BREXIT a Cautionary Tale For America

The United Kingdom just voted by a slim margin, 51.9% to 48.1%, to leave the European Union. The British exit ("BREXIT") stung world markets immediately, with an over $2 trillion plunge in stock values, with investors racing to get to "Home Base," i.e. gold, the Yen, governments bonds, etc. Major markets took the expected big hits as well, with Japan down 8.7%, Germany down 7.4%, France 8.8%, and the Euro dropping 3.8% in value amid fears of the monetary unit's stability. The hits are especially damaging because they come on the cusp of market rallies in recent days, in expectation of the UK likely remaining in the EU. These market effects are partly an overreaction. If investors hadn't rallied the markets like they did, they would not have exposed themselves too much, and feel the need to go hard in the other direction to compensate. Now, recession is an almost near certainty, and global banks have had to guarantee liquidity, The Bank of England included, across the EU to try to maintain stability.

The UK itself is reeling, obviously. London's major banks are down upwards of 30%, the British pound and sterling both plummeted 10%. Yields on 10-year bonds dropped .27%. S&P had already threatened to downgrade Britain's AAA credit rating. With the huge effects in evidence, that downgrade now appears all the more likely. And there will assuredly be interest rate cuts to come, as well as more quantitative easing, both of which will impact markets further. And this is just the beginning. Scottish First Minister and National Party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has said she will call for another referendum on Scottish independence from the UK, especially since Scottish citizens overwhelmingly supported remaining in the EU. This British betrayal will almost certainly boost the odds of a Scottish exit when the next referendum comes into play. And this is nothing compared to the possibility of more EU member countries following suit. After all, Britain was one of the anchor members of the EU, many countries became members because of the strength of Britain as a member. And if one wonders why this whole situation is a cautionary tale for America, the reason of why it happened at all is particularly important to us.

The UK Independence Party (UKIP), headed since 2010 by Nigel Farage, is a Eurosceptic wing of Britain's Conservative Party (aka the Tories) that had been applying intense pressure on David Cameron to introduce a referendum on exiting the EU. UKIP's main reasoning was immigration. The influx of immigrants has increased substantially in recent years (330,000 last year), severely straining financial resources of a UK that is still not fully recovered from the 2008 recession. Many in Britain want to be able to close the borders and curb the influx, but Britain is constrained by border regulations set and maintained by the EU. The only way to gain the ability to take control of the borders is to reestablish sovereignty, which means they needed to resign membership in the EU. That pressure was applied publicly, in the form of xenophobia, Islamophobia, nativism, racism, fear-mongering, etc. (sound familiar?) Ahead of the 2015 elections this pressure was coming to a boil. To appease UKIP voters and bolster his re-election, Cameron promised an In-or-Out referendum on remaining in the EU if he won. If he had been like most American politicians and simply turned his back on a campaign promise, the referendum would not have happened so soon. Make no mistake, it would have happened anyway, as UKIP would have seen to it that Cameron was run out of office in the next election. But there would have been more time and opportunity for something to change, for cooler heads to prevail. Instead, Cameron fulfilled his promise and introduced the referendum, splitting his party, turning supporters and friends against him, and increasing volatility in Parliament.

On June 16, 2016, Labor Party member Jo Cox was assassinated, shot 3 times and stabbed several more, as she was about to meet with constituents in Birdstall, West Yorkshire. 77-year old Bernard Kenny was stabbed trying to protect her. Cox founded and chaired Friends of Syria, a group dedicated to aiding Syrian rebels in fighting ISIS. Member countries include Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. Cox was a supporter of fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and for Britain providing safe-haven for Syrian refugees. 52-year old Thomas Mair was arrested on terrorist charges for her murder, during which witnesses said he kept shouting, "Britain first!" Upon appearing before a magistrate on June 18, Mair stated his name as, "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain."

This event punctuated the divisiveness and extreme attitudes exhibited and exacerbated by UKIP members leading up to the referendum. Cameron presumably thought winning a vote to remain in the EU to not be difficult, a drastic underestimation, otherwise he might have considered going back on his campaign promise in order to buy more time or, the smarter move, not making the promise at all. But in doing so, Cameron sealed his own fate. Just flirting with this disaster painted him as weak, and he was losing support by the week. But to enable it to such an extent not only cost them the EU, but probably Scotland as well. It's difficult to imagine a way in which Cameron could have screwed this up more. In addition to his now nonexistent future, he has virtually guaranteed defeats in future elections for anyone in Parliament who supported him, especially those who pushed him for the referendum under the presumption that winning a vote to stay in the EU would be easier to pull off with Cameron and his party in power, than if another party was in charge. Naturally, Cameron resigned, because there was really nothing else he could do. He wasn't even a lame duck, he simply became an invisible leader instantly - his credibility vanished, and his legacy will tar the British history books for the next century.

While a referendum would have likely happened at some point, what David Cameron did is an absolute cautionary tale for Americans. When an extreme wing of a party becomes powerful enough to manipulate and force the hand of politicians too weak and consumed with their own job security to stand their ground, really stupid things can happen. The xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, nativism displayed by the UKIP is not unlike what we have been seeing from the Tea Party and Donald Trump peddling to his supporters. We are not in any comparable position with the UK from a union standpoint, but we definitely have been watching the erosion of 1st Amendment, 4th Amendment, and 15th Amendment rights, states doing everything possible to circumvent 14th Amendment rights for LGBTQ, and Roe v. Wade, and politicians glorifying the fact that they flat out refuse to do their jobs - all of these pushed by the extreme wing of a major political party. There is much familiarity to see in what has happened in the UK. Just because union considerations are not something we have to deal with does not mean we are not ripe for the same type of extreme stupidity by politicians couldn't happen to us.

To a heartbroken Twitter User:

I want you to read this. It is a series of tweets from a user called supergrover (@fuzzlaw) that I compiled. This is as poignant and heartbreaking as anything you will read on the subject. I am not gay, but to the LGBTQ community, I promise you are not alone, though I imagine it's almost impossible not to feel that way often. We who support you outnumber those who don't, even if the "leadership" does not reflect that on the whole yet. It will in time, but never soon enough.

I'm an aging dyke, so I'm just going to get this out of my system: kids, y'all 35 and under, this wasn't supposed to happen to you. The generation ahead of us knocked down the wall: Stonewall. Initial visibility. Standing proud. Being out. They suffered the consequences. Backlash. Violence. The Upstairs Lounge in New Orleans. Guns fired at the places they dared to gather. Then AIDS swept in and devastated the community. Reagan and his ilk laughed at our suffering. They closed ranks. Cared for one another. Tended the dying and buried the dead. There's a reason why most 60+ gay leaders are women. See the genocide underneath the demographics. Then, the mid-90's. Anti-retroviral drugs came along. Our men started surviving. We began to flourish, stand up, stand out more strongly. Here and there, we fought for 'gay' marriage. Folks started coming out. Melissa. K.D. George. Ellen. Each was huge and life-affirming. Reveling in our newfound life and out-ness, Matthew Shepard's death cut us to the core. It was 18 years ago. 1998. As a community, we threw it down. HELL no. We didn't survive AIDS for this. We mobilized. Flexed our muscles. Change came. With every step of progress came backlash. But we pushed. And we pushed. And there weren't any Upstairs Lounges. No Matthew Shepards. We won. We won the right to marry, to have our employment rights protected, to live as fellow citizens. Fights remain, of course. But we were winning. Then, Pulse. 50 dead. 50 wounded. Babies. Kids. The ones we fought so hard to protect from the backlash. The backlash we knew all too well, but that the post Matthew Shepard generation has never known. We never wanted you to know about this. We never wanted you to experience this. It's why we fought, and fight, so hard. Yes, it's for our generation, but really...it's for you. For us, this violence is...not unexpected. We know it's possible. We've seen it. But you all...dammit, you've never had to worry about it, not collectively. We never wanted this for you. We thought we had protected you. But...clearly, the past is not even past. Welcome to being GLBTQ* in America. There are people who want us dead. And that's no exaggeration. And it's not just the nuts with the guns. It's the politicians who sacrifice us on the altar of hateful rhetoric to score political points. It's the churches that won't ordain us, won't celebrate us, who insist on continuing to 'love the sinner and hate the sin". It's the nonsensical fight over who can use which bathrooms. The inability of Congressmen to mention that it was GLBTQ* people who died. It's the families who turn GLBTQ* teenagers on to the street instead of just fucking loving them. Schools who expel them. It's every bully who teases and effinite boy and harasses a masculine girl. Every man who tells a lesbian she just needs the 'right dick'. It permeates our society. It is SO much better than it was, yet remains SO awful. It's why our generation kept fighting, and keeps fighting. But it's time for our generation to teach the next. Welcome to the fight for your lives, kids. We're with you. We'll guide you. We'll teach you everything we know. We'll stand on the front lines until you can do it. We'll be the cannonfodder. You're not alone. But the college-environment-creating-change-kumbaya-all-is-well-everyone-has-to-bow-to-what-we-say approach isn't reality. The world is not a safe space, and it only gets safer when you fight like hell for it. We weren't given the spaces we have. It's a fight. So get prepared. Read your history. Talk to your elders. Listen, and learn. And show up. We need you. Your energy and ideas. We'd still take a bullet for you, literally, and figuratively. You were just never supposed to have to take a bullet for us. RIP, my nieces and nephews and sons and daughters in Orlando. I'm so sorry we didn't protect you.

To supergrover (@fuzzlaw) :
This was not your fault. It is everyone's fault. There is failure at every juncture. We don't protect everyone in our society, only those we don't deem "less than." We continually exercise our rights at the expense of the rights of others, a direct violation of the one cardinal condition of having those very rights. Our nation's leaders do it daily, and often with the support of the Supreme Court. This is not your failure - it is systemic failure. Individually, we care very deeply. But as a country, we do not care one bit. Our elections are a clear indication of this. Voters continually re-elect bigoted and corrupt politicians who have rigged the system to their benefit, at the expense of the country, in general, and of the people most in need of protection, specifically. We have a segment of the citizenry who wants to exploit their rights the way the politicians do - so they use "freedom of religion" as a backdrop for discrimination. They tout the 2nd Amendment as the backdrop for endless and militaristic armament, walking through towns with assault-style weapons slung from their shoulders to scare and intimidate people, just praying - practically daring - someone to confront them and gives them a reason to engage their weapon.

You live in a country that is not emotionally stable. And the nation's leadership operates in a manner that keeps people there. We try to improve things, we try to engage people's hearts, so that they might see who the people are that they actually hurt, rather than the demographic. And you plug along, and you see small indications of improvement, you think things are starting to take on an exponential pace... and then you watch someone like Donald Trump take over the Republican party. And you realize the improvements are just a facade. That, given a bigoted presidential candidate to rally around, the id of the hateful segment of this country races to take over the spotlight.

So please, superuser, do not carry this cataclysm on your shoulders. This country was supposed to protect these victims. You are part of why improvements have occurred all. And they will continue to because, as I said, we who support you outnumber those who don't. As much as your heart is broken, you are not responsible for what happened. This country is. And we will continue to try to wrestle power away from those whom thrive on our instability and feed the hateful id that festers just below, and sometimes above, the surface. I promise. You are not alone.

Guns Are a Problem, But Not THE Problem

With the continued frequency of mass shootings across the country, the most recent being the attack on the Orlando night club Pulse, with at least 49 dead and another 53 injured, the discussion, as expected, has come around again to gun control. Gun control advocates think that these mass shootings would go away, if only better regulations were in place. Opponents say it's not the guns, it's the people who use them. Advocates say the countries around the world who have very few, if any, gun fatalities in a given year is because guns are either banned or heavily restricted or regulated in those countries. They would be correct, but that doesn't settle every issue. And in this country, it's not so much about rights as it is politics.

Lobby organizations like the NRA would have you believe that the muskets available to citizens in the early years of the country and its Constitution easily translate to the military-style weapons and handguns of today. It's an idiotic premise rooted in the fact that the Founders are no longer available to confirm or deny it. The reason we have so many amendments in the first place is because the Founders knew things might change with the times, and so a mechanism needed to be in place to update the Constitution if the changes with the times were substantial enough to conflict with the intentions of laws previously written. One might wonder if the Second Amendment, as written, would still exist today, if the Founders had lived long enough to see the state of weaponry evolve, as well as the conflicting interpretations of "a well-regulated militia..." But since that is not possible, we are left with NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre masturbatorily pontificating about what the Founders really meant when they wrote the 2nd Amendment, while Charleton Heston's "cold, dead hands" statement at the NRA convention in 2000 practically had the membership cheering wildly to communal orgasmic release.

What is lost in all of this is the practicality of regulation. A big reason regulation is impractical right now is because our government does not address the black market. We only deal with illegal weapons when they interfere with the weapons the government themselves are dealing. We supply weapons to dictatorship countries, to guerrilla militias and revolutionaries. And as long as no one messes with what we do with weapons, we do very little to stop it. So our black markets continue to thrive, the government doesn't destroy weapons caches, nay, they raid them and supply them to criminal enterprises to "track" illegal weapons movement, e.g. Fast and Furious, and then sit back shocked and dismayed to hear those weapons have been killing our border guards, as if it's a complete surprise that Mexican cartels and coyotes would do such a thing. And this is the real problem: If the government is, itself, a supplier of illegal weapons, from where do they get the nerve to talk about gun regulations?

First and foremost, deal with the illegal weapons trade and black markets. Regulations on guns will not work if there is a plethora of places to get them. Regardless of what Wayne LaPierre says, I don't think most gun owners have a problem with regulations. They get their guns through legal channels and protocols anyway. And as long as they can get what they need, regulations are fine, so long as the criminals being targeted can't still get them without effort. If they can, then you are just making regulations for the sake of making regulations - THAT they have a serious problem with. So if the government takes the illegal trade seriously, instead of being the traders, people will take regulations seriously. To that end, here are the regulations that I believe should be in place, if we are ever to get to that point:

• Background checks at all purchase venues, including online. This should include criminal at all levels. It should also include all available psych records, such as Baker Act or any law enforcement cases involving psychological issues. The system should know if someone has psychological issues, even those not law enforcement related, but we have to create a system that secures that information to HIPAA guidelines so that doctors and hospitals will be willing to follow a regulation that requires them to put a patient's name into the system so they can't buy a gun. And it must be a closed system, ONLY accessible for weapons checks.

• Require a weapons license, just like a driver's license. Pass a written test that shows you know the laws regarding what you can and cannot do with your weapon, and a physical test that shows you know how to handle a weapon. If you do this once, you never have to do it again, the license follows you for life as proof of weapons competency, unless you are convicted of a crime that revokes the right to have a weapons license.

• Just like a vehicle, guns should come with a title of purchase. You should have to notify the registry agency of a gun sale by turning in a transfer of title, a process that should be streamlined to be handled online. You should be required to confirm that you sold the gun to a licensed purchaser, and provide the purchaser's name. The agency then contacts the purchaser via encrypted email to confirm the purchase and transfer of ownership. This information would be available to law enforcement, as a means of absolving the previous owner of any connection to, or responsibility for, any crimes committed with that weapon after the date of transfer, unless it can be proven that the weapon was reacquired by the previous owner without notification.

• All NFA regulations already in effect, as well as those involving Title II weapons. Miltary-style design weapons, such as the AR-15, should be added to the Title II list. I know the backlash here. But the reality is that people focus on the rifles being "semi-automatic" as the problem. That is a red herring argument. Most guns are semi-automatic these days, including most handguns. The real problem with weapons like the AR-15 is the power and range. Handguns, with their short barrels, do not have the effective range of military-style rifles. That's the exact reason the military uses such weapons in the first place. Even a hunting rifle with the same caliber ammunition is typically not carrying a magazine that can hold up to 100 rounds. The magazine capacity, combined with the effective range, combined with the semi-automatic capability typical in most weapons nowadays, are why civilians should not have access to them. This is not an unprecedented philosophy. We banned civilian access to machine guns, like the M16, in the 1980s. Well, the AR-15 is an M16. It's just been stripped of certain features, like selective fire (the ability to switch between semi-automatic, fully-automatic, and burst fire), so manufacturers could sell the weapon to civilians. And AR-15s were originally banned in Bill Clinton's Assault Weapons Ban in 1994. The weapons only became legal because the ban expired in 2004. So this is not a revolutionary argument. These are military weapons, and no civilian has a justifiable reason to have them. If the weapon, and all iterations of the kind, are added to the Title II list, there is no expiration.

These are just the basics. Even with these in place, we still have no way of guaranteeing the emotional capability of trained and licensed gun owners to react properly, to know when and when not to pull their weapon, to hold fire to protect innocent people from getting hurt instead of opening fire with adrenaline feeding it (the "cowboy effect"). We need to know that the people who buy weapons know how to use them, and know the laws governing them. And we need to know that weapons are not being bought and sold at will with no oversight as to who has them. Gun owners like to point to mental issues being addressed. But if we have no mechanism for knowing if someone has sold their weapon to someone with mental issues, it becomes a moot point.

And no matter what Wayne LaPierre says, no one is coming for your guns. This has been a common tactic by the gun lobby and manufacturers to stoke fear of government-turning-Gestapo, and they reap huge power and profits from such fear. Profits from gun sales exploded when Obama was elected president, because the race for your guns was on, and just a matter of when, not if. President Obama has never indicated, or even implied, that such a confiscation was even considered, let alone planned. And no president going forward will either, there are simply too many guns out there for that to be practical. But if the black market can be dealt with, most gun owners would not have a problem with common sense regulation. Having said that, you do not get to claim a standard that all law abiders who respect their weapons would already follow, yet leave the rest of it open to the criminals. And when the government itself feeds the criminal market, there is no respect to be had with the "do as I say, not as I do" argument.