Why the Electoral College Exists

There are a lot of different claims about why the Electoral College exists here in the United States. The arguments from Wikipedia from supporters states:

Supporters argue that it is a fundamental component of American federalism. They maintain the system elected the winner of the nationwide popular vote in over 90% of presidential elections; promotes political stability; preserves the Constitutional role of the states in presidential elections; and fosters a broad-based, enduring, and generally moderate political party system.

I’m going to go down these arguments one by one.

Over 90% accuracy

This is true, it rarely skews from the winner of the popular vote.

Promotes Political Stability

That must be why we had massive political protests after the 2016 election and why after losing the popular vote President Bush signed into law the PATRIOT ACT, effectively suspending parts of the Constitution through a vague unachievable goal in a war we will never win. Stability doesn’t mean good. It also doesn’t promote more stability compared to other democracies.

Constitutional role of the states in presidential elections

This is a deontological argument. There has been a long standing thread in American politics which argues that states needs rights. Who controls the states? Historically the rich and powerful who are more likely to be involved in state level politics, while most people ignore them.

Also, the Senate used to be elected by state legislatures, so the Constitutional role of states has fundamentally changed since our founding.

Fosters a broad-based, enduring and generally moderate political party system

There is nothing moderate about the PATRIOT ACT, which wouldn’t exist if we did not have the electoral college.

Forces candidates to look at less populated states

This is simply not the case if you look at where the money goes. Money and campaign visits get concentrated in the handful of states which are most likely going to tip. States like California, New York, Wyoming, and North Dakota are always ignored. Even Maine and New Hampshire despite being swing states barely get any campaign visits.

If Joe Biden wins both North Carolina and Florida on Tuesday, he could win without winning a single state which has fewer than 10 electoral college votes.


Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

The Electoral College makes small states irrelevant for the Presidency.

The Horrible Truth

So, if those arguments are not the reason for the electoral college, we have to start by outlining why we have the system we do today and understand the two basic ways heads of government are generally selected.

Democracies generally fit into one of two camps when it comes to the selection of their head of government. You are generally either a Presidential democracy where the head of government is elected by the people, or you are a Parliamentary or Semi-Presidential democracy where the head of government is selected by the parliament. Presidential democracies dominate in the Americas, Parliamentary and Semi-Presidential systems dominate in Europe.

America is a unique Presidential democracy in how we have the electoral college between the people and the President.

When our country was founded, 17.8% of the population was enslaved (according to the 1790 census). These slaves were concentrated in the south of course, with as many as 43% of South Carolina’s population being enslaved and 292,627 slaves in Virginia. The Founding Fathers needed to find a way to elect a head of government in a way which preserved slave power, and the Great Compromise.

Parliamentary democracies usually elect their head of government by a simple majority of one house of their parliament. This person is generally called a Prime Minister. Pretty simple.

But the United States is more complicated and relatively unusual because we have two coequal branches of our legislative body.  If only one branch of Congress elected the president, the coequality would be immediately thrown out of whack.

This led to several options. Having eligible voters do a direct vote could not work and still preserve slave power because it would undo the 3/5 compromise which entrenched slave power at the time. This preservation of slave power is why we do not elect our President directly

So, in order to preserve the delicate balance needed to prevent fracturing the country and having coequal branches the Electoral College was designed. Each state has a number of votes equal to its representation of congress which dilutes the power of cities and increases the power of slave owners, and those members vote for the President. A simple majority is required to elect a president and if no majority is achieved then the Senate selects the President and the House selects the Vice President (this system has been modified since our country was founded).

The main takeaway is that the Electoral College exists to protect slavery.

But notice that note… The electoral college has already been changed in how it works. Every state votes for the President now and the electors vote like the citizens of the state by custom. That by itself is not how the Electoral College worked in the beginning when State Legislatures decided how their electors would be determined.

We changed the Electoral College.

It was designed to preserve an institution which is now extinct.

We can abolish the Electoral College as soon as we recognize as a nation the evil reason why it existed in the first place.

Slavery will never be truly extinct as long as the Electoral College survives.

2020 Elections to watch

Here are the races I am watching this year:

  1. Federal

1.1. Executive

  • The Presidential election, because duh.
    • If Biden wins Arizona and Florida tonight, he is all but guaranteed to win the presidency.

1.2. Senate

  • Alabama, likely Republican pickup
  • Arizona
  • Colorado
  • Georgia
  • Iowa
  • Maine
  • North Carolina

1.3 House

2. State

2.1. Governors

  • Montana, Mike Cooney
    • Extremely tight race which could go either way

2.2. State Legislatures

  • Arizona House, 31-29 Republican
  • Arizona Senate,  17-13 Republican
  • Minnesota Senate, 35-32 Republican

 

The United States Constitution

If you go look at history in other countries, you find that in Parliamentary democracies they have failed whenever a far right government came into power.

Germany in 1933 is the most famous example, but similar systems in Spain led to Franco, and the United Kingdom’s election led to Brexit, which is threatening the country’s existence if Scottish Independence happens.

Parliamentary democracies and Presidential alike have a habit of becoming better over time. This is very clear on every freedom index in the world.But if you look at history, no Presidential democracy which has stood for 20 years has ever failed.

The Trump Presidency was the biggest threat to America’s democracy we have ever faced. The Republican Party gerrymandered, cheated, and rigged their way into power, but today on the day before the most important election of our country’s history, a Federal Court blocked a Republican attempt to prevent hundreds of thousands of Americans from having their vote count.

America might not be perfect, and there are many issues facing our country today. But EVERY Parliamentary Democracy in the world which has seen someone half as bad as Trump has fallen quickly without exception.

The United States combination of limited Federalism, Constitutionalism, and Courts has prevented us from falling to fascism like my family saw 87 years ago. Our system of government has proven time and time again to be possible to improve for the long term and damn near impossible to make worse except for small blips in history.

Even with a trifecta, the only thing Donald Trump was able to pass in law was tax reform.

Everything else he has done can be reversed in just 79 days.

I am a strong supporter of Constitutionalism, limited Federalism, and separation of powers. I believe strongly in Public Juries. The Bill of Rights of the United States is the greatest human rights document in the history of the world, and we are about to enter a great era of American History.

If we play our cards right we can make a lot of good this decade.

We are going to get a trifecta and we are going  to see major health care reform which is going to reduce the cost of drugs and end the number of Americans who are uninsured.

We are going to get a national carbon tax.

We are going to strike down every illegal voter discrimination law in the country before the next Presidential election.

We are going to end police brutality and proclaim that Black Lives Matter.

We are going to decriminalize drug use.

AMTRAK will be refurbished.

We will break up monopolies and nationalize natural monopolies.

We will defend the Bill of Rights and end unwarranted surveillance of Americans.

We will enact the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact before 5 November 2024.

We will make this country better.

We will proclaim that the United States is a nation not of rule of man, but the rule of law, and Donald Trump is going to be tried for his gross crimes and misdemeanors.

Tomorrow is the day where we reclaim our country and enter a great era of prosperity and greater equality than our country has ever known.

America is going to reclaim our natural place as the leader of the free world tomorrow.

The rest of the world awaits our election results.

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/02/930365888/federal-judge-dismisses-effort-to-throw-out-drive-through-votes-in-houston

The Future of Social Security

If you don’t know how OASI works, please read my first article in this series, How Social Security Works.

It should be common knowledge by now that Social Security has a massive surplus. This money is borrowed by the government as one of the largest parts of our government debt, accounting for over $2 trillion and is paid an interest rate which is about the same as inflation.

This happens because the Federal Government has received more money than it has paid out to retirees over the last 40 years due to the technology revolution we are in.

This is not going to last. Social Security will soon get as much from tax revenue as it pays out to retirees due to being an aging country, and it will never run a surplus again. The surplus in 2020 was only $2 billion, or $6 per person.

The Social Security Trust Fund is going to be fully depleted by 2037 unless we make some really drastic changes.

I don’t plan on retiring (unless if I get very lucky) until 2057.

As you see, this is a problem.

There are realistically 7 ways we can solve this problem, and I am going to go through the pros and cons of each.

Raise taxes

The easiest way to solve this problem without changing the way Social Security works is to raise taxes.

We can remove the cap on Social Security Wages, but this will be impossible to do politically because only 15% of the taxes you pay on income above $75,000 annual income counts for benefits. It also won’t solve the problem. Have fun.

We can increase taxes on the middle class. The problem is that someone who makes $50,000 per year is already paying an effective tax rate of 12.8% for retirement benefits which only add up to 25% of their salary, which is not enough to live on.  Increasing taxes on the median household, without increasing their benefits, for a program which already doesn’t pay enough for them to survive in retirement to a level which will save our current system is political Kryptonite.

Have fun.

Adjust spending

We can move Federal Spending from other places!

You can try to convince Republicans to switch money from the Department of Defense to pay for OASI. Have fun.

Or we can move money from Medicare/Medicaid and education assistance to pay for a program which only pays for 1/4 of people’s pre-retirement income.

Have fun with that.

Issue more bonds

Since the United States has its own currency we can just issue more Federal Debt to cover the Social Security system. This could have major impacts on the value of the United States Dollar given the scope of the problem. It’s not a wise solution.

The other option would mean higher taxes for Millennials when we are older, defeating the purpose. Paying higher taxes in the future to cover a program which is designed for our retirement but doesn’t pay enough to cover basic living expenses.

Have fun with that.

Reduce benefits

We can gradually reduce benefits on retirees until benefits are almost nothing. This will be the biggest fuck you to Millennials imaginable. Any politician who makes a real attempt to do this to a point where it will actually help will be voted out by my generation for ruining our future.

This is not possible to do.

Superannuation

We can allow people to get out of the system and give people the option to do a system like Australia or Singapore. Australians are the richest people in the world with their current system. This will mean that Millennials will get something for retirement, and not have to pay tax rates of 15% or 20% of our income (which will cut into our ability to save for retirement) to only get a retirement income which will be barely enough to pay our property tax or rent without covering our food. It will also mean fewer of us will need forms of welfare in retirement, saving a significant amount of money for state governments.

This could actually work.

Republicans sometimes talk about this solution, and have done it for decades. But even though they had opportunities to do this from 2003-2007 and from 2017-2019 they have never proposed a serious solution to it, instead giving massive tax breaks to millionaires as a precursor to defund investments in the United States. They have never been serious about this solution.

Foreign Workers

Have fun convincing Republicans to have hordes of foreign workers coming into the United States to save welfare.

As soon as Republicans get power again, this program will end, meaning it won’t save the current system.

Invest the Social Security Trust Fund

We can invest the Social Security Trust Fund into municipal bonds and the stock market so it can grow. This will at least postpone the point where we have to make more decisions in order to allow millennials to retire comfortably.

If we did this 30 years ago, this post would never have been written, and we could cancel the payroll tax today and pay out the beneficiaries for today’s seniors without ever touching the general fund.

Unfortunately neither party is serious about actually protecting the retirement of Americans given their actions. If your employer doesn’t offer a 401k you are more or less on your own. You can choose to do a tax deferred IRA, which is a lot better than nothing, but will force you to work until you are 65 unless you make enough money to have another fund on top of that to save for early retirement or work in one of a few professions like fire fighters who can retire at 55.

It still doesn’t address the issue of how OASI only pays for 25% of pre-retirement income however, and just maintains the current system where many Social Security retirees need  welfare in order to survive.

 

Millennials like myself need to know that when we turn 65 we will be able to retire comfortably.

The longer we wait to solve this problem, the more expensive it will be.

We need a solution.

We need it soon.

Vote for Joe

I cast my primary vote for Elizabeth Warren because I believe she had the best combination of strategy and progressive ideals, significantly more than any other candidate in the race. I voted for her despite her not really having a chance of winning because I wanted her to have as much influence at forming the platform as possible.

Because I believe in progressive ideals I am going to vote for Joe Biden. He probably would have been the  third or fourth candidate if I had been able to rank the primary, but we are looking at a situation where over 200,000 Americans have died from an epidemic we could have prevented, Trump coddles dictators, insults liberal leaders around the world, empowers domestic terrorists who threaten our civil servants, and he almost took healthcare away from millions of Americans. He has quite literally been endorsed by the Taliban.

I am going to vote for as many progressives on the ballot as I can, and I am going to vote for the man who is endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Julia Gillard, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and practically every non-fascist organization and public figure in the United States and the world.

I am going to vote for the man who has fought for mass transit for half a century, authored the Violence Against Women’s Act, and against all odds as Vice President passed the largest health care reform in the history of the United States.

I am going to vote for Joe Biden, and I hope you will as well.

Rule of Man

This is a short post because this is an extremely simply issue.

We have finally received extremely rudimentary details on Trump’s taxes from a leak given to the New York Times. They have not released or leaked the full tax returns yet.

The tax returns claim that Trump gave his daughter Ivanka over $700,000 in consulting “fees”. These fees should have been taxed as income when she received them if she received them as a sole proprietor, or they should have been taxed under Federal Corporation Tax if she received them under a corporation of any type.

A former Federal Prosecutor has claimed that this leak has enough details to give probable cause of a gross crime being committed, and if Trump has indeed committed a gross crime, that is an impeachable offense under the Constitution of the United States.

Senators Murray and Cantwell, Representative Denny Heck, Speaker Pelosi, you are my representatives in the United States Congress and the third person in to the Presidency. It is your constitutional duty to create a Congressional tribunal to get Trump’s taxes since he probably committed a gross crime, and if he has indeed committed a gross crime, it is your Constitutional duty to start a Congressional hearing into the taxes of Donald J. Trump and if he has indeed broken United States law, you have no choice but to impeach him.

If you do not, than we no longer have rule of law.

It’s just that simple.

May Justice Live Forever

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg yesterday is an event which will significantly impact the future of American politics for the rest of our history.  The Roberts Court has seen multiple 5-4 decisions which have been extremely decisive for the future of our country. The timing of this vacancy just before an election which will certainly be historic as well as extremely significant, and there is precedence of courts interfering with elections with Bush v. Gore and numerous cases about voter discrimination over the last 10 years such as Shelby County v. Holder which required the revision of states which required preclearance under the Voting Rights Act.

Composition of the Supreme Court

There are currently 3 remaining liberal justices and 5 conservative justices on the Supreme Court. John Roberts has become the decisive swing vote after Anthony Kennedy’s resignation two years ago, and Kavanaugh and Gorsuch have been more moderate than I expected, but they are definitely on the conservative side of the court. Fivethirtyeight has good research on this issue.

A majority of justices on the Supreme Court have been appointed by Republicans since 1969 when Richard Nixon appointed Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun. This chart makes it very clear why we have so many 5-4 decisions right now in the Supreme Court, and how close we came to having a majority of Supreme Court justices being appointed by Democrats in 2016, the first time that could have happened without expanding the court since 1968.

Issues I anticipate will get attention

The Supreme Court will have cases on a very wide variety of issues over the next decade, just like every other decade in American history. Particularly I am concerned about their current desire to stop abortion, the possibility they will bring gay marriage back up, and the absolute guarantee that they will rule that the Affordable Care Act does not follow the commerce clause and is unconstitutional. They will invalidate voting rights laws, and defend gerrymandering. This will solidify Republican power and they will defend it.

This is a guarantee given the results of Rucho v. Common Cause.

They are not going to be moderate, and they are not going to play nice like Nancy Pelosi.

The 2 Rules of Republican Party Politics

The Republicans are not being contradictory in appointing another Supreme Court justice, but if you think it is contradictory that is because you are looking at it from a justice lens, as most Democrats have a destructive habit of doing. We expect everybody looks through the world with our own philosophy, which is damaging to society. The Republicans did not appoint Merrick Garland because it would have set them back decades in their crusade against voting rights, women’s rights, and concentrating power further in the hands of the (on average) old white men who bankroll their party. We see this with decisions to limit access to voting, but only in majority minority precincts, their crusade against birth control which is part of their very obvious quest to turn America into a plutocratic theocracy, and their adherence to Objectivism as proposed by Ayn Rand. The Republican mindset follows two rules:

  1. Might makes right.
  2. If people are not doing well, than that is a moral failure and it is their own fault.

That’s really all there is to it. You can fit every Republican policy into one of these two axioms.

The Republicans have complete power today. They control the Senate and the Presidency. They have the power to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, and because they believe might makes right, they are going to use it and we will have 6 Republican appointed justices on the Supreme Court.

Options going forward

I am expecting that we will live in a Republican dominated Supreme Court for a while. I highly doubt the Democrats are actually going to pack the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has been stable at 9 justices since 1940, and even though the stakes of the Court were particularly high in 2010 following Citizens United v. FEC Democratic Party leadership under President Obama, Chairman Kaine, and Speaker Pelosi was absolutely unwilling to modify the filibuster to pass the public option.

The Democrats have sat by and watched as States have passed many illegal voter discrimination laws, choosing not to bring them to court when there was a chance that they could have been overturned by the Supreme Court. This cost them the 2016 election. Since RBG died yesterday, it has also cost them the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.

This is the party which stood by as a majority of state legislatures were gerrymandered, as a majority of states passed restrictive illegal voting laws, as they gave employers the ability to enforce their own religious beliefs on their employee’s health options, and now are committing crimes against humanity in our immigration prisons as a gift from mainstream respectable “play nice” Democrats.

A LOT of people are now saying that the Democrats are going to do an about face and increase the Supreme Court to 10 or 11 seats when Joe Biden becomes President and get the first liberal majority in 52 years.

It is not impossible, but given the level of voter disenfranchisement in our country today, I think it is extremely unlikely that the Democrats will change their losing strategy of the last 50 years.

There are now two probable options for the election this November:

  1. Donald Trump wins the Electoral College like he did in 2016.
  2. There is a long drawn out series of court battles if Joe Biden wins.

Those are our options.

This is why I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary. I believe her pragmatic progressivism would have brought states to court for violating Federal law, and led us towards an America where we could see real progress.

Instead we will have Joe Biden who was Vice President during the 6 years where Democrats controlled the Department of Justice and chose not to bring states to court as they violated Federal law in passing voter discrimination laws.

I am still voting for Joe Biden, and you should too. I would rather have a strategy free spineless wimp who wants everyone to play nice than someone who aspires to be a dictator. I highly HIGHLY doubt that he is going to do his Constitutional duty and uphold the Constitution of the United States by bringing states to court under the precedence of McCulloch v. Maryland, because that is what he did as Vice President.

Our only realistic option is to keep the Presidency for the next twenty years until both Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have passed away, and then we can have a 5-4 court.

I want to be wrong.

But I wasn’t wrong about global warming.

I wasn’t wrong about carbon taxes.

I wasn’t wrong that the probability of one liberal justice would die before 2021.

I wasn’t wrong that Trump would play dirty.

I was not wrong that #jillnothill gave the Republicans 6 seats on the Supreme Court.

I want to be wrong.

Joe Biden, please break your precedent and prove me wrong.

Democratic vs Republican Trifectas

Does your vote matter? Aren’t the parties the same? Does Democracy work?

Let’s investigate this.

I’m going to start the clock in 1933. There are a few reasons for this. The biggest reason is that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt pushed the Democratic Party towards its modern platform significantly. It would take another 62 years for the party factions to really be finalized for reasons we will get to.

First Democratic Trifecta under Roosevelt, 1933-1947 (1-14)

  • New Deal
  • Social Security
  • Justices who would decide Brown v. Board of Education were nominated in this time period.

Second Democratic Trifecta under Truman, 1949-1953 (15-18)

  • Marshall Plan
  • Korean War
  • Racial integration of military and federal agencies
  • 2 Justices who would late decide Brown v. Board

First Republican Trifecta under Eisenhower, 1953-1955 (1-2)

  • Nuclear proliferation
  • Interstate Highways
  • McCarthyism
  • Earl Warren who presided over Brown v. Board of Education

Third Democratic Trifecta under Kennedy and Johnson, 1961-1969 (19-26)

  • Civil Rights Act of 1964
  • Voting Rights Act
  • Civil Rights Act of 1968

Fourth Democratic Trifecta under Carter, 1977-1981 (27-31)

  • Camp David Accords
  • Panama Canal Treaties
  • Continued Stagflation

Fifth Democratic Trifecta under Clinton, 1993-1995 (32-33)

  • Motor Voter
  • Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (improvement over what came before)
  • Brady Handgun Violence
  • NAFTA
  • Violence Against Women Act
  • Federal Assault Weapons Ban

Second Republican Trifecta under Bush, 2003-2007 (3-6)

  • Iraq War
  • Partial birth abortion ban
  • Laci and Conner’s Law
  • Central American Free Trade Agreement
  • PATRIOT ACT Improvement and Reauthorization Act
  • Tax cuts

Sixth Democratic Trifecta under Obama, 2009-2011 (34-35)

  • Affordable Care Act
  • Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
  • Dodd-Frank
  • Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal
  • Increase Pell Grant
  • Students borrow directly from the government
  • Easier access to student loans

Third Republican Trifecta, 2017-2019 (7-8)

  • Tax reform

When we look at the history of the 9 trifectas we can see that when Democrats tend to pass laws which target access to health care, reducing inequality, and fighting racism when they have trifectas. Republicans have only had a couple, where they tend to increase militarization, start wars, and cut taxes for the wealthy.

I believe these are all major issues.

History teaches us there is a very big difference between the parties.

Remember to vote in November.

The Mercantilist Consensus

I watched Joe Biden’s speech to his nomination to be the Democratic Candidate when it was done, and the first thing I thought was how similar he was to Trump and Sanders in one aspect, which is his views on foreign trade. He made a brief comment on how he would work to save American jobs by hiring American companies only.

This is a sign of a policy which has almost uniquely dominated American international foreign relations since independence, which is that of Mercantilism.

Mercantilism is a theory of economic thought which rests on a few major assumptions:

  • The world economy is a zero sum game.
  • In order to grow our economy we need to aim to increase exports and reduce imports.
  • Maintaining a positive trade balance is important.
  • Imports of goods is a threat to national security.

There are many, many problems with these 4 main assumptions of Mercantilism, and they do not hold up under strict scrutiny when studied by economists. There is almost near unanimous agreement among economists after centuries of research that tariffs are not worth it, and the benefits of trade far exceed the costs. There is near universal understanding of this among people who study economists as show in this Forbes article.

A few things to understand… every country has tariffs. The question here becomes the level of  tariffs each country has in reality. The World Trade Organization

The second important thing to understand with tariffs is how they impact economic growth and inequality. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tariffs in the 2018 tax bill Trump signed reduced American GDP in 2020 by 0.3 percent. This of course is significantly increased by coronavirus, but the impact of tariffs on economic growth is very real.

This is significant in particular when compared with changes in income taxes, particularly for high income earners, which have small or negative impacts, in other words, insignificant overall.

Also, there are many articles which will try to convince you that either American consumers will pay the tariff, or that foreign countries will pay the tariff, the reality of course, as know from our tax wedge is that both American consumers and foreign producers will pay the tariff, how much depends of course on the elasticities of the supply and demand of the good being taxed.

Supply and Demand

I am clearly going to get a lot of use out of that image I made earlier this month.

In short, most things people think they know about tariffs are indeed wrong.

 

The End of Tourism

How We Got Here

In 1930 Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden formed the Saudi Binladin Group. He quickly grew to one of the most powerful people in the country with close ties to the Saudi government. The Saudi Government is led by a government following the philosophies of Wahabbism.

In 1942 the United States government seized the assets of Prescott Sheldon Bush under the terms of the Trading with the Enemy Act. Mr. Bush was trading with the Nazi government and his family was under pressure by two former slaves from Auschwitz for damages in 2004. He never served a single day in prison for profiting from his trade with the Nazis.

In 1952 Prescott Bush was elected to be the Senator of Connecticut as a member of the Republican Party.

In 1967 his son, George H.W. Bush was elected to the US House of Representatives from Texas’s 7th district.

In 1971 George H.W. Bush became the United States Ambassador to the United Nations.

On 20 January 1981 George H.W. Bush became the Vice President of the United States. As Vice President and President the Reagan/Bush administration supported far right militias such as the Islamic Unity of Afghanistan Mujahideen (a paramilitary group) and Contras in Nicaragua against communists. One member of the Mujahideen was al Qaeda, led by the Saudi Osama bin Laden.

On 17 January 1995 George W. Bush became the Governor of Texas.

On 20 January 2001 George W. Bush became the President of the United States.

On 11 September 2001 al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and attempted to bomb the United States Capital.

On 21 August 2004 the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States released its recommendations in response to the September 11th Attacks. This included recommendations for travel visas for foreign nationals from every country except Canada, Palau, Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands in what has become known as the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (Chapter 12), and one thing which was missing were any significant reactions to the Saudi Government’s continual funding of terrorist activities by an ongoing refusal to prosecute their citizens who fund terrorism abroad. Their refusal to enforce their laws about financing terrorism is hard to distinguish from being a State Sponsor of Terrorism when measured by impact.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if you punish Peter because Paul committed a crime, with my degree in political science I call this a GROSS MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE. That is exactly what the ESTA is in my opinion. Member States of the European Union have all proven time and time again that they are willing to prosecute violent extremists of every ideology. They have strong social safety nets, excellent education systems, and there has never once been an attack on American soil by a citizen of a member state of the European Union. Perhaps the most egregious section of this document is this claim:

Since the international struggle against Islamist terrorism is not internal, those provisions do not formally apply,but they are commonly accepted as basic standards for humane treatment.

The 9/11 Commission report is poorly researched and doesn’t serve the purpose of reducing terrorism around the world. It fully served as an agenda to validate the far right values of the Bush Family which they have held since at least the 1930s.

In short, if the goal of the ESTA is to prevent terrorist attacks, the 9/11 Commission Report does not provide any evidence about how German tourists are at all connected with the additional requirements they have put on these tourists.

The ESTA was implemented on January 12, 2009, 8 days until George W. Bush left office.

New Travel Visas between Free Countries are Bigger than America

Several other countries have built their own security apparatuses. Australia was the first to implement such a system in 1996. Canada announced their intention to build a similar system on 10 November 2016 under extreme pressure from the government of the United States. New Zealand has implemented a similar policy last year, which is expected to have a negative impact on their economy. The European Union implemented a similar system in 2018. Japan is starting a rollout of a similar system, I expect it will be expanded to include all countries in the near future. South Korea is also planning the implementation of their own ETA in 2021.

The only countries which are wealthy (at least $20,000 GDP per capita) and have a high level of press freedom (Press Freedom Index under 40) and a low corruption score (Corruption Perceptions Index above 60) which have true visa free travel today and plan on keeping it are Ireland, Israel, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom.

The reason for this in most cases is the election of right wing governments. With the exception of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, all of the other countries which have rolled out these policies have done so after their right wing parties have gained power.

Here is a map of countries which are rated as low corruption and high incomes (including all European Union member states):

If we shade the countries which have true visa free travel, thee are only 4 countries in the world today which fit this description.

So what’s the point

According to the CBC,

It’s supposed to help catch people who might pose a security risk or who might stay in Canada longer than is legal, since these travellers don’t go through the formal vetting process required by those who need to get a visa.

This is pretty much the same reason in every country (with the exception in the Canadian case where the main reason was American bullying). In reality, I cannot find a single case where somebody from one of these free and developed countries has committed a serious crime in one of the other countries implementing these schemes. The reality is that most terrorist attacks (which the 9/11 commission report is claiming these will protect us from) are committed by people close to where they live, and hold citizenship in the country they commit the attack in.

If we are trying to stop terrorist attacks, which are mostly done by people close to where they live, implementing visas on our allies will not make us safer.

The governments of the world which have implemented these visas over the last 30 years need to do a thorough study into the impact of such policies. If they cannot prove that these visas are increasing safety, the policies need to be scrapped because they are expensive, ineffective, and bad for the world.