Monday, November 28, 2005

America-Britain Alliance

The U.S.-Britain coalition in Iraq is an alliance that has a long history. A trans-Atlantic alliance that goes back to the founding of America. When British Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed a special joint session of the U.S. Congress in 2003 he reminded America just how special that relationship is.

Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt highlighted the bond and relationship between the two countries during World War II. Abraham Lincoln and William Gladstone had a very high regard and respect for each other as America was convulsing to rid itself of slavery.

America, like Britain, has numerous political and economic differences with Europe. Britain has more historical differences with Europe, especially France than America. In fact it is not sure it wants to adopt the new European constitution, or even be part of Europe. America looks down on “old Europe” while gladly embracing the “new Europe”. Many in America in fact resent Europe for not supporting the U.S. in Iraq. The editorials and stories lamenting how America can’t depend on Europe even though America rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and defended it against Soviet aggression for 50 years best summed up America’s hostility and resentment. The feeling is mutual. Most “old Europeans” look down on both America and Britain with arrogant disdain and contempt.

Since both America and Britain are having so many differences with Europe at the dawn of the 21st century, doesn’t it make sense that they establish a more comprehensive bilateral trans-Atlantic alliance? Isn’t a more robust bilateral trans-Atlantic alliance preferable to trying to sustain and salvage the frazzled hostile multilateral trans-Atlantic alliance? In fact why not throw Australia and New Zealand into the mix since they are not really part of Europe or Asia? Both countries have more in common with America and Britain than they do with Asia or Europe.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

State Right's

Government in the United States beyond the local level generally is held to be limited in its scope and divided in its structure. These constraints were expressly written into the country’s founding document, its Constitution, in response to perceived oppression by the British monarch and Parliament against whom the American colonists rebelled. The new system was to be a “compound republic” in which “the power surrendered by the people is … divided between two distinct governments;” first, a central national level to act on particular common concerns such as defense, and secondly, a diffused “state” level allowing citizens more immediate control over elected representatives. The details underlying this concept of “dual federalism” and its legal and political implications have been objects of serious contention for over two hundred years.

John D. Donahue in his book Disunited States reminds us that: “The Framers at Philadelphia launched not only a nation, but an appropriately endless argument over the proper balance between federal and state authority -- an argument whose intensity ebbs and flows and whose content evolves, but which is never really settled.”

The Articles of Confederation adopted in 1781 provided for only a feeble form of union, specifying at the start that “each state retains its sovereignty.” The central government’s economic authority was tightly constrained -- it could not collect taxes, regulate trade, or levy tariffs on imports -- and was largely mediated through the constituent states. There were several reasons behind this weakness. Officials in the separate states were jealous of their authority and resisted any hint of subordination. The English and Scottish political traditions in which most American intellectuals were steeped celebrated the radical new idea of limited government. Yet We The Apathetic People have over time allowed Washingtons career politicians to take them away and tax us to boot.

The Framers believed that the allocation of responsibility across levels of government would need to change with the times, and the Constitution sets broad parameters around the allowable division of powers between state and national governments. Within those limits, the Framers left it to the wisdom of their successors to find the right balance to fit the circumstances of the world to come and the priorities of future generation of Americans.

In our country’s early years the states enjoyed far more legitimacy than the distant national government. Washington’s rise in public esteem has been a 20th century phenomenon because of We The Apathetic People. The Depression, The New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement all tended to allow career politicians to detach popular loyalties from the states and move them toward Washington. A 1936 Gallup Poll found that 56 percent of Americans favored concentrating power in the federal government, while 44 percent favored state authority. Forty-one percent of respondents on a 1939 Roper Poll felt the federal government was “most honest and efficient in performing its own special duties.” The states came in last in the New Deal-era survey at 12 percent, with 17 percent awarding their confidence to local government. Talk about effective managed misperception of apathetic Americans!

Contemporary opinion surveys, by contrast, show dwindling faith in the federal government. In regular polls commissioned by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, the fraction of respondents identifying the federal government as “the level from which you feel you get the least for your money” rose by 10 points (to 46 percent) between 1989 and 1994 alone. Mid-1990s polls conducted by the Gallup Organization, the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, Business Week and the Harris Group, Hart and Teeter, and Princeton Survey Research Associates found, with striking consistency, support for enlarging the role of the states. Majorities of respondents -- often lopsided majorities -- favored state rather than federal leadership in education, crime control, welfare, job training, low income housing, highway construction, and farm policies. Late 1994 polling on trust in government among Missourians and Kansans found about a six-to-one advantage for the states. A bellweather poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 1995 for the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University found that by a margin of 61 to 24 percent, respondents trusted their state governments over the federal government to “do a better job of running things.” Most subgroups gave the edge to the states, including self-defined liberals (who favored the states by a margin of 49 to 36 percent), Democrats (48 percent to 35 percent), and voters under age thirty (72 to 21 percent).

Not just instinct and tradition, but some powerful logic as well, supports the ascendancy of the states. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis framed a resonant metaphor when he wrote that “a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory, and try social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Isn’t it time We the Maids sweep in such a courageous laboratory to our states?
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Monday, November 14, 2005

To my Blog readers:

I wanted to let you know what I've been up to and why I have not posted in a couple of weeks.

On November 3rd, 2005 I re-enacted my horseback "protest" ride, which I did once before back in May of 1979, along historic San Vicente Blvd, although this time I did it in reverse. I did this ride again to symbolize the backwardness of government energy policies the last three decades, the serious crisis facing the United States over the high cost of gasoline, and the obscene multi-billion dollar oil company profits. I am calling for an end to “deregulation” of energy.

The American people need to wake up and take control of their lives by fighting the multi-national oil companies who are destroying the U.S. economy.

Political contributions from utility and oil companies should be banned. The proposed hearings on oil profits in Washington are a sham. The solution is not hearings but action and legislation. Hearings were held during the 1970’s energy crisis, in 1980 and 2000 with the same results -- the consumer stuck with higher energy costs!. We’ve been hijacked. It’s time to end deregulation and throw the bums out of office.

I have released a protest song titled “Hijacked; Throw The Bums Out”. The song is being played on radio stations across the United States. It can be purchased for $1 and downloaded from my website at http://www.custommaidbook.com/buythesong.html.

Also, pleave view a short video of my ride on my website at http://www.custommaidbook.com/protestride.html

Thank you for your your support!

Devolution

“Britain is an invented nation, not so much older than the United States,” Peter Scott has written. Historian Linda Colley argues that a distinctive “British” nationality, encompassing English and Scots, developed between the Act of Union of England and Scotland in 1707 and the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. In Britain, so often invoked as the foil to America most of the things that are thought of as British do not antedate Queen Victoria: royal ceremony, Dickensian Christmas imagery, the imagery of Empire and Burns Night. America, like its British parent is made up of states that interact as a Federal government.

Restoring U.S. state rights, like those restored to the Scottish, Welsh and Irish governing bodies and political institutions will allow the United States, like Britain, through Interlocalism, to continue its form of nationhood with few political cosmetic changes. In turn, the locals in both America and England can continue to interact with their fellow overseas compatriots in the 21st century as they have for the last several hundred years. The several million Scots in Scotland Interlocalize with the 25 million plus overseas Scots and the Irish and Welsh do the same with their families, mates and business associates throughout the former colonies, no different than global Americans.

The people of Scotland voted three to one in favor of establishing their own parliament – a – three hundred year-old dream. The vote for devolution spelt the end of the “era of big centralized government” declared Tony Blair. The parliament in Edinburgh is up and running. The London Parliament retains control over Scotland’s defense, foreign and financial affairs and employment and welfare. In the New World Order Interlocalism allows the Scots to have the best of all worlds. The English haven’t had a parliament in which neither Scotland nor Wales was represented since the Middle Ages.

The same holds true for Spain. Catalan, Basque, and all other Spanish provinces can interact with each other while retaining certain local controls in their community and region. Spain’s Basque region, from northern Spain and southwestern France, like Britain’s Scotland, Ireland and Wales, is itching for self determination. The political arm of ETA the Basque separatist party, which is similar to the political arm of the IRA, is calling for a referendum and a pact with Spain and France. Spain, like Britain, has gone from being a global colonizing empire in the last millennium to disintegrating as a country that can only stay as one with Interlocalism.

Separatism is also on the march in Italy. The Northern Italians debate the merits of independence. The opponents to independence argue that greater rights for regional government and reform of the bloated Rome bureaucracies are the solution. “Federal reform, not separatism, is the best response to frustration with high taxes, government bureaucracy and inefficiency.” There is discontent with Rome but Northern Italians, like their global counterparts, rather selfishly want to unburden themselves of the subsidized rural South. Sound familiar?

Local governments must again become responsible for everything except defense, foreign and financial affairs. Everything else goes back to the States, provinces and other local political units to distribute the responsibilities among themselves on a local basis.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson wanted a limited government. A limited Federal government with power vested in the States. Why have We The Apathetic People allowed career politicians to hijack local powers to Washington D.C.? Isn’t it time We The Maids swept them back home?
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