On the one hand, America’s Supreme Court is so concerned about the alleged ‘right to life’ of non-conscious early-stage human fetuses as to dictate to any woman in whose body such an object is being formed, “That is state property and you have no right to terminate it.” But, on the other hand, America’s public are so little concerned about their own and actual “right to [conscious] life” as to allow (and to accept their Government’s allowing) — at a time of one of the deadliest and most intensely communicable pandemics in global history — unmasked people to mass together in crowds of strangers to entertain themselves and so to catch the sometimes deadly disease and pass it on to others (after the event), and they thereby produce vast numbers of entirely preventable deaths throughout the entire U.S. population, despite America’s claimed ‘right to life’. Americans, obviously, care more about protecting the lives of pre-conscious fetuses than about protecting the lives of themselves and all of the strangers whom they meet — conscious beings. Is that sane?

On September 3rd, NPR’s Nina Totenberg headlined “The Supreme Court Heads Toward Reversing Abortion Rights”, and reported:

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority tossed a legal bomb into the abortion debate late Wednesday night.

By a vote of 5-to-4, the court’s most conservative members upheld, for now, a Texas law that, in effect, bans abortions after about six weeks. But almost as important as the result was how the court reached its decision — without full briefing and arguments before any court.

The court majority, including its three Trump appointees, emphasized that it was not ruling on the issues presented in the case. Still, it refused to block the law from going into effect for procedural reasons. The unsigned court order was just one long paragraph in length. And within a day, state legislators in Florida and elsewhere announced plans to introduce copycat legislation in their states.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who has dissented from almost every decision upholding expansive abortion rights, disagreed this time. He called the Texas law unprecedented because it not only bans abortions after roughly six weeks, but delegates enforcement powers not to state officials but to the general “populace at large.” Roberts noted that the law appears to be deliberately structured to prevent courts from being able to promptly consider the constitutionality of the law. …

Specifically, the law confers on any individual the right to file suit for money damages against a clinic, or any person who aids or abets an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected.

This is now the Trump Court; and, whereas, previously, signed 5-to-4 conservative U.S. Supreme Court rulings were common, this was an unsigned 5-to-4 theocratic ruling by all 5 of the U.S. Supreme Court’s fundamentalist Christians: four Roman Catholic fundamentalists (Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh), and the only Protestant fundamentalist) (Barrett), ruling that the new Texas law, which places $10,000 bounties on the heads of anyone who participates or assists, or “intends” to, an abortion in Texas, should maybe be allowed to be enforced by this bounty-system, and should temporarily be allowed to be enforced, though “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law,” but the ruling instead invites all states to consider passing similar laws so that the U.S. Supreme Court itself maybe won’t need to act in order to outlaw abortions, and thus this matter might simply go back to being a state instead of federal matter. Interestingly, the billionaires-controlled U.S. ’news’-media report, and generally praise, details of each of the two (signed) dissenting opinions, but not of the one (and far more important but unsigned) five theocrats’ majority decision, so that the public won’t understand what’s happening (which that majority decision is preparing to impose).

Among the very few public commentaries on that majority (5-to-4) decision was one by the lawyer Luppe Luppen, who headlined “The Supreme Court Guts Roe and Opens a New Era of Nullification”, and he summed up by saying “If state legislatures can effectively turn off constitutionally protected rights by inventing or copying procedures that flummox these five Justices, they may well try to do it.” He pointed out the legislative chaos which that will cause. However, his assumption, there, that the five theocrats were simply “flummoxed,” instead of carrying out a very systematic and carefully thought-out pro-theocracy restoration of the coathanger-abortion era in America, wasn’t backed by him citing any evidence, because it is simply false. These theocratic ‘Justices’ are respected by the public, though they are carrying out the commands in the Bible, instead of in the U.S. Constitution, and it’s achieved by their own, and by the ’news’-media’s, deceits, and, especially, by ’news’-media refusing to call lies “lies.” Though, during Trump’s Presidency, Democratic Party ’news’-media were starting to call his lies “lies,” none of the American media call lies “lies” generally. For example, Obama’s hefty serial-lying is still generally ignored, instead of noted.

As regards Americans being “so little concerned about their own and actual right-to-life as to allow (and to accept their Government’s allowing) — at a time of one of the deadliest and most intensely communicable pandemics in global history — unmasked people to mass together in crowds,” RT headlined on September 5th, “‘Not a mask in sight’: Fans return to U.S. college football in a BIG way – to the delight of many, but the horror of others (VIDEO)”, and posted numerous photos of huge crowd-scenes of Americans at sporting events and other entertainments, in which no one was wearing a mask. Covid isn’t just a matter of private health, but it is especially a raging matter of public health; but, if Americans don’t care about the health of anyone but themselves, and if they are stupid enough to believe that by attending such events they are not endangering both themselves and others, then what else can this be but an insane country, where such dangerous behavior is legal? It might be common for many countries — France, for example — but still it is, quite simply, insane.

Is insanity normal? Is it good? Or is it bad? Is there any doubt about that?

Last week Texas experienced a cold snap that resulted in serious statewide damage, death, and destruction. The collapse of the state’s energy grid left millions of Texans in the dark and freezing for days at a time. Tragically, at least 30 people died.

There are many reasons why Texas became like a Third World country, and we should be careful not to pin all the blame on just one factor. But it seems clear that the disaster was to a large degree caused by political decisions to shift toward “green” energy generated from solar and wind and by Governor Abbott’s authoritarian Covid restrictions.

Abbott, who won a “wind leadership” award just this month, oversaw the near-collapse of wind energy generation last week. Yet the politicization of energy generation in favor of “green” alternatives over natural gas and other fossil fuels has led to the unintended consequences of freezing Texans facing multiple millions of dollars in property damage and worse.

Additionally, federal emissions and other restrictions forced Texas to beg Washington for permission to generate power at higher levels in anticipation of unprecedented demand. Governor Abbott finally received permission from the Department of Energy on February 14th, but by then many facilities found themselves off-line due to freezing conditions.

Why should the Federal government be allowed to freeze Texans to death in the name of controlling emissions from energy generation plants? It’s a classic example of politics over people. I guess if you want to make a “Green New Deal” omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

While Governor Abbott was quick to blame energy generators and even the state Electric Reliability Council of Texas, NBC News in Dallas reported that ERCOT “did not conduct any on-site inspections of the state’s power plants to see if they were ready for this winter season. Due to COVID-19 they conducted virtual tabletop exercises instead – but only with 16 percent of the state’s power generating facilities.”

Governor Abbott’s authoritarian Covid executive orders at least indirectly led to lax inspection, maintenance, and winterization of wind and other energy generation plants.

But Texas did not only freeze because of Abbott’s Covid restrictions. For the better part of a year thousands of businesses have been destroyed. Recovering drug addicts and alcoholics have relapsed. Depression and suicides have skyrocketed. Children have been deprived of education.

And for what? Texas with Abbott’s restrictions fared no better than Florida with no restrictions when it comes to Covid cases and deaths. The Texas governor knew that months ago when the data from Florida proved that lockdowns, masks, and other restrictions had no effect. But he refused to change course. He refused to follow the brave lead of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and open Texas completely.

Politicians too stubborn or fearful to change course when facts dictate otherwise do not deserve to remain in office. Governors Gavin Newsom in California and Andrew Cuomo in New York are finally facing consequences for their Covid authoritarianism. When the smoke clears – and it is rapidly clearing – many more of these petty tyrants will fall. That list of deposed Covid tyrants may well include Texas Governor Greg Abbott – and the slumbering Texas state legislature – as well.

Let’s hope Texans – and all Americans – will learn from this and more forcefully demand their God-given liberty!

ronpaulinstitute.org

There is an interesting tendency in American political history that whenever there is some sort of crisis, one answer to it, especially from the Right, is some form of secession. The waves of Liberal triumphant ecstasy that Obama rode into the White House were scary enough to start discussions of leaving the Union from Ohio to Oregon. During the 1990s it was the scary militias of places like Michigan that were supposedly going to fight for some sort of breakaway from the tyranny of Clinton. None of this came to pass and the only semi-successful attempt to do something like this required the support of the entire political and economic elite of the South, with a very heavy economic dependence on a “peculiar institution” to even try. But for some reason this naive power fantasy of being able to simply break away from the evil grip of Washington, gaining everything, yet somehow losing nothing just will not die. And so, now there is discussion of an imminent “Texit”. This time though the strategy is going to use a long term bureaucratic roadmap and vastly more signatures, stamps and red tape in order to ultimately fail.

Brexit is a False Narrative

This new term Texit comes from the “success” of the Brexit movement that sort of got the UK out of the EU to some extent. The glowing positive side of Brexit, is the fact that things were done absolutely peacefully via referendum and very slowly bureaucratic processes. Although the drudging seemingly endless path of Brexit was very annoying for those who advocated it, having lots of time to play with, allowed for things to happen more gently and with less economic consequences. If they would have just put up barbed wire and machine gun nests on the British side of the Chunnel the day after voting, the economic impact would have been a lot more severe. For us commoners we want politics to be exciting and full of triumphant victories towards a better tomorrow, but the reality is that sometimes slow and steady wins the race. No matter what the anti Brexit crowd says, Britain’s economy has not crumbled or suffered some sort of fatal wound due to leaving the EU. Essentially a soft secession, at least in the context of the EU, is now proven to be pleasantly survivable, at least for a major player like the British.

Image: Is a post-Brexit UK really fundamentally different?

It is probably this particular safer softer bureaucratic approach that appeals to those who understand paper dancing most intimately – local politicians. From their standpoint, why not try to slowly break Texas away from impending death from Socialism/Globalism, but in a rainbows and kittens peaceful way? Brexit required no guns nor blood, simply lots of time and stamps, this looks very spiffy in contrast to blood soaked Civil War 2.0.

If the British could leave without collapsing, why can’t the Lone Star State? Everything is bigger (and better) in Texas right?

The issue is that for pencil pushers the Brexit narrative looks attractive but ultimately this narrative is false. England was not able to lead some sort of massive Conservative or Nationalist revolution by gentle means. Yes, the Union Jack was taken down at the EU parliament, and in theory Brussels cannot suck more resources from across the English Channel at will, but ultimately the UK remains in NATO, completely philosophically dominated by extreme Progressive Liberals, and is not going to reforge “The Empire” any time soon. All of the pre-Brexit issues not related to tax that have been slowly destroying English culture and nationhood are still very much in place, but taxes are lower so that’s nice.

The UK is not truly independent, Brexit or not. The real test of a nation’s independence in a Monopolar world is if it can (or at least tries) to pursue policies that go against the desires of the Hegemon (Washington). So far we have yet to see a post Brexit UK try to work the Russians or Chinese against Washington or assert its interests over those of America’s anywhere on the globe. The Brits are not players in a “great game” at the moment, they have just adjusted the flavour of their vassal status. This Brexit narrative is something to note, something of interest, but it is not a “proof of concept” for Texas.

The collapse of the USSR is realistic a model for Texas

We should be impressed that local politicians in America were actually aware of an event that happened overseas. This level of worldliness is rare, but sadly if they were to look just a bit further east they would see the potential nightmare that can happen even if they were to succeed in leaving the United States on “peaceful” terms.

Despite the fact that 77% of the populace voted to save but reform the Soviet Union, it was broken up by pen strokes hidden in the forests at the very western edge of the empire. What ensued was a nightmare scenario of starvation, collapse and untold small military conflicts. Many of the chunks of the USSR felt quite confident in their ability to stand on their own as part of a great Red Civilization, but the second it fell apart they quickly had to fight to survive and quickly realized just how small and helpless their nations were without big daddy Moscow. To this day all the Former Soviet Republics remain poor irrelevant territories whose only purpose in their existence is to antagonize Russia and challenge the spelling skills of their Washington masters with their unpronounceable last names.

Image: Breaking away from the big empire comes at a high cost, is it worth it?

Texas is big and has a very vibrant culture, but it has far more value as a part of American Civilization than as a Texan nation. This is much in the same way that Armenia, Georgia, the Ukraine etc. were vastly more relevant as part of Russian/Soviet Civilization, than as forgettable blips on the global radar. Within Russia everyone can at least recognize Armenian script, knows the name of those big Ukrainian red trousers they like and can determine what is Georgian cuisine. As “independent” nations they are culturally non-existent globally except for those twerps who accidentally bought the wrong “Georgian” flags to the Capitol Hill protests. Even if Texas would be allowed to slowly nudge its way out of the Union by some sort of Texit its destiny will look much more like a Former Soviet Republic in the 90’s than their mythical Brexit narrative.

The geopolitics of Texas are dismal

If Texas were to become independent it would find itself surrounded by 3 different spaces. The first being the land border with the rest of America, who would be very hostile to the breakaway republic and very willing to put the economic screws to them. The United States has brought misery to many places across the globe with embargoes, sanctions and blockades. We shouldn’t be so naive to think they wouldn’t do it to a naughty Texas. The second space would be the Gulf of Mexico which is essentially dominated by the U.S. Navy. Texans would have to say goodbye to goods from China, unless they could get them via Mexico. Blocking off Texas from the rest of the world is very realistic and this enforced isolation will change the shining big cities of the state into dim impoverished Capitalist copies of North Korea in terms of economy.

Image: Texas would have it worse than North Korea during a “Texit”.

The third and most important space is the border with Mexico. If the Mexicans were not under the thumb of Washington, this could be a potential “way out” for an independent Texas, to get access to the world’s goods. But as it stands today Mexico City will always side with Washington when it counts. meaning that Texit would lead to a new nation being born that is completely cut off from the rest of the world. It would not only have to economically fight against the Global Hegemon but would start life surrounded by it on all sides to be consumed and digested like a longhorn steak. Texas is big, it has a diverse landscape, but maintaining an economy with guns pointed at you from every direction will not exactly be easy.

The geopolitics of America, being far away, surrounded by oceans with only underpopulated Canada and submissive Mexico at the borders is a huge boon to American stability. Well wishing and power fantasies cannot topple geopolitical realities and the fact that Washington will simply never let a Texit take place. The politicians advocating this position should understand that if they go forward with this Texas will gain geopolitical realities worse than those of North Korea. Furthermore, any Texan politician who will seriously put forward legislation for a referendum or soft exit process is likely to decide “to take their own life” as often happens with people who disagree with certain U.S. policies. The people advocating for Texit are naive, they have no idea what they’re actually getting into and just how bad things will be even if they succeed.

Regarding the CARES Act, J. Robert Downen headlined in the Houston Chronicle on December 14th, “Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church got $4.4 million in federal PPP loans”, and he reported that “Lakewood received a $4.4 million loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, a part of the federal CARES Act that provided loans to pay employee wages or for other basic operational costs such as utilities. The program marked the first time federal lawmakers allowed for direct financial assistance to houses of worship. … More than 1,000 religious groups in Texas received hundreds of millions of dollars to retain a combined 59,000 jobs, the Chronicle reported in July.”

At around the start of the coronavirus-epidemic, the Texas state government had announced, on 24 January 2020, that “Our workforce continues to grow and is now 14,188,100 Texans strong”, and this means that the CARES Act’s breaking-of-precedent (“the first time federal lawmakers allowed for direct financial assistance to houses of worship”) was helping to retain employment for one two-hundred-and-fortieth of employed Texans, and therefore it couldn’t even possibly have produced any significant impact upon the rate of unemployment in Texas, but only improved the re-election chances of public officials in Texas, by its purchasing from Texas’s preachers (who have lots of political clout in that state) a more favorable attitude toward those incumbent governmental office-holders, who had provided this largesse, upon their special interest.

Downen’s article also listed 16 Texas corporations (such as “Percheron Holdings LLC”) which had been given federal loans of at least $10,000,000 each; and, so, the federal Government’s largesse wasn’t only to ‘non-profits’, nor to religious organizations.

However, if the actual intention of the CARES Act had been to help workers instead of to help their bosses, then nothing would have been funneled through the corporation down to its workers, but everything would instead have been paid directly to each individual worker, and any corporation that was suffering losses during the epidemic could separately have applied to the U.S. Small Business Administration after-the-fact, for loan-assistance, in order for that corporation (or church, or etc.) to be able to stay in business, if they otherwise would have gone bust.

In other words: all CARES-Act monies that went to corporations were funneling their benefits to workers by way of and through their employers, and thus were really political pay-offs to the richest, in order for political incumbents to be able to retain their seats as governmental officials. A ‘democracy’ like this is actually a kleptocracy. And that news-report in the Houston Chronicle appeared only after the 2020 ‘election’, not before it. So: it was no help to voters in preparation for the November ‘elections’.

Also on December 14th, the great investigative journalist David Sirota’s blog headlined “SCOOP: Stimulus Bill Bails Out Defense Contractors, Denies Direct Payments to Families” and reported that, “Buried in the new 525-page stimulus bill is a provision granting military contractors benefits that are being denied to workers and small businesses across the country.” He and his reporter Julia Rock opened by noting that, “Earlier this year, Republican senators slammed the idea of spending money to pay Americans not to work during the pandemic. Only a few months later, a group of GOP senators has signed onto stimulus legislation that would authorize the government to pay idle defense contractors to not work, even as those contractors rack up big profits during the pandemic. Meanwhile, the same bill excludes bipartisan provisions authorizing direct payments to millions of Americans struggling to survive.” They reported that Democratic Party leaders in Congress (especially West Virginia’s U.S. Senator Joe Manchin) were quietly working in the background in order to be able to pass this new corruption into law, and were no less corrupt than their bolder Republican colleagues were in in whoring themselves to ‘defense’ contractors — the “Military-Industrial Complex” or “MIC,” which basically writes America’s international sanctions, and other U.S. foreign policies, so as to maximize the global sales of U.S.-made military weaponry.

All of this news is “belated,” however, unless the major American ‘news’-media, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times and CNN and Fox and ABC and CBS and NBC and The Atlantic — all of which are owned and controlled by America’s fewer than 1,000 billionaires — will decide (which they never yet have done) to make a public issue out of the real issue here, which is the question of whether or not funneling public benefits through employers constitutes anything else than the corruption of any democracy and the installation of an aristocracy of the super-rich replacing that democracy of the people by a dictatorship of the aristocrats. This is a fundamental issue, and it is always being simply avoided, banned to publish. (In fact, a recent law-review article, which was titled “The ‘Small Business’ Myth of the Paycheck Protection Program”, actually defended what had happened by saying that that program, which is commonly acronymed “PPP,” had been sold to the public as being intended to protect workers in small businesses, but never was intended to do that. This article claimed that “The misinformed condemnation of large companies obscured the fact that Congress had designed a flawed program with limited ability to help small businesses.” But it wasn’t ‘misinformed’, and these weren’t merely ‘flaws’. In fact, lobbyists for huge corporations had heavily lobbied and paid Representatives and Senators to lard the entire CARES Act with huge give-aways to large corporations and to the investors in those corporations; and, as a result, Wall Street boomed even while unemployment soared. “Congress had designed a flawed program” because they were being paid to produce those “flaws” in it. Academia is, itself, often either grossly incompetent, or else part of the corruption, and therefore it should be viewed as being part of the ‘news’-media, itself — in other words: propaganda.)

Perhaps all of America’s ‘news’-media ought to be nationalized and donated to a public trust which is headed by a board of directors which consists of 100 certifiably low-income Americans who are otherwise (than their being in the lowest-wealth category) selected randomly from the general population, and who will, then, in turn, select and fire the top officials of all of the nation’s largest twenty media corporations, so as to make the news-media accurately inform the general public, instead of to continue deceiving the public in the ways that the super-rich — both liberal and conservative — collectively want the public to be deceived. Maybe that would do it. Maybe that would restore democracy, to the United States of America. Democracy is impossible without there being an accurately informed public. And, in the U.S., the public is instead systematically deceived, so as to hide from them what the billionaires of both of the nation’s political Parties want the public not to know, or not to understand. That can’t be a democracy.

In an aristocracy, everything is just a racket. Even a covid-19 relief bill is.

Setting up new a political power hub in Miami, expatriate Cuban who were supportive of the CIA- and Mafia-financed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba, established a right-wing Cuban community known as “Little Havana” in Miami. The CIA used Cuban military veterans of Batista’s armed forces Miami to recruit mercenaries for “anti-Communist” operations in Central America, Bolivia, and the Caribbean region, including the abortive 1961 “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba to unseat Fidel Castro from power and the 1980s “contra” war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

After the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza was ousted by the leftist Sandinistas in the 1979 revolution, backers of Somoza moved to South Florida, where they congregated in Miami’s “Little Managua” and joined their Cuban fellow travelers in fomenting anti-progressive political movements throughout Latin America. After Hugo Chavez came to power in Venezuela in 1999, Venezuela’s European elite, fearful that political power was vested in the mixed indigenous-European population that promoted socialist policies, packed up their bank books and moved to South Florida and formed a tightly-knit community in Doral in Miami-Dade County, later known as “Little Caracas.” Smaller in numbers when compared to the Cubans and Venezuelans, exiled Colombians, many with money and some with drug cartel connections, settled in Little Havana and Little Caracas. The main reason for the Colombian immigration was to escape the violence in Colombia caused by the drug cartels that are supported by successive pro-U.S. governments in Colombia.

When Republicans talk of Donald Trump gaining support among Florida’s Hispanic community, the are referring to the mostly white European exiles of Miami-Dade. These so-called “Hispanics,” largely devoid of the indigenous native American or Afro-Caribbean ethnic roots of their socialism-supporting countrymen, support candidates like Trump because of their nostalgia for anti-democratic and fascist caudillos like Batista, Somoza, and Marcos Pérez Jiménez of Venezuela. In Little Havana, the most hated man after Fidel Castro is President John F. Kennedy, with Barack Obama in third place. Little Havana and its counterparts, Little Managua and Little Caracas are hotbeds for far-right politics and extremist politicians.

What goes largely unreported by the U.S. “news”/infotainment complex is the overwhelming support that the Biden-Kamala Harris ticket has among South Florida’s Caribbean community of Bahamians, Jamaicans, Haitians, and others from the English-, French-, and Creole-speaking Caribbean. Harris, whose father was Jamaican, has tapped into the wellspring of support from South Florida’s and the Houston, Texas region’s tightly-knit Caribbean communities.

Trump also has very little support among the Mexican-Americans of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California. They saw the Trump administration rip babies and youngsters from the arms of their asylum-seeking parents from southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The Southwest U.S. Hispanic community will never forget the photographs of babies and young children of the mestizo and Mayan migrants being forced to live in cages in concentration camps established in the southern border region of the United States.

In many cases, it is incorrect to refer to Mayans and other indigenous asylum-seekers from southern Mexico and Central America as Latino, Latina, or Hispanic, since they are full-blooded Amerindians and only speak their native tribal tongues and are partly or totally non-conversant in the Spanish language, let alone English. What has forced these hapless people to the north and hopeful asylum are caudillo-run and CIA and drug lord-financed dictatorships in their home countries, particularly in the Northern Triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

Unlike the exiles in South Florida, who were gladly granted U.S. residency and citizenship, the mestizo and indigenous exiles of the U.S. Southwest had no country club memberships (including at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida), gated communities, and money-laundered bank accounts in Miami waiting for them in the United States. The average financially well-off migrant to Florida from Venezuela, Chile, Colombia, Panama, and Peru pays an average of around $450,000 for a four-bedroom home with large yards and swimming pools. That sort of affluence is certainly not the norm for immigrants in the American Southwest or Texas.

For many of the Hispanic Trump supporters in South Florida, they see Trump as serving in the Latin American tradition of caudillismo leadership, classism, and institutional racism, commonplace in the histories of their countries of origin but anathema to modern-era U.S. constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

Some 141 caudillos have occupied the presidential palaces of Latin American nations since their independence. Their kleptocratic and nepotistic rule, maintained by the power of the military and entrenched oligarchs, resulted in generations experiencing dictatorship rather than democratic rule. There was never a case of such a caudillo as president in the entire history of the United States, that is, until the inauguration of Trump.

The cultural traditions brought to the United States by wealthy white European exiles from Latin America has resulted in their largely being in lockstep when it comes to supporting right-wing Cuban-American Senators like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. The orders for Trump and Senators like Rubio and Cruz to push for sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have come from the wealthy exiles in Little Havana, Little Managua, and Little Caracas in Florida. For them, it is simply the trading of their votes for a U.S. foreign policy that punishes Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

The threat posed by Trump and caudillismo politics is not lost on Florida’s Black West Indian diaspora community. The addition of Jamaican-American Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket has electrified the West Indian community. Those Florida and Texas voters who have roots in Jamaica, Guyana, Belize, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, the Bahamas, Curacao, and Haiti know all-too-well what it is like to come from countries sharing land or maritime borders with Latin American nations ruled by menacing caudillos. They want no part of Trump or his caudillismo supporters in South Florida. The political traditions of West Indian Americans is one of Westminster parliamentary democracy, not one of succeeding military tyrants wearing chests full of medals, but of judges and barristers wearing the wigs seen in every British judicial court. Adding to the anti-Trump ranks in Florida are Puerto Rican residents of the state, many of whom are hurricane transplants who have witnessed their storm-ravaged U.S. commonwealth and its people repeatedly come under attack by Trump and his administration.

Working class Hispanics in Florida, unlike the wealthy Latin American expats, worry every time they hear Trump talking about serving unconstitutional third and fourth terms as president. Many of the poorer immigrants to the United States from Latin America fled dictators in their native countries and the last thing they want is to see Trump proclaiming himself as president-for-life.

On July 2nd, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order mandating the wearing of face masks across the state, whether indoors or outdoors, when six feet cannot be maintained between people. In the governor’s decree, he cited a rise in Covid cases, a rise in test positivity, and a rise in hospitalizations as justification to force people to cover their faces in public.

The move is not only a violation of the civil liberties of all Texans. Abbott may have based his executive order on inaccurate information about a “rise” in Covid cases due to the Texas State Department of Health Services changing the definition of what constitutes a “Covid case.”

Thanks goes to Collin County Judge Chris Hill for blowing the whistle on what appears to be a move in mid-May to redefine what was a “Covid” case to open the door to a massive increase – all to match the mainstream media line that a “second wave” was on the way.

In a Commissioners Court hearing for Collin County on May 18th, it was revealed that while previously the determination of a Covid “case” was a confirmed test result, the definition was suddenly changed to count “probable” cases as “cases.” At the same time, the threshold for determining “probable” was lowered to a ridiculous level.

As Judge Hill said at that May 18th meeting, “If you have a subjective fever and you have a headache and you live in Collin County, you now meet the qualifications to be a probable COVID patient. It is remarkable how low the standard is now.”

Even worse, once a “probable” case was determined based on possibly unrelated subjective criteria, up to 15 people in possible contact with that “probable” case were also listed as “probable cases.” And “probable cases” were considered cases.

Repeat that farce across Texas and is it any wonder there was a “spike” in “cases”?

Also, Governor Abbott’s claim that hospitals were being over-run by Covid patients was refuted by the Houston hospital directors themselves, who said they were nowhere near actual capacity and in fact were about the same level as they were last year.

The basis for Abbott’s unconstitutional “executive order” has been shown to be false. Will he admit his mistake?

It is encouraging to see so many local and county officials across Texas announcing they will refuse to enforce Governor Abbott’s unconstitutional face mask order. Thankfully the spirit of freedom and love of liberty is still alive in Texas.

The “second wave” is driven by propaganda. Across the country, Covid testing increased from about 150,000 to more than 700,000 per day. You can’t drive through Houston without seeing a flurry of signs advertising “Free Covid test! Results in 15 minutes!” Last week Reuters reported that tests shipped around the country by the federal government were contaminated.

Deaths from coronavirus – even the deaths “with” coronavirus rather than deaths “from” coronavirus – are down more than 90 percent since the peak in April. The decline in deaths continues. That means we are closer to the “herd immunity” that will finally kill this virus. Yet Governor Abbott and others across the country see this as a reason to lock the country back down.

ronpaulinstitute.org