Joshua Caplan – Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) on Thursday vetoed a bill which would have pledged the state’s six electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote for President of the United States.
Assembly Bill 186, which recently passed the Senate on a 12-8 vote, would have seen Nevada join with 14 other states in an agreement to vote for the winner of the popular vote. The Assembly had voted in favor of the measure 23-17. Continue reading
Steven Kessler – A common refrain concerning suicide is that it’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicide is a drastic and permanent solution to a situation that in all likelihood will pass.
Amid the fervor of anti-Trump hysteria, there are now 15 states that have either passed legislation or are attempting to pass legislation giving their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in the presidential election (1). These moves no doubt are aimed specifically at defeating President Trump in the upcoming contest.
The problem with these moves is that they are a permanent solution to the Left’s temporary Trump problem. While these legislative acts are understood in the present as an effort to beat Trump in the next election, the authors of these bills fail to understand that the move may have long-term consequences that could come back to hurt them. Continue reading
Charles Hugh Smith – A limited government is concerned with proscribing the exploitation of citizens by elites and criminals. A Totalitarian State seeks control of everything–including what goes on in the bedrooms, living rooms and minds of its citizens.
G.F.B.’s example of the state exerting control over its citizens’ private choices and behaviors in their own homes was the Prohibition of alcohol which was the federal law of the land in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933.A recent conversation with my longtime friend G.F.B. clarified a key distinction between the public and private spheres.
Though alcohol consumption in the home was not banned outright at the federal level, the net result of banning the manufacture and distribution of alcohol was the criminalization of everyday citizens’ attempts to purchase alcohol for their home consumption.
A limited government’s purview is actions taken in public that could harm other citizens. Drunken drivers, for example, end up killing innocent citizens. Limiting the “freedom” to drive drunk is a state action that is limited to the public sphere: if a citizen chooses to get drunk in the privacy of his own home, that’s different from driving on public streets while drunk.
In the good old days of the early Republic, the government was focused on matters of sovereignty and defense, not what citizens were doing in their own homes or communicating in private letters. Enforcement of federal laws was largely limited to collecting tariffs and other revenues and adjudicating property disputes. Continue reading
Stephen Lendman – Democracy in America isn’t “messy” the way some duopoly power insiders portray it. It’s nonexistent, policymakers ignoring the will of the people and their welfare entirely.
Events in Philadelphia alone expose how America is run, for its privileged class alone – flagrant electoral rigging anointing a party standard bearer belonging in prison, not high office.
Hillary is the most widely reviled Democrat in party history – beyond rehabilitation no matter how hard DNC handlers try reinventing her.
“I just don’t see how her numbers at this late date are going to improve on the likability issue or the trust factor,” University of Virginia’s Miller Center presidential studies director Barbara Perry explained.
Scandals since the 1990s made her damaged goods, most voters believing she’s a self-serving corporate shill, a law breaker not to be trusted – exposed electoral rigging the latest example.
She didn’t win her party’s nomination. It was handed to her, party bosses choosing her for standard bearer before campaigning began last year. Sanders never had a chance and he knew it.
Endorsements from party notables can’t erase her Lady McBeth image, her Machiavellian history, her high crimes too serious to paper over.
Charles Hugh Smith – In the original version of feudalism, peasants armed with pitchforks knew where to go for redress or regime change: the feudal lord’s castle on the hill. Though you won’t find this in conventional narratives of the Middle Ages, peasant revolts were a common occurrence; serfs weren’t always delighted to toil for their noble masters.
In the present era of corporate dominance, where can serfs go to demand redress and financial freedom from the neofeudal system? Nowhere.The global corporations that own the land and the productive assets have no castle that can be stormed; they exist in an abstract financial world of stock shares, buybacks, bonds, lobbyists and political influence.
When the agribusiness corporation fouls the local water supply with animal waste, where do the local peasantry go to demand restoration of their water quality? The corporation? What if the headquarters are thousands of miles away?
What impact will 100 serfs gathered outside the modern-day castle have on water quality in a distant land? Zero, because the corporation has rendered it illegal (via lobbying the local political flunkies desperate for “jobs” and campaign contributions) to even take photos of their vast animal-waste output or their inadequate disposal.
Where do oppressed serfs go to advocate for transparency in America’s private Gulag prison system? If you go to the prison to protest, you’ll be arrested and will soon be looking at the world from inside the privately operated gulag.
Once again–where is the castle on the hill? It’s not there. The corporate operators of the private Gulag are far away, and security will disperse any troublesome serfs who travel hundreds of miles to air grievances.
Continue reading