Revolutionize around Common Sense

Dear Mr. President (On the Subject of Afghanistan)

2009-12-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

Mr. President,

I am writing today to you today to express great concern and distress over your announcement of the new strategy for the Afghanistan war on this next Tuesday. It has been indicated in many news reports that you are planning to announce an escalation of the Afghanistan war, with up to 40,000 additional American troops being sent to that country. Now, admittedly, I am young (17 years old) and you are older (and the President) and therefore have the benefit of being wiser in the ways of the world. Nonetheless, I really think that this escalation of the Afghanistan war is an unwise decision to make, a decision which may compromise the success of your Presidency.

My greatest qualm with this Afghanistan escalation is that Afghanistan may become America's next Vietnam. Lyndon B. Johnson would probably be considered one of America's great presidents today if he had not made the decision to escalate the Vietnam War. I would certainly hate for your legacy to be compromised by an unpopular, endless, quagmire war just as Lyndon B. Johnson's legacy was. I can say, without a single doubt in my mind, that I would vote for you in 2012 if you didn't escalate this war and instead went about removing American forces from that country as swiftly as would be possible and prudent.

Mr. President, I don't really see what good end could be accomplished by American forces remaining there in harm's way. It seems to me that, just like Vietnam, Afghanistan is a war which can never be won. It will be, as Dexter Filkins called it, "the forever war". As far as I can discern, we are fighting terrorism in Afghanistan. Since terrorism has been with humanity from the beginning and with be with us 'til the end, and since terrorism is ingrained as a part of human nature which cannot be destroyed by any number of determined guns and armies, we will never be able to achieve a victory in Afghanistan if to fight and destroy the terrorists there is truly our goal. It seems to me that the only thing that can be done with the terrorists in Afghanistan is to contain them for an indefinite amount of time spanning infinitely off into the future, and, as I'm sure you will admit, that is not a feasible option. I suppose that is why you are attempting to lessen the corruption and uselessness of the Afghanistan government: you hope that someday they may take over counter-terrorism activities in their own country, and that the United States will no longer have to do it. But, Mr. President, please consider that the United States’s plan to get out of the Iraq war was to strengthen the Iraqi government and the Iraqi army over time, until the Iraqis could keep order themselves---and we are most certainly not withdrawn from that war yet. I'm afraid that the same fate may come to the Afghanistan war: indefinite guidelines for withdrawal spanning off into a distant future. If the goal is to stabilize the country of Afghanistan and its government, what tangible goals could there be to demonstrate the completion of this task? Are there any measurements of stability which are not purely abstract, considering that the stability of a country and of a government is an abstract concept? And are we to presume that we can stabilize a volatile Middle Eastern country which has been unstable and plagued by rarely-ceasing warfare and violence for the past several centuries? If you put these three questions to yourself, there may be created in your heart some creeping doubt about this planned escalation.

Mr. President, as I am sure that you well know, the United States army is already strained and over-stretched by these two ongoing wars; I don't think that the military should be further strained by an Afghanistan escalation. Many soldiers have been killed and many have been irreparably mentally or physically damaged. It is a terrible thing for our country that so many young people should be returning home, physically or mentally traumatized, from the ravages of war. A certain cousin-in-law of mine returned home from his tours of duty in Afghanistan so mentally disturbed that he ended up slitting his own wrists in an attempt to kill himself. He is now, fortunately, on some medication. And I am sure that my cousin-in-law is not unique in this sort of thing; I am sure that it's widespread in veterans across the country. Mr. President, it must be a great moral dilemma for you to contemplate having to send more of these young men and women off to war with the looming threat of their being killed or seriously injured, mentally or physically. It must create a terrible moral dilemma for you, just as it did for Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman and all of our other wartime Presidents, to remember that the buck ultimately stops at your desk; that it is you who will ultimately be responsible for further deaths and maimings of the young people in America's armed forces. I certainly hope that this moral dilemma will weigh heavily in your decision and in your announcement on this next Tuesday.

Mr. President, though I'm sure that you have already considered this, I would like to mention one last thing to you---one last thing which makes your indicated escalation of the Afghanistan war all the more distressing to me. Our presence in these Middle Eastern countries, our military involvement there, actually creates more terrorists than it destroys, for terrorist organizations can use the American presence (perceived as imperialistic, over-reaching, and infringing on the sovereignty of Middle Eastern peoples) as a recruiting tool. Our continued presence in Afghanistan is making us less safe, not more so; it is creating terrorists faster than we can destroy them. The National Intelligence Estimate of a couple years ago said as much, and I hope that you weigh this knowledge when making your decision on the Afghanistan war.

Mr. President, now that I have informed you of my personal viewpoint on the Afghanistan war, perhaps you can understand my great distress and concern upon hearing that it is a very likely thing that you will escalate this war. I know that my mother, my father, my grandparents, one of my uncles, and a few of my cousins feel quite the same way as I do about this: they don't want an escalation; they want us to commence withdrawal as soon as is possible. They don't believe that this war is a winnable war, and therefore see no point in escalating it. They, as Democrats or progressive Independents all, don't wish to see your presidential legacy compromised by such a war. They don't wish to see more soldiers killed and maimed, the American military more greatly strained, and at the same time more terrorists created. Mr. President, Harry Truman had a lot of guts; he refused to escalate the Korean War despite repeated requests from General Douglas MacArthur that Truman do so, by bombing the mainland of China. Harry Truman refused to escalate, fired the very popular General MacArthur, and was vilified at the time for it. However, today, Harry Truman is considered to be one of America's near-great Presidents. Truman stuck to his guns and his principles, and today he is honored for it. Truman considered what the reckless MacArthur did not: that bombing mainland China and widening the scope of the Korean War very well could have initiated a nuclear confrontation with Communist Russia and a World War Three. Mr. President, whatever your decision on Afghanistan is on this next Tuesday, I hope that in making it you will stick to your guns and stay true to your principles. Trust in your principles, your personal inclinations and beliefs, rather than your "expert" military advisers. Expert military advisers navigated John F. Kennedy's Administration into the embarrassing "Bay of Pigs" Fiasco; and Kennedy was wary of these military advisers after that, which perhaps may have given him greater success in diffusing the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Several expert military advisers in Kennedy’s Executive Committee wished to bomb the Russian missile sites in Cuba, which likely would have resulted in a devastating, chain-reaction nuclear war with Russia.) "Expert" military advisers came up with the "domino theory", which kept us in Vietnam for a number of long years; and in the end the whole theory was a flop and came to nothing. So, Mr. President, please don't necessarily trust the "expert" theories; trust in yourself and do what you think is right. I implore you, whatever your decision on Afghanistan, whether it be escalation or withdrawal or monotony, to at the very least stick to your principles and do what you think is right.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Cable

Some of the most serious problems facing 21st century America

2009-12-01T11:59:00.000-08:00

As we come to the end of this first decade of the 21st century, we may look back with gladness at all humanity has thus far accomplished, but we also may look forward with determination at the many problems which have yet to be faced down. Of the most serious problems facing the United States of America as we progress into the 21st century, I have chosen to discuss today those which I consider most pressing. These problems are: the Environment, Poverty, and Education. Each of these general problems contains more specific issues. Environmental problems include global warming, the use of dirty and polluting sources of fuel such as oil or coal, and strip-mining. Problems connected with poverty include the widening gulf of inequality between the rich and the poor, an educational system which could be greatly improved, and lack of a living wage and adequate healthcare. Problems connected with the United States’s educational system are: poverty, lack of quality education, poor graduation rates, failure to instill intellectual curiosity, failure to instill a sense of civic responsibility, and lack of access to higher education. These three main issues, which we in the 21st century have been faced with to solve, are rather complex and sometimes interconnected. In my investigation of these problems, I will begin with the beginning: humankind’s haven, mother earth.

The most pressing problem presently facing earth’s environment is global warming. Global warming is caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases can be added to the atmosphere by humanity’s automobiles and factories in quantities far greater than nature by itself could produce. These gases thicken earth’s atmosphere, and this thicker atmosphere causes more of the sun’s energy to be trapped within the atmosphere of the earth. As more of the sun’s energy becomes trapped, the earth heats up and its climate changes from colder to warmer. There has been speculation that a change in climate from warmer to colder is what caused the extinction of the cold-blooded dinosaurs and led to the rise of the warm-blooded mammals. What effect could this latest change in climate, produced by man-made global warming, have upon human beings?

The answer is not a pleasant one. Warmer temperatures could cause the great expanses of ice in Antarctica and in Greenland to melt. A massive influx of fresh water into earth’s oceans would certainly raise the water level of these oceans, and as a result many lands that human beings inhabit could become flooded by rising water. The millions of refugees that escape the floods will have to pour into the surrounding lands, causing a refugee crisis in many countries. The flooding will affect lands around the world, from southern Florida and New York City to Japan and southeastern Asia. Other effects of global warming are supposed to be stronger and more frequent hurricanes and tropical storms, an expansion of tropical diseases, an extremely unequal distribution of water (with some places suffering from devastating droughts and others from massive flooding), and the retreat of glaciers.

Obviously, global warming is a problem of utmost importance. It threatens the earth itself and calls into question the assumption that earth will be livable in the future. To prevent global warming from getting overly out of hand, action needs to be taken by governments and by ordinary citizens to find solutions. The best place to look to find solutions is at the causes. It seems to me that global warming is predominantly caused by human pollution and by human overpopulation of the earth. Overpopulation of the earth can be dealt with in a few ways, some of which are within human control and some of which are not. Pandemics of diseases, which can often be outside of mankind’s control, are a rather terrifying solution to overpopulation. Another solution is the limiting, by law, of how many children each person can have. Communist China, which is already plagued by over-crowding, has limits in place to control its population growth. However, the problem with this solution is that it is not compatible with the ideals of liberty and freedom espoused by western democracies. But something must be done to limit the uncontrolled growth of human beings, or we will eventually smother the planet and ourselves. A greater population of earth has created a greater amount of pollution. This pollution is the primary cause of global warming (and many other environmental problems). Some of the ways in which pollution could be lessened are: limiting the population of the earth, instituting a “carbon tax” to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, increasing mileage standards for polluting automobiles, increasing usage of clean electric cars, and developing clean and renewable sources of fuel such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

The issue of energy is intricately connected with the environmental issue. Coal, oil, and other fuels that create hazardous pollutants and greenhouse gases have the ability to destroy our environment, in addition to being an unstable source of fuel which we must import and which we must depend upon erratic Middle Eastern countries for. The use of coal and oil as our primary sources of energy threaten the United States’s national security in more ways than one. Over the next few decades of this 21st century, it will be necessary for the United States to transition to cleaner and more stable fuels. Thousands of wind mills will have to be constructed in North Dakota, in Texas, in Kansas, and in other windy states across the nation. Solar collectors and solar cells can be made more efficient and economical so that buildings and homes across the nation can be powered by almost unlimited energy from the sun. In Iceland, almost 80 percent of the homes get their heat and hot water directly from hot springs and geysers; can’t the United States work to increase its use of the geothermal heat of the earth? There are many clean options for energy and yet we continue to use the fossil fuels which may come to endanger our very existence. Despite an abundance of other options, mankind continues abusing its home planet with dirty pollutants.

Aside from pollutants and their effects (among these being global warming), a further manifestation of human abuses of planet earth is strip-mining, in which human beings plunder the earth for its precious resources, sacrificing natural beauty in the process. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., described the problem of strip-mining as an “Appalachian Apocalypse” because it primarily affects the mountainous regions of Appalachia, where there are plenty of resources to mine from the fruitful mountains. I have seen the strip-mining that takes place in East Tennessee, where in some places large parts of mountains are torn away; and the land of East Tennessee is not unique in that respect. Not only does strip mining tear apart the natural beauty of America’s mountains, it also impoverishes the people of Appalachia, who are having significant resources removed from them when strip-mining occurs. Mining companies and corporations come to Appalachia, strip away the resources, and then take these resources to be used in another part of the country. That is how things have been for decades, ever since the commencement of the Industrial Age. I think that (along with global warming and polluting forms of energy) strip-mining, and other types of wrongful exploitation of earth’s natural resources and wrongful destruction of earth’s natural beauty in general, is another problem to be solved during the 21st century.

Of course, if environmental problems are not solved and the earth is destroyed by global warming and human pollution, then every other problem that I discuss here will become absolutely irrelevant. No one would have to worry about those living in poverty and despair if there was no one living. As it is presently, there is plenty of worrying to be done about the approximately 37 million people who are living in poverty in the United States. 37 million people are about 12 percent of the entire population. Though no nation can ever fully eradicate the scourge of poverty from its shores, efforts can be made to lessen the terrible plight of those living a substandard economic existence in one of the richest countries on earth. As Robert F. Kennedy said, “Where there is plenty, poverty is evil.” We, as Americans living in a materially-rich country, have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate than ourselves. The poverty situation in the United States begs for an answer to two questions. Firstly, how can both excessive economic extravagance and grinding poverty co-exist under this same national roof? And, secondly, how can those living in poverty be helped by the better-off segments of the population?

Excessive riches and exhausted poverty co-exist in the United States due to the widening gulf of inequality between the rich and the poor. In the United States, the economic inequality, or the unequal distribution of wealth, is startling. According to inequality.org and the Economic Policy Institute, “The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent.” Additionally, the top 10% of the people in the United States own 71% of the wealth. That is a striking inequality and indicates the level of concentrated wealth in the United States. And economic inequality always leads to political inequality, due to the power that money has in our government. Inequality compounds upon itself; to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., inequality anywhere is a threat to equality everywhere. What can be done by those living in the 21st century to break up this dense concentration of wealth and power? Since I’m not a candidate for political office, I’m not afraid to suggest that perhaps the richest members of the population should have a significantly higher tax burden than other, relatively-poor members of the population and a higher tax burden than what they have presently. But, the focus of tackling economic inequality should not be bringing down the rich but rather bringing up the poor.

And how do we improve the conditions of our nation’s poor? Again, we need not look any further than the causes for the solutions to this problem. One of the causes of poverty is that the United States’s minimum wage is at such an insufficient level that those earning this wage can’t live off of it. The Democrats have, in the past five years, passed legislation to increase the minimum wage to $6.55 per hour. Despite this, the minimum wage today has less value than the minimum wage decades ago, and, despite this, you can’t live off of the minimum wage. The cost of housing, transportation, food, clothes, and other necessities in life is just too much. If you work at the minimum wage level 40 hours each week, and if you work 365 days in a year (an impossible number), basic math tells you that you’ll still only be making $13,624 each year. As a solution to this problem, the United States could institute a “living wage” (to replace the minimum wage), which would be certified by the Treasury Department that people can live off of it and not live in poverty. The probable level of an hourly living wage would be $12 per hour.

Another cause of poverty in the United States is lack of a sufficient healthcare system.
If a person is not provided with healthcare by their employer, then that can be extremely detrimental to themselves and their family. Lacking healthcare, Americans can become saddled with huge medical costs, aiding the establishment of poverty. As a solution to this problem, it could be mandated by the government that businesses must provide healthcare and all other such benefits for their workers, but that would be saddling businesses with a cost that would make them less competitive in the world. Perhaps a better solution would be a single-payer, universal healthcare system—provided by the government to protect its citizens and its industry, and extending benefits to all areas of health, from eyeglasses to dental.

However, the most important cause of poverty, even more than lack of a living wage or lack of decent healthcare, is lack of opportunity. Opportunity is furnished upon the population by its educational system. And the United States’s educational system, in many areas, is sorely lacking in both the quality of the education and in the quantity of students which graduate from this educational system. As for the quality of education, in some areas it is questionable. While visiting the state of Kentucky in August 2008, I observed a local newspaper article that stated that only 6 percent of Knox County high school seniors were prepared for college-level courses, and that only 17 percent of high school seniors statewide were prepared for college-level courses. That is a poor reflection upon the educational system of the state of Kentucky, for one, and I doubt that Kentucky would be unique in this matter. As for the quantity of students graduating from high school, in some areas these figures are very poor as well. In my home state of Georgia this year, there was a 77 percent high school graduation rate, one of the worst graduation rates in the nation. Consider the other 23 percent of Georgian young adults who failed to graduate from high school. Consider the other students across the nation who fail to graduate from high school. They are condemned to a substandard economic existence. High school drop-outs can only get jobs at McDonald’s or as ditch-diggers but not much anywhere else in this modern world of technology and computerized service industries whose need is skilled workers.

Education is important not only in the realm of economic opportunity and the attainment of jobs. An enlightened citizenry is essential to the continued existence of a democracy and the continued existence of liberty. Only an enlightened population can set about protecting their liberties from abuses by usurping Presidents and acquiescent Congresses (or usurping Congresses and acquiescent Presidents). As Thomas Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and what never will be.”
The primary means of enlightening the citizenry is through education. In our educational system, there is not enough emphasis on civics and on the responsibilities of the citizen-student to safeguard their liberties and participate in their government. To remedy this, I think that it would be wise for civics classes to be mandated as a part of the curriculum in elementary school, middle school, and high school.

But education is not meant to simply prepare citizens for jobs or prepare them to protect their liberties; it is meant to teach citizens how to learn, how to be curious, how to think for themselves, how to investigate and question theories and ideas, both old and new. As John Adams said, “There are two types of education. One should teach us how to make a living, and the other how to live.” Unfortunately, it seems to me, the United States’s education system has been fairly successful in the former type of education but has failed miserably in the latter type of education, which is the most important type of all.

In his 1996 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, Carl Sagan writes of the difference he sees between first-grade classes and twelfth-grade classes in the American education system: “[First-grade students are] curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm… But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize ‘facts’. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts, has gone out of them. They’ve lost much wonder and gained very little skepticism…” What has happened in between the fifth grade and the twelfth grade? In between, I think that the natural curiosity of the student (however much there was to begin with would vary with each individual) was stamped upon by drudging rote memorizations of facts and figures, sacrificing intellectual curiosity for teaching to the narrow confines of a test or various tests. Teaching students how to think and how to question is sacrificed in favor of teaching the student to accept a group of repetitious facts which will help them improve their test scores.

Christopher Hedges, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, briefly criticized the standardized test system in a recent book of his. Hedges wrote that, after his son got a critical reading score on the SAT that was less than they had hoped for, he hired a professional SAT tutor for his son. Hedges writes, “The tutor told my son things like, ‘stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.’ [Hedges’s son’s] reading score went up 130 points…Had he somehow become smarter thanks to the tutoring? Was he suddenly a better reader because he could quickly regurgitate a passage rather than think about it or critique it? ... Is it really a smart, effective measurement of intelligence to gauge how students read and answer narrowly selected multiple-choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over them?” In other words, Hedges was criticizing the tests (and furthermore the education system, which focuses on preparation for the tests) for the fact that they did not really allow for any intellectual curiosity or thinking for oneself and instead focused upon regurgitation of facts and figures.

Thus, the major problems that I see in the high school education are poor graduation rates in some areas, poor educational quality in some areas, and failure to promote civic responsibility, and failure to promote intellectual curiosity and thinking for oneself. As for college education, the major problem seems to be lack of access to that higher level of education. The main barrier for most high school graduates upon attempting to gain a college education is, naturally, the high level of expenses that come with tuition, books, and lodging. The high cost of college can make it impossible for poorer students to achieve a college education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just 27 percent of adults age 25 and over had a college degree in 2003. To promote college attendance, some states have instituted their own educational scholarships funded by the state lottery. The most notable of these states is Georgia, who provides the HOPE scholarship to all students with a grade point average of 3.0 or higher. This scholarship pays the tuition for the Georgian students’ college, if the college is located within the state of Georgia. Tennessee is also experimenting with a similar system. The question is, why can’t a nationwide HOPE scholarship, or something similar to it, be adopted by the federal government? This would increase access to college education for the students who maintained a decent grade point average in high school, and this would help to improve the general condition of the United States as a whole.

Another solution to increase college access and graduation can be found in the workings of the United States military. A distant cousin of mine recently joined the military just so that he could attain the college education which he would have otherwise been unable to afford. The military, in return for the service, will pay for the soldier’s college education. The question is, why can’t a similar national program of public service be founded where there is no risk of getting killed in some Middle Eastern country thousands of miles from our shores? Participants would enlist in the service of the United States government, in programs where the participants would do many of things that the TVA and PWA and other public works programs used to do during the Great Depression (such as planting trees, building infrastructure, restoring monuments, etc.). In return for their public service (spanning a certain number of months), the participants in this program could then have their college education paid for by the United States government. To achieve funding for this program, other aspects of the federal budget will have to be cut. I’m not sorry to say that the funding for war and for armaments will likely have to be reduced from its present bloated state.

A mention of the highest level of education (college) ought to be followed by a mention of the lowest level of education: pre-school. There is an excellent government program, created by Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, which is meant to give low-income children a “Head Start” on their education. This is an honorable goal. During the 21st century, to further aid our educational system and increase the enlightenment of our population, funding for this “Head Start” program ought to be increased and access to this program considerably expanded.

In the United States during the 21st century, we need to improve both the quality of education and the quantity of people whom education is successfully distributed among. We need to use the educational system to instill intellectual curiosity in American citizens rather than simply instilling in them a grudging respect for rote memorizations of various facts and figures that they will encounter on a test. We need increased access to college education for any American student who has the drive, the determination, and the grades to make it into college. Education in the United States is a complex problem, and, in this 21st century, Americans are going to have to grope for innovative solutions. Some of these future solutions (aside from those that I have already mentioned) may be: increasing federal funding to education, increasing the salaries of teachers, and building more schools so that classes may be of smaller sizes. However, it is beyond my ability to predict the greatest innovations in the future of education.

Now I have discussed some of the astounding problems facing the citizens of the United States as we enter and make ourselves comfortable in the 21st century: (A) the environment, global warming, human pollution and the necessity of human restraint and reform, exploitation of the earth’s natural resources and destruction of the earth’s natural beauty; (B) the terrible condition of poverty which has been shackles upon the bodies and souls of human beings ever since they first began their existence thousands of years ago; and (C) the educational system which fails to instill a sense of civic participation in students, fails to instill a sense of curiosity in students, condemns a significant percentage of students to a substandard economic existence, and is not at its higher levels fully accessible to American students.

The question that ought to be put to us living in the 21st century is: Will we be able to surmount all of these difficult obstacles, for the sake of the survival and of the physical and intellectual well-being of future generations? Personally, I’m an optimist. And I have an optimistic theory about what will occur in the United States during the 21st century. In the American generation that lived immediately after the turbulent events of the Great Depression and of World War II, there was a sense of their living in a post-heroic generation. I am sure that the generation living immediately after the Civil War, and the generation living immediately after the American Revolutionary War, would have felt much the same way: with an acute feeling of living in a post-heroic generation. Eighty-four years passed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the start of the Civil War. Eighty-one years passed between the time of the start of the Civil War and the time of the start of World War II. Approximately every eighty years, a heroic generation of Americans has come up against and overcome the greatest obstacles that have yet faced the United States. It seems to me that, after the passage of this decade spanning 2009 to 2019, America’s next heroic generation is due to appear. What challenges that generation shall have to face, I do not know; it may be some of the problems which I have noted here, or it may not be. But, whatever the challenges, that generation must rise to the occasion, just as their forefathers did eighty or one-hundred-and-sixty or two-hundred-and-forty years ago, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of future generations existing in the 21st century and onwards, through all time.

Egalitarianism

2009-02-12T21:15:00.000-08:00

The Declaration of Independence states that "all men are created equal." But what happens after these people are created? Are they still provided with equal opportunities to attain the "inalienable rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? Egalitarians are individuals who are devoted to the proposition of keeping men (and women) equal long after their creation. There are various types of egalitarianism addressing different types of inequalities. It seems to me that there are a number of significant inequalities in our society today. Four types of inequalities which I consider to be apparent in the United States are economic, political, civil, and social inequalities.

In the United States, the economic inequality, or the unequal distribution of wealth, is startling. According to inequality.org and the Economic Policy Institute, "The richest one percent of U.S. households now owns 34.3 percent of the nation's private wealth, more than the combined wealth of the bottom 90 percent." The top 10% of the people in the United States own 71% of the wealth. That is a striking inequality and indicates the level of concentrated wealth and power in the United States.

Economic egalitarianism is based on the principle that each and every person in a society has equal standing and equal opportunity in the realm of economic wealth and power. In a more egalitarian society, the strikingly unequal distribution of wealth seen in our society, with an enormous amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of a very small minority of the population, would be much lessened. The poor would be helped and made richer, and the rich individuals and entities would still remain very well-off but not to the point of the present ludicrous concentration of opulence. The key, though, here is not to target the rich but to extend a hand to pull up and out those who are currently suffering from poverty, desolation, and despair. In an egalitarian society, no one would be poor to the point of desolation, and no one would be rich to the point of disgusting opulence, monopolizing a huge amount of the resources of society. I think that increasing economic equality will lead to a more generally healthy economy and nation (a greater number of people will be happy and content with money to save and spend); that furthering the cause of economic egalitarianism will help to eliminate both poverty and severe concentration of wealth and power.

Economic inequality leads to political inequality, the second type of inequality that I mentioned. I say this for two reasons: (1) the ones who can afford to donate the most money to political campaigns achieve the most influence in the government; and (2) political and financial elites are often the same people because of the connection between money and politics (and the need for millions of dollars to win an election), so financial elites often get elected to political office. Consequently, the wealthy and the corporations achieve greater influence in our government than the masses of the people. That is an example of political inequality, the disproportionate and unequal distribution of power.

Political egalitarianism is based on the principle that each and every citizen in a society has equal political power and influence. This indicates that, in a more egalitarian society, direct democracy, in which each citizen has just one vote, would be used. The United States is not a direct democracy. First of all, it uses an "electoral college" rather than a national popular vote to determine its President of the United States, and secondly, it is an indirect democracy in the way that the citizens elect representatives who will make policy decisions for them (instead of the citizens directly making policy decisions themselves with such a proposal as the National Initiative for Democracy). I think that furthering the cause of political egalitarianism will do much to further this grand experiment of democracy in human governance that our forefathers embarked upon centuries ago.

But, as for the present, high-minded ideals give way to cold reality. Recollect the statistic that I quoted previously, that a mere 10% of the people in this nation control the vast majority, 71%, of the wealth. The bottom 90% only owns 29% of the wealth. And, as economic inequality breeds political inequality, so this bottom 90% mass of the citizenry has greatly lessened influence in the government and the wealthiest 10% of citizens and corporations have greatly increased, although decidedly undemocratic influence. This disparity in the influences of particular groups upon the government, I believe, makes it so that the priorities in government are skewed and wrongly organized. The civil and social rights of the People are neglected and destroyed, while the rights of corporations are closely guarded. I will provide a recent example of this. Last year, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2008 was passed by a Democratic Congress. This bill provided immunity for telecommunications companies which helped the National Security Agency and the government spy on telephone conversations. The bill ignored the civil liberties of working people while improving the civil liberties of corporations. One of these telecommunications corporations granted immunity by the FISA bill passed in Congress was AT&T; a couple weeks later, should it have been any surprise when the AT&T logo was emblazoned on the official bag of the Democratic National Convention? AT&T was one of the convention's corporate sponsors. The people within the government, using the system of government itself, have compromised individual liberty in favor of corporate liberty, and that is unacceptable, and all due to the influence of rich corporations upon the government. Corruption ensues. Money is power, and power corrupts, and so therefore money corrupts. Particularly when the money is concentrated in so few hands; and this has proved true in the case of the government.

Economic inequality produced political inequality, and, as I have illustrated above, with the gifting of civil liberties to corporations which removing them from individual citizens, political inequality produces civil inequality (or inequality in the realm of civil liberties). Inequality builds upon itself. Inequality anywhere is a threat to equality everywhere, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr. Look back in history and you will see examples of how this inequality compounds upon itself. People shipped from Africa to America centuries ago (presumably not wealthy people, as it would probably have been troublesome to drag rich princes and such onto a slave ship) were ripped from their native lands and enslaved and made desolate by rich landowners in America. They had no political influence and were not granted freedom from slavery, let alone any other human rights, in the United States until a terrible civil war made it exceedingly necessary, for the survival of the nation, to abolish slavery. These individuals, in the difficult climb up from slavery and desolation, were still fighting for equal civil rights one hundred years after slavery had been abolished, and being equal socially in the eyes of American society would take even longer than that. Until then, African Americans suffered from the prejudices brought by social inequality.

Social inequality, the fourth and final inequality that I mentioned in the beginning of this article, is the inequality of persons or groups in the eyes of a society. This is different from civil inequality, as that is the inequality of persons or groups in the laws of a government. (One modern example is that of GLBT rights; civil unions only provide a measure of civil equality, as in the laws of government, while not providing equality in the eyes of the society itself by allowing GLBT individuals to marry just as heterosexual couples would.) Social inequality is much more fluid and much more difficult to lessen and eradicate than civil inequality. The entire enlightenment level of a society has to improve for social inequality to disappear; it can’t be dealt with by simply writing up a law to change it. Increasing economic equality will increase political equality, which in turn will increase civil equality and social equality over time.

I believe that these egalitarian philosophies of de-concentrating and making more equal economic and political power are good and necessary to advancing the progress of our nation, addressing increasing inequalities in American society, and creating a more equal and democratic society which truly exemplifies the principle that all people are created equal, with equal opportunities for self-betterment and contribution to their country and the world.

2008 Presidential Election approaches

2008-11-02T12:00:00.000-08:00

As the 2008 Presidential Election is now so fast-approaching, I suppose that I should now take the opportunity to clearly state my sentiments on it. I think that Obama and McCain are essentially good people. But they have been corrupted by the political system which they inhabit and are not, I believe, capable of bringing about the fundamental reforms which our country truly needs.

For example, on foreign policy, McCain and Obama, both corrupted by the military-industrial complex and other pressures such as the militaristic and pro-Israel AIPAC, are American imperialists who will continue to police the world; who will not cut the bloated military budget; who will continue to espouse American exceptionalism; who totally ignore the humanitarian crisis among the Palestinian people on the Gaza Strip; who will, by their espoused policies, keep us in Iraq for an undetermined period of time (Obama with his "residual forces") and likely turn Iraq into a new Germany, or Vietnam, with American forces remaining there long after the fighting has ended. Both McCain and Obama will both mistakenly treat the "War on Terror" as an actual, physical war---when it should be instead a police and intelligence action. Obama wants to expand the size of the military by 100,000 people. Obama and McCain, it seems to me, will both be incapable of bringing needed reforms to American foreign policy, because they are interventionists who shall police the world because they are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the military-industrial complex, the defense industries who donate to their political campaigns.

I believe that both Obama and McCain will be similarly unable to bring reforms on the domestic front, particularly in the realm of addressing our economic problems. Both candidates have been corrupted by the influence of corporations on Wall Street, and they both voted for the $700 billion bail-out of Wall Street accordingly. Some of that bail-out is now being used by corporations to pay the salaries and bonuses of company executives. Obama/McCain, it seems to me, are too busy representing the interests of rich corporations to represent the interests of the working people, and I think that Obama/McCain will continue to maintain these qualities when they are elected, for the most part. They do not support and make no indication that they will fight for a living wage, fair trade policies (to protect the worker), cutting the military budget so that that money can be re-directed to education and infrastructure, blocking another bail-out of Wall Street, a prescription drug benefit which would pay for all of the prescription drugs of seniors, and many other such things which would benefit working people and those living in poverty. The only thing that may be accomplished, by Obama, due to great public demand, is a universal healthcare system, and even of that I am doubtful due to Obama's campaign contributions from insurance companies.

The issue of civil liberties is of specific importance. Obama and McCain both voted for the re-authorization of the Patriot Act, which harms the American right to privacy (by allowing law enforcement officials to search an individual's telephone, medical, e-mail, financial, and other records) and generally tramples upon constitutional rights. A number of the Patriot Act's provisions have been ruled unconstitutional by Federal courts. In addition, neither Obama nor McCain support the LGBT right to marry; Obama supports "civil unions" but not outright marriage, while McCain takes a "states'-rights" stance on the issue and is unsupportive of gay marriage and civil unions. But I contend that it is unconstitutional to discriminate and not allow this group to have the same rights as heterosexual people.

However, both Obama and McCain supported corporate liberties with the 2008 FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act) bill. This bill provided immunity for telecommunications companies which helped the National Security Agency and the government spy on telephone conversations. Liberties for the ordinary citizens: bad; but liberties for corporations: good. Obama and McCain have, in these stated instances, ignored the civil liberties of working people while improving the civil liberties of corporations. One of these corporations granted immunity by the FISA bill passed in Congress was AT&T; a couple weeks later, should it have been any surprise when the AT&T logo was emblazoned on the official bag of the Democratic National Convention? AT&T was one of the convention's corporate sponsors. The two major candidates and parties have compromised individual liberty in favor of corporate liberty, and that is unacceptable.

The fact of the matter, it seems to me, is that the candidates will be unable to make needed reforms when they are immeshed in a system corrupted and controlled by entities who are opposed to these reforms. It is a broken system of government, one of concentrated power and wealth; one controlled by the few and not the many; one which is not truly a democracy of the people, by the people, and for the people. The appeal of Independent Presidential candidate Ralph Nader is that he seeks to reverse this. He wishes to give the power to the people and shift the power from the few to the many. He bucks corrupting corporations and special interests---he has fought corporations during his entire career as a consumer advocate. Nader opposed the Wall Street bail-out, the telecom immunity in the FISA bill, and the Patriot Act; he advocates cutting the bloated military budget and repealing America's militaristic foreign policies in the Middle East and elsewhere; he supports a living wage, fair trade policies (to protect manufacturing jobs), the repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, and other things to give greater power to the workers; and etcetera.

A vote for Ralph Nader is a protest vote well worth making. It is a protest vote against corporate control of government in our country. It is a protest vote against all that has subverted our democracy, broken our system, corrupted our government, and silenced the voices of the people. It is a protest vote against compromising the general welfare in favor of the corporate welfare. It is a protest vote against the two corrupt parties who have not made much progress on any of the major issues for the past few decades, who have not succeeded in making needed reforms during these past few decades, and who are so immeshed in the corruption surrounding our government that for them to attempt to destroy it would be like someone attempting to cut off their own leg. And that protest vote is, in my view, the only vote worth making in this 2008 Presidential Election.

Moral Leadership

2008-10-31T18:23:00.000-07:00

This is about Moral Leadership in the United States and the World. To start off with, perhaps I should define what "moral" means, in my view of the term. In my mind, moral does not mean religious, though many people seem to think that it does. I see morality as differentiating between right and wrong---I see morality as doing what is right and just and compassionate---as acting in a fashion that is respectful and loving of your fellow human beings and of the earth as a whole, and, naturally, not taking unnecessary action to harm your fellows and the earth---as demonstrating the common human decency which unites us all but which we often forget unites us. Acting upon these basic principles and ideas is, in my view, the definition of moral leadership. There is nothing religious about these ideas, unless religiosity is the same as humanity, and the human race and religion are not synonymous (the ideas within the Bible and other documents, it seems to me, however heretical this may be, are simply expressions of humanity).

So, now that I have informed you of my view of moral leadership, I suppose that the next thing to do is examine whether the United States's leadership has been consistently moral during the 20th and 21st centuries, the modern era. I am personally inclined to the opinion that morality has not been the primary concern of most leaders. I will provide some examples. During the years 1959 to 1975, fifty-eight thousand American soldiers were killed, over three hundred thousand were wounded, and millions of south-east Asian civilians were killed in the Vietnam War, a war that was sustained by lies and deceptions from American leaders. During the 1990's, five hundred thousand children died in Iraq for lack of adequate medical care, due to sanctions by the U.S. Government. During the years 2003 to 2008, over four thousand American soldiers--young men and women--have died in the Iraq War, as have tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, as the result of a purposeful deception by American leaders. And the United States is now also under criticism for the Iraqi displacement crisis: millions of Iraqis, over three million, have fled the country since the March 2003 United States invasion--a deplorable state of affairs. There have obviously been a number of leaders in recent history who have disregarded the restraints of conscience.

Recalling these historical and current events, it occurs to me that politics is an occupation where little to nothing is framed in moral terms, and yet it is the occupation which most requires morality, and deeply-heartfelt compassion, towards our fellow human beings. It is the occupation in which you have the most responsibility, in which the most lives are placed in your hands. Unfortunately, as Mao Tse-tung observed, "Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed." Harming your fellow human beings, especially unnecessarily, in warfare and other avenues, seems to me to be the height of immorality in leadership.

Perhaps, we as a country should ask ourselves a few questions regarding this current Iraq War and displacement crisis (though the questions could be just as applicable in other eras of United States history), using advanced interrogation techniques if necessary. We should ask: should we treat our fellow human beings better than this? Should we cause such upheaval and shatter so many lives? I suppose that what we should be asking ourselves, in moral terms, is if, as a country and as a people, we have the right to inflict such pain and suffering upon another people of another country? In my personal opinion, I answer with a resounding NO. I don't believe that we have the right to do these things--rather, I think that we have the responsibility, as the foremost superpower of the world, to refrain from abusing our power by attacking poorer countries than ours. The most powerful country is the one that should govern itself with the most wisdom and restraint, because it has the potential to inflict the most damage upon the earth. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." In my judgement, that statement, made decades ago, rings true to this day.

I have defined what my idea of moral leadership is, and I have provided examples of leadership which has not been particularly moral during the modern era. What to do now? Well, naturally, I would like to provide my ideas on why leaders are so often tempted to immorality---and I would like to express my ideas on the age-old question of whether humankind is inherently good or inherently evil.

You often hear the argument about whether humankind is inherently good, and moral, or inherently evil. Naturally, when I hear an argument, I can't help but join in and provide my two cents, whether they are two wheat pennies from the 1800's or two old beaten up pennies from the year 2006. As an argumentative creature of the highest order, I feel inclined to assert my belief that, when a person is born, they have a natural tendency towards one side of the spectrum (of good and evil) or the other, but human beings do have both good and bad in them, and their conditions in life, and living in general, determines how exactly these tendencies develop---or if they do. Morality or immorality is not inherent in us--we all are split, we all have to choose according to our own developed characters. Though we may lean greatly towards one or the other, we will always, for the entirety of our lives, have some of both good and evil in us. It seems to me that humanity, fallible and wonderful, is what is truly inherent in us all.

And I am afraid that the leaders of humanity are no exception to this rule (of course; rulers are no less human than the ruled). But, for the leaders, an extra factor is added to how they slide along the good-evil spectrum, a factor which most people living daily life do not have or choose to take part in: power. Leaders of the human race, with great corrupting power in their hands, are very often tempted to the immoral side of themselves. They are tempted to embark upon unjust wars to increase their own power, and other such acts. To resist this, a leader must have extraordinary character, or have constant oversight to ensure that they do not abuse their powers---in many cases, such as initiating an unjust war or secretly torturing people, power abuse can be quite immoral. Leaders who are not provided with oversight very often succumb to their temptations. Power corrupts the fallible human being. The act of having abusable power adds another dimension to the human mind, a dimension in which human morality, and human conscience, is challenged.

The National Initiative for Democracy

2008-10-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

The National Initiative for Democracy was first proposed by Former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel, who served in the Senate from 1969 to 1981 and who later ran for the 2008 presidential nominations of the Democratic and Libertarian parties. I first learned of the National Initiative for Democracy during Gravel’s 2008 presidential campaign. This proposal will, in short, empower the American people as lawmakers in partnership with their elected officials, to make laws on all of the issues that affect their lives. The power to make laws will be provided through a national referendum system, the kind of initiative that is currently used statewide in 24 states and which has been used successfully in the country of Switzerland for centuries. I believe that this proposal is necessary in the United States in order to shift power back to American people from who has it now, political and financial elites and their moneyed special interests. I believe that this proposal is necessary to create a more egalitarian and democratic form of government, in which every single citizen in the United States has power in deciding the issues that affect their lives.

Let’s examine a quote from Cicero, the great Roman orator and statesman, “Freedom is participation in power.” Ralph Nader, when I went to an event of his in July 2008, said that he had been to many dictatorships in his life, and that they have nearly as much personal freedom as a democracy—you can live where you want, marry who you would like to, eat what you like, go fishing if you want to—your daily, personal events are not under government scrutiny. What is the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy? Why, in a democracy, you can exercise civic engagement and act freely in the realm of politics—in a dictatorship, you cannot. The real freedom, that differentiates free countries from others, is participation in civics. Participation in power, Nader noted, is the real freedom. If freedom is participation in power, then that leads to the logic that, if you don’t participate in power, then you don’t have any freedom. What is the central power of government in the United States? Some people believe that the exercise of power is when you go to the polls to vote for one candidate or the other on Election Day, but it seems to me that, really, what you are doing is giving your power away to corrupt elected officials who make many promises but keep few of them. The central power of government is not voting—it is law-making—those who make the laws have power over all aspects of the country and system—even over those sacred voters who go to vote on election day—the law-makers can determine where, how, or if you vote. In order to have real participation in the power of government, and some control over their government and lives, the people must exercise the power to make laws, the central power of government.

These laws would be made on a majoritarian basis. Some people have qualms about this because it sounds like a tyranny of the majority over the minority. But, I assure you, there are safeguards to prevent this from being the case. First of all, the people make the laws in partnership with their elected officials—these national ballots initiatives will simply be a fourth, stabilizing leg on the currently three-legged stool. The Supreme Court can check the laws of the people, and declare them unconstitutional if they appear to be unconstitutional and detrimental to the rights of the minority. The minority of the population is still provided with protection. Secondly, it is important to note that, if you aren’t ruled by the majority, then you are ruled by the minority. There is no in-between. Right now, the United States is being ruled by a rich minority that does things that are in their own self-interest, and in the self-interest of other moneyed entities such as corporations. Political elites and financial elites are often the same people, because of how intricately politics and wealth are intertwined. Everyone knows what a corrupting effect that money and special interests have upon our representatives in Washington; this influence, it seems to me, has directed our representatives away from representing their constituents and towards representing the major entities that donate to their campaigns. Is it better for the majority to be governed by the minority, or is it better for the majority to be governed by the majority? It seems to me that, especially considering the vast corruption of modern politics, that it would be better for the majority, rather than the rich and corrupt minority, to govern itself. Those who are affected by the laws should be the ones who make the laws—the people should, by way of the National Initiative, be able to make policy on all of the issues that affect their lives—that power should not be relegated to a minority corrupted by money and power.

Efforts are currently being made to enact the National Initiative for Democracy, this historic proposal to allow the people to have the right to make laws in partnership with their elected officials and change the paradigm of human governance. There is a website for the National Initiative, ni4d.org, where you can vote for its enactment. In order to be enacted, it must receive an affirmative vote of over half of the actively voting population—in other words, over half the number of people who voted in the last presidential election—in other words, the National Initiative requires about sixty million affirmative votes. For those of you wondering whether this process is legal or constitutional, it is founded on the legal basis of the “First Principles”—affirming the constituent sovereign's right and the legislative power of the People to create or alter governments, constitutions, charters, and laws—these principles were what allowed the Founding Fathers to colonize America, declare our independence from Great Britain, and write the Constitution in the first place. I urge you, fellow citizens of the United States, to go the National Initiative’s website, ni4d.org, to explore further the great proposal of the National Initiative for Democracy, and I urge you, my fellow citizens, to vote for the National Initiative. Claim your right as a free citizen of the United States to participate in power.

http://ni4d.org/

We have committed a historic blunder

2008-10-06T16:44:00.000-07:00

Can you imagine how different our country's history would be today if, in 1932, instead of creating public works programs and other policies to help the working citizen, Franklin D. Roosevelt simply gave billions of dollars to banks and corporations in a massive government bail-out? This past week, our country has committed a great historic blunder. The U.S. Congress has passed, and President Bush has signed, a $700 billion bail-out bill for failing corporations on Wall Street. We have, unlike Franklin Roosevelt decades ago, addressed the symptoms of the economic problems rather than the causes. The problems did not start with Wall Street and then trickle down; the problems began on Main Street, with people losing their jobs and being unable to pay their mortgages and other bills, and then spread to Wall Street. This bail-out bill will solve nothing because it does not address the causes of the problems. This bail-out bill will not patch the gaping hole in our Ship of Economy which is causing it to fill up with water and sink. This bail-out bill is not right, because it protects corporations from the consequences of their corrupt and reckless practices while neglecting the struggling average American. And what is not right shall never be advantageous, for, as Cicero wrote, "Advantage can never conflict with right. That is why Socrates, as the tradition goes, used to curse men who had first begun to differentiate between these two things which nature had made inseparable---everything which is morally right is advantageous, and there can be no advantage in anything that is not right." Right and advantage are one and inseparable, now and forever.

Despite this, leaders in Congress and in the White House, including the two major-party presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, passed and signed the bail-out bill this past Friday. The fools in Washington have bumbled things up again. That day, I spoke to my grandmother, who asked me what I thought would happen now that this bail-out bill had been passed. I said, "I think that things will get temporarily better, and then much worse, because we haven't addressed the causes of the economic problems. We need to address high jobless rates (currently 6.1%, the highest in over a decade); the inability of people to pay their mortgages, to pay their other bills, to make a half-decent living in this country and be able to have a house and other economic opportunities." My grandmother said, "I think that you might be right." However, apparently, things shan't even get better before they get worse. They are getting worse already. The DOW plunged over 300 points today, putting the DOW below 10,000 points for the first time since 2004. Most everything in the Stock Market was heavily in the red. But there is no FDR in sight this time. There is no great leadership present to direct us along a better and alternative way. All leaders and prospective leaders have fallen right into line to sing along to bail-out tune, save for a few truly principled and good individuals such as Representative Dennis Kucinich.

I have to tell you, I think that every bit of this current economic situation is just utter insanity. Having a debt-based economy brought it and our country down, and so, naturally, the way to solve that would be to accumlate more government debt by way of bail-outs. The more money we print to fund the bail-outs, the further the American dollar will be de-valued, and, the more money that we borrow from China to fund these bail-outs, the more destruction that a debt-based economy will wreak upon our society. Were the people who voted for the bail-out bill even thinking and aware when they enunciated the word, "Yea!" Perhaps they were thinking, "Yea! I get another term in office, because now my corporate interests will be appeased because of this $700 billion bail-out, and the people in my congressional district will be appeased because of the $150 billion of added ear-marks just for them!" I have to be honest with you, this is just killing me, and not in a funny way like a good joke would. This is as serious as a 76-year-old man having to go back to work after his second heart attack because he needs the health insurance from the company. And this is personal---I know that man, and there are noble others like him. Where are the people who are supposed to help him? Well, apparently, they're all busy shoving money down the throats of their corporate sponsors with this $700 billion bail-out. It is truly sickening.

Instead of creating public works programs, establishing a single-payer healthcare system, creating a prescription drug benefit that pays for the prescriptions of all seniors, instituting a living wage and Fair Trade policies to protect the worker (the fundamental element of our economy), and re-evaluting our debt-based financial system, all we are doing is bailing out big corporations to save them from the consequences of their reckless practices while totally neglecting Main Street and the causes of the problems, and we expect these actions to prevent an economic crisis! Can you imagine, can you just imagine, how different and more terrible our country's history would be if all FDR had done was exactly what we are doing now?

On the Economy and Government Bail-outs

2008-09-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

In this taxpayer-financed bail-out of Wall Street, the government will be buying up mortgage-backed securities and other toxic assets from the companies that are failing. Perhaps I can explain in plain language what it is that the government is doing---what they are purchasing. For example, what are mortgage-backed securities? Security is just another word for investment. You make an investment in a company that lends out money to other people for mortgages. These companies lend the money that you invest, and, when a person pays back their mortgage payment, there is a certain 7-8% interest charged. So, your money (your investment) in the mortgage company grows by 7-8%. Used to, most people would pay their mortgages---unlike car payments, which are more often defaulted on---and so mortgage-backed securities are looked upon as a safer investment. They might not pay as well as perhaps the Stock Market would, but they have been looked upon as a safer investment. But, now that there are all of these economic problems and people can't pay their mortgages on their homes, these mortgage-backed securities in these big companies have been failing, crashing, and burning. And so, the government is buying and taking possession of these mortgage-backed securities and other toxic assets like them from these failing companies, in the hopes that this measure will at least temporarily save these companies and stop them from failing utterly.

The problem is, you don't know exactly how much all of these purchases will cost until you make them. Unfortunately, there's not a price tag like you would see on a television at a store. The government has set the number of about $700 billion for these bail-outs, though there is no real certainty that that is indeed what these assets are worth. According to some business sources, such as New York Times Business Columnist Joe Nocera, the actual price-tag for these bail-outs could be over a trillion dollars. If this proposal of the Bush Administration and others is approved by Congress, then they will have once again handed the U.S. Government a blank check to spend as much as they please to bail out these corporate entities. We can't even afford this kind of opulence, but this wouldn't be all right even if we could. The government will have to print more money in order to buy these mortage-backed securities and bail out these companies. Printing more money will decrease the value of the money already in circulation, and, as a result, the dollar will further weaken. This bail-out will just continue the destructive nature of our debt-based economy, and it won't increase regulation of speculation or solve any long-term problems regarding our financial system.

The fact of the matter is that bail-outs are not the magical solution, the panacea, like President Bush and other proponents make this out to be. In their view, if bail-outs are not approved, then the economy will collapse, and, if they are approved, the economy will be saved. President Bush got onto the television (somehow) the other night and put the fear into everyone that the economy will collapse if these bail-outs are not approved. Fear is a very powerful thing which has been used for centuries to rob people of their powers of logic and reason, throwing them into a wild panic which is blind to everything but their consuming fear. This tactic has worked before, and it will likely work again.

In opposing such a Wall Street bail-out plan, Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich has been working on an alternative, comprehensive plan for a “Main Street economic recovery”, in which, it is stated, both the economy will be stimulated and a fair deal will be provided to the American people. Kucinich’s plan decidedly is made up of a different kind of more long-term thinking than what is currently convention and policy at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Aspects of Kucinich's plan, viewable at kucinich.us, includes: numerous public works programs to provide jobs to citizens of the United States, a plan for a single-payer healthcare system, a plan for a prescription drug benefit to pay for the prescriptions of all seniors, and an affirmation of the need to re-evaluate our monetary policy and our debt-based economic system. I think that it is a brilliant alternative plan, and I give it my full and whole-hearted support. All of the components of Representative Dennis Kucinich’s plan are aimed at helping those working on Main Street rather than those speculating on Wall Street. The plan introduced by the Bush Administration to bail-out Wall Street is aimed at doing exactly the opposite, and does not re-evaluate our debt-based economic system (which is likely the root of this financial decline) or provide a long-term solution to our country’s problems.

The Future

2008-09-24T11:33:00.000-07:00

There are a number of things politically that I would like to see done in my lifetime. As you read this list, however, you will likely see how unlikely it is that any of these things will occur in the next 50 years. Here is my idealist view of the future of the United States:

1. The U.S. defense budget greatly slashed and U.S. troops brought home from most or all of their stations in countries around the world. The United States usually spends about 50% of its total budget each year on defense. As a result, this country spends more on defense than the rest of the countries of the world combined. No other countries can rival us, so what are we afraid of? Terrorists? The War on Terror should be an intelligence and police action rather than an actual war---especially considering that such a war would be perpetual, since terrorism is a part of human nature and can not be eradicated. Our budget priorities should be re-organized to favor things like education and infrastructure.

2. A federal program that pays for college education in the United States, up to Ph. D. level. As for highschool and younger education, I support the repeal of the "No Child Left Behind Act", which places too much emphasis on testing and removes funding from schools who do the least well on the tests (removing funding from schools that need the money most).

3. The enactment of the National Initiative for Democracy proposal (ni4d.org), which will empower the American people to make laws in partnership with their elected officials. This is a historic proposal to change the paradigm of human governance.

4. A significant plan and action against poverty in the United States. Components of this could be: a living wage, public works programs, fair trade policies, and urban and rural revitalization plans with tax incentives for companies to remain in the United States and re-locate to depressed areas.

5. A significant plan and action towards solving our global warming problems. This could include a carbon tax and increased use of such clean energies as wind and solar.

6. A single-payer, not-for-profit, government-run healthcare system which provides most everything from eye-glasses to dental.

7. Public works programs to rebuild America's infrastructure (and other projects such as the building of a national rail transportation system), which can help create new jobs and improve the country.

8. Breaking up of corporate media monopolies and the corporate control over our information supply. Also implement major election reform and public campaign financing in order to limit corporate influence in our government (the NI4D may also help with this).

9. A living wage (not a minimum wage that people can't live off of), the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act and increased Union activity (unions can fight for workers' rights), and the implementation of Fair Trade policies (with tariffs in place to protect manufacturing jobs in the United States). All of these things will help protect the worker and increase the rights of workers.

10. Civil rights in general should be increased. The Patriot Act should be repealed, abortion and gay marriage should be made legal nationally, the failed War on Drugs should be ended. Marijuana should be legalized, as it is less strong than some forms of alcohol, and other drugs should be distributed only by a doctor's prescription: drugs should be a public health issue, not a criminal issue. We should have heightened civil liberties in this society, with equal rights for all and greater rights than what we have presently.

11. Simplification and replacement of the U.S. tax system, which is currently a complex and corrupt income tax system with many loopholes. The complexity of the tax system can allow the richer citizens among us to exploit the loopholes and evade paying their fair share of taxes. Only the rich can afford to hire people to find these loopholes. Replacements for this current tax system could be the Fair Tax, a flat tax, or some other option I have not yet heard of. In addition to this, the Bush Tax cuts, which benefit the wealthiest alone in society, should be repealed. Inequality between the rich and poor should decrease, and one way to do this is to create a fairer tax system that is helpful to the middle class and the poor, and not just the rich.

12. Peace, diplomacy, cooperation, and friendship with all other nations in the world. Use an uderstanding and respectful foreign policy rather than an aggressive, militaristic, and threatening foreign policy. Perhaps this cooperative friendship could be used to combat global warming, among other things. If the people of the world are united in their goals, then what shall be able to stop them? People like to divide things between East and West, but, if I know anything, I know that East always meets West somewhere. And, in this case, that meeting is in the fact that we are all human beings with an interest in maintaining human life on earth.

13. Voting age lowered to 16. In my view, if you are allowed to work a job, if you are allowed to take your life and the lives of others into your own hands when you are driving a car, then you should be allowed and you should be considered responsible enough to be able to vote. Suffrage should be expanded, and the disenfranchisement of this group of American citizens ceased.

14. Increased funding for space program, put a man on Mars. Also increase funding for research for diseases such as AIDS and cancer: hopefully, if any cures exist for these previously incurable diseases, government policy shall make these cures easier to be found. In the area of science, the United States should attempt to contribute to human progress.

These ideas, though not exclusively, greatly comprise my ideal view of how this country should be in the future. How the world should see us. With equal rights for all, citizen empowerment, a citizen-oriented society. Striving towards new precedents and contributing to the progress of humankind on the planet earth. With a cooperative, understanding, and peaceful foreign policy. Taking steps towards a human society where the emphasis is most greatly laid on the rights and goals of humanity---a humanist society. Will this ever come to pass? The question is not whether the current established society will pass away---it will, for it is the law of Time and of the Earth that it must do so---the question is what will replace them. The question is whether these societies which never existed will ever come to pass.

Endorsement for President

2008-08-07T14:33:00.001-07:00

Before I tell you about any of the specific issues and changes that I think that the country needs, I would like to offer to you my endorsement for President of the United States. I am doing this in part because I don't want to be associated with Barack Obama every time I use the word "change". I'll be straight with you here: I support Ralph Nader for President. I know that my endorsement means little or not at all to anyone besides myself, but the fact of the matter is I like to hear myself talk (and, yes, I am talking this out as I am writing it), and because I would like to provide myself with the happy delusion that I am of at least some little importance. Now, let me just tell you why exactly I support Ralph Nader for President when there are two such great candidates running for the Democrats and the Republicans. The two general reasons are that (1) I don't consider the Democrats and Republicans to be that great (I am an Independent personally, happily unaffiliated with either major party); and (2) Ralph Nader has impressed me with his record of public service as a consumer advocate, and he says essentially nothing that I really disagree with. To provide examples:

Nader advocates citizen engagement and activism, and he supports the "National Initiative for Democracy", a proposal of Former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel's, which would allow the American people to make laws via a national ballot initiative in partnership with their elected officials. This is a pet issue of mine (since I was a supporter of Mike Gravel for President from April 28th, 2007 to May 25th, 2008), and I appreciate Nader for taking it up as an issue. To learn more about the National Initiative for Democracy, visit ni4d.us. This proposal is not even on the table for either Barack Obama or John McCain.

Nader advocates cutting the terribly, unnecessarily bloated military budget. Out of the United States budget, approximately 50% of funds are spent on defense. This is hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars we're talking about here. This spending might be necessary if we were in the middle of a World War with several powerful enemies, but the fact of the matter is that the United States's defense spending makes up 50% or so of the world's total for defense spending. Not a single other country in the world---not Russia, nor China, nor even Iran---makes up more than 10% of the world's defense budget. There are no real threats to the United States around the world, no major enemies, and so why is our defense budget so dreadfully high and wasteful? Which power are we defending ourselves from? I expect that it must be Lesotho. Of course!

Nader advocates an Israeli-Palestinian policy much different from that of Obama and McCain. One day, I asked my mother why the United States is so strongly pro-Israel, overlooking any of the sufferings and problems of the Palestinians forced off their lands, overlooking the amazing ratio of Israeli to Palestinian deaths in Gaza---1 Israeli civilian dies for every 400 Palestinians that die. And the conflict and deaths continue despite a great desire for peace, and a two-state solution, among the peoples of both Israel and Palestine. Ralph Nader, who asserts that we should be concerned about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the harm caused to Palestinians as well as Israelis, sides with these peace movements of both sides who desire an end to the conflict and killing; Barack Obama and John McCain side with AIPAC and the extremist right-wing Israeli militarists who continue the conflict. Neither Obama nor McCain will substantially change our Israeli-Palestinian policy, and, as I believe this to be an important issue, I support Ralph Nader and his ideas for President.

I have provided three detailed examples. Here are a few others of how it seems to me that Nader is the best progressive candidate for President, more desirable than Obama and McCain.

(1) Nader advocates a universal, single-payer, government-provided health insurance plan that removes profit from the equation of the nation's health.

(2) Nader supports Fair Trade rather than Free Trade. Fair Trade provides for tariffs and regulations to protect the American worker, while Free Trade does not. As for worker's rights, Nader is strongly pro-worker and pro-union---he advocates the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Union Act of 1947, so that "tens of millions of workers, whom surveys show want to form trade unions, [can] engage in collective bargaining with their employers."

(3) Nader supports the Impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Obama and McCain do not consider defending the Constitution in such a manner.

All in all, I consider Nader to be the most principled, best qualified candidate with the best ideas about the issues. His official campaign website is votenader.org.

Good Afternoon

2008-08-07T14:07:00.001-07:00

Good afternoon, and welcome to my blog, "Revolutionize around Common Sense". This blog's link is nineteenthofapril.blogspot.com, and I would like to explain to you why I picked this particular date. On this day, April 19th, in 1775, the first shots of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord. These shots began the war that would eventually, through a great many "times that try men's souls", result in American Independence from Great Britain. It began, in others words, a great overhaul of existing conditions, in a relatively rapid period of time.

There are many conditions in the United States in 2008 that I, and fellow concerned citizens, would desire to be greatly improved upon---though, as I am not a Communist, a violent revolution and complete tearing-down of existing conditions is not my advocation. Rather, there are numerous issues in which I believe that the prevailing policies of today should be flipped in the other direction completely. I believe that America's priorities should be reorganized, moving from defense spending and war to the worthier priorities of Education and Infrastructure. I believe that our approach towards foreign policy should be revised, with less aggressiveness and more respect towards our fellow countries and our fellow citizens of the world. I believe that more power should be given and taken by the citizens of the United States; the power of government should rest more in the hands of the People of the United States, and our society should become more civically involved and democratic.

These are my thoughts; these are my general goals of areas in which to redirect the stream of political discussion. On this blog, I plan to reverse the course of a waterfall, send all its water falling up instead of down. As you can see how difficult this will be, I ask for you help, if you support similar ideas to mine (and, don't worry, I will get around to the specifics), to blog about them yourself. If enough human ingenuity and intelligence is employed, I don't see why not the course of a waterfall couldn't someday be reversed.

Thank you.

Election 2008: Ralph Nader in Athens, Georgia

2008-08-03T20:00:00.000-07:00

On July 25th, 2008, my father, my thirteen-year-old brother, and I went to go see Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and 2008 Independent Presidential candidate, speak at “Master’s Hall” on the University of Georgia campus in Athens. I had been incredibly excited to see that Nader was coming to Georgia on his “Southern Tour”, and no more than forty miles away from my town, no less! My father, being the good open-minded fellow that he is, agreeably drove myself and my uninterested brother there and paid the $10 each to get in. We each received a free Nader/Gonzalez ‘08 pin for this payment. There was a long table set up just outside the hall for this practice of collecting money, and for collecting signatures on a petition to get Ralph Nader on the ballot in Georgia. The number of signatures necessary to get Nader, or any Independent candidate, on the ballot in Georgia is inane: 42,489 signatures by July 8th. Such ballot access laws are implemented so that independent candidates cannot make a significant challenge to the two major parties in power (who are the ones that make the laws, of course).

The event was at 5:30 in the afternoon; we three were situated in our seats by 5:00, and we watched as the hall filled up with likely about two hundred people. Since Ralph Nader had held an event in Columbia, South Carolina, at 12 o’clock that afternoon, and since he had run into some bad traffic on the way to Athens (no surprise there), he did not arrive at the hall until about 6 o’clock that evening.

After giving a brief press conference upstairs, Nader arrived, amidst a burst of applause. He walked down the aisle, right next to where I was sitting (close enough that I could have touched him, if I lacked judgement and prudence), towards the podium. Nader sat down and briefly rested from his busy schedule while a young African American campaign volunteer, a “concerned citizen”, gave an earnest introductory speech. In this speech, the young man affirmed how much he cared about the country and the issues at hand, and how important it is for everyone to care and be civically involved. And then he said, “And now I am proud to present a more-than-worthy 2008 presidential candidate, Mr. Ralph Nader.” The crowd erupted into applause. This was the moment that we had all been waiting for. We three were not disappointed.

After thanking the young man for such a sensitive introduction and apologizing for being late, Nader began, “Let me start in a more fundamental way. The problems we have in this country start with how individuals, in the millions, use their time. That’s where it all starts. I grew up in a small town in Connecticut. It had a town meeting form of government. And the town meeting was the legislature, the local legislature, and you could just walk to the town meeting; there were no obstacles to going into the auditorium, or the town hall, to decide important issues in the community. It was, in my judgement, the most pristine form of democracy in the world; you really can’t do much better than that. We had a local daily newspaper; if we didn’t print what you liked, you could canvas the whole town, it was ten thousand people.”

Nader continued, “There was no excuse for not having a very democratic form of government, with all the benefits that come from that. The quality of government in our town was directly related to how many people turned out, how many people voted, how many people showed up. And when people showed up, we’d work out our problems, nobody won everything—people didn’t show up, power moved into a concentrated format: the factory-owners, or the local politicos. In other words, if the dynamic of citizen engagement is weak, power flows to the few against the many. And that means that those few make decisions in their favor, against the majority, the masses of the people. And that’s why we get these political candidates, at the presidential and congressional level, who speak in such generalities that their rhetoric belies their record of almost never, in Congress or in the White House, proposing anything that shifts power from the few to the many. For example, public funding of public campaigns; we don’t do that. For example, national referendums, with binding power; we’d [Nader would] do that.”

There, at the part about national referendums, I believe Nader was referring to the National Initiative for Democracy, proposal of Former Senator Mike Gravel, which has now apparently earned the support of Ralph Nader, though Nader does not make it a centerpiece issue. Nader continued with ideas of how to shift power from the few to the many (a major theme of his campaign), and, though he had many, one of the most important of these was, “Getting rid of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, the most notorious anti-union worker law in the Western world, and letting tens of millions of workers, whom surveys show want to form trade unions, to engage in collective bargaining with their employers—That would shift power.”

Nader also said, in the area of workers-rights (he is apparently strongly pro-union and pro-worker), “Opening up the courts so that wrongfully injured people, or defrauded people (there are enough of us in that category), could have their full day in court, before a judge and jury, instead of being restricted by this notorious, misnamed ‘tort reform’ movement, perpetrated by the insurance companies and the wrong-doers corporate lobby—That would shift power. 90% of all people wrongfully injured in this country never even filed a claim. Do you know how bad that is?”

I did not record the speech in its entirety, but Nader made several other interesting points, which remain etched in my memory. Here they are, listed out.

1. Nader has visited some dictatorships in his life. They have almost as much personal freedom as a democracy; you can live where you like, go fishing if you like, eat what you like, marry who you want to, etc. The real exercise of freedom, Nader said, is in the area of participation in politics and civics. Nader cited Cicero’s famous quote, describing it as the best definition of freedom he had yet heard, “Freedom is participation in power”. That is where dictatorships and free democracies differ. In democracies, you can participate in power—you can be an active, civic-minded citizen. Participation in power is the real freedom.

2. It seemed as though Nader was speaking directly to my younger brother when he noted that youths who do not care about civics and who do not practice civic engagement will reap the consequences when they are older. They will reap the consequences of their failure to act and speak out and become involved, such as a bad healthcare system, lack of a living wage (despite some claims, the minimum wage is not a living wage; you most certainly cannot live off of it), a corrupt tax code, etc. Nader talked about how youths these days spend 60 hours each week staring at a screen, either television or computer, neglecting the beauty of the outdoors and nature, which he believed was unfortunate.

3. Nader called hotdogs “pink missiles”—a cute name for this decidedly unhealthy food likely made of cow intestines or something equally pleasant. This is a suitable topic for a consumer advocate who greatly contributed to the establishment of a mandatory installation of seat belts in cars.

4. Nader began talking about how the government was bailing out corporations with government funds. Nader told us about how, one time, while his family had been sitting around the dinner table, his father had asked his children, “Why will capitalism always survive?” Their natural response was, of course, “Just tell us, Dad.” Their father answered, “Because socialism will always be there to save it.”

5. Nader described prisons as “finishing schools” for criminals, which focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation. He also affirmed his desire to legalize marijuana and end the “war on drugs”.
6. Nader made a proposal for a “Congressional Watchdog” organization. Congressional districts have an average population of 645,000 people. In each Congressional district, Nader proposed, 500 to 1000 citizens should organize into a group specializing in overseeing the actions of the representative from that district. Each member would pay out a small fee, enough to rent a small office space and hire a couple of full-time employees. This would aid the oversight that each representative receives from the citizens of that district that they are representing.

After Mr. Ralph Nader’s speech (which I, my father, and even my brother, just a little, enjoyed), some fellow from his campaign got up and made a speech, with a great deal of “Uh’s”, “Um’s”, and “Er’s”, and then the purpose of the speech was revealed when the fellow began attempting to auction off a signed copy of “The Good Fight”, by Ralph Nader, for $2300 (it ended up fetching $250). After further painful begging for donations by this fellow (with Ralph Nader all the while sitting quietly, resting, a little bit away from the podium), Nader got up again to take questions from the audience. There were not very many questioners, probably about four or five.

Nader was asked a question about the Middle East and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, about how his policy was different from McCain’s and Obama’s. Mr. Nader said that Obama and McCain are on the side of the minority, the extremist Israeli militarists and wars hawks, while the vast majority of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples in that region just want peace—a two-state solution. Mr. Nader also asserted that we should stand up against the injustices inflicted upon the Palestinians by Israel. There is a ratio of 400 to 1 in the Palestinian to Israeli civilian casualties in Gaza; for every Israeli killed by Palestinians, there are 400 Palestinians killed by Israelis. There is a humanitarian disaster going on in Gaza.

Another fellow asked a question about the Fair Tax proposal, for a national sales tax, and Nader replied that he was not in favor of the Fair Tax proposal but that he was in favor of a fair tax system. Nader said that the tax system should be reorganized, starting with the basic principle that things such as alcohol, cigarettes, pollution, and speculation should be taxed the most, while desirable things such as food and work should be taxed less. His answer was a little longer and more complex than this simple statement I have made here, and he received a great deal of applause for it. Of course, you can see Nader’s full positions on the issues at his website votenader.org.

After all that was finished with, Nader left to go to his next event in Atlanta, Georgia (which was at 8 o’clock and which he was already late for; and, knowing Atlanta, he would probably hit some bad traffic on the way there too). It must be exhausting to carry on with such a busy schedule: three events in one day, each quite a drive away from the others. My father, my brother, and I set off from Master’s Hall back to our car. The sky was darkening, with some clattering of thunder, threatening a great storm. Just as we got into our car, it began to rain, great big noisy drops. The storm had begun.

Is our nation, in this 2008 election, heading for a perfect storm? Some people seem to think so, but it is not just mere, unsubstantiated, wishful thinking that is behind it. Ralph Nader currently has 6% in National polls, while Bob Barr usually receives about 3%, giving third party candidates a combined 9% in most polls. And yet these candidates are rarely mentioned, if ever, in the media. Do you ever wonder about this? Nader was wondering aloud what he would have to do to get any attention in the media—dress up as a panda? Have someone else dress up as a female panda, and then have male-panda Nader flash suggestive looks at them? Nader continued on humorously: the media does, after all, certainly seem to be very interested in the mating practices of pandas, if you’ll recall. There is no time to mention any third-party candidates.

I had a wonderful time at this Ralph Nader event; I very much liked Nader’s key message of civic engagement. He is a remarkable fellow, which is a condition that he attributes to his remarkable parents. My father, after the event, told me in complete seriousness that, if Nader got to 20% in the polls, he would vote for Nader. Dad might vote for him anyway, unless it looks as though Obama might win Georgia, of course, of course. My thirteen-year-old brother asserted a few days later that he would vote for Nader if his middle school held a mock election for President. I hope that you, too, have been pleasantly informed by my, and Ralph Nader’s, words and actions—and I hope that, upon finishing this article, you are now more open-minded than you were before you first laid eyes on it.

Congress Agreed to Bush Request to Fund Major Escalation in Secret Operations Against Iran

2008-06-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

Veteran Investigative Journalist Seymour Hersh has published an article in the New Yorker Magazine that asserts that congressional leaders agreed to a request from President Bush last year to greatly increase funding, to 400 million dollars, for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran. This escalation of these covert and secret activities is meant to destabilize the religious leadership of Iran. Hersh wrote his article based upon information from “current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources.” The article notes that covert activities by the United States are not new in Iran–we have been conducting cross-border operations from Southern Iraq since last year.

The request for the $400 million was described in something called a “Presidential Finding”, signed by President Bush, and, under Federal Law, these Presidential Findings “must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees”. The article by Hersh noted later that, “In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.” This is a glaring contradiction and hypocrisy that is certainly not unfamiliar to the politics of the United States.

I hope that we all can now clearly see that the Republican Party is a war-like party of imperialists and interventionists. And I hope that we can now also clearly see that the Democratic Party is a war-like party of imperialists and interventionists, through their aiding and abetting of policies that are as such. I hope that we can now clearly see that both political parties are about policing the world, and spending huge amounts of taxpayer dollars to do so. We are spending 400 million dollars alone on trying to destabilize one single country. That money could have gone to education. That money could have gone to healthcare. That money could have gone to infrastructure. But, out of all of the needy areas of our country, our political leaders, of both parties, decided to direct the money instead towards destabilizing another country. 400 million dollars! That could not be described as “spare change”. Obviously, though, there is no “change” that our leaders can spare. And the small, superficial change that they do provide is worthless.

But Iran is not the only country targeted by the United States. According to Dennis Kucinich’s 35 Articles of Impeachment against President Bush, “On September 30, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of overturning the regime in Iran, as well as those in Iraq, Syria, and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted in then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith’s book, ‘War and Decision’.” The four other countries in the Middle East were, according to Wesley Clark, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Lebanon.

It is my opinion that the United States has been the interventionist policeman of the world for too long. And especially covert interventions, because that promotes “blowback”, defined as a term used in espionage to describe the unintended consequences of covert operations. Hatred in the Middle East towards the United States as a result of our covert operations targeting Middle-Easterners, and then Middle-Easterners demonstrating their hatred in a terrorist attack, is an example of blowback.

Is it honestly in our best interest to undertake operations such as this, especially when domestic issues are in such dire need of attention? And, ask yourself, do we even have the right to interfere in and destabilize another country, someone else’s country, as such? My personal opinion is that we have neither the right nor the obligation to try to destablize the governments of other countries and throw them into political chaos. Aside from the concerns of blowback and the misplacement of tax money, it is very important to do unto others as you would want done unto yourself.

The End: A Tribute to Mike Gravel

2008-05-28T19:48:00.000-07:00

Former Senator Mike Gravel, on May 25th, 2008, acknowledged the truth for the last time in his political career. “This is the end. I started in politics at 15 years old, and this is the end of my political career. Right today. Right this afternoon.”

Asked if there was anything that he would have liked to have done differently in this campaign, Gravel said, “No, no, no, we played it straight. My style of politics is just to tell people what you are, what you believe in, and what you want to lead to.”

Mike Gravel’s political career may have ended on a warm day in May 2008, but it began when, in 1945, as a young man at age 15, he began passing out flyers and volunteering with local political campaigns in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. It continued when he headed to Alaska in 1956, leaving the Kennedy-controlled politics of Massachusetts, in the hopes of launching his own political career. Alaska was the perfect place to do it; when Gravel first arrived there, it was in the pre-statehood phase and didn’t even have any Senators yet.

Mike Gravel was elected to the Alaska House of Representative in 1962, and he tried to make the most of the power of his office in order to help people. Gravel said at the HRC/LOGO debate in August 2007, “My first piece of legislation in the State Legislature was the creation of the Human Rights Commission of Alaska. I fought hard, I used political capital. And what I learned is that when you use political capital, more capital comes to you. The Human Rights Commission dealt with gays and dealt with the black community. That was my first accomplishment, and I felt it deeply.”Mike Gravel rose to become Speaker of the House in 1965, and, as Speaker, he furthered his attempts to improve the lives of his fellow citizens. During his campaign for the Alaskan House, he said, he probably visited more Native American villages than any other white man ever had. He learned from the Native Americans that their children, when they reached puberty, were being flown off to other, far away states to get an education. So, as Speaker of the House, Gravel authored and fought to pass (successfully) legislation that established the structure and budget for a regional high school system for rural Alaska, permitting native students to receive their education near their homes rather than travel to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ schools outside Alaska.

In 1968, Mike Gravel was elected as a United States Senator. He went to Washington an idealistic young man who desired to get things done and make a difference. From 1969 to 1973, when Gravel was a freshman Senator, was when he accomplished some of his greatest Senatorial triumphs. These triumphs include the Alaska Oil Pipeline, which has been responsible for 20% of the United States’s oil supply and whose economic benefits substantially raised the quality of life for the people of Alaska. Gravel also released the Pentagon Papers upon the public record, with the hope that it would bring the War in Vietnam to a speedier conclusion and with the fear that he would be prosecuted for his actions. The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret, 7000 page study that detailed the history of the decision-making and lies of our government during the Vietnam War.

Gravel also tried filibustering military draft renewal legislation to bring the Vietnam War more quickly to an end. In addition, during his career in the Senate, Senator Gravel successfully fought to stop nuclear testing in the North Pacific, organized citizen opposition to nuclear power, and was involved with many major pieces of environmental legislation passed during that time, due to his service on the Environment and Public Works Committee. In every act of his public life, Senator Mike Gravel had the greater public good in mind.

In 1981, Mike Gravel lost his Senate seat. Heart-broken, and disillusioned with representative government, he fell into a depression. He said, of his experiences at that time, “Nobody wanted to hire me for anything important. I felt like I was worthless. I didn’t know what I could do.” All through his life, it seems that it was of the utmost importance for Mike Gravel to be important. That was one of the reasons that Gravel so enjoyed passing out flyers as a youth in Springfield; it made him feel important. As Gravel said in a Washington Post news article, “I loved the recognition. I liked the way people listened when I talked about a candidate . . . It gave me confidence.”

Gravel was drawn back towards politics. In 1989, he reentered politics when he founded The Democracy Foundation, which advocates direct democracy, and began promoting “The National Initiative for Democracy”, which would allow Americans to become lawmakers in partnership with their elected officials and make laws on the federal level. The National Initiative for Democracy, and the empowerment of the people, would become the cause of his life from that day forwards.

In April 2006 (with the purpose originally being to promote the NI4D), Mike Gravel launched his Presidential campaign for the Democratic nomination, with the NI4D as the centerpiece but also calling for an immediate end to the occupation in Iraq, a “Fair Tax”, a single-payer and universal healthcare system, full LGBT rights (insisting, “What we need in this world is more love!”), an end to the War on Drugs, a restoration of human rights and civil rights, and a fight against the military-industrial complex. The campaign soon became more than just an attempt to promote the National Initiative. In the Washington Post article that I cited earlier, Gravel also said, after meeting with young people enthusiastic about his message, “It suddenly occurred to me that if they got so excited listening to me about the war and the National Initiative, that I could convince other people, too — I could actually win. And that’s when I started believing, too.”

Mike Gravel participated in several televised debates, making passionate declarations such as, “The only thing worse than a soldier dying in vain is more soldiers dying in vain!”, concerning the Iraq War, and “Representative Government is broken!”, concerning the NI4D. Although he was lauded by some for speaking “truth to power”, Gravel’s efforts were all for naught, and he didn’t move above 1% in any polls. To add to that, media outlets began cutting him out of debates. Whether a sinister motive was behind it is open to debate, but I do know that many of these media outlets are owned by corporations that benefit from the military-industrial complex, something which Gravel had sworn to fight. Despite these trials, during his campaign Gravel managed to enlighten thousands of people, including myself, and spread his deeply-heartfelt message.

In March 2008, Mike Gravel abandoned the Democratic Party for the Libertarian Party. He wrote, in an official campaign email, “The fact is, the Democratic Party today is no longer the party of FDR. It is a party that continues to sustain war, the military-industrial complex and imperialism — all of which I find anathema to my views.” He also believed that the Libertarian Party would embrace his proposal “The National Initiative for Democracy.” After all, what would be more liberating than to have the people empowered, to be empowered yourself? Gravel began competing for the Libertarian Presidential nomination; his main competitors were Bob Barr, Mary Ruwart, and Wayne Allyn Root.

Mike Gravel made his last debate appearance on May 24th, 2008, the day before the Libertarian Convention. The debate was covered by C-Span, as would be the convention the next morning.

May 25th rolled around. The convention began taking ballots. On the first ballot, Gravel came in fourth. On the second, third, and fourth ballots, Gravel came in fourth. His votes held steady at the 71 or 73 mark. After the fourth ballot, his name was struck from the ballot. His attempt to win the Libertarian nomination had failed. And he gracefully conceded: “This is the end. I started in politics at 15 years old, and this is the end of my political career. Right today. Right this afternoon.” He joked that, even though his political career was over, he wasn’t dead yet. Gravel said that he would continue to promote the causes that he passionately believes in, and enlighten the American people about his grand proposal, the NI4D, so that the American people may one day empower themselves…

…And so ended Former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel’s career in politics.

You can see it all through his political career: Mike Gravel was not just a politician. He was, and is, above all else, a human being. Above being a Senator from Alaska, above being a citizen of the United States, above being French Canadian, above being all of his other roles in life, he is a human being. He emphasizes with his fellow human beings, no matter their country or race or gender or sexual orientation or whatever else divides us. All through his political career, Mike Gravel embodied the common human decency which should govern all of our actions.

Senator Gravel was also a progressive idealist. What is a progressive idealist? An idealist is someone who sees things as they should be, or, in H.L. Mencken’s words, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.” If you are an idealist, and then you add to that quality a progressive viewpoint, then you are a “progressive idealist.” You see things as they should be, and then wish to improve upon that. You see into the future and far beyond. Progressive idealists are the farthest reaching of visionaries, because they see the improvements that should be made before even the first improvements are made yet.

This may be the end for Mike, but this is not the end. The future, a future which I hope will see the National Initiative empower the people, awaits us. In the words of Winston Churchill, “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The National Initiative for Democracy

The Politics of Insanity

2008-05-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

Over the past couple decades, the American people have seen the incompetence, corruption, and inability to get anything done among the collective group of their elected officials. These elected officials find themselves indebted to lobbyists and corporations who donate to their political campaigns, rather than their constituents, and so they often find it necessary to represent and work for their corporations rather than their constituents. Many Americans these days are probably now wondering, “How do I go about picking a candidate who is competent and able and who is not corrupt, so that I can then vote for them and work for them, so that they can get into office and work for me?”

It is difficult attempting to scrutinize each candidate to try to determine what exactly they are thinking, so I have come up with a better solution to ascertain that the candidate that you elect will work for you, and work hard. For those candidates running for elected office, what the constituents need to do is to all get together, have the candidates in front of them, and then everyone stand back and each throw one dart towards the candidates. I almost can guarantee you that the candidate who receives the most darts will work, and work hard, for his or her constituents. They shan’t want any darts thrown at them again.

But, seriously, friends, there is an incompetence, corruption, and ineffectiveness that seems to be held collectively among our elected officials, with a few exceptions. It also seems to be held, generally, among both of the major political parties. What we, the American people, have essentially been doing these past several decades is swinging back and forth between the Democrats and the Republicans, reverting from one to the other when one does not satisfactorily execute its promises. When we tire of one party, the other party shouts, “Here! We can do all of the things that you want, and more! We shall be a ‘change’ from this other useless party!” But this new party does not deliver on its promises either.

We switch back and forth, finding each party unsatisfactory over and over again, and we expect different results each time the Democrats or each time the Republicans promise to bring different results. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is, according to Albert Einstein, the very definition of insanity.

Abandon these false promises. Abandon these politicians of ineffectiveness, incompetence, and corruption. Abandon these two parties, which seem to be growing closer and closer to the other day by day. Become an independent and not loyal to either major party, and vote to empower yourself with the National Initiative for Democracy. The National Initiative for Democracy is a federal ballot initiative that would allow the people to make laws in partnership with their elected officials. Law-making is the central power of government, so, if the people are ever truly going to have power over their government and ensure that it is effective and not under the dominion of two completely corrupt political parties, then they must have the power to make laws. Having this power will allow the people to make laws, such as campaign finance reform, that will limit corruption and the involvement of special interests. These are laws that the politicians will not make themselves because they all got elected because there was no campaign finance reform and other reforms in the corruption of our system. Doing these two things, becoming an Independent and empowering yourself, are two of the only things that will help the United States to get out of these politics of insanity. Being an Independent can lessen party loyalty, and the National Initiative for Democracy will allow for laws to be made against our corrupt two-party system.

And to go along with becoming an Independent, why not vote independently? If the major Presidential candidates have each put up arguments that resound less with you than the arguments of other less well-known candidates, then why not vote for the other, less well-known candidate instead? Don’t vote on the basis of party. You have no obligation to either major party to vote for them. You have no obligation to the presidential candidate of one party or the other. It is they who are responsible for winning your vote. You should have that mindset.

If the two major parties appear to be corrupt and never get anything done (and they haven’t gotten anything done on any major issues for the past few decades), then you don’t have to vote for either of them. As I said, you have no obligation. In this presidential election, instead of voting for Politics as Usual, why not vote for Ralph Nader (an Independent candidate), Cynthia McKinney (the Green Party candidate), or Bob Barr (the Libertarian Party candidate)? Or, of course, you could always write in your own name on the ballot (a favorite suggestion of mine). But, whatever you choose to do this election cycle, be sure to think critically and independently about your choice. If you think for yourself, trouble will come. But, if you don't think for yourself, trouble will come. Just so long as trouble will come either way, I'd rather think for myself. I'd rather break party loyalties and break the politics of insanity.

In favor of exercising caution with Sanctions

2008-04-25T14:56:00.000-07:00

Did you know that, during the 1990’s, the foreign policies of the United States killed hundreds of thousands of innocents just in the country of Iraq alone? You might be wondering what kind of terrible policy could have caused that measure of destruction. Well, the policy is the use of sanctions, and it can be just as harmful to other countries as all-out war would be.

Sanctions are restrictions upon international trade and finance that one country imposes on another for political reasons. The United States liberally uses this tool. We sanctioned the country of Iraq for years, resulting in the deaths of five hundred thousand children due to inadequate healthcare, lack of medicine, and lack of clean water. That sanctioning was not effective, nor has the sanctioning of Iran been effective for 26 years, nor has the sanctioning of Cuba been effective for decades, nor has the sanctioning of North Korea been effective for more than 50 years. Frankly, I’m surprised that we aren’t still sanctioning Germany. I believe that sanctions are generally ineffective and should be cast aside in favor of alternatives. In this article, I plan to answer two questions that you might be wondering about either now or shortly in the future: “Why do you say that sanctions are ineffective?” and “What are the alternatives to using sanctions?”

Firstly, why do I say that sanctions are ineffective? For starters, there is the sanctioning of several countries for decades with no distinguishable positive results. My logic on this here is that, if we had seen measurable positive results from the sanctions, then we could have gotten back to the point where we would no longer have to sanction the country. We would not simply remain in diplomatic gridlock, as we apparently are in now with the sanctioned countries. I mean, sanctioning is supposed to have a point, a positive result such as resumption of diplomatic talks, is it not?

And while I see few to nonexistent positive results, there certainly are negative results of sanctions. One of the most concerning of these results is that sanctions serve to punish the innocent civilians by crippling their country’s economy, while the leader of their country suffers little personally from the sanctions. I bet that Saddam Hussein never missed a meal while hundreds of thousands of his citizens were dying because of lack of medical products. And, not only do sanctions hurt the innocent rather than the leaders of the countries being sanctioned, the leaders of these countries can actually use the sanctions to their own advantage. Our own weapon is being used against us here; we are inadvertently giving fuel to our enemies. The tyrants of these various countries can deflect attention away from domestic failures and direct attention instead toward a hatred of the sanctioners.

In these ways, both by killing innocent people and by helping tyrants direct attention away from their domestic failures, the United States policy of sanctions has not only failed to yield positive results for the United States, it has also had negative results for the United States. Sanctions lower America’s standing in the world, both by tarnishing our name by destroying innocent lives and by stirring up hatred towards us in the countries we are sanctioning.

Well, you might be wondering now, if sanctions don’t work, then what should we use as an alternative? That is a much more difficult question, and a question whose answer is not readily and easily available. But, I will try to answer it here to the best of my ability. What we need to do is fundamentally alter our foreign policy. Right now, we have entrusted ourselves with the responsibility of being the world’s guardian, of policing the world, of engaging in threats and imperialism, and of interfering in countries where we don’t quite like exactly how things are going. We need to stop taking the responsibility for all of the world’s countries into our own hands and focus on our many problems here at home. We need to treat all of the other countries of the world as equals, be less arrogant, stop bullying them, and treat them with respect. We do not treat other countries very respectfully today, probably because we believe ourselves to be superior and the greatest nation on earth. We need to change our mindset from believing that we are better than other countries; and that it is THEY who should treat us with respect, and not us who should treat them with respect.

But, if we do treat other countries as equals, with due respect, I predict that our respect will often be returned, and we will no longer have to engage in threats and policies such as sanctions quite as often. It is as Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, “If you treat people right they will treat you right - ninety percent of the time.” That works vice versa, of course, as well: if you treat people badly, they will treat you badly. We should treat other countries right by sitting down in diplomatic talks with them, and being both respectful and persistent in these diplomatic talks, rather than bullying them and sanctioning them. Essentially, what we need to do is alter our whole mindset towards the relationship between America and the other countries of the world.

To summarize, my friends, I believe that sanctions are bad policy and that they hurt America’s standing in the world by both killing innocents and by allowing tyrants to stir up hatred towards America. I have suggested the alternative that we alter our whole mindset towards the application of United States foreign policy and treat other countries with respect that will often be returned, making sanctions necessary much less often. We should sit down in diplomatic talks with other countries rather than bullying and sanctioning them. Some political candidates have suggested sanctions as a tool of diplomacy, but those who say that have apparently not heard of the reality of sanctions on the ground. Just as war can kill hundreds of thousands of people, so can sanctions. Sanctions can be just as serious and destructive as war, and we should employ just as much caution in our use of them.

A Greater Appreciation for Peace

2008-03-13T03:27:00.000-07:00

Eric Hall hailed from the fine city of Jeffersonville, Indiana. Jeffersonville is a city located on the Ohio River, just north of Louisville, Kentucky. “Jeff”, as its inhabitants have affectionately termed it, is part of Clark County, which was named for General George Rogers Clark (brother of William Clark of the Lewis & Clark expedition). The city of Jeffersonville itself was named for Thomas Jefferson, whose grid design was used as the layout for the city. Some of the localities that Eric Hall grew up with, in Jeffersonville, are Schimpff’s Confectionary (where you can get some of the best chocolate in the country, in my opinion), the Howard Steamboat Museum, and Mick’s Lounge (where the Papa John’s pizza restaurant chain was founded). Eric went to school at Jeffersonville High School, and he graduated from it in 2002. A little while after graduating high school, Eric joined the United States Army, as did many others from small towns where there were few opportunities. He found himself in favor of the goals of the Iraq War and desirous of contributing to the cause. My cousin went to the same school (from first grade through high school) and was friends with Eric, and that is how I first became aquainted with the story of Eric Hall’s Post Traumatic Stress disorder and the events resulting from it.

In June 2005, the Iraq Occupation was in full swing. Eric Hall, now far from Jeffersonville, was traveling the streets of Fallujah in Iraq with fellow United States Marines. When a bomb suddenly exploded very near at hand to Eric and his fellow soldiers, Eric was severely injured, both physically and mentally. He had suffered a severe hip injury, a broken leg, and nerve damage to his arm. As his injuries in that blast were being sustained, he watched one of his fellow soldiers, and his friend, die right before his eyes, decapitated when the bomb went off. Eric Hall’s experience in the Iraq War left him not only suffering from physical pain, but from Post Traumatic Stress disorder as well, brought on by seeing the brutal reality of the war on the ground. Eric was in the hospital for thirteen weeks recovering from his injuries, but, even after that, he experienced pain and had to take pain medication for it. The amount of pain that he suffered from, both physically, and mentally (regarding his memories of war), is immeasurable.
When Eric Hall came home from Iraq and from the hospital, he had trouble getting proper care and benefits from the Veteran’s Administration, just as so many of his fellow veterans did. This is evidenced by the story on wounded veterans in November 2006, done by The Evening News and The Tribune (which proclaims itself as Southern Indiana’s award-winning source for community news), in which Hall was profiled, and he reported having trouble receiving full Veteran’s Administration benefits. All the while that he was struggling with the Veteran’s Administration, he was struggling with his own personal problems concerning pain and his post traumatic stress disorder. The fight with the Veteran’s Administration probably did not help his well-being, and it certainly did not help lessen the level of stress that he felt from the remembrance of his experiences in the Iraq War.

On February 3rd, 2008, Hall was back in the states and out of Iraq, although the memories of the Iraq War were doubtless still with him. His phyiscal pain, however, must have been getting slightly better, because he had recently taken himself off of his pain medication. Almost three years after his war experience, Hall was visiting a relative in Punta Gorda, Florida. Escaping his past and starting a new life was evidently the reason for going to Florida, judging by this statement from Eric’s father, Kevin Hall, “He was going down there to start a new life and get things together — which he was.” But Hall’s efforts to accomplish this were reduced to dust due to the events on the day of February 3rd. After playing a video game titled “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare”, which, I believe, is based on the Iraq War, Eric announced that the house was surrounded and that he had to leave. He was not joking, he was in earnest. Apparently hallucinating and having flashbacks from the Iraq War, he took off on his motorcycle, as though trying to escape invisible enemies. That would be the last time that anyone saw Eric Hall alive.
His motorcycle was found, on its side and still running, along a road. A search was launched around the general area of where the motorcycle was found (Charlotte County in Florida), but searchers were unable to find Eric Hall. Weeks of searching yielded no results. However, they did find a sophisticated “spider hole” dug into the ground, which contained some bottled water and which Hall had likely used as a shelter. Hall’s father, Kevin Hall, commented, “If he went back to full military mentality — he knows how to hide.”

And hide Eric Hall did. A fellow veteran and a fellow sufferer from post traumatic stress disorder, Jim Cannon, said about Hall, “I imagine he thinks he’s in a different place, somewhere in a different time and he probably thinks we’re the enemy looking for him.” Hall hid so well from the searchers that the way that searchers finally discovered him was by the strong odor coming from his decomposed body. It’s an unpleasant statement, but sometimes we have to be confronted with the unpleasant realities of the world. Eric Hall’s body was removed from the culvert, or the conduit used to enclose a flowing body of water, and he was identified using his military medical records.

And so ended the life of Eric Hall. His death was a casualty of the Iraq War, although it is a casualty that will never be recorded in the official record.

With every death that I hear of or observe, I attempt to draw some meaning, some lesson, from the life and death of the person who has died, because I so hate to see a life ending with no lasting meaning. What can we learn from the death of Eric Hall?

Eric Hall’s death can be blamed on a number of things: his lack of pain medication, the “Call of Duty” video game, his post traumatic stress disorder, or the inability to get sufficient help from the Veteran’s Administration. But, I think, looking at the larger picture, the blame should rest ultimately on the Iraq War and the fact that we are sending soldiers off to die or become injured in a war such as this in the first place. Prevention is the key to the solution, just as it is the key to so many other problems that we face. Why add to the suffering of the world, which is already so great, by having people suffer as Eric Hall and other veterans have suffered, in the name of an unjust war which could have easily been avoided? There is too much suffering in this world already without preventable things like this happening. We should be doing all we can to, first of all, stay out of war, and, secondly, if avoiding war is absolutely impossible (and avoidance of war is only very rarely impossible), then we should do everything in our power to help the returning veterans. Humankind and our nation, which is supposedly the first among the nations of humankind but which shows little indication of that, are better than this. We are better than fighting senseless, useless, preventable wars, and then further displaying our immaturities by discarding the veterans of our wars.

To derive one final lesson from the death of Eric Hall, let us return to the area where his life began. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Frasier Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. You should go, if you’re ever visiting near Louisville. The museum is about the History of Violence in the world. It has a room full of old guns and weapons, one of which being an old one-shot Derringer from the 1860’s that looks very similar to the one that killed Abraham Lincoln. They also present one-person historical reenactments of historical events, such as the Battle of Hastings (which took place in England in 1066 between King Harold and William, Duke of Normandy, fighting for control of the country). I’ve been to the Frasier Museum twice, while visiting family, and I have found it very enjoyable, although it is not because I revel in violence. There is a quote that I have seen on the lower floor of the museum that tells you the museum’s purpose and why the museum was originally founded: by presenting to you the history of violence, it is hoped that you will gain a greater appreciation for peace. May the events surrounding the Iraq War, such as the death of Eric Hall, give you a greater appreciation for peace.

Executive Efficacy Expanded

2008-02-16T03:45:00.001-08:00

Many, many people in these united states long for the day upon which George W. Bush will vacate the Presidency. During Bush’s terms in office, he has gotten us into a Quagmire in Iraq (and has engaged in a generally arrogant and foolish foreign policy), deftly removed many of our civil liberties from us, racked up record deficits, exploited the people’s fear of terrorism (which helped him to win elections, achieve his agenda, and rob us of our apparently undeserved liberties), and, most importantly, greatly increased the power and influence of the Executive Branch. The People long for Bush’s exit because they are tired of these repeated abuses and usurpations, and with the hope that, once Dubya leaves, we’ll be able to get a Democrat or at least a moderate in office and get America back onto the right track. This perspective is not in agreement with my own; in point of fact, I disagree with it very strongly. It seems to me that this belief is the product of the very ignorance which allowed Bush to expand his office and worsen the state of the country in the first place. Let me take just a few moments in order to explain my thoughts more clearly on this matter.

During these past several years, Presidential puppet George W. Bush and the various puppeteers in his administration have worked to greatly expand the power of the Executive Branch in the United States government. They have been very successful in their pursuance of this goal, and it now appears as though we have a new kind of “imperial presidency” in place. Their ability to expand the power of the Presidency was due to the negligence and cowardice of the Congress and the ignorance and inattentiveness of the American people. It is as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions.” The people were inattentive to the Executive office, so the officials associated with the Executive all became wolves, thirsting after, not blood, but power in the excess. But what are the implications of this greatly expanded efficacy of the Executive? What are the implications of all of the new precedents set by the Executive office?

During Bush’s two terms, We the People of the United States have effectively given many new and frightening powers to the Executive Branch, simply because of how much we tolerate. We tolerate phone wiretapping, we tolerate torture, we tolerate the violating of the Constitution, and so that becomes part of the policy, part of the powers of the executive branch, because we allow it. These terrible things will all be set as precedents for the next Executive to follow, and they, whomever they may be, will fall in step with these precedents. I say this because there have not been many in history who have denied themselves nearly unlimited power purposefully (George Washington, the great leader, being a notable exception). The next President shall not deny themselves the excess power because they know that they can get away with exercising such power with no consequences to them. They will not be punished, they will not be impeached, they will reap the rewards of nearly absolute power, and with not a squeak from the American people on the matter because the masses are too busy watching American Idol to watch American Government. However, the next Executive may not be as blatant about exercising these excesses in power as George W. Bush has been. An image to present to the public must be maintained, because image is everything to a People who only look broadly over the surface of the ocean of politics without bothering to look deeper. Bush really has been quite inept at projecting a good public image. However, both political parties are in general very good at fabricating false images with which to hoodwink the People: among other things, the Republicans have been skilled at fabricating an image of being better terrorist-hunters, and the Democrats have been adept at fabricating the illusion that they are a populist Party of the People.

I believe it very likely, and, in fact, inevitable, that these repeated usurpations and injuries will not end with George W. Bush. The precedents have been set for nearly absolute power for the Executive Branch, and power corrupts and is irresistable to falliable human beings. It is fairly apparent to me that the actions of George W. Bush will be perpetuated by every future President of the United States. That is, unless the People and the Congress step up and put the option of impeachment on the table, and preferably impeachment for George W. Bush, because it is best to stop the problem at its source. However, it is very unlikely that we will impeach Bush or Cheney, because the members of Congress are politically calculating cowards who don’t want to do anything controversial with an election coming up. But if we don’t impeach Bush now, we’ll either have to impeach another President farther down the road or perpetually suffer from usurpations from the Executive Branch.

To you people who still believe that electing a Democrat will get rid of the deplorable policies and precedents of George W. Bush, I salute you for navigating, in direct conflict with evident truths, along the channels of blind party loyalty. It is naive to believe that all of the damaging actions that George W. Bush has inflicted upon us will just disappear upon the entry of some other falliable human being, whatever their political affiliation, into the office of the presidency. It is naive to believe that all of this overstepping of constitutional authority will end as soon as George W. Bush is gone. It is naive to believe that a new president, even a Democratic President, will be a magical remedy to the things like loss of civil liberties. Only We the People can ensure that our civil liberties are perpetually protected, and we can protect them by informing ourselves and being attentive to the actions of our government and demanding impeachment for elected officials who overstep their authority. It is lazy to assume that the politicians who we elect to our political offices are the only ones responsible for keeping our civil liberties safe, and that We the People are not responsible in the slightest for preserving our own rights. This responsibilty absolutely does not belong to our assorted elected officials. When I say that the People must protect their own rights, who do you think I mean that the rights have to be protected from? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not the terrorists. These United States politicians who we trust, trust on the basis of faith in their abilities, to protect our liberties, become nothing more than wolves when the people are not attentive, as Thomas Jefferson stated centuries ago. The entire system fails to work if the people are not enlightened and watchful.

The preservation of liberty requires eternal vigilance from the informed Peoples of the United States, creators and overseers of their own elected leaders, safeguards of their own democracy, and keepers of their own country’s well-being. That’s what self-government is all about. And, if we fail to understand that, then perhaps we just don’t deserve our liberties. If we fail to understand that and act upon it, then it is likely that our problems with unprecedented Executive power, created by the lack of political attention and activity among the People, will never be remedied. Perhaps our democracy is destined to fall to the power of an unchecked Executive, and then swirl down the toilet into the Sewers of History.

Corporate Control

2008-02-06T19:22:00.000-08:00

It is a well-known and unfortunate fact in the United States that businesses, corporations, and special interests play a much greater role in our politics and government than we would certainly like it to. There has been, for decades, if not centuries, the element to our politics that is the corrupting influence of money. It has become particularly pronounced in recent years, especially in this 2008 Presidential Election, where candidates of both political parties are raising millions and millions of dollars each in campaign cash. In fact, this could be the first billion-dollar presidential campaign in our country’s history. That is, assuredly, not a positive sign.

The great influence of money in our politics is a very dangerous thing because, if the main emphasis in politics becomes money, the people who have the most money, also known as the people who can afford to donate large sums to political campaigns, will gain an inordinate influence in our government. This means that the rich and the corporations will gain a much greater influence in our politics than will the povertized and the Middle-Class. It is very important to ensure that this small minority of ultra-rich citizens never gains complete and total control of our government. That would degrade and deplenish our grand democracy, which is based upon the values of being of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Unfortunately, it seems as though the ultra-rich minority has already gained nearly complete control of our government, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party, the media, and, not only that, but our entire country as well. Let me explain my thoughts on this matter.

Firstly, the financial and political elites are often the same people, for the reason that the financial elites have enough money to launch and run a political campaign, and to maintain a political career. These financial elites who gain political office have, first and foremost, their own self-interest, and therefore the self-interest of other financial elites, at heart. Adding to the reasoning of the statement that politicians have the self-interest of financial elites at heart is the knowledge that most politicians take extraordinary amounts of money from the ultra-rich and the corporations (financial elites). Political leaders find it necessary to take money from these elites, for the reason that they would not be able to win elections otherwise. In order to win an election, one political party has to out-raise another political party. Make no mistake, money is the greatest determining factor in the outcome of elections. The Republican Party has been raising money from the businesses and special interests for years now, and the Democrats, in an attempt to regain power from the Republicans and win elections, had to establish an allegiance to the corporations and ultra-rich as well, to raise enough money to be serious competition. Bill and Hillary Clinton accomplished this, by taking the Democratic Party to Wall Street, and removing it from Main Street, where it had resided for decades. Shame on them, and other Democratic political leaders, for degrading the sacred “Party of the People”.

So, both of our political parties, both competing with each other by trying to raise the most amount of money for elections, have sold out and both become the property of the ultra-rich and the corporations, who are the entities which can donate the most money to political campaigns. And, since our two-party system, with the Republican and Democratic parties, completely controls, and in fact has a monopoly on, our politics and government, our government itself has been sold out to the corporations, ultra-rich, and special interests.

It is also a noted fact in the United States that these same corporations, and the same ultra-rich people, who buy and sell our politicians on a regular basis also own all of the media outlets in the United States. All of the major media outlets in this country are owned by five large corporations. That is a fact. This has caused many to rightfully describe and decry the mainstream media in the United States as the “Corporate-Owned Media”.

Now, when I’m talking about the corporate media, some mistakenly believe that I mean FOX News alone, as it is seemingly the worst, most corrupt media outlet. But, in actuality, with regard to the corporate media, I’m talking about every single major news network. MSNBC, CNN, FOX, etcetera. They’re all owned by large, greedy corporations. And having all of our major media outlets owned by large corporations is very bad for our democracy, especially since it now seems that the corporations are allowed to exercise censorship with disregard to the public good, and to promote the interests of the corporations rather than the interests of the entire country. These corporations can exclude and include presidential candidates on their media outlets based on whether or not these candidates agree with the corporations and whether they would help the corporations as President. If you don’t have the best interest of the corporations at heart, don’t expect to be given an opportunity to talk and express your view and spread your message on their news media channel.

There was a recent example of this in the decision to keep Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich out of a recent MSNBC Presidential debate. General Electric, a beneficiary of the military-industrial complex which Kucinich would fight as President, instructed their MSNBC media outlet to keep Kucinich (and, earlier, Former Senator Mike Gravel) out of the debate. The Kucinich campaign appealed to a judge, because Kucinich had been invited to the debate, and then disinvited just a few days later. The judge ruled in favor of Kucinich’s inclusion and ordered that Kucinich be included (or he would stop the debate), so MSNBC (backed by GE) fought tooth and nail to keep Kucinich out, appealing the judge’s decision. The case went to the Nevada Supreme Court. The Nevada Supreme Court ruled in favor of MSNBC and GE, and set the precedent that the corporate media can determine who can and who can’t speak out on their media outlets, based on the 1st Amendment right of Freedom of the Press. But I thought that Freedom of the Press was supposed to bolster the already-given individual right of Freedom of Speech, not to allow large corporations to decide who’s allowed to speak and who’s not. Corporate control of the media needs to be more regulated, not less regulated.

Corporations owning the media gives the media, in my mind, two very unfortunate goals that they might not have otherwise. One of them is to maintain the status quo (under which both the media outlets, the corporations, and the rich are currently flourishing), and keep average Americans good and distracted and ignorant in order to do so. As long as the ultra-rich and the corporations maintain the ignorance of the poor and the middle-class, they can remain in power. If the People realized what was going on here, there would be a revolution. The other goal of the corporate media is to, of course, like any good corporation, make lots of money. Having a media outlet be owned by a business essentially makes that media outlet a business in itself, as the main goal of the business that owns it will be to make money.

The Corporate Media accomplishes both of its main goals (maintaining the status quo and making money) by using the material that they air on the corporate media television channels to frighten, misinform, and distract the People. The fear, distractions, and misinformation serve to preserve the status quo by promoting ignorance throughout the population. Also, the distractions that they air also appeal to the worst part of human nature (the most small-minded part of human nature, focusing on people, gossip, and celebrity). Because the media material appeals to the most basic, primitive, small-minded part of our nature, we all enjoy it and tune in and watch, and so the news media profits a great deal as a result. Sensationalist and celebrity stories are what the media lives upon today. They breathe it as we breathe air.

In reality, “politics” means “policies”, but the type of “politics” that the news media outlets air does not have anything to do with policies. It is a new brand of politics, “celebritics”, which focuses on the sensationalism and celebrity of certain candidates and their individual actions rather than focusing on policy issues.

The focus on celebrity has worked out so well profit-wise for the Corporate Media that they have even tried to incorporate celebrity into every aspect of the 2008 presidential race. This is reflected in the fact that, from the beginning, the media has tried to make the Democratic Presidential race a competition between the two most sensationalist stories. Of course, I’m talking about the stories of electing the first woman or first African American as President. The Media gave so much more media attention to the sensationalist and celebrity stories (which is profitable for them), and, also, the corporations who own the media have both Clinton and Obama very soundly in their pockets. It’s a double-benefit for the media and the corporations which own it. But, you have a third choice on the Democratic side, a candidate who is not owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by the corporations: Former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel. However, it is unlikely that Gravel will ever be elected President, even though he is honest and has integrity and courage. The corporations of this country use the media outlets to further their goals, and ensure that they, the corporations, are firmly and completely in control of our government and all of the major leaders in it. The corporations, with the power of the propaganda sent from their media outlets behind them, can make it a certainty that only a presidential candidate friendly to the corporations will be elected in 2008.

When the corporations who own the politicians own the media outlets, it is essentially as though the state, the government, owns the media outlets, in an indirect way. It seems to me that, in that way, our press is no freer than the press in Russia, where the three major media outlets are all owned directly by the State. In my mind, the corporations are the government here in the United States, and they, even more frighteningly, own nearly all of our sources of information. Capitalism can be a force for good in the world, but only when it is regulated. And it is my belief that we certainly don’t regulate our corporations enough, especially with respect to the ownership of media outlets. But, really, how can we expect to get anything major done in the realm of regulating corporations when all of the political leaders lack the political will to do so, for the very reason that they are owned by those corporations? Only the most courageous of political leaders will forfeit their political careers and go against the corporations (their campaign donors) on the basis of principle. And it seems to me that, right now, we have quite a shortage of courageous and principled politicians; no one in our government today even has the courage enough to filibuster a war funding bill for this illegal, unconstitutional, damaging Iraq War that we are currently immersed in. Political calculation trumps political courage.

Not only is our government controlled by corporations, our entire country and our culture is controlled by corporations, and we, like good brainwashed sheep, march in step, on their command, to their tune of greed and selfishness. Our entire culture has been permeated by the values of the corporations. This is illustrated by the emphasis that the United States puts on both competition and the individual. These two values are ingrained into our beings. These two things combined, emphasis on competition and emphasis on the individual, breeds a culture of selfishness, one of the most notable characteristics of a corporation, which nearly always puts profit and its own self-interest before the public interest. We are seeing that culture of selfishness being bred in Americans every day; many of us all all so immersed in our own selfish little material pursuits, such as watching reality TV and American Idol and focusing on making a great deal of money and so on, that we care relatively little about informing ourselves about politics and focusing on our shared necessity for things to be done in the name of the public good. We are living in country ruled by the corporations, both in our government and in our media, so it is really no wonder that things are so bad here in the United States today.

The Illogicality of Perpetual Wars

2008-02-04T19:15:00.000-08:00

Throughout human history, humankind has been fond of waging perpetual wars, the meaning of which being a war waged upon an enemy that can never be definitively defeated. We likely do this because we are rather illogical creatures, creatures whose passions and prejudices can easily trump logic. In modern times, one place in the world where this illogicality of perpetual war has fully taken root is the United States of America. Given, all countries behave illogically to some extent (as they are all governed by fallible human beings), but America is the one that I know the most about. This illogicality is illustrated perfectly by two “wars”, one military and one not, that America currently is waging: the War on Terror and the War on Drugs.

Firstly, the War on Terror. We have carried on a “War on Terror” in this country ever since George W. Bush declared it to be so after the 2001 Terrorist attack. It is, as John Edwards stated, a bumper sticker slogan. The nature of humankind is such that there have been acts of terrorism for the entire length of our existence, and there will be acts of terror for the remainder of the time that humankind resides on the earth. I doubt that this element of our nature will be eradicated simply because a President of the United States has declared “war” on it. It is as Noam Chomsky said, “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.” Terrorism will never disappear unless people discontinue participating in it, and they never will. We are fighting a foe that will exist perpetually, so, indeed, if we declare it to be so, then we are trying to defeat what can never truly be defeated: a part of our Selves. But, of course, now I see the logic in George W. Bush wanting to start up a World War III. Blasting the human race off the face of the earth with nukes is the only way that we can win the War on Terror.

That seems to be extraordinarily illogical on our part. Why would we have hundreds of thousands of human beings die and spend trillions of dollars over this, to try to change human nature? More likely millions have died as a direct result of our declaration of a “War on Terror”, and, ironically, I doubt that many of them were actually terrorists. Nearly a million innocent Iraqis have died as a result of America’s invasion of their country (although Iraq really had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism or 9/11, we did attack them as a result of George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”).

Does the "War on Terror" have to be an actual, physical war? Wouldn’t it be better if we just improved our intelligence services and intervened in planned terrorist attacks which our improved intelligence system would have detected? That would be the ideal (and the most effective) solution, I think, because, with our current policy of fighting wars all over the world, we are actually incurring more hatred and inspiring more terrorism. We are creating more terrorists than we are killing with our flawed policies. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that these kinds of ridiculous policies just don’t work. And, in addition to an improved intelligence system, we need to fundamentally alter our approach to foreign policy.

What we need to do is to stop engaging in threats and imperialism. We need to stop policing the world. We need to stop invading other countries preemptively and illegally. We need to stop bombing other countries unnecesarily and secretly; if the politicians don’t want the public to know that they are doing something, then we probably should not be doing it. We need to treat all of the other countries of the world as equals, be less arrogant, stop bullying them, and treat them with respect. That way, we will incur less hatred around the world and be less vulnerable to terrorism as a result. Terrorism towards the United States feeds off of and lives off of hatred towards the United States. We make our own enemies, and we need to stop continuing these policies that inspire hate towards us. The main reason that Osama bin Laden attacked us on September 11th was because we intervened militarily in the Middle East, killed many Middle Easterners, and incurred hatred there in pre-9/11 policy. That’s called blowback. Bin Laden attacked us as a direct result of our foreign policy of destruction. And, now, we’re intervening even more in the Middle East, and killing even more Middle-Easterners, and incurring even more hatred there. Is that supposed to solve the problem? If something doesn’t work, try it again? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” said Albert Einstein, in his accurate definition of insanity. Evidently, our leaders meet the criteria and are officially insane.

Here, on a related but unrelated note, I would like to say that it is ironic that the government (the Bush Administration and the Congress) claims to be fighting terrorism abroad, while at that same time, they are instilling terror in their own people as a method of maintaining power. James Madison predicted this development, “It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.” Why have we not listened to and heeded the message of our Founding Fathers that liberty requires eternal vigilance to maintain? It’s not too late to heed their warning across the centuries.

Now, of course, the second illogical, perpetual war that I am planning to be espousing my views on: the War on Drugs. We have carried on this War on Drugs for decades, particularly ever since Richard Nixon declared an official “War on Drugs” in the 1970s. This policy is utterly ineffective, and we are spending billions of dollars on it each year, taking precious funds away from more deserving outlets, such as Education or Healthcare. It is a policy reminiscent of Prohibition during the 1920s and 1930s, which we all know from history actually caused more crime and conflict and didn’t stop people from drinking alcohol anyway. FDR had the good sense to end this policy as soon as he got into office in 1933. And the next President of the United States, Democrat or Republican, should sensibly end the War on Drugs.

The Drug War has been ineffective and will be ineffective, and perpetual, because drugs are substances that can never be eradicated; more of them can always be grown and made. Human nature, of course, plays a part in this one too. As long as people want to use drugs and as long as people want to make profits off of selling drugs, drugs-dealers and drug-users will exist, and the Drug War will go on. This Drug War which is ravaging our cities and putting thousands, if not hundred of thousands, of our citizens in jails. We currently have 2.3 million people total in jail in the United States, which is the most out of all of the countries in the world. We are #1 in the number of people that we have in prison, now that’s an accomplishment.

Throwing drug addicts in jail doesn’t solve their addiction problem. The fact of the matter is that drugs (particularly marijuana) should be a public health problem, not a criminal problem, and certainly not a “war”. We need to legalize marijuana, and make it so that the harder drugs will be provided by doctors. I said before that as long as people want to and can sell drugs for a profit, the drug war will go on. Well, making it so that certified doctors can provide the drugs will get rid of the drug market, and people will no longer have to go to drug dealers on the streets to buy drugs. This will greatly lessen crime, which is certainly desirable. And, of course, once drugs are made legal and are provided by a doctor, people may be able to muster up the ability to get off of the drugs. Increased stability in their supplies of drugs can help people to stop worrying about where they are going to get their next fix, and once that uncertainty disappears, they can begin to collect their thoughts and develop a will to get off of the drugs.

These two “wars”, the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs”, are just plain foolish. Can’t we deal with our problems any more effectively than by declaring a “war” on them? If we’re going to do this kind of thing, why don’t we declare a war on backseat drivers, or pittbulls, or dust, as well? Why do we fight these illogical Wars of Perpetuity? Of course, you know, I have an answer. But even if you don’t have an answer, you should still ask the questions. Oftentimes, the questions are insurmountably more important than the answers anyway. But, it is my belief that our country fights these so-called “wars” because the people who can wage them, the people in power, benefit. That is why the United States has many of the policies that it does; politicians set policies according to their own self-interest first, ascertaining what option would be the one most likely to maintain their power. We could fight these problems more effectively than with a “war”, but, no, our leaders refuse to do so. These perpetual wars, they’re just politics. They’s just another way to frighten and pacify the masses, and they’re just another way to please the special interests. Politics as Usual.

I’ll specifically address how the people in power benefit from both the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. Firstly, the War on Terror. Of course, the first benefit of this is that it serves as the political tool of manipulation of the American people. The politicians use the issue of terrorism to scare people into accepting policies and decisions that they absolutely would not accept if they were not under the influence of Fear. Fear has the power to cause all of our powers of logic and reasoning to be drowned out by a consuming panic which overwhelms the senses. Such policies that the people would not accept unless they were under the influence of fear are things like the Iraq War invasion, the Patriot Act, and the destruction of our civil liberties. We will willingly lay down all of our rights when under the influence of Fear, believing the compromise of these rights essential to preserve our safety, with the panicked hope that we may yet remain safe. In this situation, we are undeserving of either liberty or safety, as Benjamin Franklin so accutely observed, “Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither and lose both.” Exploiting the people’s fears have led to the creation of a veritable monarchy of an Executive branch within the United States government, because it has allowed the Branch to take so many of our rights from us.

These perpetual wars are not only designed to scare the population into accepting policies that they would not accept otherwise: also, the fear created as a result of these wars can manipulate people in order to make them vote for one political party or the other. It is not only a political tool, it is a partisan tool. It can be used to either enact change (usually negative), or to preserve the status quo, it depends on how it is utilized.

Additionally, it seems to me that the “War on Terror” serves an even more sinister purpose than the ones that I have above described, if that is possible. Having a perpetual war against an indestructible entity means that the military-industrial complex and its corporate beneficiaries (who are an enormous influence in our government, country, politics, and culture) will continue to benefit financially, as long as we are always fighting or always preparing to fight the “terrorists”. I believe that the long arm of the military-industrial complex has played a part in starting every single military venture (large and small) that we have been engaged in ever since the 1950s, when Dwight D. Eisenhow first warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the military-industrial complex. It is no coincidence that the beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex contribute greatly to the political campaigns of the politicians who get us into military conflicts like this. The “War on Terror” is a creative and perpetual way for politicians to please the special interests related to the military-industrial complex. Our “War on Terror”, if continued, would ensure that the defense industry has steady profits for years to come. You might be in disbelief that politicians would actually sacrifice innocent lives in order to please the special interests and maintain power. But, let me tell you, political calculations and the desire to maintain one’s power often trumps morality. The desire for power can be dehumanizing.

But, now, of course, I’ll dedicate a little time to how the politicians benefit from the perpetual war of the War on Drugs. Throughout our history as a nation and throughout the history of humankind, leaders have inspired fears and prejudices of those who are just different. Leaders use this inspiration of fears (fear of drug addicts, for example) in order to control and manipulate the masses of the People. It is exactly as Noam Chomsky said, “The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.” The War on Drugs helps the people in power to manipulate us all by way of fear (as, of course, is also the case with the “War on Terror”), and that is certainly desirable to them. It is deplorable that We the People are so ignorant as to be so easily manipulated. I don’t understand why we can’t see through the shroud.

It seemed apparent to me that both of these “wars” cause all of our powers of logical thought and critical analysis to be completely obscured by one devouring passion: fear. These perpetual wars, just like the current airport security system, are designed to scare the population into submission. This fear causes us to accept the illogical perpetual wars and other policies. It is a sad cycle that these perpetual wars cause fear in the population, and so we cannot stop them for that very reason, and so they go on.

Perhaps perpetual wars are not really so illogical after all, from the perspective of those in power. In fact, from their point of view, it seems to me that perpetual wars would be extraordinarily logical and desirable. Maybe if I ever get into office, I’ll start up a War on Raisins. I don’t like those very much, and I feel that I could inspire popular terror due to popular error, against raisins.

But in the end, honestly, all I can do is agree with Bertrand Russell: “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.” We are not behaving rationally. We are being herded around like a flock of sheep by our “handlers”, the politicians. We allow them to control and manipulate us using, among other things, the tool of perpetual war. We do not control the politicians, as we believe that we do; rather, the politicians control us. We fail to realize that fact. And you can’t fix a problem without being aware of it first.

Trade

2008-02-03T02:35:00.000-08:00

Trade is an issue which, relative to more prominent issues, many do not feel strongly about. It is an issue upon which the mainstream candidates from each of the major parties agree, so it can not be used as an issue to inflame voters with partisanship and get them to go to the polls to vote against the opposition party. Trade is quite unlike the issues of abortion, or gay marriage, or the War in Iraq, in that respect. However, I believe that Trade is a very important issue which affects all of our lives here in the United States on a daily basis. Specifically, whether the United States assumes the policies of Free Trade or of Fair Trade.

Free Trade between countries is essentially when there are no restrictions whatsoever at their borders when it comes to trade. There are no tariffs, regulations, fees, etcetera. With Free Trade, trade is free and open between countries, and companies are allowed to ship their products across the border at very little cost. The argument for this is that it will raise the economic level of countries on both sides of the border. On the other side of the coin, there is Fair Trade. Fair Trade is basically the opposite of Free Trade. In Fair Trade, there are tariffs and regulations at the border. Trade is not open and free between countries. The argument for Fair Trade is that it will protect the workers on both sides of the border.

Under Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the United States had Free Trade policies. During his terms in office, the NAFTA Treaty, between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, was signed, and it has created one of the largest Free Trade zones in the World. The purpose of NAFTA is to raise the economic level of the lesser economies (Mexico), by allowing them to participate in and benefit from the greater economies (United States). In this way, the total bloc of North America would be made more powerful economically. Currently, under George W. Bush, we have Free Trade policies. Bush has followed Clinton’s example concerning Trade. Both parties, Republican and Democratic, are in favor of Free Trade policies. All of the 2008 Presidential candidates, Republican and Democratic, are in favor of Free Trade, except for Mike Gravel and Ron Paul. So, Obama, Clinton, McCain, Romney, and Huckabee are all in support of Free Trade. Many ordinary Democrats and Republicans simply acquiesce in agreement in favor of Free Trade, for the reason that the leaders of their respective parties are in favor of it.

However, after some thought and discussion about the issue, I find myself very strongly opposed to Free Trade and very much in favor of Fair Trade. I will use NAFTA as an example. Specifically, the effect that NAFTA has upon the United States, Mexico, and workers from both countries.

Mexico imports 75% of its agricultural products from the United States. Because of Free Trade policies and NAFTA, it is cheaper to import the products than it is to just grow them in Mexico. There are no tariffs and trade restrictions, so it is very cheap to just buy the products from the U.S. and ship them across the border, compared to the greater cost of growing the products in Mexico. The result of less agricultural products being grown in Mexico is that Mexican agricultural workers lose their jobs. I should think that that certainly wouldn’t help Mexico’s economy. These Mexicans who have lost their agricultural jobs in Mexico then have to go to the United States to find work. As the jobs move to the United States, the workers have no choice but to move to the United States. This most certainly contributes to the illegal immigration “problem” in the United States, making Free Trade a concern to those who are advocating in favor of securing our borders. I think that if we had Free Trade rather than Fair Trade policies, and if there were tariffs at the border, Mexico would find it more beneficial to just grow the agricultural products in Mexico, and many Mexican agricultural workers would keep their jobs.

Of course, Free Trade between the United States and Mexico certainly doesn’t solely affect Mexico and Mexican workers. On the other side of the equation, the United States loses manufacturing jobs, due to Free Trade. American businesses ship the manufacturing jobs to Mexico for, in my mind, two main reasons: because (1) the workers in Mexico can be paid much less to do the same job and, plus, (2) there are no tariffs and restrictions due to Free Trade, so businesses can ship products across the border (to the United States) at no cost to them and still sell their products to American consumers (at a greater profit to the businesses). It’s a pretty sweet deal for those businesses who outsource jobs to Mexico. Maybe it wouldn’t be such an incentive to outsource jobs if we had some tariffs at the border that the businesses had to pay. The way it is set up now, with Free Trade, outsourcing is doubly beneficial to the businesses who choose to outsource. Do we really want to encourage outsourcing of American jobs in this fashion? Wouldn’t it be better if we had some tariffs and restrictions on business and trade, in order to protect both American and Mexican workers?

From my point of view, from my perspective, it seems like we should put Fair Trade policies in place, rather than Free Trade policies. The economy of Mexico could better develop if the jobs were kept in Mexico, and the economy of the United States could better develop if the jobs were kept in the United States, in my opinion.

And I have been trying to determine why politicians from both parties, Democratic and Republican, are both very supportive of Free Trade policies and why few are supportive of Fair Trade policies and of protecting the worker. My ultimate conclusion was that politicians from both parties support Free Trade for the same reason that they support our corrupt income tax system: it helps the rich citizens and big corporations who fund their political campaigns.

The only thing we have to fear is...

2007-12-24T23:56:00.000-08:00

Franklin Roosevelt said in his First Inaugural Address, during the thick of the Great Depression, to a frightened, uncertain, and despairing population: “Firstly, I would like to assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is… fear itself.” Roosevelt, arguably one of the greatest Presidents of these united states, gave new hope and comfort to the down-trodden population with his first address to the American people. And, ultimately, he would assuage the people’s fears altogether by lifting them out of the terrible Depression.

In 1933 and the years following Roosevelt’s Inauguration, the leaders of yesteryear triumphed over the problems facing them. We must face many new challenges in this new millennium, and it seems to me that we have something new that should be feared above all.

Many people these days are really displeased with the current president, George W. Bush, and he is often disparaged by average people and media personalities alike. That’s very good, it shows that we are exercising our right of Freedom of Speech, and he very much deserves every criticism that he gets. But, if we do not recognize that the sorry shape that our country is in today is not the sole fault of George W. Bush, then we are all delusional, and can do nothing to improve our country and protect it from further usurpations in the future.

George W. Bush, Commander-in-Thief of the United States of America, has (1) gotten us into an illegal and damaging War in Iraq; (2) made torture an acknowledged device of American foreign policy; (3) trampled all over our civil liberties, particularly the right to privacy and the right to a fair trial; (4) racked up record deficits and has had to borrow heavily from other countries, meaning that China now owns us; (5) has alienated America from the rest of the world with his foolish and arrogant foreign policy decisions; and countless other things, many of which we do not know of as of yet, due to the secrecy of our government. But, when you look at all of these things that George W. Bush has done, you must remember that we have more than one branch of government. We have a system of Checks and Balances, with each branch of government checking and balancing out the other. However, the Congress of the United States has failed miserably in checking and balancing the Executive Branch. In fact, they, the Democrats included, have facilitated nearly every action that George W. Bush has decided to take as president.

Take, for example, the War in Iraq. In 2002, the Congress passed a resolution that would allow the president to declare war on Iraq (a middle-eastern country with a lot of oil, who was supposedly a nuclear theat to us) whenever it happened to tickle his fancy. Sure, the resolution instructed that the President go to the U.N. and follow all of their rules, but it meant that, effectively, the President, rather than the Congress, declared war on Iraq. The Congress did not issue a direct declaration of war. So, you can see, the Congress completely facilitated the President, and, although the Congress was Republican at that time, there were Democrats in that Congress, and, had they taken the initiative, one of them could have filibustered the bill that would have allowed the President to declare war on Iraq. The system of Checks and Balances failed because of the cowardice, and political calculation, of our Representatives.
And it will continue to fail, as it has done in many instances since 2002.

One of these instances was the recent Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, in which the Democratic Congress practically bent over backwards in order to give Bush a reason to go to war with Iran (another middle-eastern country with a lot of oil, who was supposedly a nuclear threat to us). The bill passed overwhelmingly in the Democratic Congress, with many a Democrat voting for it, including Hillary Rodham Clinton. The bill declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. And, because the IRG has ties all over Iran and Iran’s government, George W. Bush could easily use this Kyl-Lieberman amendment to justify a possible military strike on Iran. Bush could just say the magic word “terrorism”, and we could be off on another “misunderestimated” adventure. Fool me once, shame on you, but, fool me twice, shame on me.

Congress has completely and utterly failed to utilize the system of Checks and Balances. George W. Bush would not have been able to do all of this if he had been prevented from doing so by the Congress, exercising its full power as the more powerful branch of government. But our representatives are completely and totally preoccupied with winning reelection and maintaining their power (and raising enough money to do so). The Congress is so preoccupied with this that they are not doing their jobs. One instance of this which is prominent in my mind was at a recent Democratic Presidential debate: Former Senator Mike Gravel suggested that the candidates in Congress leave the campaign trail and vote, for forty consecutive days, to end the War in Iraq. The moderator and the other candidates seemed to think this an insane suggestion; god forbid that our representatives actually do their jobs.

The preoccupation with money and maintaining power makes it so that our “representatives” represent the special interests and businesses that they must get money from to win reelection, rather than representing the People of the United States. Essentially, George W. Bush’s two terms in office are indicative of a much bigger problem: representative government is broken. It no longer functions in the interest of the people, as it was originally designed to do.

John Adams once said to his friend, Thomas Jefferson, “You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.” What we have right now, in our government, is essentially a monarchy and an aristocracy. Our Executive branch has nearly unchecked power due to the negligence of the Congress, and the Congress is full of rich, power-hungry, corrupt politicians, most of which care more about appeasing the special interests and maintaining power than helping those less fortunate than themselves. It certainly reminds one of an aristocracy and a monarchy.

How did it get to be this way? Why has our government degenerated into this cesspool of corruption and destruction?

James Monroe, the 5th President of the United States, once said, “It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and a usurper soon found. The people become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin.”

Monroe’s neighbor and the 4th President of the United States, James Madison, had this to say, “The people are the only legitimate fountain of power, and it is from them that the constitutional charter, under which the several branches of government hold their power, is derived.”

Ponder these two quotes, and they will help you see a clearer picture of our current situation. When you look at our government, and when you look around our country today, you have to realize that, ultimately, the responsibility lies with us, the People of the United States of America. We are the only legitimate fountain of power. We are the pillars that hold our Democracy up…but these pillars are crumbling. We have become ignorant, corrupt, and complacent, and that has allowed our elected officials to usurp power and corrupt our government. The people are too ignorant to stop them. And it is a sad fact that the People cannot elect a great leader to pull them back together for the very reason that the People are falling apart.

And, when people realize, once in a great while, that their government is doing them a great deal of harm, they blame their elected officials alone, even though the power of those elected officials springs from the Power of the People. We solely blame those elected officials, and so, like I stated before, we can do nothing to improve our country and protect it from further usurpations in the future, because we don’t realize that there is a greater problem than just those few elected officials.

People don’t realize that they, living in a Democracy, are the only legitimate fountain of power, from which all other legitimate powers in this nation spring. They are living in a state of Civic Adolescence, so they don’t take responsibility for their country’s problems, and they leave it to their elected officials (who are often ineffective and incompetent) to become learned about problems and fix them. Because they feel no responsibility and leave everything to their elected officials, they are ignorant about many of the problems of today.

I have a solution to some of these problems that I have above described. To move us out of a state of Civic Adolescence and into a state of Civic Adulthood, Former Senator Mike Gravel has an interesting proposal. It’s called the National Initiative for Democracy, and it would empower the people to make laws, directly, in partnership with their elected officials. If people make the laws directly, then they will see that they are directly responsible, and then they will bother to educate themselves about the issues (because it would be greatly in their own self-interest to do so). Then, perhaps, shed of our thick skin of ignorance, the People will become the true masters in this Democracy and will no longer allow their elected officials to exploit them and corrupt their government.

But, today, there is a different reality. Sadly, as James Monroe over 200 years ago warned us might happen, we have become the willing instruments of our own debasement and ruin. Our elected officials are exploiting the ignorance and corruption of the people for political gain, to the point that they have been able to set up a veritable monarchy and aristocracy.

In 1933, the only thing that we had to fear was fear itself. Today, the only thing that we have to fear is ourselves.

Why Mike Gravel Should be the next President

2007-11-27T20:03:00.000-08:00

With these elections, it is necesary that people carefully consider all of the candidates, even though the media likes to thin out the field of candidates for us before a single vote is even cast. Do not discount any candidate immediately: it is your duty as a citizen and voter of the United States to evaluate any and all candidates to decide which one best represents you. Dispel any qualms about Gravel’s electibility: the fact of the matter is that if everyone believes that a candidate is electable, then they will be electable, while if everyone believes that a candidate is not electable, then they are not. People should vote for whom they truly agree with in the primaries, so maybe then they won’t be presented with two bad choices in the general election (and then complain about that fact). So, here, in order to inform the population, I’ve written an article detailing the aspects of Former Senator Mike Gravel’s illustrious life and his positions on various policies and issues.

Maurice Robert Gravel was born on May 13th, 1930, in Springfield, Massachusetts. However, his parents, Alphonse Gravel and Marie Bourassa, always called him Mike. Mike’s father and mother were working-class French Canadian immigrants, and they lived in a working-class neighborhood. His father was a painting contractor, and when Mike wasn’t helping with the house painting and construction business (along with his brothers), he volunteered in local Springfield politics. His political involvement as an adolescent initiated a life-long interest in politics and government.

As a young man, Mike studied at the American International College in Springfield for one year, and then, in 1951, he enlisted with the United States Army. In the army, he served in West Germany as both a Special Adjutant in the Communication and Intelligent Services and as a Special Agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps. Mike ended his tenure in the army in 1954. He headed back home to the United States to attend college at Columbia University’s School of General Studies in New York City. To support himself while in college (which much have been much cheaper back in the 50’s), he drove a Taxi Cab, a classic checkered cab. The difficulty of working his way through school was probably added to by the fact that he is dyslexic.
After Mike graduated from Columbia University in 1956 with a Bachelor of Sciences in Economics, his avid interest in politics had evidently endured, for he moved to Alaska, without any money and without any job, seeking to be a candidate for political office. In Alaska, he worked several different jobs while trying to get his big break in Politics: he worked as a brakeman for the Alaska railroad, he tried his hand at the business of real estate sales, and he became a successful property developer on the Kenai Peninsula (a beautiful area on the Southern Coast of Alaska).

On April 29th, 1959, Mike married Rita Jeannette Martin, who had been Miss Fur Rendevous in the 1958 Anchorage Fur Rendevous Festival. They had two children: Martin Anthony Gravel, who was born in 1960, and Lynne Denise Gravel, who was born in 1962. During this time, Mike continued his quest for public office: he ran unsuccessfully for the territorial legislature in 1958, and he ran unsuccessfully for the Anchorage City Council in 1960. He also went on a speaking tour concerning tax reform in 1959, sponsored by the Jaycees (the United States Junior Chamber, which is a leadership training and civic organization for people between the ages of 18 and 40).

Finally, in 1962, Mike was elected to political office, fulfilling the dream that he had no doubt nurtured ever since he was first interested in politics as an adolescent. He ran for the Alaska House of Representatives, representing Anchorage, and won. He served as a Representative from 1962 to 1966, winning reelection in 1964 and becoming the Speaker of the House from 1965-1966. As a Representative, one accomplishment of his was his authorship of legislation that established the structure and budget for a regional high school system for rural Alaska. This action permitted native students to receive their education near their homes rather than travel to the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ schools outside Alaska.

Mike’s time as Anchorage’s representative ended in 1966 because, instead of running for reelection, he challenged incumbent Democrat Ralph Rivers of Alaska for a seat in the United States House of Representatives. Mike lost the election: he had gambled, taken a risk, and he had lost. Although it must have been devastating, he recovered quickly enough and renewed his political ambitions. These ambitions caused him to challenge Incumbent Democrat Ernest Gruening, one of the “Founding Fathers” of Alaska, for a seat in the United States Senate.
The Democratic Senate Primary in 1968 was a very close race. Mike’s youth gave him an advantage against the ancient Gruening, as did Mike’s heavy use of well-produced television advertisements and his deliberately ambiguous position on the issue of Vietnam. Alaska was then a very Democratic State, so, once Mike won the primary, it would be smooth sailing from there. When Election Time rolled around, Mike unexpectedly beat his Democratic opponent in a tight result, and then he went on to defeat the Republican Elmer Rasmuson and Gruening (running as an Independent) in the General Election.

So, Mr. Gravel finally went to Washington. His position on Vietnam was ambiguous no longer: he came out in full opposition to the war. As Senator, he had a fantastic record: he fillibustered (in 1971) an end to the military draft in the United States, he halted nuclear testing in the North Pacific, he used his office to organize citizen opposition to nuclear power, and he was responsible for the creation of the Alaska Pipeline, in addition to many other smaller achievements. But what Gravel is most known for is his role in the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers.

The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret government report regarding the policies and lies of several presidential administrations in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Daniel Ellsberg (a former Defense Department Analyst), had possession of the Papers and leaked snippets of them to the New York Times. When some of the content of the Pentagon Papers were published on June 13, lawsuits and controversy ensued, because the U.S. government did not want the Papers to be made public. Daniel Ellsberg asked Mike Gravel to release the Pentagon Papers onto the Senate record, suggesting the Papers’s use in Gravel’s ongoing fillibuster of the draft, so that Gravel’s office as Senator would shield Ellsberg, and others involved, from the government. Ellsberg also hoped that making the contents of the Papers public would bring about an end to the unjust Vietnam War.

Gravel agreed to Ellsberg’s request (despite the risk of prosecution from the U.S. government), and he released the Papers on June 29, 1971, onto the record of his Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, declaring that his constituents and the American people had a right to know the truth about Vietnam. When Gravel determined to publish the Pentagon Papers shortly afterwards, a constitutional battle with the U.S. government ensued. The case went to the Supreme Court. Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution states that “for any speech or debate in either House, they [a Senator or Representative] shall not be questioned in any other place.” So, the Senator could not be prosecuted because of anything said on the Senate floor, or, by extension, because of anything released upon the Senate record, as was ruled in the landmark Supreme Court decision in Gravel vs. the United States Government. This Supreme Court decision allowed Gravel to publish the Senator Gravel Edition Pentagon Papers, which has provided invaluable insights into our Southeast Asia policy during the 20th century.

Gravel easily won reelection to the Senate in 1974 (with 58% of the vote), but, by the time of the 1980 Senate election, the conservative “Reagan Revolution” was in full swing. Gravel lost the Democratic primary to Clark Gruening (the grandson of Ernest Gruening), and then Gruening went on to lose the General Election to Republican Frank Murkowski. To date, Gravel is the last Democrat to represent Alaska in the U.S. Congress.

The 1980 defeat completely devastated Gravel. As he said, “I had lost my career. I lost my marriage. I was in the doldrums for ten years after my defeat.” He and his wife divorced in the early 1980s, and she now receives his full Senate pension. Gravel married his second wife, Whitney Stewart Gravel, in 1984. He, after losing his job as Senator, was forced to look for other work: he worked as a real estate developer in Alaska, a consultant, and a stockbroker. One real estate venture, a condominium business, was forced to declare bankruptcy. During the years after his 1981 defeat, he also founded The Democracy Foundation and worked to develop a program of direct democracy which could be applicable to the United States. In 2004, Gravel had a bad health year and was forced to declare personal bankruptcy, and today, he himself has said that he has ‘zero net worth’.

After his defeat in 1980, Gravel disappeared from public life for over twenty years. In 2008, he has returned to the political arena to run for President of the United States. Lee Iacocca asks in his new book, “Where have all the leaders gone?” Well, one leader is back. Back to speak truth to power, just as he did in the 1970’s.

Gravel’s presidential bid is very different from his 1969 Senate bid. Mike Gravel is now 77 years old, although he has hearty French-Canadian health. He hasn’t enough money for flashy television advertisements, and he cannot afford for people not to know about his positions on the issues. However, his campaigns of yesteryear helped to form the very progressive ideas that Gravel promotes today, in his 2008 Presidential campaign. His current campaign is based upon his proven record of leadership, his substantial plans for big change, and his desire to shatter the mold of “politics as usual” in the United States. If you think that electing Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Biden, Dodd, Richardson, or Kucinich (who is politics as usual, only from the liberal side of the equation) will cause fundamental structural change to occur in the United States, then you need to reevaluate the candidates. Gravel may be 77 years old, and he may plan to serve only one term, but he certainly doesn’t plan to simply warm the seat.

The centerpiece for Gravel’s current campaign for the presidency is the National Initiative for Democracy, a program which he founded. The National Initiative for Democracy would be a federal ballot initiative which would allow the people to make laws in partnership with their elected officials. But Gravel is not a one-issue candidate. Gravel was one of the few who spoke out against a war with Iraq in 2002, on a major news network (MSNBC), and his opposition has remained steadfast: he supports immediate and complete military and corporate withdraw from Iraq.

Also in his 2008 Presidential bid, the former Senator supports the Fair Tax, an end to the War on Drugs (hear any other candidates saying this?), diplomacy with Iran and all other countries, Universal Healthcare Vouchers, a carbon tax (to combat climate change), full and equal rights for all citizens (homosexual and heterosexual), a woman’s right to choose, and full and unambiguous funding for our Veterans (including Post-Traumatic stress disorder treatment). He would also like to restore our civil liberties to us, greatly lessen government secrecy (which he fought against regarding the Pentagon Papers in 1971), and combat the influence of the military-industrial complex in our government and culture.

Even if you do not agree with this great man on the issues or support his candidacy, you should, at the very least, respect him for all that he has done for our country. He is the very embodiment of what it means to be a patriot and a leader. I like to apply what John Quincy Adams once said about leaders, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

But Mike Gravel should be president because he is, above all else, a human being.

gravel2008.us

Corporate Censorship: A Threat to Democracy

2007-11-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

You may or may not know that Former Alaskan Senator and current 2008 presidential candidate for the Democratic nomination, Mike Gravel, was been excluded from the October 30th MSNBC Democratic debate, and all presidential debates since then. In the case of the October 30th debate, Gravel met all of the arbitrary requirements, except for one: he has not raised $1 million dollars. This only serves to further the corruption and influence of money in our politics, which is ridiculous considering that most Americans believe that there is already an inordinate emphasis on money in politics. (For example, Chris Dodd had about the same amount of support levels as Mike Gravel, and yet Dodd had raised over $13 million total? How is that possible?)

So, Gravel held an Alternative debate on October 30th, and has held an Alternative debate on many debates since then (all of which were broadcasted on Ustream.tv). But I am not writing here to simply rally support against Gravel's censorship. It is my responsibility as a Citizen of the United States to address the full scope of the problem, so I would also like to note the problem of censorship by the media in general, and its implications for our society.

Gravel is certainly not the first candidate to have been censored by the media, and he won't be the last. Ralph Nader (who I defend against accusations that he is the reason that Al Gore lost in 2000), Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and countless others who don't quite fit the mainstream media's ideas, or who are not corrupt and don't take money from special interests and corporations, have been censored or are in danger of being censored.

Because, you see, if a candidate is not in the pocket of the corporation that owns the media, then it is against the self-interest of the corporation to allow that candidate to speak out on the media outlets that the corporation controls. This works vice-versa, as well. Candidates who are in the pockets of the corporations that own the media will be allowed to speak on the media outlets that the corporation owns.

This corporate influence in our media only serves to make sure that the candidates that we elect to our highest offices in the land are the most corrupt candidates. It serves to make sure that the candidates with the most integrity are silenced. It's no wonder that we have such a sorry bunch of representatives in Washington. It's no wonder that we have a man like George W. Bush as president. Unfortunately, their lack of integrity is why they win.

It is very dangerous to allow the corporate media to have this kind of power over us, to thin out the field of candidates before a single vote is even cast. It undermines the values which our democracy was founded upon, and it undermines our democratic elections. Are we really such a democracy after all, when the rich and powerful alone decides who runs our government? Our government is not of the people, by the people, and for the people, it is of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.

Our so-called "democracy" is currently in a very unfortunate state. It's time to bring Democracy back. And the only way to bring back Democracy is to lessen ignorance by diffusing knowledge throughout the population.

Manufactured Populism

2007-11-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

Let’s play “Guess the candidate!”. I’ll write a few lines about different 2008 presidential candidates (all facts, no opinion, although I am selective about my information), Republican and Democrat, and then you guess who it happens to be. Most of my information comes from whitehouseforsale.org, opensecrets.com, or vote-smart.org (I recommend these websites; you should definitely take a look at them if you would like to know more about the current state of our government).

#1: This first candidate that I will mention has the most money bundlers out of all of the candidates: he or she has 543 money bundlers (or people who funnel large amounts of money to campaigns), one of which is a lobbyist. He or she has raised less than $30 million dollars, but he or she has raised over $8 million of that money from lawyers or law firms.

#2: The second candidate has raised the most from Lobbyists (over $500,000), and he or she has also raised the most from lawyers and law firms as well, at over $9 million dollars. He or she has taken the largest amount from commercial banks ($919,000), the second largest amount from Hedge Funds and Private Equity Firms ($970,000), and the first largest amount from the Pharmaceuticals/Health Products industry ($269,000). He or she has 322 money bundlers, 18 of which are lobbyists.

#3: The third candidate has taken over $70,000 from lobbyists, has taken the second largest amount from the commercial banks ($879,000), has taken the third largest amount from Hedge Funds and Private Equity Firms ($950,000), and has taken the second largest amount from the Pharmaceuticals/Health Products industry ($261,000). He or she has 314 money bundlers, eight of which are lobbyists.

What’s more, none of these three candidates will pledge to have the United States out of the Iraq War by 2013, the end of their first term.

Who are these three candidates? They must be Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain? No, indeed, they are three supposedly “completely different” candidates. They, in order, are John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Don’t believe my facts? Check them yourself. Although, to be fair, the Republicans are just as bad (you just expect more out of the Democrats), and, notably, Rudy Giuliani took vastly more money from the Oil and Gas Industry than any other candidate.

It is a direct contradiction if you claim to run a political campaign based on populist values but finance that campaign with the money of businesses and special interests. The supposed populism of the Democratic Party is manufactured populism; it does not really exist, we just percieve it to exist because of how the Democratic Party attempts to present itself. If you broadly survey the two political parties, they look very different, but, if you look closely enough, there are few substantial differences between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to how they operate: they are all Demoblicans.

The reality of the situation is that, if you want a good candidate the truly represents you, you must not vote solely on the basis of which political party they occupy: you must vote by carefully weighing and examining each candidate’s individual aspects, like a good and informed voter should. You should examine which candidates truly represent the people, not the businesses and special interests, and, in my opinion, the only major presidential candidates (that I know of) who even begin to fit that bill are Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Ron Paul.

You may say that “Well, the Democrats are better than the Republicans though, so I vote Democratic.” Our society presents you with a false choice between either Democrats or Republicans. You do have other choices. Not just the Independent candidates, but the Green Party, Populist Party, and countless others as well. The Democrats and Republicans, however, have made such a good effort to stamp out these smaller parties and the Independent candidates that you really see very little of them. An example of this is Georgia’s very unfair ballot access laws.

In conclusion, the Republicans and the Democrats are not so different after all; the Democrats just present us with a manufactured image of populism, while the Republicans usually don’t attempt to do so. The infighting between the Democrats and the Republicans in our society distracts us from the real fight: the struggle between those who have power and those who have none, the struggle between the people and the politicians.

A Plea for Independence

2007-11-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

I am a great believer in the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who stood up for those who could not stand up for themselves. I wholeheartedly agree with his statement that "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little." That is why I have been a member of the Democratic Party until just recently. But, now, I am afraid that the Democratic party of Franklin D. Roosevelt no longer exists. Changing times have necessitated that it be replaced.

The Democratic Party has traditionally been the "Party of the People", while the Republican Party has traditionally been the "Party of Business". Republican President Calvin Coolidge once said that "The business of America is business". But, it seems, in recent years, the lines between the two parties have been blurred. The focus for the Democratic Party has shifted from standing up for the common man: their main goal today is winning elections, and obtaining and maintaining power, at any cost. This is the main goal of most politicians today. The raising of millions of dollars is absolutely essential in achieving this goal, because, I'm sorry to say, our political elections in the United States are all about money and money alone.

The Republicans usually raise more money than the Democrats during the election season, due in part to the donations that they receive from the business community. In order to compete with the Republicans in elections, the Democrats have found it necessary to become friendlier with businesses and the related special interests, such as the defense industry and the insurance companies. The Democrats have raised much, much more money than the Republicans during this 2008 presidential election season: how, how could they do that with no measure of support from businesses and special interests? The answer is that they could not.

But, honestly, who could blame the Democrats for becoming cozier with the business community? Representing and fighting for the common man does not pay. Average Americans alone cannot provide the millions and millions of dollars that is necessary in order to win an election. However, representing rich businesses and special interests pays very well. The Democrats had to establish an allegiance to those who could fund them best, in order to win the most elections possible in the future.

This is why I say that the Democratic Party is the "Party of the People" no longer. No longer will it stand up for those whom society has forgotten. No longer will it think about what is best for those who are living in fear, poverty, ignorance, and despair when it is making all of its legislative decisions. The Democratic Party will instead stand up for the businesses and special interests. They will think of the businesses and special interests when it comes to making legislative decisions. And, of course, they will think about whether or not the decisions that they make will hurt them in the upcoming election. This is the Democratic Party of today and of the future. This Democratic Party is the one that had to slip a promised minimum wage increase into an Iraq War funding bill. This is not the Democratic Party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This Democratic Party no longer represents me, and the Republicans represent me even less than the Democrats do. Neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party are truly the "Party of the People". That is why I do not belong to either political party. And that is why I plan to vote for the Independent, or independent-minded, candidate in the future elections. And I suggest that you, my fellow citizens, do the same. Do not allow this corrupt two-party system to continue to control our elections and our government. It will only be to the detriment of our society if we continue to allow them to do so. It is as Theodore Roosevelt once said, "The death-knell of the republic has rung as soon as the active power becomes lodged in the hands of those who seek, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others."

Thank you, and please consider my plea for independence.

WHAT is so different about Iran?

2007-11-05T02:34:00.000-08:00

It was recently reported on October 29th that the White House has no objection to the Egyptian nuclear program. Here is one instance of this article: http://rawstory.com/news/afp/US_No_objection_to_Egyptian_nuclear_10292007.html.

The White House “said it had little information about Egypt’s plans to relaunch its nuclear power program but declared itself ‘generally supportive’ of civilian atomic power.” White House Spokewoman Dana Perino, speaking shortly after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced Egypt’s plans to build several nuclear power stations, “I don’t know a lot about it. In general, we are supportive of countries pursuing civil nuclear energy. It’s clean burning. It provides electricity in a clean-burning and affordable way for citizens.”

After decades of Egypt’s nuclear program being frozen, the current Egyptian president is thawing it out, and he SAYS that it will be used for peaceful purposes (which is what the leader of Iran has said). Egypt is an unstable Middle Eastern country. Now, how is this Egyptian nuclear program different from Pakistan’s, also an unstable Middle Eastern country? Evidently, it is not: we are perfectly fine and well with Pakistan having a nuclear program, and, additionally, a nuclear WEAPON. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that Pakistan has built as many as 48 nuclear warheads, while its chief rival, India, is estimated to have built only 30-35. The United States also seems to have few problems with India’s nuclear program. So, we are okay with Egypt, Pakistan, and India, three unstable Middle Eastern or Near East Countries, having nuclear programs and either having or potentially having a nuclear weapon. The same is the case with Israel and countless other countries. No problem with them having nukes, or in starting up a nuclear program. No difference between those countries.

So, what is so different about Iran? It is also an unstable Middle Eastern Country, and it has been accused of developing a nuclear program. George W. Bush, and many 2008 presidential candidates (Democrats too!), have said that they would do everything to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. “We must stop Iran!”, they resoundingly say. But what is so different about Iran when it is compared to other countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and India? What is different? And don’t say anything like “Oh, Iran, they are sponsors of terrorism!” because you know just as well as I that the hands of Egypt, Pakistan, India, and others are not clean when it comes to terrorism. Pakistan is where Osama bin Laden is currently supposed to be hiding, and, judging by the fact that he has access to a dialysis machine and abundant black hair dye, he is being well taken care of (and not hiding out in some cave somewhere).

I would like to note that, with Iran, we are just talking about the threat of a nuclear weapon; they are years away from acquiring one, if that is what they truly intend to do (they say, like Egypt, that they are using their nuclear program for peaceful purposes only). And if Iran does indeed develop nuclear weapons eventually, would their nukes even be a threat to us? The United States of America spends the most money on defense out of all of the countries in the world, and we have a HUGE nuclear arsenal. If Iran even hinted that it would hit the United States with a nuke, they could easily be wiped off the face of the map by our extraordinary amount of weapons. Or if a nuke given to a terrorist organization was traced back to Iran, the aforesaid result could also occur. It is just not in Iran’s interest to take any kind of action against the United States, nuclear or otherwise.

And if they do truly intend to get a nuclear weapon, it will probably be used simply as a deterrant, because currently, no doubt, Iran feels threatened by the many countries currently around it that have nuclear weapons and by the various threats from the United States against Iran. For use as a deterrant was the very reason that Pakistan developed nukes: it was afraid of its nuclear neighbor, India.

My conclusion is that these situations with Iran and its fellow unstable Middle Eastern Countries are not different, from the perspective of an unbiased observer. However, from the perspective of a deluded politician who has already lied us into one war and hopes to start another…it may be convieniently different (just like Iraq).

It is my opinion that Iran’s nuclear program is the least of our worries and that this whole pile of rubbish about Iran and its imminent threat to the United States is just a political ploy, by George W. Bush and others, in order to get us into another war with Iran. Or, of course, it could just be another distraction from all of the serious problems (which the politicians just hate HATE to talk about) that are afflicting our country today. Did you notice at the last democratic presidential debate (on Oct. 30, on MSNBC) that there was much less talk about ending the Iraq War and a great deal more talk about Iran?

Please, if you have an explanation for why Iran is different, then absolutely post it here. I am so curious about why on earth Iran is any different from Egypt, Pakistan, or any of the Middle Eastern Countries that have nuclear weapons already or who are threatening to get nuclear weapons in the future. Why is Iran singled out? And why is it assumed that Egypt’s nuclear program is being used for peaceful purposes, while it is assumed that Iran’s nuclear program is being used for malevolent purposes?

Do we truly control our government?

2007-11-04T13:14:00.000-08:00

Contemplate this quote, “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.” It was spoken by Thomas Jefferson. Do you think that, today, the people fear the government or the government fears the people?

I, personally, came to the conclusion that the government certainly isn’t afraid of the people, or it wouldn’t be doing all of the horrible rubbish that it is now (such as torture and wiretapping). Rather, the people are afraid of the government, or at least have good reason to be afraid of their government. The government is getting rid of our civil liberties daily (this includes Congress too, because they facilitate it); our privacy has all but disappeared, we are all at risk of being whisked away by the government and detained for an uncertain period of time, and there seems to be nothing we, the people, can do to stop this erosion of our civil liberties.

But this converges with my next point. Voting is supposedly our power, correct? It’s how we control and change our government and representatives? That’s what we’re taught in our schools and families. Well, here’s the question I asked myself the other day: If we control our government, if we can actually change our government, if we actually have power over our government, by way of voting, then why on earth are we afraid of it?

My conclusion is that we don’t truly control our government. My conclusion is that, when we go to the polls to vote, we are simply giving our power away to elected officials that manipulate the electoral process to be elected. Once you elect a politician (usually from one of the two designated political parties) to office, they very often do not fulfill their campaign promises, and you can beg, plead, write letters, start a petition, etcetera, but you have no real power. The main power of government is not voting: it is lawmaking. So, if the people are ever truly going to gain control of their government, they must acquire the power to make laws.

This is where the National Initiative for Democracy comes in. The National Initiative for Democracy is a federal ballot initiative that would allow citizens to directly vote on and establish laws about the issues that affect their lives, in partnership with their elected officials; the laws created by the ballot initiative process would be subject to the scrutiny of the Congress and the Courts (the laws passed by the people would have to be constitutional). With the National Initiative for Democracy, the people who make the policy could finally be the ones to suffer the policy, and, with the National Initiative for Democracy, average Americans could finally have some control over their government.

The ability of the people to make laws would solve a lot of problems in this country. For example, campaign finance reform is a necessary remedy to campaign finance corruption. But how can you expect a politician, who got elected because there was no campaign finance reform, to pass campaign finance reform? Wouldn’t that be directly in conflict with their own self-interest? Perhaps that is why we have seen little to no campaign finance reform passed in Congress in recent years. Or what if a proposed law directly hurt one of their big campaign donors? Wouldn’t voting for that be against their self-interest? The people are not influenced by the corruption of money in politics, and the people can not be bought out by the forces that currently control our government.

Now, if you would like to learn more about National Initiative for Democracy, please visit nationalinitiative.us, and, if you would like to learn more about the man who is the founder of the NI4D, please visit Gravel2008.us.