of foreign states as beyond its reach. Since it does not act only as a nation, we should base our patriotism on our total and absolute loyalty to the federal government. That is enough. Since we recognize Washington’s laws as superior in their proper place to state laws, we should regard it as the leader of a nation only in a very limited sense. Since Washington is already a de facto world government, we should think of our loyalty to Washington also as loyalty to its worldwide goals.  It is part of the fundamental character of our political identity as Americans that we have been continually admitting new states to our union since the union's beginning in 1790, in all 37. The Constitution that rules state and federal actions asserts in article IV section 3 that Congress has the power, an unlimited power, to admit new states. Our political identity must be triple to be true. The United States with characteristics of both a union of states and a nation and with a dominant role in the world can never fulfill itself except by admitting new states from all over the world and by transforming its federal government in Washington DC to the central government of a united states of the world. Only if we Americans act in harmony at the same time with the three elements of our political identity - state,national and international - can we create our true good and the world’s true good.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 38

    The nation-state is a European invention. The Romans began the long fight to establish their empire beginning as a tribe living among the 7 hills of Rome. European nations developed typically in patterns of historical experiences much like those of the Romans, but the Romans ended up with an empire, the Europeans with the nation-state. The Romans fought heroic battles to enlarge their territory. They subdued neighboring tribes and established new borders and then went beyond the borders to new conquests. So did Europeans. The Romans made a central city, Rome, the seat of their expanded territory. The Europeans did the same setting up London and Paris, Madrid and Lisbon and other European cities as the seat of some expanded territory. The Romans took their tribal language, Latin, refined it and forced it on the natives of their conquered territories. The English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and all the other leading tribes of other European territories did the same. The most powerful confederation of tribes selected one of many languages, refined it and forced it on all the remaining tribes in their nation-state. The Romans won heroic life and death struggles with enemies to confirm their conquests and their imperial identity as Romans in a settled territory with a distinct language. The Europeans did the same except that they called their newly founded empires states. The European states grew up over long periods of crises and wars into firmly established unities of peoples with racial similarities and with well developed languages protected by armies eager for glorious a  wars to vindicate their national honor. The African and American states never went through similar experiences. Europeans left them with the boundaries of states and with European languages but without a living inner kernel of common creative and dramatic historical experience necessary to give birth to a genuine nation

    The union of the thirteen original sovereign American states was a unique construction. The American Constitution is generally understood to have been a masterful creation using doctrines of revolutionary European political theorists of the age of enlightenment. This is not true. Rationalist philosophers in Europe railed against the endless wars among their European nation-states but none of them theorized about setting up some kind of new supranational government whose purpose and being was designed to unite states rather than to be only just another national state among national states. The government of the United States of America was just such a supranational creation. The government in Washington set up by the Constitution was “The Government of the United States”. It had a purpose and a being for the united states not over the united states. Washington D.C., a non-state located in no state, was the seat of a government of a union of 13 sovereign states who had each dared to legally limit their sovereignty to receive the benefits of free interstate commerce and citizenship. The government of a nation-state restricts the freedom of its citizens by imprisoning them within borders. A union of states continually opens up for its citizens grand possibilities beyond all borders. European nation-states limit for their citizens what is possible. The 50 American states teach their citizens that there are no limits and that everything is possible.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

A New Form of Colonialism for Europe and America

Emmanuel Macron, the new President of France, has now cut enough money for the poor, the sick, pensioners, lower-end public employees, and the unemployed to make clear that the fist he is using to beat down the wages and public benefits of the middle-class and lower-class French is also European Union public policy. Punch the Europeans without power in the face and refuse to allow the EU economy to expand rapidly which would mean devaluing the euro. This is the same economic philosophy used by the bourgeoisie all over Europe in the nineteenth century. Their politicians and captains of industry worked for their own riches and nothing else. The idea of expanding an economy by any means to give the poor a bigger piece of the pie was absent. Wealth was created for the wealthy without any regard for the size of the scraps of wealth thrown to wage earners. The European Union is already top-heavy and down the road it should be as heavy at the top as the American Union is now. Unions of states don’t work for those at the bottom of the economic ladder unless they expand politically. A corollary to this law is that the only way to expand is to add new states. Thus the only road to a better way of life for average Europeans and Americans is a new form of colonialism. The old colonialism used gun boats and soldiers supported by cannons to expand to new territories for new economic possibilities. The new colonialism should add states to established unions of states for economic expansion by promising to transfer to newly admitted states advanced financial, legal, political and educational systems supported by advanced technologies. Any poor state added to the states of the US or the EU would devalue the dollar or the euro but provide a rush of new economic development and a bigger pie for both the rich and the poor. But who needs to create new wealth globally if the rich can stay at home and beat down the powerless locally in phoney unions of states that are not much more than new colossal nation-states if they do not continually add new states?

Daniel McNeill

READ OTHER POSTS AT: theunitedstatesoftheworld.blogspot.com

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World Unity 37

     When George Washington appeared at the first meeting of the Constitutional  Convention in Philadelphia in May of 1787, he was voted president of the body unanimously. During the debates designed to secure a more perfect union of the states by transferring some sovereign state powers to a central government, Washington was mostly silent. He believed it was his duty not to lend his prestige for or against any particular position. As he sat silently as president, he listened as the powers that the new government would have emerged from the debates. The men came like Washington in carriages from great distances over poor dirt roads. A few were acquainted but most were strangers to one another. But as the debates went on and they met socially at dinners in taverns, barriers between them fell and they grew more comfortable with one another. The convention of men coming great distances was an embryo of the Congresses that would meet year after year once the Constitution was ratified by the states. No one was perfectly satisfied with the final document they signed and sent to state legislatures to reject or ratify. Washington had his doubts about what was decided as did many others but he reasoned correctly that there were provisions in the Constitution for amending it. The founding fathers divided the powers of the new government between the executive, legislative and judicial branches. They granted  absolute sovereign powers only to the executive branch over diplomacy and the military. They did their best to try to solve a political problem that no congress of men had ever tried to solve before. How could they preserve the power of thirteen sovereign states and at the same time create a central government with enough power to defend the union and keep it united by limiting state power? They knew that the powers they granted the federal government would be tested by events in the future history of America and they knew that its powers might be increased by the radical interpretations of the Constitution by unpatriotic men desiring only money and power. However they made another power absolute and safe from malicious interpretations in addition to military and diplomatic powers. The Constitution gives the federal Congress the absolute power to admit new states. It can pass a bill admitting new states to our union any time it wishes. George Washington did not participate in the debates but he ratified the Constitution by signing it. We citizens of the union can ratify it every time we elect men and women to represent us in a new Congress in Washington DC who will work like the men in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to create a more perfect union and to share sovereign powers between the Federal Government and the states justly. And since our Congress has the absolute power to admit new states, any national state in the world can also ratify the Constitution by applying to the American Congress for admittance to our union.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 36

    Once a state gives up its right to make war on other states and to conduct diplomacy with other states, what rights does it need to keep its integrity as a state? Does it need the right to set up tariffs to protect the economy within its borders from competition with other state economies? Yes, unless it is a member state in a union with other states worldwide who have agreed to get rid of all tariffs and make all commerce among states free. Must a state recognize by a passport or other official documents who its citizens are and who have the right to work within its borders? Yes, unless it is in a union of states who all agree that anyone from any state in the union can by right be a citizen of any of the other states with the right to vote and to work and to run for public office by simply deciding to reside in some chosen state. But if there is universal citizenship in such a union, how can a state govern its own affairs and protect its citizens from criminal behavior if it has stripped itself of normal state powers? It has state and local police under the control of a state governor and it has a state judicial system as well as a state constitution. How does it protect its state government from rule by a dictator and from corruption by state officials? There is no protection from dictatorship or corruption in a nation-state isolated from other states. Even in democratic nation-states, elected officials sometimes act like dictators and support corruption. The only way to permanently assure real democracy is for states to give up a completely independent state judicial system and make all its citizens subjects also to a federal judicial system with a Supreme Court as the final judge of the validity of all laws made by any government. Only a system with dual governments at both the federal and state levels can produce the independent out-of-state authority needed to arrest corrupt officials of any state and to put them in jail for their crimes. This means that there will be a central government established with supreme legal power. Isn’t this the death of democracy? How can democracy exist in a state that has given up so much power? The central government’s army will protect every state from invasion and guarantee a republican form of government in every state. Well, what about taxes? Why should a state give up its exclusive right to tax its citizens? Why should it allow a central government to also tax them? To finance freedom, peace, justice and democracy. When citizens in nation-states send all their tax monies to one government, they get little back and they often end up financing corruption in various forms, legal and illegal.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 35

    The German philosopher Hegel wrote the greatest work examining humanity’s progress towards the expression of the divine in history. In his Philosophy of History, he examines the progress in world history of what he calls “universal spirit”. This spirit expresses itself throughout history in a variety of finite forms among many peoples all of which fail to reveal the universal spirit absolutely. Each finite form of universal spirit is inevitably surpassed in a dialectical movement of history by a new finite form which reaches however a higher form. Hegel identifies the progress of the world towards universal spirit as progress towards freedom. The oriental world, he writes, knew only the freedom of one man, as the pharaoh in Egypt. The Greek and Roman world knew the freedom only of some men, since slavery was instituted. The Protestant Germanic states of Hegel’s time, the early nineteenth century, finally realize the freedom of all. “The essential being,” he wrote, “is the union of the subjective with the rational will: it is the moral whole, the state, which is that form of reality in which the individual has and enjoys his freedom”. Hegel was right that the European nation-state, set up by middle-class lawyers with laws protecting the riches of the middle class and exempting the rich from most taxes, was a historical development that granted at least the rich freedom. He did not know what might develop in the future beyond the European world of his time, but he did declare that “America is therefore the land of the future where in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself.” According to American history, the nation-state is itself a burden that the world must get rid of if world history is to become unburdened. The true burden of America is to show the world that universal spirit reveals itself more fully in a union of states than in isolated nation-states. If the United States of America can transform itself to the United States of the World, universal spirit and universal freedom have a chance to become at last universal on our earth.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 34

    When George Washington took the oath of office in 1789 in New York as the first president of the United States, the occasion was so solemn that it was indeed like the awesome moment of the birth of a nation except that no nation came into being and Washington was not sworn in as the head of any state. He considered his role as president that of a referee. Most American historians nonetheless crowned the event as the birth of a nation and volumes have since been written attempting to unite American history since the arrival of Europeans in the seventeenth century as the story of the germination and birth and growth of a nation. This view is false. George Washington as commander of the Continental Army had led a rebellion that was not a national event since he fought in a civil war between colonists subjects of the British Parliament and King. It is fairly easy however for historians to call anyone who lived in the thirteen colonies an American and any action of the central government set up by the rebels national. George Washington became president of a federal government of thirteen states whose governors had powers that could be described more accurately as national than his. The truth is that as law and as fact there was no national government anywhere because none of the American governments were fully sovereign. The states had great powers and reinforced by the powers granted the Federal Government, they acted as sovereign nations. A state governor had the same police powers as any nation-state governor. The people lived under state constitutions and state courts and they now had the fantastic new liberty of having the right under the Constitution to cross state borders and live in any state they chose with full political rights. State governments were now even more secure in their power since a provision in the Constitution allowed them to appeal to the American army for help in putting down insurrections in their states. George Washington was a charismatic figure like Napoleon in Europe and he could have embodied a nation as did Napoleon if there were a basis for one. Instead he was a referee. He had as head of the executive branch sovereign powers over the military and diplomacy. But he did not fight any foreign state and the diplomatic actions he undertook did not affect Americans greatly. Foreign nations recognized the new government as a nation because it acted as a nation when dealing with them. At home, citizens of the new form of the union were enthused with developing their states and the continental territories open to them all the way to the Mississippi River. Foreigners and American historians called them Americans  living in an American nation, but the title given their president at his inauguration, “George Washington, president of the United States” indicated that the country Americans lived in was the United States. They did not care much how foreigners and historians defined their political system as long as it let them live freely as free men on the move in free states and wide-open territories.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 33

    Jefferson and Madison, the third and fourth presidents, were men of culture and thought who had direct experience of the fight for independence and the formation of the Constitution. Historians usually concentrate on a conflict during this period between Federalists, who wanted a strong central government, and conservatives who were for states rights. Thomas Jefferson never gave up his firm conviction that Virginia was his country and not the United States but any conflict in his mind between federal and state power faded when Napoleon of France sold him the territory France possessed west of the Mississippi River, from Louisiana on the gulf of Mexico to territory in the far northwest on the Pacific Ocean, for 3 cents an acre.  Settlers were already moving westward into the open lands east of the Mississippi and now in addition a huge new open territory was added to the union west of the Mississippi all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Napoleon was doing his best with his army to set up in Europe a union of states in a French empire and he more than doubled the future size of the American union by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. While the Napoleonic wars were going on in Europe and Madison was president, America began a war with Britain in 1812. Madison had to flee Washington D.C. when it was occupied by British forces. He returned the next day to examine government buildings set on fire by the British. But by 1812, 5 more states had been admitted to the union. The war proved that a European nation-state might set fires in the seat of the union’s government but none of them could stop the advance of a union of states with limited sovereignty and democratic freedoms. During the war, the 5 New England states met in Hartford Connecticut to consider secession from the union. The war against Britain was clearly not in the region’s economic interest and New Englanders were concerned also that the admission of new states reduced their political power in the central government. But an extraordinary new way to organize humanity’s political life in a new revolutionary system was underway and the New Englanders at the conference in Hartford voted to remain a part of it. In Europe after the Napoleonic wars, independent nation-states reappeared with full independent power and the strongest set out with their ships to conquer and subjugate more peoples worldwide for their colonial empires. But in the new open territories in America, new free states were set up with guaranteed democratic governments and unalienable human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The 5 New England states showed the political power states with limited sovereignty possessed when they asserted their right to secede and then rejected secession. George Washington died 16 years before Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo in 1815. George Washington had created a democratic union of 13 states that would expand to 50 by admitting in 1959 the state of Hawaii. Napoleon lost his battle to unify Europe but he succeeded in expanding the American union by selling it enough territory for 14 new states. A future United States Of The World will have for its history books two heroes who personally created 27 of them.
Daniel McNeill Read other posts. theunitedstatesoftheworld.blogspot.com

World Unity 32

    On July 4th 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, both John Adams of Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia died. The two had worked together during the rebellion to keep their colonies and the other colonies united against Britain. They both served as president of the United States and kept up a friendly relationship with one another communicating by letter until their deaths the same day. In 1826, 24 states were in the union. For historians of the period from 1814 to 1861 when the Civil War began, the union’s extraordinary and rapid growth should have been their main theme, but instead they focus on a trend they discovered in the union towards nationalism and contrast this with what they call sectionalism. A union of 24 states stretched out over a continent the size of Europe, each with sovereign powers, would naturally be expected to have separatist tendencies but none of any importance emerged. New England was a strong and prosperous area with a Protestant body of English-speaking people and a cultural unity based on 200 years of common history. But New England considered secession from the union and then rejected it. Historians however seize its tendency towards secession as a strong example of sectionalism. Virginia is cited as sectionalist because it considered itself a sovereign state and opposed decisions of the Supreme Court that reduced its sovereignty. The Supreme Court held that the states had not full but limited sovereignty and the court’s increase of power is cited by historians as the correct tendency of the union, one towards nationalism. But the actions of both New England, the home of Adams, and Virginia, the home of Jefferson, both give evidence of the firm sense of sovereignty that was powerfully alive in the states before the Civil War. And there were now 24 of them. Both Adams of Massachusetts and Jefferson of Virginia would have been shocked to learn that the revolutionary democratic union that they had helped create was somehow transforming itself, according to historians, from a union to a nation-state. What could motivate historians to tell the story of a rise of national power in the government in Washington D.C., which was neither fully sovereign nor a state, rather than the extraordinary birth of 24 free democratic states all with the same degree of sovereign power as that exhibited by the New England states and Virginia? The answer is that historians write with a view ahead to what will happen on April 6 1861, the start of a civil war between two groups of states. Historians must show somehow, even though the actual history of the period does not show it, that seeds of division between sections of the union were developing that inevitably would burst forth into civil war. In reality, the union was sound and developing magnificently. There were sectional tensions in the union but the union was not the problem. The union did not cause the Civil War. One politician, Abraham Lincoln, caused it. Lincoln was the problem.
DanielMcNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall 
usoftheworld.com

World Unity 31

    A terrorist massacre in Paris, a terrorist state in Iraq and Syria, more than a 100,000 illegal immigrants in Italy. What is the link between these events? They are the result of education and prosperity reaching only a minority of people in the world. The only real solution is providing education and prosperity for everyone in the world. The political system necessary to start the long and difficult fight to eliminate ignorance and poverty worldwide already exists in the United States. Yet we Americans waste our time and money trying to solve the problem by military means alone as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Democracy without corruption is an essential weapon in the war for worldwide education, freedom and prosperity that we, the prosperous people of the world, must fight. We Americans must eliminate in our public talk and in our minds the myth that we are a nation like other nations. We have the power under the Constitution to act as a nation when dealing with foreign nations but it is false that we are but a mere nation. We have added 37 new states to our union since 1789 and we must add many more to kill poverty both in the United States and in the world. Entrance to our union of democratic states offered to all the states of the world is not just a way to defeat ignorance and poverty worldwide, it is the only way. No nation-state has ever had the American political experience of setting up new state after new state  and giving each a strong central government ordered by its Constitution to provide every state in the union with a democratic government and protection  from corruption and military invasion. Who is better prepared to give new states secure borders than we with our powerful army, navy and air force already positioned worldwide? What advanced economy  better than our economy could infiltrate and update the economies of new states? Would our powerful banks and our highly sophisticated Federal Reserve central banking system somehow block economic growth in new states? We have thousands of college graduates who could find careers in newly admitted states as teachers. We have thousands of small-business owners with advanced technical know-how who could easily move to new states and create jobs. Any state that joins our union will attract investors from all over the world who know that their investments will be backed financially and militarily by the American government just as it now backs investments in the present 50 states. Washington D.C. will become even more powerful with the addition of new states but it deserves additional power because it is the world’s new Rome and history has taught us to keep Rome as powerful as possible or ignorant barbarians will destroy the civilized world.
Daniel McNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall
Read all World Unity writings at: usoftheworld.com

World Unity 30

   Abraham Lincoln declared in his presidential inaugural speech of March 4 1861 that the Federal Government was a “national” government yet it possessed no national territory except the District of Columbia which was a stateless district. The American Constitution never uses the word “national” or “nation” or “Federal Government” anywhere. It says its purpose is to form “a more perfect union…for the united states of America” and it then enumerates powers that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the new government possess. The tenth amendment to the Constitution states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Clearly the Constitution is about delegating certain powers to a central government and this would have been an odd way indeed to set up a “national” government since the powers delegated are limited. President Lincoln used the word “national” on  March 4 because his purpose was to make the Federal Government a national government. A month later on April 6, he started the Civil War and won it using his army against Americans living in 11 southern states. Winners of all major wars everywhere gain as a reward for their victory a rewrite of history purged of their misdeeds. Historians accepted Lincoln’s revolutionary view that America was a nation and then went to work to show that all American history up to Lincoln was nothing less than the germination of a nation that he pulled deftly from the womb of time and set solidly on its feet in Washington D.C..

   The English colonists from England who arrived in 1620 at Plymouth in Massachusetts became Americans and the political compact they agreed to for their small community became an embryo of democratic concepts that, according to historians, would one day be embodied in the US Constitution that established Washington as the head of a nation. Colonists in Massachusetts rebelled in 1689 for independent rule and, assembling an armed force of 1500 men, arrested the British governor Edmund Andros. According to historians, these were the first rumblings of volcanic forces that would one day roar forth in a fiery blast and form a nation. The Massachusetts colonists who fired their rifles at the British army at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and killed or wounded nearly 200 British soldiers as they drove the enemy regiments back to the safety of Boston were Americans. George Washington, a Virginian, came to Massachusetts in 1775 to take command of the New England army that historians renamed the American army. Samuel Adams, the organizer of the Massachusetts rebellion, instigated the Boston Tea Party, attended the first two continental congresses in Philadelphia, signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Articles of Federation and supported the ratification of the Constitution by Massachusetts. Samuel Adams might have been elevated by historians to the level of an American hero like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson if he had not constantly and outspokenly made it clear to his fellow colonists that Massachusetts was his country. Historians did not allow anyone on their lists whose deeds could not be nicely metamorphosed as presages of the nation Abraham Lincoln’s military victory required.  

   No defined geographical area is named “America” and no nation has ever established itself, including within its borders a well-defined distinct people, on the North American continent. This fact did not stop historians from finding “America” and the “nation” wherever it was convenient. In the public schools, our history books never taught us that the true majesty and glory of America derived from the successful union of 50 sovereign states with open borders and democratic governments. We were educated as though it were a matter of indifference if we happened to live in Massachusetts or Louisiana. Washington was the head of a nation but it had never built and funded a public school or university in any state, it had never built and funded a public hospital in a state, it had never built and sustained state roads or state transportation systems, it had never established and maintained libraries outside of the District of Columbia, it had never established and funded police and fire services outside the District of Columbia, it had no power to register births and deaths because a United States citizen can be born and die only in one state of many states, it had no power to marry couples under civil law, it could not incorporate banks and corporations, and it had also nothing to do with hundreds of  professions and public organizations and public activities that were governed by state authority. No one taught us that the state we happened to live in had power to do everything necessary for the public good as in any other state anywhere in the world except that it had no power to wage war or conduct diplomatic activities with other states. The armies of historians who followed Lincoln had done their job. Since we had a nation, it was none of our business to open our eyes and see that an extraordinary unfolding and development of humanity into a new revolutionary political system unlike anything in its past had happened among us.

Daniel McNeill Read all World Unity Writings usoftheworld.com