Statehood for Canada: Hardly a Merger

The U.S. Constitution includes an open invitation for the accession of Canada into the U.S. as a state. The invitation was made before Canada spread across from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. So, were Canadians to seek statehood in the American union of states (i.e., the U.S.A.), they would have a good argument for Canada being split in to a few states rather than just one. This is qualitatively different than a “merger” between the two countries; the latter ideological conjecture is predicated on a category mistake. Such a mistake would say, for example, that Singapore and China are of the same genus politically even though the former is a city-state and the latter is on the (early modern) empire-scale. Just because both Singapore and China have foreign policies and are member-countries of the UN does not mean that a city-state is to be treated more generally as if it were the same as an empire. By “empire,” I am referring to China itself, rather than any territories it might have beyond mainland China. The Qing emperor Kangzi expanded mainland China to include some central Asian kingdoms, thus making China an empire (of kingdom-level/scale subunits). Similarly, the U.S., as well as the E.U., are empire-scale/level polities of (kingdom-level) polities, whereas Canada does not have enough such polities to qualify as being on the empire-scale, for an empire contains many kingdom-level polities.

The full essay is at "Statehood for Canada."

Lawbreakers at the Mexico-California Border: Appealing to Law

At the Tijuana-San Diego border between Mexico and California on November 25, 2018, a “peaceful march by Central American migrants veered out of control . . . as hundreds of people tried to evade a Mexican police blockade and run toward a giant border crossing.”[1] In response, the U.S. Government shut down the border crossing in both directions and fired tear gas to push back migrants from the border fence. The American media made much of the use of tear gas, with convenient stories from migrants of their kids having been affected. To be sure, the suffering of innocent children is horrible, so at the very least the use of gas is debatable. Yet this focus came at the expense of another on the mentality and conduct of the adult migrants, including parents, largely from Honduras.

The full essay is at "Lawbreakers at the Border: Appealing to Law."

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[1]Maya Averbuch and Elisabeth Markin, “Migrants in Tijuana Run to U.S. Border, but Fall Back in Face of Tear Gas,” The New York Times, November 26, 2018, italics added.

Mexico’s Name-Change: A United States No Longer?

Shortly before leaving office, Mexican President Felipe Canderón sent to the Mexican legislature a proposal to amend the state’s constitution by renaming the country “Mexico,” from the “United Mexican States.” His rationale was that Mexico didn’t need “a name that emulates another country and which none of us Mexicans uses on a day-to-day basis.” Indeed, the emulation evinces a category mistake in that it treats what was province in an empire, that of New Spain, as an empire.

                                   Mexico's head of state, Felipe Calderon, who proposed the name-change.  

The full essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.

Wal-Mart: Political Contributions as Bribery

In September 2005, “a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country. . . . Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: ‘There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.’”[1]

The full essay is in The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.

1. David Barstow, “Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle,” The New York Times, April 21, 2012.