Find Insurance Online

There is something unAmerican about consolidated power.   The financial consolidation even after the financial bailouts of 2008, is now generally known to be dangerous economically.  What we don’t typically realize is that it complements political consolidation at the empire-level of Unions such as the US and EU.  I suspect that many Americans have a baleful sense from the various manifestations of consolidation.  We have a vague sense of a trend that seems to go against what our predecessors have stood for (i.e., against centralized power…going all the way back to George III).   Let’s just say that it is in the interest of big government and big business that we continue to forget this point and continue to chase after various demons.  That is to say, the anti-democratic power that has more influence in our government than even the skeptics realize does not fear the democratic element of one person, one vote, because we are scattered.  Should we ever unite and take back our government, it would be interesting to see what the corporate elite does.  Will they allow us to remain a democratic republic, or will they tell our government officials to give us the impression that we are in control?

United Russia, the party led by Prime Minister Putin, decided in August, 2010 not to submit the name of the governor of Kaliningrad, Georgy V. Boos, for reappointment. The decision appeared to put pressure on governors to do more to ensure the satisfaction of those they govern, or to at least keep a lid on dissent. Governors had been popularly elected in Russia until a 2004 decree by Mr. Putin, then Russia’s president, that gave the president responsibility for appointing them. In that decree, the president is to select governors from a list of candidates drawn up by the governing party. Critics have said that the practice has made governors beholden to the Kremlin and insensitive to the popular sentiments. This can be problematic on two grounds.

In an empire-scale polity the size of Russia, which is inherently diverse,  insensitivity to popular sentiments can create pressure that could cause the federation to eventually explode. Being geographically separted from the rest of Russia and comparable to a small country, Kaliningrad is undoubtedly in a position to have expectations arise from its people concerning some extend of self-governance. As Russia treats its constituent republics like a republic’s provinces, the people in the republics are likely to take offense and demand more in terms of self-governance more in line with that of the EU’s states.

Secondly, the appointment power evinces a democracy deficit. The inability to elect governors was one of the central grievances when 10,000 people protested in Kaliningrad in January, 2010 to call for Mr. Boos’s ouster. Konstantin Doroshok, the head of the Kaliningrad branch of the opposition group, Spravedlivost, said of United Russia’s decision to deny the governor a second terms, “On the other hand, it is important to understand that the people have not been given the most important thing: the real opportunity to independently elect governors.” To the extent that the protest was over the constitutional change rather than Georgy Boos in particular, United Russia may have taken the wind out the Baltic sails without having to directly address the raison d’etre of the complaint. Even so, the pressure for more self-governance is likely to intensify in Russia’s republics. In excessively consolidating, Russia may go the way of the USSR.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/world/europe/17russia.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=russia&st=cse

A constitutional moment engaging the citizenry is urgently needed with respect to the system of government in the United States. In short, the citizenry should decide, as a people, whether to revert back to a federal system or to make the political consolidation that has ensued official. If the latter, Alexander Hamilton's suggestion that the states be districts of the US Government, whose energy he thought could not directly extend to the outer reaches of the empire (i.e., into the wilderness of states distant from the seat of the U.S. Government). This was Hamilton's view in the U.S. Constitutional Convention; his writings eventually published in The Federalist Papers were meant to sell the proposed constitution rather than to give his own proposal. His own view may have come to pass, though through incremental Congressional encroachment on the turf of the governments of the several states and concurring U.S. Supreme Court assuaging (or enabling) doctrines.  I submit that this process of change over many years has eventuated in a gap between the system of governance as it is and as it is to be constitutionally.  Whereas some people argue that we must revert back to the constitution following a "strict" construction, I believe we the people, as a people, should commence a constitutional moment of heightened attention and debate concerning whether we want centralized consolidation (i.e., no states), decentralized consolidation (i.e., states as districts), or federalism (which entails dual sovereignty and a balance of power between the general government and the governments of the states).  I believe the latter is the best suited for an inherently diverse empire-scale political union, but that the people reach a decision is the imporant point now.  For otherwise, we will continue to live a lie--to claim to be a federal system while actually being consolidated: essentially flying with miscalibrated instruments. 

Actually making a decision on the type of political system is better than having the system inadvertantly change as a byproduct of whatever issue is being legislated at the moment. If the latter habit continues, I suspect that the United States will continue along the trend of consolidation at the expense of the State governments, with Congress, the U.S. President, and the U.S. Supreme Court gaining more and more power without sufficient checks on their abuse of power.  Progressives could look back on Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court allowing President George W. Bush to essentially declare war on Iraq and command the forces, while conservatives could look back on "Obamacare" applying to every state. Being concerned about the government of the Union having too much power is or ought to be an American proclivity. So too, the need for a decision on what type of political system the United States should have bears on every citizen, regardless of party.  This is what a constitutional moment is, after all; the people itself rising to discuss the system of government itself without being distracted by partisan issues of the day. To be sure, such a moment requires self-discipline among the people and responsibility in the media, so to keep on topic.

I find myself wondering why I even make the arguments.  It would take so much energy and agreement just to get to a constitutional moment wherein the citizenry as a whole become engaged in revisiting the governance system itself.  We are so easily distracted, and do we, as a citizenry, really care whether our government is federal or consolidated?   It might be that most of the citizenry is ready to say good riddence to federalism.  If so, then so be it.  Let’s at least make a decision.  If we as a people are incapable of making such a decision, it might be asked whether we are capable of democracy itself. It would be ironic if we were preaching democracy to the Middle East while not embracing popular sovereignty here at home.

“In a sense, Europe seemed to be living down to expectations. Earlier, the foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, warned against a 'minimalist solution' that would reduce the European Union’s 'opportunity to have a clear voice in the world.'"  Olivier Ferrand, president of Terra Nova, a center-left research institute in France, said, “It is quite astounding. . . . It is jaw-dropping. It is the end of ambition for the E.U. — really disappointing.”

I think these are rather extreme positions on the selection of Herman Van Rompuy on November 19, 2009 as the first non-rotated president of the European Council.  Moreover, I don’t think the E.U. is going the way of the dinasaur just because Van Rompuy was not well known at the time of his selection.  He has written six books, is a writer of Japanese poems, has consensus-skills, and seems humble enough.  Would popular election have yielded a better candidate? As the election would have been E.U.-wide, it is doubtful that a high proportion of the voters would have been sufficiently familiar with him to make an informed decision. 

The New York Times continues, “The deal that produced the two choices emerged as a result of backroom negotiations among leaders jockeying for future and more important economic portfolios that could be more powerful in the enlarged European Union, which is still more of an economic union than a political one and looks to remain so.”  However, the E.U. includes a popularly-elected Parliament. Is a parliament not political? Is a parliament not a government body?  Perhaps, moreover, we should simply say that transfers of sovereignty are now economic in nature.

One might ask: who would have a vested interest in perpetrating such a subterfuge wherein governmental institutions, whether intergovernmental (e.g., the European Council) or national (e.g., the E.U. Parliament) are to be portrayed as solely economic in nature? According to The New York Times,  “The leaders of Europe’s most powerful countries, France and Germany, did not want to be overshadowed. Nor apparently did their foreign ministers.”   After the European Council elected Van Rompuy, Gordon Brown, the then-current British Prime Minister who had been pushing for Tony Blair (his precursor), told reporters that the posts are only ceremonial anyway since the state governments are still in control.  However, is Van Rompuy's role in presiding over the European Council merely for show? Is there not power in chairing a political institution? Furthermore, are the heads of the state governments in charge of the E.U. Commission, the E.U. Parliament, and the European Court of Justice? Even within the European Council where the governors of the states sit, qualified majority voting on most issues means that any given state government is not in control. We can conclude that E.U. level officials are not mere gloss on a window, and that the member states have indeed transferred some of their governmental sovereignty to the E.U. Government. Lest is be thought otherwise--that the E.U. does not have a government, there is a saying in English: If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and swims like a duck, odds are it is a duck.  It might be useful to ask why it is in the interest of some that the obvious conclusion be withheld.

My only caveat concerning the selection of Van Rompuy is that the consensus maker was not the sort to make transparent the "duck" subterfuge and denial, which had gone unchecked at the expense of greater European integration. In other words, the E.U. needs its own leaders who can garnish attention for the E.U. itself (i.e., apart from its state governments) because if integration falters, the danger will be dissolution unless or until more governmental sovereignty is transferred to the E.U. As for Van Rompuy's low name recognition outside Belgium at the time of his selection, let’s not forget that few, if any, presidents of the U.S. Senate (the Vice President of the U.S.) have been known at the beginning of their respective terms. Of course, outside of breaking tie votes, the president of the U.S. Senate (whose members are the member states of the union) is more ceremonial than is the president of the European Council.  In fact, senators regularly stand in for the presiding officer when the U.S. Senate is in session, whereas Van Rompuy himself presides over sessions of the European Council.  Also, the European Council is possibly more powerful among E.U. governmental institutions than the U.S. Senate is in the U.S. This is probably so because the state governments in the E.U. have more power at the E.U. level than the American state governments do in the U.S. This could explain why Van Rompuy's position, the President of the European Council, is powerful (because the Council he chairs is powerful) even if Van Rompuy had been an unknown outside of Belgium and was not an attention-getter in the media (e.g., unlike Tony Blair).

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/world/europe/20union.html?_r=1&ref=world

As of 2011, Russia had 11 time zones, from the Polish border to near Alaska, a system so vast that a traveller could get a walloping case of jet lag from a domestic flight.  In 2009, Russia was considering shedding some of its time zones.  People running businesses in the far east were complaining because the regulators were typically in Moscow, which could be several hours behind.    The issue blossomed at the end of 2009 into an intense debate across the Russian Federation about how Russians saw themselves, about how the regions should relate to the center, and about how to address the age-old problem of creating a sense of unity in a diverse federation that had been consolidated politically.  In short, the issue concerned the challenges involved in a consolidated empire. 

The sheer amount of territory in an empire that is made up of republics that are on the scale of independent states or countries makes “one size fits all” from the center extremely difficult.  It might have been different when kingdoms and empires were smaller—such as the medieval sort (e.g. the Swiss confederation and the Netherlands—both empires on a medieval scale but states in modern terms).  For China, the US, the EU and Russia, the extent of geography is a limitation on how much centralized authority is possible.  The Chinese government maintains one time zone for China, when there could easily be four or five.  In the case of Russia, such consolidation would mean that people in some places would be getting up and having breakfast in the middle of the night!   Even reducing the number of zones could make it more difficult on some, given the short duration of daylight in the winter.   Consider, for example, the trouble of going to and from daylight savings time in the US and EU.  Eliminating a few time zones in Russia would be to act as though a few hours difference doesn’t matter much.  The far east may already be two hours off of the correct biological time—meaning the most fitting with the human biological clock. 

In the end, the problem is one of consolidating an empire-scale polity.  Given the inherent heterogenuity involved in such an expanse, there are limitations in what can be done centrally.  Moscow can’t simply issue an order and expect that every Russian city will be awake and thus able to reply immediately.  Resentment toward central control in such cases (i.e., empires) is quite natural.  Indeed, proposals to modify the time zones have stirred deep suspicions, especially in the Far East and Siberia, where people have long resented Moscow, much the way people in places like Idaho distrust the goings-on in Washington.  So the issue is not simply one of whether time zones should be adjusted.  The tensions come when an empire seeks an inordinate amount of centralized control—more than that which is consistent with natural differences.  A consolidated empire on the modern scale (i.e., early-modern kingdoms being the scale of the units) is an artificial construction.   The time zones, I submit, should be oriented to biological clocks, while the federal system is given greater weight (i.e., more autonomy for the republics and regions).  “We have to look at this from a biological standpoint, how it is going to affect health,” said Yekaterina Degtyareva, 27, a personnel manager who lives in Novosibirsk, the most populous city in Siberia, and often travels to the Far East and Moscow. “If it is going to be a centralized, so-called totalitarian decision, then nothing good will come of it.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/07/world/europe/07zones.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=russia%20time&st=cse

Should the EU allow Turkey to join as a new state?  That Turkey is overwhelmingly not in Europe and does not have a European culture are cited by those arguing against it.   Of course, not every state of the European Union has to be in Europe.  The USA has Hawaii even though the islands are far from America.  However, Hawaii has a westernized culture and is a small state in the American Union, whereas Turkey is Islamic and Middle Eastern and is huge in comparison with most EU states.   100 million people  is more than Deutschland (80 million)…so turkey would be the largest state peoplewise.  I don’t think it would be very wise to have a non-European state/culture being your largest state. it would be a sort of hypertrophy.  (good word to look up)  It is the EUROPEAN Union, afterall.  To compromise the European Union as a means to gaining leverage in the middle east is in my view rather short-sighted and not really in the Europeans’ interest.
As I see it, the primary reason for both the US and EU is to forestall war between the states within and to provide a defense against foreign threats.  I know the economic threats (and power) is though to be primary in the case of the EU, but I would go back to the speeches in the early 1950s by Jean Monnet and even Churchill on the primary need to avoid another world war sourced in Europe.  The early iron and coal cooperative between six states was geared to preventing Germany from re-militarizing primarily…economics being secondary.  The EEC was built onto this High Authority and the economic has been thought to be the dominant rationale.  Not to discount the benefits of a common market; the US has def benefited from one.  But I would argue that the EU’s mission is not primarily economic, but rather to prevent war within Europe.  This is why I think still more power should go to the EU, but not so much that it consolidates like another union that  I won’t mention.

Dmitri Medvedev, President of the Russian “Federation,” fired Yuri Luzhkov in September, 2010, after the mayor of Moskow (legally a governor of a region) questioned the president’s fitness and thus rattling the tightly controlled government.The conflict had turned into a highly unusual spectacle because such defiance of the country’s leadership by a senior official rarely occurs in public. “It is difficult to imagine a situation under which a governor and a president of Russia, as the chief executive, can continue to work together when the president has lost confidence in the leader of a region,” Mr. Medvedev said. The state-controlled television channels, which rarely if ever voice criticism of party leaders, suddenly went after Mr. Luzhkov, signaling the Kremlin’s displeasure with him. They broadcast programs that questioned Mr. Luzhkov’s performance and suggested that he was responsible for corruption in Moscow.  To be sure, Luzhkov had endured sustained criticism for reigning like an autocrat, muzzling dissent and allowing blatant corruption to flourish. During his tenure, his wife, Yelena Baturina, obtained much of the construction business in Moscow, becoming one of the world’s richest women.However, it was criticism of Medvedev, rather than corruption, that costed Luzhkov his job.  We can conclude that the governors of Russia’s regions, which are equivalent to the states of the EU and US, are in no way free of the central government.  In federalism, the federal states are semi-sovereign.  The Russian Federation is thus not a federation; rather, it is a consolidated empire like China.  Because an empire is of such scale that it is inherently heterogeneous (diverse), consolidation has the drawback of not allowing for the diversity to express itself politically.  As the pressure builds, the seeds are laid for the eventual demise of the polity.  The EU is in much better shape in this respect, as its member states still have sufficient sovereignty to enact laws that reflect their particular conditions.  Lest it be said that the long tradition of the EU states’ governmental sovereignty is a sufficient buttress against consolidation, the delegates at the US’s Constitutional Convention relied on the citizens’ identification with their states against encroachment by the new general government of the federal system.  History and people’s political identification may seem solid to us, but what holds for us may one day be an afterthought. While we can learn from history, it does not have its own staying power; it is in this sense artificial—a creature of the mind.  One might counter that the history of centralized rule in Russia (and the USSR) played a role in the demise of Russian federalism.  I would counter that it is the present locus of power that decisive.  Consider, for example, the present power of the US Government as against the history of state power in the US wherein the federal government handled mostly foreign affairs.  That history could not stand up against the encroachments of centralized power.  I predict that the EU, should it endure, will suffer the same plight.  Russia is simply further along.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/world/europe/29moscow.html?_r=1&hp:

According to Newsweek, "Conservatives have been quick to declare that "ObamaCare is on life support" in the wake of federal district court Judge Henry E. Hudson's ruling in Virginia that the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) requirement to buy health insurance is unconstitutional. But in truth Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, won only a partial victory. He sought to have the entire law overturned, but instead only the section creating an individual mandate was." This is perplexing to me, as the law contains a clause indicating that if any part is deemed to be unconstitutional, the entire act would fall. (the health insurance industry didn't want to be forced to pay out without being guaranteed the expanded customer base by the U.S. Government).  According to Newsweek, "Judge Hudson was very explicit in his ruling that only the mandate that individuals have coverage and 'directly-dependent provisions which make specific reference' to it will be affected. Technically, this means virtually nothing but the mandate is eliminated. But as a practical matter, the requirements placed on insurance companies to make coverage more generous and available to everyone are economically dependent on the mandate. To keep the rest of the bill in place without the mandate would provoke the wrath of the insurance companies’ powerful lobby and set premiums on an upward-spiraling trajectory. On the upside, Medicaid would still be expanded so the millions of poor who are without health insurance will be insured."  In my comparably small and insignificant view, this is the major significance in the entire law. That is to say, health-care as a right even for the poor is a matter of human rights. Lest the rich poo poo this right because theirs is secure, I can only shake my head in utter disgust; in a civilized society, even a person incapable of working has the right to survive. Not wanting to pay for this right when one enjoys other advantages of living in a society (e.g., police protecting one's property) is sheer selfishness.  I take the right to survival to be the kernel worth saving in Obamacare even if scrooges poo poo's the plight of their less fortunate fellow citizens while ignoring their own self-centeredness. Hudson also declined to prevent the law’s implementation while the courts sort out the constitutional question. The ACA has been upheld as constitutional by two district courts. According to Newsweek, "Hudson’s decision actually guarantees only one thing: that the constitutionality of the individual mandate will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. Legal experts are unclear which way the high court will go

The question of whether the mandate is constitutional hinges on whether it falls within the federal government's enumerated power to regulate commerce. In particular, the question is whether inactivity can be regulated. Failure to buy insurance is inactivity.  Is a decision to buy or not to buy to be counted as an activity?  Or is requiring Americans to carry health insurance a way of regulating how they pay for something that every American will use (i.e., health-care)?  It seems to me that this question has been overly simplied, whereas the past "logic" used by the U.S. Supreme Court to ok expansions in the commerce clause is notoriously invalid even as it has been generally accepted in American society.

Historically, the U.S. Supreme Court has not resisted ever deepening and broadening encroachments by the national legislature and executive on the States by means of the enumerated power of regulating interstate commerce.  In 1942, for example, the court held in Wickard v. Filburn—the most relevant precedent for this case—that a farmer growing wheat for his own chickens, above a maximum of growth allowed per acre at the time, was subject to federal regulation under the commerce clause because the resulting extent to which a farmer does not buy wheat to feed his chickens on the market affects the national market price of wheat. "This goes a step further than Wickard because it’s the omission of action that’s being defined as the interstate act," says Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law instructor at George Washington University. Critics of the mandate say that if you start defining choices not to buy things as actions that affect interstate commerce then there is no limit on what Congress can make you buy. In my view, the action/inaction distinction is not vital to whether the power of the U.S. Government is potentially unlimited under the commerce clause; <em>Wickard </em>itself evinces the potential unlimitedness in the power; even growing wheat for one's own use can be deemed as interstate commerce even though the wheat never even crosses the road.  It is the tenuous multiple links of inference that dwarfs even the action/inaction distinction. The legalese in the inferences has already supported Congress in using the interstate commerce clause to reach a variety of objects (Morrison and Lopez being the two exceptions, but even they allow for indirect effects to the commerce). As another example involving what one grows and consumes on one's property, in 2005 in Gonzales, the court held that the commerce clause entitles the federal government to outlaw California residents from growing marijuana for personal medicinal use. Of course, the government's purpose here was not to regulate commerce; the policy was against illegal drugs being used. This is precisely how the commerce clause can be stretched to cover virtually anything.

If the court throws out the health mandate, it might be just as well as the State governments really should be the ones to address health-care for the uninsured, given our system of federalism. If the mandate is declared to be unconstitutional, I would advise the justices to do it in a way that also exterpates the inferences of legalese that have for more than one hundred years enabled the federal government to encroach on the States--effectively ending the check on government that is afforded by federalism. In other words, the court could use the case as a means of setting definitive limits on the enumerated powers.  Otherwise, Congress will return to the clause for yet another encroachment using linkages--simply sidestepping regulating inaction. The case can occasion a wake-up call concerning the consolidation of governmental power at the center at the expense of the innate diversity that exists in an empire-scale polity. I doubt very much that the court will sound the alarm--seeing the forest through the trees--even if the mandate is declared to be unconstitutional. We simply are not good at looking at things in terms of the big picture; it is no accident that most members of Congress are lawyers.

Source: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/15/will-the-supreme-court-overturn-health-care-reform.html%22%3Ehttp://www.newsweek.com/2010/12/15/will-the-supreme-court-overturn-health-care-reform.html

The Hungarian state government assumed the over-all presidency of the E.U. on January 1, 2011 for six months. This instantly put the question of whether some of the state laws enacted the previous year violated E.U. constitutional law.  The extent of the breach is itself instructive for us in wondering how it is that a state government could find itself so obviously in violation and yet look the other way.  In other words, this case study suggests that European integration, and federal government in general at the empire-level, is not exempted from the tensions in federalism between the state governments and a general authority tasked with holding the union together. According to The Wall Street Journal,  "In some ways the dispute between Budapest and Brussels goes to the heart of a debate over the proper distribution of power between national governemtns and the central authorities of the European Union."  Hungary's governor, Viktor Orban, stated, "The EU basically has no right to interfere" in these sorts of policy decisions. In 2008, EU government officials had criticized Hungarian officials for relying on short-term fixes rather than long-term spending cuts to shirk the state's budget deficit.

In Hungary, "crisis" taxes that fell disproportionately on out-of-state businesses doing business in the state had been enacted.  The European Court of Justice had previously ruled against such taxes having a disproportionate effect, yet somehow the Hungarian legislature missed this point in enacting the law. It should come as no surprise that officials of other state governments in the E.U. claimed that Hungary was targeting select sectors and out-of-state companies in particular to balance the state's budget. Even so, a state official in Hungary claimed that the "question is: how much economic liberty you have in the EU? We think every state does hoave economic freedom--within a certain framework, we have different methods and models."  While the notion of a shared framework allowing of diversity fits with modern federalism, the diversity cannot contradict the basic principles in the framework.  In this case, a common market requires that states do not discriminate in intention or consequence against firms based in other states. In other words, a common market requires a level playing field.

Secondly, the state legislature enacted a new media law that became quite controversial in the E.U. The law passed by the state legislature in late 2009 allowed regulators to impose fines for "unbalanced" or 'offensive" reports and sets limits for the amount of time that can be devoted to certain types of news. The law also required bloggers to register with the state government. It should be <i>prime facie </i> evident that this law goes against the E.U.'s commitment to freedom of the press.  Guy Verhofstadt, leader of one of the parties in the E.U. Parliament, stressed that no state government should be allowed to put "restrictions to freedoms that lie at the heart of our union of values." From the standpoint of republican principles alone (i.e, being a representative democracy, or "free"), a government fining journalists for being unbalanced or for their allocation of news stories is odious. That a state government in the E.U. would even attempt such a thing ought to give pause to anyone who assumes that it most of the governmental sovereignty in the E.U. should remain with the states. In other words, there is a real need for the E.U. governmental institutions to provide a check with teeth on wayward states, or the union will dissipate.

Finally, European Central Bank officials claim the Hungarian government's changing of the selection process of the state's bank's rate-setting committee threatens the bank's independence. This change of law in Hungary illustrates the difficulties involved in having monetary policy set at the E.U. level (for states using the euro as their currency) while fiscal policy is set at the state level.  Bringing fiscal policy to the E.U. institutions would give the E.U. the added puissance it would need to effectuate a viable check on state governments that for one reason or another are confused about E.U. basic law and principles.  In other words, because the state governments being on the same page concerning the E.U. and its principles cannot be taken for granted, so more power should transfer to the E.U. level from the states--though while working on institutional firewalls to keep the E.U. government from encroaching on the states such that a consolidated central state results (similar to what has happened in the U.S.). 

Source: Gordon Fairclough, "European Probe Fuels Tensions with Hungary," The Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2011, p. A11.