The Empty Promises of Trump and Sanders

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are surging in the polls because they talk as though as president they would be the head of a nation. Sure, if all the power in the US ran in thousands of lines from all over the states like the tentacles of an octopus directly to the president, we could  believe Trump might “build a wall” around the country or Sanders might actually be for “free college” as a realistic possibility. The president has powerful but limited powers. He is the head of the largest military in the world and could order the army to “build a wall” around the US but we know that is not going to happen and anyway Congress would not vote to fund it. The Congress, not the president, possesses the commerce power. Bernie Sanders as president could not get a $15-an-hour minimum wage from Congress let alone “free college”. Why is it that we Americans can not face the simple truth that we do not live in a nation? It is not a bad or evil condition. It is in fact a very good condition and one that we thoroughly enjoy. The president has serious worldwide political, economic and moral responsibilities but the Constitution never instituted his office to make him president of a nation. George Washington described himself as a “referee” when he accepted the presidency. The federal government’s limited powers are cut in three between the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court. New York city will try to pass a $15.00-an-hour law but it can be challenged in courts and overturned by the Supreme Court. Would this be on the part of the court the act of a nation? A nation works the other way around. It sends down laws from the top that are valid for everyone absolutely within four borders north, east,west and south. We don’t have four international borders touching most of the 48 states south of Canada.  Alaska has four more international borders and so does Hawaii. We have 50 legal jurisdictions in the 50 states of our union and that is why our name is The United States. We could get a lot more good things done politically if we were a nation but it would be positively frightening to be ordered around by the bureaucrats of a central government as in all the states of the world with citizens unhappily locked up behind the borders of a nation.

Daniel McNeill

Human Statues and Real Experience

   Few philosophical movements have lost their elan as fast as existentialism and few have proved so eternally essential as bourgeois idealism. The philosopher Sartre believed everything happens as an escape from a perfect form of being that does not exist. We are none of us essential. We can never experience perfect being. We are beings arising from nothingness  condemned to be inessential beings. Anything that seems to us essential in our experience, for Sartre, is a bourgeois illusion, bad faith. He wrote of his grandfather,  a nineteenth-century style idealist: “He loved those short instances of eternity where he became his own statue.” Do we ever in 2015 struggle against the thoughts in our minds that make us our own statues? Never! We are perfectly sure of ourselves. We must be who we are because idealized thought tells us we are who we are. We exist essentially. We love being in-itself. We don’t want anything to do with being for-itself. I think therefore I am, said Descartes. Everything real is rational, said Hegel. Thought, either our thought or the thought created for us by others, makes us real. We only want an existence that is essential even though real experience is existential.

   Nothing is more essential than our state governments. They almost never act existentially and they force us to live according to laws that they decide are essential. Any existential deviation from their laws is a crime. It is truly an amazing thing whenever a state acts existentially. The government of Russia between 1941 and 1945 became the most existential government ever. It ordered all its men to forget completely about living essentially and to die existentially. The laws of the German government designed to kill every Russian who resisted and enslave all the rest were not  essential for anyone in Russia. A war to save one essential state government from another essential state government created for a few years a bold and brave belief in the hearts of millions of men about to die that freedom alone was essential and everything else a universal lie designed to turn humans into statues.

Daniel McNeill

The website of The United States of the World is: usoftheworld.com

Read Daniel McNeill’s complete book, “The United States of the World” at: usoftheworld.com/history  

   

   

The Triple Identity of Americans

    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 threatening 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 galloping all over the globe chasing a goal of universal worldwide peace and unity for all the peoples of the world.

   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 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 its foundation 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 itself to 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

 

Globalization For Small Businesses

  

   The solar energy business on the island of Sardinia, a part of Italy, is booming because it is sun-drenched most of the year. An Italian solar-energy company was recently purchased by Chinese businessmen from Italians. The Italian government subsidizes the company so as a result the Chinese investors will be paid monies from the Italian government’s tax revenues for several years in addition to the profits from their investments. The American government has military bases in Italy and treaties for defense with it that make Italy a highly secure place for foreign investment. It also has military bases in hundreds of nations worldwide making it the undisputed champion fighting to make nations all over the world safe for investment. But does the military and diplomatic efforts of the federal government worldwide make it easy for every type of American business to invest anywhere in the world or is it mainly large American corporations that it helps keep secure worldwide as well as the large corporations coming from foreign nations? A world secure for safe investments by people of any nationality is surely a good thing but we Americans pay to make it secure with our federal taxes. Our small businesses, those with up to to 500 employees, deserve some means to efficiently transfer their capital and know-how to foreign states to take advantage of small scale business opportunities as the Chinese investors did in Sardinia. Worldwide investments coming from sources of capital worldwide are already changing the world radically but states worldwide remain fixed in political structures that are old-fashioned. In the United States a small businessman can take his business to any one of 49 states easily, but the best way he can transport it easily to foreign states is if they petition the American Congress  to become new states of the United States.

Daniel McNeill’s play,The Body Is A Legal Drug, will have 3 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 comedy about finding your true identity.

Performances: July 28 8:30 pm. July 31 8:00 pm. August 2 3:30 pm

 

Italy Restructured

In Italy politicians and the leading commentators about politics all agree about Italy’s problems, widespread corruption, excessive taxation, the lack of a good economic plan for growth, a failing public health system, an unworkable pension system, radical changes in the educational system and so forth. The politicians argue that they are trying to solve the problems but that despite the progress they are making, they must go slower than they wish and deal with constraints and lengthy procedures inherent in their government’s structure. Political commentators shout with rage that an intelligent approach to the problems would lead to quick positive changes if only politicians would use common sense to override outdated procedures and devote themselves to the public interest. Neither group is on the correct path to real solutions because the only power that can change Italy for the better must come from outside of the nation’s governmental system. Suppose the government were a large private corporation. If one of its subdivisions were not working well, it would sell it off and let some other agency take care of it. The central government in the American union of states acts as a means for states to get rid of problems and subdivisions that they cannot handle well at the state level. The Federal Department of Justice and the FBI investigate state politicians and regularly put them in jail for corruption. In effect, American states have gained better governments by assigning (rather than selling off as do private corporations) divisions of state governments to an outside power. Suppose Italy’s state government could get rid of handling its pension system. Would it not be less costly and and more effective as a state government without the burden? All workers in every state in the American union pay Social Security deductions from their paychecks to a universal pension system which pays retirees money not from the taxes of any government but from a proportion of the wages of workers actively working. Each state does the work of government that it can do well and does nothing in areas of government beyond its reach and costly like worldwide diplomatic activities and military operations. Clearly Italy would be better off if Rome needed to do nothing in military, diplomatic, and pension matters and an outside justice and police power could investigate politicians and put them in jail for corruption. The health care system would work better if it were not all handled from the top down but was based instead on some kind of private/public insurance system that could keep Rome as far away from it as possible. Education should be run and paid for locally with Rome paying a share of the cost. But Italians will say we want to change Italy for the better by taking away its full national sovereignty. Yes we do. We want it to transfer some of its sovereignty to the central government of a union of states located in Washington in the District of Columbia and we want it to send democratically elected representatives both to the central government in Washington and to its state government in Rome, Italy will throw some of its sovereignty out the front door but it will get it all back in a different form through the rear door and give Italians a much better working state government than they have now and much better economic prospects for the future. Italians will have a new reduced state government at Rome demanding less taxes and doing much less but doing it much better. Italian citizens will still have the state of Italy and they can become citizens of fifty other states simply by deciding to live and work in one. Wherever they live and work they will have two governments. Two is better than one especially when one standing on its own in Rome cannot do well what needs to be done.

aniel 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 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

 

Revolutionary Cries

 

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 arguments 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 fifty 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 fifty 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
Visit the website of The United States of the World. usoftheworld.com

A New Form Of Democracy

The institutions of the American union of states make it impossible for any government state or federal to make any law that cannot be challenged by individual citizens and overturned. Such a political system is what every state worldwide needs and we Americans are fortunate to have it already. This  extension of democracy means that American citizens do not just vote for representatives to sit somewhere in a body and make laws. It also means that because they have a written Constitution, a union of states and both state and federal court systems, every citizen can appeal to any one of hundreds of courts to possibly overturn and void every law passed by any of our 51 governments. No other people anywhere have this right because they are all controlled in mononational states by one fully sovereign central government possessing all the power and ruling from the top down.  A parliament or legislature elected democratically is but  one key to political freedom. We Americans have two keys and every people everywhere also need two. We have had them since the beginning of our union of states in 1790. Here is an example of the extended democratic power we possess and that we hope that every people in every state will soon possess by joining our union. The American Supreme Court heard a case on appeal from one individual and voted that any law passed by any state not  allowing same-sex marriage is illegal. It was a great victory for a universal human right that no state anywhere should have the power to oppose by a law. Is it not a new form of democracy if citizens can vote for representatives to make their laws and also appeal to courts to overturn them?
Daniel McNeill
Go to the website of The United States of the World usoftheworld.com