The Times That Try Tunisian and US Souls

   These are the times that try men’s souls. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered but the brave people of the nation of Tunisia threw out a tyrant four years ago and now terrorism has destroyed their tourist industry and the 40% unemployment of their young is threatening to trample down their hopes for democracy in their streets. The sunshine American patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the good things that his political system alone can give Tunisians, but the American patriot that demands that the Congress in Washington DC offer Tunisia immediately acceptance of it as the fifty-first state of the American union deserves the love and thanks of every man and woman in the world. Yes, Congress would make an offer that Tunisia may refuse for all the wrong reasons but make the offer anyway. Let America stand at last for something noble and good and let every American who hates tyranny be at least proud that they supported an act directly opposed to it. Tunisia may reject allowing the Coast Guard to run its  harbor and may not allow its possible new navy, the American navy, to station ships there. It may be against allowing the Federal Department of Justice to set up offices in Tunis and begin searching out corrupt politicians to put them in federal jails. It may not accept that Tunisian men and women will no longer have a state army and may have military careers only in the United States army which will buy lands in their state to station soldiers with advanced military technologies to defend and secure Tunisia’s borders from all foreign dangers. Every Tunisian citizen overnight would gain a second citizenship as new citizens of the United States with the right to live and work and vote in any one of fifty-one states, but Tunisians may reject that possibility because they may refuse to become a colony of America. (The government of America in Washington DC is not a state, is not located in a state, and does not have enough power to rule or colonize any state.) As the fifty-first American state, the dollar would become their currency and all the capital in all the nations of the world would look upon Tunisia, a new American state, as a perfectly secure place for investments creating the thousands of new jobs that young Tunisians need. But that may be rejected also even though the rejection can not be based on any logic and is ignoble. Tunisians would be able as citizens in a new American state to be elected as representatives to the Congress in Washington and to vote for president and run their state as before, their court system as before, their education system and their financial system as before, and experience an influx of new residents of their state from 50 other states and experience as well many other beneficial changes that may not happen if Tunisian politicians reject Congress’s offer. Tunisians may become again like most Americans merely sunshine patriots, but at least we Americans who stood by the good things our political system alone can offer the world tried. We were willing to do all we could to help Tunisians kick tyranny out once and for all and bring real democracy in forever.

Daniel McNeill with Thomas Paine, THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered...

Is Italy or Massachusetts More Sovereign?

    Italy has an enormous tax problem. Its government taxes absolutely everything it can for more revenue. Excessive taxes on businesses stifle expansion and employment. Widespread government corruption and the mafia take large chunks of public money. The only good thing about the absurd inefficiencies in its government is that at least some public money is recirculated justly into good hands as well as unjustly into bad.  Massachusetts does not need a broad tax base for revenues because some possible government functions, like having its own military and diplomacy or its own social security system, are handled by its citizens’ second government in Washington. It does not need to create a large recirculation of money  throughout its state economy by taxing extensively because federal taxes sent to Washington from fifty states create a gigantic continental-wide recirculation of money. Corrupt politicians in Massachusetts are tried and sentenced to jail in Federal courts by the Federal Department of Justice. The mafia is active in very few areas, is hunted down by Federal as well as State police, and is not a cancer in  government as in Italy. Who is more sovereign?Technically Italy. But Massachusetts possesses a more efficient sovereignty because its political alliance with Washington leaves it free to rule mainly over matters of immediate interest to its citizens and, more important, to face public problems that only a state with limited sovereign responsibilities can readily solve for the public good. The best public officials in Italy with the best will in the world  can not solve its problems. Massachusetts  officials can. Who is more sovereign in an efficient manner?  Massachusetts is as sovereign as it needs to be. Italy is totally sovereign and totally unable to function in a way that correctly manages its citizens needs.

Daniel McNeill

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A Fleeting Vision of Statehood and Sovereignty in Washington

   President Obama gave his last state of the union speech January 12  before persons exercising all federal powers. Supreme court members,  senators, congressmen, cabinet members, department heads of federal agencies sat before him. He held the supreme power over the military and diplomacy but all his other powers, like the powers of persons who sat listening to him, were limited by the Constitution or laws passed by Congress. No one present in the chamber of the House held total power. Imagine Vladimir Putin addressing a large assemblage of government officials in Russia. All the sovereign power of the Russian state is in his hands and whatever he distributes down to officials to exercise is absolute over all Russian citizens anywhere in Russia. The American president does not have the power to distribute down absolute power because various federal powers have already been established in the hands of persons he does not control directly by the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution.

   However the assemblage listening to the President appeared grand and, if understood correctly, it was grand. If somehow every hand present holding a bit of power could come together and form some absolute and coherent unity working as just one hand, we would have something like one sovereign government. It would seem as sovereign as Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia. However none of this unified power could be used absolutely to command at will every American citizen. It would be a unity creating a sovereign power with no base and therefore a useless sovereignty. However, while the President addressed his audience, an odd and fleeting unity appeared to him as a vision. For a while, for an evening, Washington seemed, with all its great powers gathered together, a sovereign state like every other state in the world. Then the meeting broke up. The vision vanished. The Washington government was again split into parts and the momentary illusion of being a state vanished also because the Constitution does not grant Washington enough powers to be a state. The fifty American states have the right under the Constitution to consider themselves sovereign states. But they were all absent and none of their governors were invited to hear a speech about the condition of their union.

Daniel McNeill

Political Correctness and Incorrect Political Organization

   We Americans have a fundamental moral and political duty: we must make sure that every foreigner in the world lives in a secure state with a national identity and we must also be politically correct in our behavior towards foreigners who come to live in America. Everyone in the world has a right to a national identity except Americans. Our duty is to keep the foreign national identities of peoples secure and vital whether they live in foreign states or in the united states. Since we do not live in a nation and have no national identity, it makes sense that we try to make all national identities in the world obsolete but we do the opposite. We support them. We pay taxes to our government to protect worldwide the integrity of foreign states and with it the national identities of their citizens.

   Our unique and revolutionary political and financial system is rooted in our government in Washington. Without it, the vast swirl of our union of 50 states would become a jumble of independent states each like a wheel of a car detached from a hub rolling anywhere and nowhere. But our patriotic loyalty to Washington can not give us a national identity since it was established by our constitution without the fully sovereign powers necessary to be a state. People leave some foreign state and come to America to live in one of our 50 states each without the full sovereign power necessary to be a national state. They automatically assume that the government in Washington which is not a state is nonetheless their new national state. We are mostly quiet about their error. It is not politically correct to tell them that they and their descendants have cut the ropes forever that tie them to some national state. It is better to encourage them to remain identified with some foreign race or some foreign identity while they live among us and gradually become like us nationless.

   We Americans will go on creating our various identities by the way we choose to live and work, free forever from the slavery of a life ruled by a fully sovereign national government. We are forced to obey absolutely no law created by any government with absolute power because no such government exists anywhere among the thousands of governments in our 50 states. But how long can we go on spending large portions of our wealth supporting financially and militarily sovereign governments with no worldwide consciousness? Can we support forever political leaders who use their sovereign power corruptly and hold their citizens like prisoners behind national borders that prevent the new creative identities possible for them in a global world that can not thrive without some new revolutionary political reorganization?

Daniel McNeill

   

Why Donald Trump Is So Popular

   The first important man to decide that the United States was a nation was Abraham Lincoln. In his inaugural address of 1861, he said the Federal Government in Washington in the District of Columbia was a “national” government. He won the Civil War and since then there has been no stopping the rush to find a “nation” where none can possibly exist. The central government of the “nation” has the right to function only in a district located in no state and thus it would be if it were  not impossible the government of the “nation” without being itself a state. None of the 50 states can be “nations” since none of them have full sovereignty. A nation can not  give up full sovereignty and be a nation and a government like the one in Washington that was not granted full sovereignty by the American Constitution can not be either a state or a nation. But Lincoln won the Civil War and gangs of historians not only concluded that all the many peoples who ever settled in “America” , a place that can not be located on any map of the world, were “Americans” but also that “America” was, going back hundreds of years, a “nation”. Some English settlers from Holland who settled in 1620 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a speck on the North American continent 5000 miles from another part of the “nation” on the Hawaiian Islands,  were “Americans” who founded the “nation”. Many other “Americans” coming from various locations from all over the world, settling all over a non-existent place called “America”, also were latter-day founders of the “nation”. Let’s not quibble over the details of how the “nation” came to be because it never came to be as a reality. Let’s just agree that every day on the public media when reporters call the totality of our complex political system a “nation”, they are just reiterating what our historians have been telling us for  years, that we are a “nation”.

   The concept of a “nation” is one good means of uniting the hundreds of different peoples living in the United States. But if you believe as do I that the devoted loyalty of the peoples of the fifty states of our union to the government in Washington DC is not only worthwhile but also essential to our unity and the unity of all the states of the globe, what can be worse than people who have been told for generations that they live in a “nation” taking their teachers seriously? What if Americans really believe they live in a nation and a presidential candidate comes along like Donald Trump whose bombastic rhetoric and notions reveal he believes also that he lives in a nation and intends to rule our union of states if elected as a nation? This would be Gotterdamerung. This would be the fall of Stalingrad to Hitler’s army in 1943. This would be the end of democratic worldwide civilization. Without the government in Washington uniting with its laws and policies and its power not only the 50 united states but also the states of the world and the world economy, there will be no world as we know it. We Americans created Washington but it doesn’t belong to just us anymore. It also belongs to the world. It is the guts of the world and without it continuing to function as both a federal American government and as a world government we will have no world. Donald Trump wants to make the United States a great nation. They can never be a nation and if they try to become one they will destroy their own unity and the precarious unity of the world. Many Americans now see a chance to really live in a nation like everyone else in the world. That is why Donald Trump is so popular.That is why his election would be a disaster.

Daniel McNeill

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Failed States Made Secure

Clearly there are now states who cannot control their borders and without this power they can never be sovereign states and certainly not democratic states. Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are suffering from this condition and it was caused mainly by the United States. Can the fox who ravaged the chicken coop ever make the coop safe? It seems impossible yet the United States government alone in the past has been successful creating states with secure borders and forcing by law state governments to govern themselves democratically and without corruption. The great European nations lack a political system capable of making a state like Syria secure except as a colony ruled from London or Paris or Moscow. The government in Washington DC does not rule any of the American states and it is itself not a state. If Syria became the fifty-first American state, then Russia, Israel, Turkey and France would either retreat beyond Syria’s borders or else be blown away by the American military. Syria would be a sovereign state again with two governments, one in Washington and one in Damascus, and its political leaders in both governments would have to be elected democratically by Syrian citizens. Once elected, if they acted tyrannically or corruptly, they would be tried in court and put in jail for violating Federal laws by the Federal Department of Justice. Every state in the world can possibly lose control of its borders. They all need a world central government with just enough sovereign power to back them up militarily and judicially.
Daniel McNeill

Read "The United States of the World" a complete book of 12 essays on the movement within American history towards changing the central government in Washington to the central government of a worldwide union of states at: usoftheworld.com/history

Read other writings about worldwide unity at the United States of the World website:usoftheworlf.com

Imperium and Libertas

   We know the day the disaster happened.  Romulus killed his twin brother Remus and founded Rome on April 21, 753 BC. Imperium does not allow power to be shared ever. Imperium is total power to do anything at all to anyone and anything. Imperium gave Romulus the power to kill anyone who threatened his new community and since every other community eventually threatened it, he killed with his army anyone who took up arms against him exercising for the defense of a community an enemy imperium. He then allowed conquered communities to live without libertas in peace as long as they accepted that Rome possessed imperium over them. The Roman father had imperium over his family. He could kill anyone within it at will legally without punishment. Peoples before Rome lived with libertas in tribes all over what later became Europe as well as in North Africa and the Near East. Under Rome they lived in a huge community where no one had a separate community with local imperium. One universal community now existed and the Senate in Rome plus the Roman people, SPQR, ( senatus populusque romanus)  alone had imperium.

   It is incorrect to describe Rome as an empire even though the word “empire” derives semantically from imperium. It was a huge nation governed at the top in Rome by a group of men, the Senate, and later by one man, the emperor. European nations developed as did Rome. A strong tribe conquered neighboring tribes and expanded the imperium of a king until a large community of conquered tribes emerged behind fixed borders. Rome united its gigantic nation (which was not as large as the present nations of Brazil, Canada, Russia) by spreading the use of Latin as well as Greek as the national languages although only Latin was official. European nations did the same. They united tribes in their domain speaking many languages by making one language common and official. Rome could have expanded further but it restrained itself and built walls and fortifications at what it called the limes which gives us the word “limit”. European nations were smaller nations than was Rome and they were congregated beside one another or near one another, all with  governments with full imperium. Another disaster. Not just the disaster of a large community with one government at Rome with imperium over all its peoples. Several communities, nations jumbled together with the power in a central government to do anything at all to any of its citizens and always ready with a national army to make war on enemy neighboring nations. A disastrous state of affairs. The disaster that Romulus created expanded and split into several warring parts. A universal disaster.

   The disaster was well known in the late 18th century when Americans and some Europeans met in Philadelphia to create the government of a union of states. The British like the Romans were out to have imperium over as much of the globe as possible. British imperium imposing taxes on Americans by a tax on tea caused the Tea Party in Boston in 1773. The British tea chests Bostonians dumped in their harbor were, so to speak, the British imperium. But how to get rid of not only British imperium, but all imperium? How could imperium once and for all, so to speak, be dumped overboard and be forever gone from the American part of the North American continent, dumped once and for all in the ocean, defeated, expelled legally from all American governments, gone forever with its disastrous warlike corpus bloated with exclusive power? They had to create a central government with some sovereign powers and at the same time strip it forever legally of full sovereign power. They had to assure a human face, devoted not to imperium but to libertas, on the new central government that history’s so many disasters based on imperium was amazingly now allowing them to bring to life by a Constitution.

   Most of the people in the more than 200  nations on the globe, formed in the same disastrous mode as Rome and the nations of Europe, do not believe that the government in Washington in the District of Columbia, which unites 50 American states and tries to promote with its great military and financial power peace and democracy for all the nations of the globe, is the only central government in the world that legally under the Constitution does not have imperium. But it is true. The founding fathers of America took away from Washington imperium and gave it only enough power to create for its citizens libertas.

Daniel McNeill
Daniel McNeill's books are at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall
Read his writings including a complete novel and a two act play at: usoftheworld.com