Month: January 2020

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

On January 12th, Deutsche Welle (Germany’s public broadcaster like BBC, PBS, NPR, and RT) headlined “Mayor’s resignation highlights threat to German leaders: Arnd Focke, the Social Democratic mayor of a town in Lower Saxony, was regularly threatened by nationalists. Now he has resigned. Regional officials have repeatedly faced threats across Germany.” He quit for his safety, because carrying out Germany’s compassionate policies toward the flood of mainly Middle-Eastern refugees has produced a backlash that is becoming increasingly organized and dangerous to Germany’s democracy.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s policies in support of overthrowing secular governments (such as in Libya and Syria) in the Middle East, and his attempts to install there new governments — which were planned to be allied with the fundamentalist-Sunni Saud family who own Saudi Arabia — caused the exodus, from those secularly-headed U.S.-attacked Middle-Eastern countries, of millions, some of whom live now in Germany and are not accepted there, for many of reasons, some valid and some invalid. The resulting influx of millions of culturally markedly different people has given rise to a rebirth of Germany’s Nazi movement.

Whereas Obama’s U.S., and especially now Trump’s U.S., has refused entry of refugees from these countries that America (by means of its tens of thousands of jihadist proxy-forces from around the world) invaded, Europe (and especially Germany) has been compassionate toward the refugees, and are now experiencing the political blowback, at home, from their admission of refugees from America’s foreign policy – a policy favoring dictatorial fundamentalist-Sunni Arab regimes, to overthrow secular governments in the Middle East.

How and why did this happen?

Muammar Gaddafi was a socialist who believed in spreading to the masses (instead of to foreign investors) the wealth from the nation’s oil and who consequently was rejected by the U.S.-and-allied aristocracies who control the private oil companies. Gaddafi was demonized by their governments and their media. After extensive planning by the CIA and associated coup-organizations, he was finally overthrown in an “Arab Spring” in 2011 and replaced by what they expected to be a re-privatization of Libya’s oil.

Hillary Clinton proudly proclaimed, “We came, we saw, he died! Ha, ha, hah!” Europe gets the refugees.

Bashar al-Assad was similar, in those basics. During 2012, Obama was well-warned by U.S. intelligence — and even by the anti-Assad ‘rebels’ themselves — that if he tried to overthrow Assad, then the U.S. would need to be using proxy-fighters to do it, jihadists, under the direction of Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch al-Nusra, and he chose that option and left to the Saud family to choose whom to rule Syria in the aftermath. Consequently, the Saud family selected the individuals who were to ‘represent the rebels’ at the UN-sponsored ’peace’-talks to end the Syrian ‘civil’ war. It was all a set-up deal, by Obama and his foreign allies. Even the pro-Obama New York Times reported on 27 April 2013 that “Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of.” But still Obama insisted that “Assad must go.” (Though that was a common headline on news-reports about Obama’s position, he was too slick ever to utter that phrase: in his rhetoric he was the exact opposite of his successor, who continued Obama’s Syria-policy.)

Conquering Syria for the Sauds to control was the aim. Europe has received the refugees from that U.S. decision, not only from the other ones, on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere.

By Europe’s siding with the United States, it has opted to side with the Sauds, and with jihadists, and, now, also with Nazis, and other racist-fascists.

Now that Trump has gone so far as to terminate Obama’s only good foreign-policy action, the JCPOA or Iran nuclear agreement, and to opt for war against Iran, the dangers to democracy in Europe could escalate even farther. But for some people, the rebirth of Nazism in Germany might be enough of a reason for Europe to reverse its foreign policies in fundamental ways.

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”

– John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

There can only be one winner emerging from this year’s Super Bowl LIV showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, but the biggest losers will be the hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—who will be bought and sold for sex during the course of the big game.

It’s common to refer to this evil practice, which has become the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns as child sex trafficking, but what we’re really talking about is rape.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.

According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

Child rape has become Big Business in America.

This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out, “The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.

It’s not.

It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice. Every transaction is rape.

In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.

Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out,

“Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.”

“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking.

“They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”

This is America’s dirty little secret.

But what or who is driving this evil appetite for young flesh? Who buys a child for sex?

Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life. “They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

Catholic and Protestant churches have been particularly singled out in recent years for harboring these sexual predators. Twenty years after the clergy sex abuse scandal rocked the Catholic Church, hundreds of sexual predators—priests, deacons, monks and lay people—continue to be given work assignments in proximity to children. In many cases, the abuse continues unabated.

Although much less publicized, the sex crimes within the Protestant Church have been no less egregious. For instance, a recent expose into the Southern Baptist Church leaders by the Houston Chronicle documents over 700 child sex victims “who were molested, sent explicit photos or texts, exposed to pornography, photographed nude, or repeatedly raped by youth pastors. Some victims as young as 3 were molested or raped inside pastors’ studies and Sunday school classrooms.”

And then you have national sporting events such as the Super Bowl, where sex traffickers have been caught selling minors, some as young as 9 years old. Yet even if the Super Bowl is not exactly a “windfall” for sex traffickers as some claim, it remains a lucrative source of income for the child sex trafficking industry and a draw for those who are willing to pay to rape young children.

According to criminal investigator Marc Chadderdon, these “buyers”—the so-called “ordinary” men who drive the demand for sex with children—represent a cross-section of American society: every age, every race, every socio-economic background, cops, teachers, corrections workers, pastors, etc.

And then there are the extra-ordinary men, such as Jeffrey Epstein, the hedge fund billionaire / convicted serial pedophile who was arrested on charges of molesting, raping and sex trafficking dozens of young girls, only to die under highly unusual circumstances.

It is believed that Epstein operated his own personal sex trafficking ring not only for his personal pleasure but also for the pleasure of his friends and business associates. According to The Washington Post, “several of the young women…say they were offered to the rich and famous as sex partners at Epstein’s parties.” At various times, Epstein ferried his friends about on his private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

Men like Epstein and his cronies, who belong to a powerful, wealthy, elite segment of society that operates according to their own rules, skate free of accountability by taking advantage of a criminal justice system that panders to the powerful, the wealthy and the elite.

Still, where did this appetite for young girls come from?

Look around you.

Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.

“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. 

“Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”

This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”

In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators.

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported, “Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on … social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.” Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky.

According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).

With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.

Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Trafficked children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

Unfortunately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking – much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime – has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to protect our children from sex predators.

In a significant development which could serve to soften soaring tensions between Washington and Tehran, as well as between the US administration and increasingly frustrated European allies, the US announced Thursday the opening of a new “humanitarian aid” banking channel with the cooperation of Swiss authorities through which the sanctioned country can find relief in terms of importing badly needed medicines and staples like food. 

Since pulling out the 2015 nuclear deal nearly two years ago, the Trump White House has faced stinging criticism from the EU over extensive and unprecedented sanctions preventing children, elderly and other common Iranians from treating curable diseases or obtaining basic life-saving drugs. The Europeans have since erected an alternative sanctions-busting payment vehicle called INSTEX, said to focus initially on humanitarian-related transactions, after the Iranians were booted from SWIFT.

In a Thursday statement the Treasury Department said “The successful completion of these transactions provides a model for facilitating further humanitarian exports to Iran,” but also noted transactions are “subject to strict due diligence measures to avoid misuse by the Iranian regime.” It further touted that “Cancer and organ transplant patients in Iran were the first to benefit from the new channel,” per the statement.

Switzerland is the key European country facilitating the program, which has been in the works since 2018. Reuters describes current participants as follows: 

Geneva-based bank BCP and drugmaker Novartis took part in the pilot deal, with the humanitarian channel expected to be fully operational within weeks, a spokeswoman for the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs said.

…Politically neutral Switzerland has been working with U.S. and Iranian authorities and selected Swiss banks and Swiss companies on the plan. The U.S. Treasury Department will provide banks involved with assurances that financial transactions can be processed without violating U.S. law.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin further said upon the program’s roll out that “humanitarian transactions are currently allowed under our sanctions programs, and we encourage companies to use this humanitarian mechanism” [hint: not INSTEX – Mnuchin appears to be saying].

However, this follows months and years of the administration demanding all international companies sever ties with Iran, which has sent the economy and currency into a tailspin, and has ravaged human well-being related industries like aviation, food, transport and medicine.

1. Should be noted that the Swiss “payment channel” for humanitarian trade with #Iran is totally different from EU’s #SPV effort. The Swiss gov has been negotiating with the US Treasury for greater clarity for banks with *active relationships* with Iran. https://t.co/Hgbq2rBZWU

— Esfandyar Batmanghelidj (@yarbatman) December 19, 2018

Critics say this new US-Swiss humanitarian channel is not only too-little-too-late, but still has overly difficult and cumbersome hurdles in place which could actually further disincentivize pharmaceutical companies from doing business with Tehran.

Bloomberg outlines some of these restrictions further: 

In a four-page document released in October, the Treasury Department laid out the expectations of any financial entity wanting to use the Swiss banking channel. The “enhanced” due diligence includes restrictions on dealing with the Iranian central bank, which holds the nation’s forex reserves but is sanctioned.

Requirements also include the identities of Iranian customers, balance sheets of any Iranian customers’ accounts at the bank and a list of business relationships of the Iranian entity receiving the humanitarian aid.

That will certainly prove overly invasive even for those parties willing to test the waters. 

And despite INSTEX still making slow progress – though beset by continued difficulties in implementation – many are already declaring the death of the Iran nuclear deal, especially following the near ‘state of war’ reality between the US and Iran after the killing of Qassem Soleimani. This also as Iran has said it’s blown past all uranium enrichment limits stipulated by the JCPOA.

It could further be argued that the new US ‘humanitarian channel’ is itself meant to reinforce the US position that the deal is already dead. It appears Washington’s ‘saving face’ attempt to shield itself from criticism in the future, given the sanctions regimen will likely only push the population of Iran to the brink of humanitarian disaster, while simultaneously only increasing the people’s dependency on the regime. 

Authored by David Goldman via AsiaTimes.com,

The Commerce Department has abandoned long-expected rules to tighten controls on US firms’ exports to Huawei, China’s national champion in broadband technology and the world leader in 5G Internet equipment. The Wall Street Journal this morning reported that the Defense Department blocked a long-signaled change in export rules that would forbid US companies from selling components to Huawei from foreign subsidiaries if 10% of the content is derived from US technology. The Treasury Department reportedly backed the Pentagon’s objections.

In related news, the United States has backed off from earlier threats to abandon a trade deal with Great Britain if Boris Johnson’s government allowed Huawei to build part of its 5G network, The Daily Telegraph reported on January 25. The United States has demanded that Britain exclude Huawei entirely in high-profile public statements. PM Johnson and President Donald Trump discussed the issue in a January 24 telephone call

In an apparent break from the previous US position, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told an audience at Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs on January 25 that the US might not oppose Huawei’s participation in some parts of Britain’s 5G network. Mnuchin said, “Which parts of the network it [Huawei 5G] goes into matters,” according to a tweet by the RIAA’s director Robin Niblett. “Is the Trump administration giving a sliver of manoeuvre to B Johnson?,” Niblett added.

Mnuchin’s declaration appears to echo the Johnson government’s position that the UK can manage any prospective security threat from Huawei as long as it is restricted to “non-core” parts of the 5G network. Last year, a study by British signals intelligence concluded that any prospective security problem with Huawei was manageable. A senior Huawei official told me,

“The Security Evaluation Centre Oversight Board looked at our source code exhaustively, and pointed out some ways we could improve. In fact, they did us an enormous favor by calling attention to less than perfect architecture. We made an enormous investment in improving the software and are confident that we will satisfy UK security concerns.”

US technology companies, especially chip designers, sell the great majority of their products in Asia. China’s chip design and manufacturing capacity is expanding rapidly with a blank check from Beijing, and US companies fear that Huawei and other Chinese companies will retaliate against US export controls with a price war for the high-end chips that power smartphones and servers. The Pentagon and Treasury objections to the proposed export controls indicate that the balance of power in the global chip industry has shifted towards China.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Commerce officials have withdrawn proposed regulations making it harder for US companies to sell to Huawei from their overseas facilities following objections from the Defense Department as well as the Treasury Department, people familiar with the matter said. The Pentagon is concerned that if US companies can’t continue to ship to Huawei, they will lose a key source of revenue – depriving them of money for research and development needed to maintain a technological edge, the people said.”

This appears to be an admission of defeat in the US-Chinese tech war, which in the long term is far more important than the trade war. China seeks to dominate what it calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution centered on 5G and artificial intelligence. China is investing massively in its “Made in China 2025” plan to leapfrog the West in high technology, while US support for basic R&D is barely half of its Reagan-era level in proportion to GDP.

In April 2018 the US banned chip exports to the Chinese handset manufacturer ZTE in retaliation for violation of Iran sanctions, shutting ZTE down until President Trump negotiated a massive fine in return for resumption of deliveries. Only four months later, in August 2018, Huawei announced its Kirin chipset for smartphones, claiming better performance than Qualcomm’s market-leading product. In December 2019 Huawei began shipping smartphones with no US components. It already had shipped 5G base stations in September 2019 with zero US components. 

In May 2019, the Commerce Department placed Huawei on the “entity list,” requiring special licenses for US sales. As the Nikkei Asian Review reported in a December 2019 cover story, Huawei began “mobilizing Asian suppliers for a production surge,” leading “a split from US technology.” Taiwanese companies who for years had begged for Huawei’s business are now flooded with orders. Taiwan has the world’s best chip foundries, and Huawei depends heavily on Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing – for the moment. Meanwhile China has hired 3,000 Taiwanese chip engineers at double pay, to build chip foundries in the mainland. 

Other US attempts to choke off Huawei’s access to chip technology have failed. The Chinese company uses chip design technology from Britain’s ARM, owned by Japan’s Softbank. In October, ARM announced that its exports to Huawei do not violate US content rules. 

Despite the May 2019 export restrictions and Washington’s campaign to discourage Western countries from buying Huawei’s 5G technology, the Chinese giant boosted sales by 20% during 2019. In response to the failure of earlier efforts, the Commerce Department proposed to set the threshold for US content in offshore sales to Huawei at 10%, down from the present 25%. 

A senior Huawei official told me that although the US restrictions are making life difficult for the company, China was moving rapidly towards self-sufficiency in the most advanced computer chips. That would do more than cut off US sales to China: It would enable China to undercut American companies in the global ship market. US chipmakers depend overwhelmingly on Asian sales.

On Thursday the Democratic-led House passed legislation to stop funding for military action in Iran and to repeal the 2002 war authorization for Iraq — which multiple administrations have based unilateral military actions on without the approval of Congress. 

Predictably, Trump has threatened to veto both bills amid an ongoing struggle in which doves in Congress are attempting to reign in presumed executive war powers. The first bill blocks President Trump from accessing federal funds for “unauthorized military force against Iran” in a vote of 228-175, which largely came down along party lines.

The 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) came up for debate immediately on the heels of the passed Iran vote. A number of Republicans have invoked the AUMF to defend the Jan.3 assassination by drone of IRGC Quds force chief Qassem Soleimani.

“The last thing we can do is give the Pentagon another blank check,” bill sponsor Rep. Ro Khanna of California Khanna (D) told reporters Wednesday. “The only time the Pentagon listens is where we exercise our power of the purse.”

Ahead of the vote, Trump tweeted Wednesday:

“Nancy Pelosi wants Congress to take away authority Presidents use to stand up to other countries and defend AMERICANS. Stand with your Commander in Chiefs!”

Both bills are expected meet their end in the Republican-held Senate, but even if not they would be vetoed by Trump.

Nancy Pelosi wants Congress to take away authority Presidents use to stand up to other countries and defend AMERICANS. Stand with your Commander in Chiefs!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2020

Ironically, the White House has argued that the bills actually make war with Iran “more likely” because they make it harder for Trump to take action to prevent broader conflict before it starts (i.e.- in the form of assassinating Iranian military leaders to send a strong punitive message, apparently).

Also ironic is that Trump previously criticized former President Obama as well as his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for themselves waging non-Congressionally approved “regime change wars” in places like Libya and Syria, especially on the 2016 campaign trail.

Authored by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Disclaimer: I don’t have answers to everything. In fact, I probably don’t have answers to anything at all, just some thoughts on what’s wrong with the structure of governance around the world (it’s too centralized and authoritarian) and some general ideas about what direction we should head in.

Given the increased likelihood that all sorts of things about the current paradigm will begin to fail in a more acute and undeniable manner in the years ahead, well intentioned people capable of critical thought should begin contemplating how things could be as opposed to how they are. Ideally, this will lead to increased action and experimentation, particularly at a local level. Never forget, if we don’t come up with our own ideas and perspectives for how things should be, others will be more than happy to decide for us.

More than anything else this piece should be seen as a thought exercise of how I would try to structure things if presented with a blank slate opportunity. 

In Part 3 of this series, I outlined a framework of sovereignty beginning with the individual, progressing to family, municipality/county, state and finally country. Though the broadest scope of decision making should always reside with the individual, the reality of social relations means some individual autonomy is relinquished as sovereign units grow to include more and more people. It’s part of human nature to expand beyond ourselves and our families into larger and more complex social relationships, but far more thought should be directed at the dangers and uncertainties that arise as these units start to include increased degrees of geography and population.

As you move along the units of sovereignty scale you always add complexity and individuals, but at certain levels you start piling on additional meaningful variables, such as geography (coastal, mountain, plains, etc) and various population densities (urban, suburban, rural, etc). Both these distinctions lead to meaningful differences in the needs and desires of given populations, and must be considered carefully rather than flippantly waved away in the pursuit of larger political unity. This is one reason I’ve come to conclude political life should be centered at the municipal/county level as opposed to larger units such as the state or country. It’s at this smaller unit that actual self-government is possible. Once you start adding geography and disparate masses of people you can’t properly and practically address local concerns (for more see my post: The Next Revolution by Murray Bookchin).

While it’d be nice to stop there and proclaim we’ve solved politics by deciding local’s the way to go, it’ll never be that easy. Issues will arise and conflicts will emerge that result in larger political structures being formed. The key aspect to discuss and ponder is how should these structures look once they grow beyond the city or county level? In the modern world, many people seem to think it intuitive and appropriate that larger political units exercise greater power and authority than the smaller bodies that comprise the whole. I believe this is fundamentally wrong and must be addressed and corrected in future models of governance.

I think we should stop viewing political constructs beyond the local level as sovereign. The individual, the family and the municipality/county can be seen as sovereign units for a few reasons. First, they check several important boxes that should be required in order to exercise ethical governance. For one, they’re generally voluntary since they offer well-defined escape routes (divorce, move to a new city). Second, there’s usually a shared geography that’s limited in scope, whether we’re talking about a concentrated metropolis or the boundaries of the more than three thousand counties that comprise the U.S. These attributes start to disappear once you leave the local level.

Although moving from one state to another is fairly easy in the U.S. (it checks the voluntary box), it doesn’t check the other boxes. Virtually all 50 states have some mix of rural and urban; liberal and conservative; mountainous, plains, or coastal; and many states have populations that exceed certain countries. As such, we should ask whether it makes sense to place so much power in the hands of the 50 state governments, as opposed to the people at the municipal or county level. If you ask me, it makes no sense at all. Moreover, if we’re going to concentrate a great deal of power in the states, why is 50 the right number? It seems low.

Beyond the states, putting power into a national government is far more concerning and problematic since the voluntary aspect of the union pretty much disappears. The vast majority of people on this earth are born to a certain piece of land with a particular national government, and they will live under it their entire lives. In most cases, leaving to go to one’s desired external country simply isn’t feasible or desirable for a variety of reasons. As such, at the national level you not only add the complexity of large numbers of people, diverse geography, but also a lack of exits. For all practical purposes, it is no longer a voluntary relationship at this stage. So what should we do about it?

We can’t just pretend political unions won’t expand beyond the city or county level, in fact, I’m convinced this will always occur to some degree. As such, the real question becomes how best to structure such bonds, and the first thing to do is establish some ground rules. I’d start with the view that any issue (beyond core civil liberties) which does not require larger scale cooperation, be decided at the municipal/county level.

For the relatively small number of issues that must be kicked up to the state or national level, the sovereign units that make up the larger body must be consulted. Directly. Via referendum. No more of this “elected representatives” deciding things for the people. They do not know best and they tend to be corrupt, unscrupulous types. We may still want to elect representatives to larger political unions for administrative tasks and crafting legislation, but the final vote on any such agreements should always be finalized and approved directly by the public.

This is a start, but it skirts an even larger issue that must be addressed. How do we ensure larger political bonds are more voluntary and fluid? The issue of secession is a challenging one to discuss in the U.S. due to its historical association with the civil war and slavery, but it’s something that must be addressed more thoroughly. I’ve personally come to believe questions of secession should be seen as a regular and normal part of human political life. Our larger political associations, particularly at the national level, are far too rigid. While stability is important, so is flexibility.

This really hit home for me during the Catalonia revolt of 2017. In the post, It’s Time to Question the Modern Nation-State Model of Governance, I noted:

As things stand today, humans essentially have two choices when it comes to political life. We either accept the nation-state we’re born into and play the game to the best of our advantage, or we try to become citizens of another country with values that more align with our own. The only way to really shatter existing political power structures and form new ones is through violent revolution or war, which is an insane way of reorganizing matters of human governance. One of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s key arguments in casting the Catalan referendum as illegal is that Spain is an indivisible nation under the 1978 constitution. Let’s think about what this means in practice.

Anyone who’s spent any time in Spain understands how culturally and linguistically distinct many of the regions are when compared to Madrid. These are differences that go back centuries and can’t be brushed off by a constitution created a few decades ago. The idea that these various regions must be part of a centralized Spain even if the people within the regions want political autonomy is ethically preposterous, as well as authoritarian and evil in every sense of the word. If done properly, human governance should always be a voluntary arrangement. If an overwhelming majority of culturally distinct people within any nation-state decide the super state is no longer working for them, they should have every right to leave. Anything else is bondage.

If the smaller units that make up a nation decide they’ve had enough, they have no real options in the modern world. The presumption that the nation-state is eternal and unchanging is as unrealistic as it is authoritarian. As such, it’s my belief that any political union that reaches beyond the local (city or county) level be subject to regularly scheduled referendums on the union. The cities and counties that make up a state should periodically vote on whether or not they wish to continue in that relationship, and the states should do the same with regard to the federal government. It shouldn’t be some extraordinary act, but a regular affirmation or rejection of the larger union.

When entering into a larger political union, all parties should start with the assumption nothing in this world’s permanent and this new bond will last only so long as it’s working for the smaller units involved. Any initial agreement should include an explicit understanding that regular referendums on the bond will be held in order to ensure the union remains voluntary. The length of time between referendums should be long enough to provide for a period of stability, yet short enough to allow a person who lives a full life to vote on the union several times. I think a 20 or 25 year period between such votes might make sense.

The goal here isn’t to have nations constantly breaking apart, but rather a system that more properly distributes power and final say to the smaller units that comprise the whole. If such a system existed in these United States I doubt Washington D.C. would be as big, bloated and powerful as it is today. The simple understanding that states could easily leave in a few years if the feds pushed too hard could provide a meaningful deterrent to massive expansions of centralized control in the first place.

The key thing is we need to shift our entire perspective. We need to view the local units as sovereign, and emphasize that the larger unions exist only at the pleasure of the smaller bodies. Secession, as well as reconstitution into new more favorable/appropriate bonds, should not be seen as unthinkable and extreme, but rather as completely normal. This shouldn’t just apply at the national level, but every step of the way. Municipalities and counties should hold regularly scheduled votes on whether to remain in their current state, join another state, or perhaps even band together to form an entirely new state. Larger political bonds should be structured in a far more fluid and voluntary manner in order for them to serve their real purpose, which is the sovereign interests of the smaller units.

As I noted in the beginning, I don’t want anyone to think I’m presenting these thoughts as a silver bullet. Even if we implemented everything I outlined above from scratch, if humanity fails to become more conscious and ethical, it probably won’t make much of a difference.

I also understand it’s unlikely we move to such a governance model anytime soon — or even within my lifetime — but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be discussing these things. I think it’s helpful to highlight where sovereignty should reside (locally) and how larger political bonds should be structured in a more voluntary and fluid manner. This isn’t supposed to be the final word on anything, but a thought experiment in political philosophy. I hope it sparks inspiration in the minds of those who read it, so we can carry this important conversation forward.

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