Tag Archives: united-states

A Very Brief Reflection on Non-Citizen Impact on Governance in the United States

Posted on by
Reply

On August 13 of this year (2026), Sue Seboda published an article on Substack entitled “Will the SAVE Act Save America or is it just more spitballs and sledgehammers…”.  It follows a multipart series of articles Sue has written and published on Substack dealing with the history of immigration and immigration legislation in the United States, a decent fairly objective effort worth reading, as is her latest article which can be accessed at https://sueseboda.substack.com/p/will-the-save-act-save-america?r=lwzkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web.  Sue strikes me as being on the conservative side of the political spectrum but objective and open minded.  I like her work.  I, on the other hand, am and have long been a democratic socialist along the lines of Noam Chomsky, Nelson Mandela, Pepe Mujica, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. (not to be confused with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin or even Leon Trotsky).

Sue’s article deals with very significant issues, issues that also impact other critical issues not dealt with in the article such as the nature of the federal decennial census used to apportion Congressional representation and distribute federal funds and the issue of birthright citizenship, all of which should probably be dealt with concurrently via a federal constitutional clarifying amendment after robust debate that results in legal requirements that deal with real problems in a manner avoiding discrimination based on race, gender, religious beliefs or  national origins but definitely limits the roles of non-citizens in United States institutions.  The article focuses on the pros and cons of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act), a proposed Congressional bill that would requires individuals to provide documentary proof of United States citizenship (such as a passport or certified birth certificate) when registering to vote in federal elections.

If formal participation in the political process by undocumented migrants is an important issue, an even more critical issue has been ignored and is generally ignored, the role of foreign governments and their agents, advocates and representative in the United States electoral and political system and the role of campaign contributions from sources ineligible to vote in the elections impacted, including political action committees, corporations, labor unions, chambers of commerce and individuals.  That is a real clear and present danger.  The two great villains in the foregoing, albeit not the only ones, are the Israeli American Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the United States Supreme Court, especially in its Citizens United decision, Citizens United v. FEC; 558 U.S. 310 (2010) and its June 30, 2026 decision in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, 609 U.S. ____ (2026).  Of course, the legacy media focuses primarily on imaginary roles by Russia and China, ignoring the reality of United States interference in foreign elections, most recently, along with Israel, throughout Latin America.

For the most part (in the author’s opinion), the least rational political posture with respect to securing the electoral process has been that adopted by the Democratic Party and its activist base which vehemently oppose action to require picture identification and proof of citizenship to vote.  That specifically includes vehement opposition to the SAVE Act which includes concepts that enjoy overwhelming support among the citizenry, opposition to which is likely to cost the Democratic Party a significant number of votes among the independent voter community in upcoming Congressional elections.  The SAVE Act is far from perfect and could certainly use a bit of constitutional and pragmatic polish though its premises seem sound.  However, a rising swell of Republicans, apparently political descendants of the nineteenth century “American Party”[1], are seeking clearly inappropriate actions designed to minimize the rights and even citizenship status of United States citizens, especially naturalized citizens and Islamic Americans, or indeed any United States citizens opposed to Zionist and Israeli control over United States officials, both elected and appointed.  Republican advocates have gone as far as to demand that certain United States citizens be stripped of their citizenship and expelled from the United States for opposing policies such as undeclared wars and support for genocide and ethnic cleansing, or that they at least be imprisoned and deprived of their political rights.  The foregoing is even more ludicrous than Democratic Party and Democratic Party activist opposition to limiting the right to vote and receipt of federal benefits, as a right, to United States citizens.

The reality is that the positions of both the Democratic and Republican parties are based on few moral, ethical, legal or constitutional factors but rather, only on how they benefit their ability to dominate government at all levels: federal, state and local.  That is something that should disgust all decent citizens regardless of their favored political ideologies but, unfortunately, the communications and entertainment industries in the United States, rather than educate and enlighten, manipulate, obfuscate, confuse and deceive, making functional democracy at best highly improbable, inefficient and dysfunctional, i.e., the ludicrous system we have today led by the ludicrous national leaders proffered by both major political parties for the past half century: i.e., William Jefferson Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack H. Obama, Joseph Robinette Biden and Donald J. Trump (with their supporting casts in Congress, the Judiciary and the Bureaucracy, led by their noses by the Military Industrial Complex against which President Dwight David Eisenhower warned as he left office).

It may be that at some level things are changing, ironically, based on dissidents within the Republican Party (such as Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Green, Thomas Massie, Joe Kent and Candace Owens) seeking a real “Make America First” alternative, and on an evolving democratic socialist wing in the Democratic Party led by recently elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.  I confess to admiring them all, though I’m not always in full agreement with them.  If they could somehow unite and develop a platform based on issues with which they agree, and there are many, many of the worst problems engrained for over a century in United States politics might be minimized.  However, that is a posture their respective followers appear to consider anathema and thus, such a scenario is only a bit more probable than Hell freezing over or the United States electorate finally coming to grips with the Declaration of Independence they claim to revere.

Good article Sue!!!
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] Better known as the “Know Nothing Party”.

Irony by the Dawn’s Early Light

Posted on by
Reply

Many decades ago, actually, in 1984, a film, Red Dawn[1] was released.  It was directed by John Milius from a screenplay he co-wrote with Kevin Reynolds and starred Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey with supporting roles played by Ben Johnson, Darren Dalton, Harry Dean Stanton, Ron O’Neal, William Smith and Powers Boothe.  The film impacted me a great deal in a number of different ways.  It instilled a great deal of empathy in me for people I’d been taught to view as uncivilized terrorists, for people I’d been taught I should despise and hate and who were subhumans not entitled to human rights (even though none were represented, even indirectly, in the film).  But it also made me wonder how the United States citizenry would actually react were the United States ever to be successfully invaded and conquered by a foreign government.  Little did I know at the time that such conquest had already taken place, albeit imperceptibly.

The film dealt with a takeover of the United States by foreign communist forces, Soviets and Cubans as I recall, acting under a United Nations mandate during a major internal crisis, and of the refusal of a small segment of United States civil society to accept foreign domination, even if it was purportedly well intentioned.  The film, as history has demonstrated, was inversely prescient as well as revealing.  The roles, in reality, are and have always been the obverse of reality where it is the United States and its allies that have been and are the invaders and occupiers and looters virtually everywhere.  Something the United States inherited from the British and the French.

The emotional irony involves the profoundly empathic justification generated by the film for the resistance, one with which United States’ citizens viewing the film emotionally bond not realizing that such resistance mirrors resistance against United States colonialism and imperialism all over the world.  Che Guevara, of course, comes to mind but so do the members of Al Qaeda and Isis who resisted the US conquests in the Middle East, and Hamas and Hezbollah in Palestine, and today’s Iranians, and the Cubans and Nicaraguans who have been resisting the US for more than half a century.  And Chileans in 1973, and Argentinians in the 1970’s and today, Panamanians, and Grenadians, and Haitians, and Yemenis, and Libyans, and Syrians, etc., etc., etc.

In today’s context, internally, given the current situation within the current United States, the film leads has led me to reflect on how far from reality John Milius and Kevin Reynolds strayed when they wrote the screenplay given that current history exposes a United States occupied and looted by Fifth Columnist[2] “Israel Firsters”, bought and paid for by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (“AIPAC”), a United States whose citizens, for the most part, be they politically Democrats or Republicans, accept domination by (rather than resist) a tiny foreign power that uses money to fuel its occupation instead of bombs and bullets (those are reserved for use elsewhere), a situation where many (and at the federal level, most) United States elected officials receive the bulk of their income “sort of” from abroad. Where elected officials in many instances receive many times their official salaries in the form of political contributions but also in the form of highly paid post-retirement consultancies and stipends, from AIPAC and its billionaire allies.  My use of the phrase “sort of” reflects the irony (and irony is an oft repeated term in this article) that the funds used to make such payments (some would refer to them as bribes) come indirectly through a devious route from the pockets of United States tax payers whose taxes then to Israel and the “defense” industry (against which Ike, in his wisdom, once warned us[3]) and through them to select investors who then contribute a portion of their “winnings” to AIPAC, which then recirculates a portion of them (everyone needs a bite of the proverbial apple) to the servile “civil servants” who authorized their misdirection in the first place.  Sounds a lot like a shell game doesn’t it?  But a shell game with consequences far worse than mere small time peculation. 

Even worse perhaps, at least in the context of the film’s premises, many active and retired United States military and police personnel wholeheartedly support the looting of the United States and the commission of genocide, ethnic cleansing and wars of conquest, at the expense of United States tax payers, violating every principle they purportedly hold dear, applauding the wholesale murder of journalists and medical personnel and educators as well as the wholesale slaughter of women and children.  It is even worse from my perspective because some of them have been my classmates and are people I have long loved and admired and believed to be profoundly honorable as well as patriotic.

It makes me wonder whether the film was an intentional satire ridiculing who the populace of the United States thought they were.  After all, the United States, building on the framework initiated by Woodrow Wilson in Hollywood during the purported war to end all wars (with George Creel as his handyman), has always appropriated the heroism of others as its own. Witness the perception in the United States that it was primarily responsible for victories in World Wars One and Two when the reality was far, far different[4].  Or the purported bravery of United States aviators murdering thousands of civilians from miles in the sky or safely ensconced in videogame style bunkers as they rain down death on civilians below.  Those are not mirrors into which we enjoy gazing.  We prefer the illusory Hollywood spectacles where United States’ Davids destroy foreign Goliaths against impossible odds.

Again, ironically (that word again), the United States utterly corrupt leaders and brave but naïve military men and women are standing by and indeed assisting in the looting of their three-hundred-and-fifty-million co-citizens by the most evil selfish and depraved ten million people the world has ever known.  So while those ten million enjoy free health care, free education, subsidized housing and alimentation and unbounded military weaponry, all paid for by overworked and underpaid United States taxpayers, none of those benefits exist at home.  Horrors!!!  That would be socialism.  But apparently, paying for socialist programs is fine as long as we are not tainted by benefitting from them.

Irony indeed reigns. 

All of the foregoing is massively supported in the United States by Christian Zionists cheering on the end of the world so that Jesus can return and consign those ten million who they currently hail and support as well as many innocent Jews to perdition, … after Jesus returns. 

How sick is that?

Israeli Zionists know that and scoff.  How can a Jesus consigned to boil in pools of feces in the Hell to which Zionists are sure he’s been consigned ever return at all?  He’s as securely disabled as are the tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of Muslims that Zionists have been able to “eliminate” since the blessed year of 1948.  1948; ironically (again), the year when Eric Arthur Blair, writing as George Orwell, first published his seminal dystopian novel, 1984.

So, “Red Dawn”. 

Enlightening in a sick way to the few who can see and who care about morals and justice and equity and peace but, fortunately for the powers that be, those few are an insignificant lot, more like gnats, troublesome but not all that dangerous thanks to the blinded mases who keep cheering for their captors and for the Fifth Columnists who lead and purportedly protect them.  “Rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air by the dawn’s early light” a nice turn of phrase by a vehement supporter of slavery, one that all citizens of the United States, even the descendants of former slaves, are expected to revere.  But nowadays we can safely note that they’re our bombs and our rockets raining down on others (through our “generosity”) as they once purportedly rained down on Fort McHenry in Baltimore’s harbor.

In the film, one aspect touched me was when Ron O’Neil, playing the role of Cuban Colonel Ernesto Bella, spared captured United States’ “freedom fighters”, having become disgusted by his senseless role in the subjugation of others.  A role not echoed by very many United States “patriots” today.  But one can hope.  One can hope that at some point our military, if not our political leaders, will come to their senses and awake from the somnambulant nightmare in which they’ve permitted not only our country but our world to be placed.

That Red Dawn was released in “1984”, the year when Eric Arthur Blair predicted that our world would have attained its current form may have been deliberate, but probably was not.

It should have been though.
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] See superficial description of the film on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn.

[2] See description of Fifth Columnists on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column

[3] “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”  President Dwight David Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (January 17, 1961), at https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address.

[4] The casualties suffered by the major participants in World Wars One and Two were as follows:  The Soviet Union/Russia suffered the highest losses in World War Two (22–27 million) and 2 million deaths in World War One.  China experienced 20 million deaths in World War Two, mainly civilians due to Japanese occupation.  Germany suffered about 5.5 million military deaths in World War Two and roughly 2.7 million in World War One.  The United Kingdom lost only 383,600 deaths in World War Two but 886,000 in World War One.  On the other hand, the United States only lost 416,800 deaths in World War Two and 116,000 deaths in World War One.

Pandora’s Box, Chemical Warfare, Thomas Hobbes and the Israeli-United States State of Nature

Posted on by
Reply

‘Intentional Chemical Warfare’: Toxic Black Rain in Tehran after US-Israel Bomb Oil Facilities, article by Jon Queally published on March 8, 2026 in Common Dreams:  “These attacks on fuel storage facilities amount to nothing less than intentional chemical warfare against the Iranian citizens.”

Murphy’s Law and the purported Law of Unintended Consequences sometimes coincide and they may have done so when the United States and Israel bombed Iranian petroleum facilities creating a toxic chemical rain that seems to have violated the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction which purportedly entered into force on 29 April 1997.  Israel has signed the treaty but has not ratified it (although it has, as it does with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, accused others of its abuse and with the help of its proxy, the United States, has sought to have other countries punished for its purported violation). 

The foregoing is not surprising as both Israel and the United States now feel that they have the right to violate International Law at all levels with impunity.  But, in this instance, they may have bitten off more than they expected.  Chemical weapons (and biological weapons as well) are not difficult to manufacture or to put into play and having opened Pandora’s Box (figuratively, it was an amphora, not a box) it may be that other states or even non-state actors will also decide that International Law is not a norm binding on them, certainly not on them but not on their adversaries, and may decide that when treaties are not honored, they certainly do not apply with respect to protecting the violators.

Until now both Israel and the United States have enjoyed absolute impunity in their violations of international law assassinating and kidnapping foreign heads of state, blatantly stealing other countries national resources, imposing illegal blockades and embargoes, attacking, invading and destroying foreign cities and towns, even engaging in blatant genocide and ethnic cleansing but, until now, there seemed now viable means for the victims to strike back.  Strike back at the United States and Israeli homelands, not just defensively.  But when you place an adversary in a position where it has nothing to lose, the consequences can be terrible.  That has not been the case in modern history, until now.  There have always been the protections provided to the vanquished under International Humanitarian Law and International Law, but those concepts have proven to be delusory illusions.  Even the Nazis refused to violate very international norm.

So what now?

Chemical weapons, mass poisoning, etc., are seemingly on the table but the real horror, the one likely to wipe us out, is the one apparently recently experimented with under the guise of the Covid 19 pandemic, something many feel was a trial run by the United States, Israel and their allies.  And that is biological warfare.  And biological warfare can quickly spin out of human control.

The sixteenth century English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, used the concept of a primordial State of Nature as an illustration of a lawless society, one without any rules other than strength, the kind of society to which both Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump allude from time to time and one which their ministers and followers seem to fully embrace.  The State of Nature was a metaphor for a time where only the strongest ruled and ruled with impunity, but Hobbes noted that even the strongest had vulnerabilities, they had to sleep, and thus a rules based society emerged.  That society has now, in large part, broken down. 

Both the United States and Israel act as though they can engage in any kind of conduct, regardless of how depraved.  And in that they, especially the Israelis, enjoy widespread domestic support.  But cheap and easily deployed biological and chemical weapons may change that equation leaving us to wonder what species will replace us after our extinction and whether, eventually, some successor species will evolve with the ethical and moral instincts necessary to assure their survival.  Something we, or at least enough of us, seemingly lack.

The Armageddon that Christian Zionist pray for may be on the brink of arrival, albeit not quite in the manner they expect.  If Jesus does return, he may well return to find nobody home.  
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.