Last night as my house settled down after a busy Sunday of yard work, I turned on my television at 8 o'clock, and I saw breaking news coverage with the headline, 'Osama bin Laden killed by US forces'. I called my wife and children into the room to watch the reporting of this historic news. As we watched the exhilerated crowds celebrate in front of the White House, my 12-year-old son Brodie asked if we could get out the noise-makers we use on New Year's Eve and go out in our neighborhood and celebrate, too.
I understand the need to celebrate a victory over my enemy, and I do celebrate the fact that bin Laden's death came at the hands of American forces. But what does his death really mean?
As the face of al-Qaeda, bin Laden's death is noteworthy, but long overdue. Shortly after 9/11 President Bush set a $25 million bounty on his head, ordering bin Laden to be taken dead or alive. Even with this death sentence hanging over his head bin Laden evaded US forces for almost 10 years. And like the families of victims of a convicted murderer, those who lost loved ones on 9/11 waited too many years for the justice and closure brought, too late, by the death of the one responsible for their loss. It has been said that revenge is a dish best served cold, but I think that the families of those killed by bin Laden's plans would rather have enjoyed this moment if it had happened in the days immediately after the attacks, when their losses ached most and when America's passions were at their hottest.
The death of this one man does bring some element of closure to the terrible events of that day, but for the 3,000 killed that day in 2001, bin Laden's death offers only a thimble-full of blood to each victim. Add to the number of those killed on 9/11 the other victims of al-Qaeda's acts, the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi in August 1998, the attack of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, and all those others killed by terrorist attacks inspired by bin Laden's leadership, and that thimble-full of blood is halved for each victim. Add the lives of US servicemen killed in pursuit of bin Laden and his organization and there are only a scant few drops of blood for each victim to treasure as a trophy of this 'justice'.
Osama bin Laden was but one man. It would be nice to imagine that, as the putative leader of al-Qaeda, killing this one man would be like decapitating his terrorist organization and with one stroke we would have attained victory. But the truth is that al-Qaeda is a many-headed Hydra, and chopping off this one head will only result in two more heads growing to replace it.
The war on terrorism is important, and bin Laden's death at our hands is definitely a noteworthy landmark in this war. This is not a war of our choosing, we are forced to extend this war to protect ourselves from those who have already attacked us and done us harm. I honor all the brave American soldiers who have put themselves in harm's way to fight this war and protect our country. Osama bin Laden's death won't end the threat and resolve of those who fight against us. His death may be just as symbolic to our enemy as it is to us. Let this day do more to bring us together as Americans than it does to unite our enemies against us.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Monday, March 22, 2010
Our Crumbling Infrastructure
If I were President, I would bring back the WPA.
After the stock market crash of 1929 the country (and in fact, the world) faced years of the Great Depression. The banks had no money to lend, businesses closed right and left, unemployment rates skyrocketed. Sound familiar?
America had never had a financial breakdown of this magnitude before, so the government was caught a little off-guard by the far-flung and lasting effects. In 1932 President Herbert Hoover authorized the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to help rebuild the wealth lost due to the Depression. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt expanded on Hoover's 'stimulus package and created a number of other agencies to provide aid, among them, the Works Projects Administration (WPA).
Roosevelt knew that millions of Americans were out of work and unable to support their families, but he was against a welfare system to provide aid. He thought that Americans would take more pride in working for their living than in accepting handouts. With millions of jobs to create, the WPA needed to create millions of opportunities. Roosevelt used this vast labor pool to build roads, bridges, dams, public parks and public buildings. People were paid a fair wage for a fair day's work. Most of America's public highway system was laid-out and built by the WPA. As a result of this work the United States was connected like never before.
It can be argued that the billions of dollars the US government spent on these WPA projects returned huge dividends. The nation's new highway system created the means for business to move its goods to market quickly, and to ship those goods to all corners of the country. The dam-building projects ensured the safety of numerous towns and created power generation for our growing cities and industry. Parks and libraries built by the WPA added to the quality of life for many Americans.
But by 1942 we had largely recovered from the Great Depression. Indeed, with World War II workers were much in demand. Factories were working round the clock to produce war-time goods and many of their strongest and best workers had gone off to war. The WPA, having served it's purpose, was not funded and was allowed to end.
Now, nearly 80 years later we are still driving on those same highways and bridges built by the WPA. A road system built to carry 1940's traffic is struggling to serve conditions in the 21st Century. Bridges are weakening, and even when reinforced, are too narrow to carry the traffic that funnels into them and become traffic bottlenecks. Highways that cross through cities are gridlocked, carrying ten times the traffic they were designed for. Water, telephone and electrical delivery systems are outdated and failing in many parts of the country.
What is the cost of gridlock? How many hours of productive time are lost with workers spending 2 or 3 hours each day sitting in their cars trying to get to work? Those are hours they could spend with their family or volunteering in their community. How many extra trucks are on the road everyday because traffic limits the number of miles and the number of deliveries any one truck can complete in a day?
A modern and robust infrastructure is required if we, as Americans, want to ensure our high standard of living. A dated and decaying infrastructure will drag us down and hinder the efficient running of our economy. The phone companies have done a good job of updating their infrastructure because there is a lot of money to be made there, but our electrical and water delivery systems are run by government-controlled utilities and there is no incentive for them to spend money and manpower on upgrades.
So now we find ourselves again in economic turmoil. Once again millions of Americans find themselves out of work and unable to support their families. And once again, the infrastructural framework of our country is in need of repair and rebuilding. So, let's spend that stimulus money on reinventing the WPA. Let's spend that money creating millions of jobs and give that money directly to the people who need it the most. No more of this trickle-down stuff, where we give the money to companies so they can hire new workers. Let's have the government give every American who wants to work a job building roads, building bridges, building subways and trains and monorails. Let's build the America that will carry us through the next 80 years.
After the stock market crash of 1929 the country (and in fact, the world) faced years of the Great Depression. The banks had no money to lend, businesses closed right and left, unemployment rates skyrocketed. Sound familiar?
America had never had a financial breakdown of this magnitude before, so the government was caught a little off-guard by the far-flung and lasting effects. In 1932 President Herbert Hoover authorized the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to help rebuild the wealth lost due to the Depression. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt expanded on Hoover's 'stimulus package and created a number of other agencies to provide aid, among them, the Works Projects Administration (WPA).
Roosevelt knew that millions of Americans were out of work and unable to support their families, but he was against a welfare system to provide aid. He thought that Americans would take more pride in working for their living than in accepting handouts. With millions of jobs to create, the WPA needed to create millions of opportunities. Roosevelt used this vast labor pool to build roads, bridges, dams, public parks and public buildings. People were paid a fair wage for a fair day's work. Most of America's public highway system was laid-out and built by the WPA. As a result of this work the United States was connected like never before.
It can be argued that the billions of dollars the US government spent on these WPA projects returned huge dividends. The nation's new highway system created the means for business to move its goods to market quickly, and to ship those goods to all corners of the country. The dam-building projects ensured the safety of numerous towns and created power generation for our growing cities and industry. Parks and libraries built by the WPA added to the quality of life for many Americans.
But by 1942 we had largely recovered from the Great Depression. Indeed, with World War II workers were much in demand. Factories were working round the clock to produce war-time goods and many of their strongest and best workers had gone off to war. The WPA, having served it's purpose, was not funded and was allowed to end.
Now, nearly 80 years later we are still driving on those same highways and bridges built by the WPA. A road system built to carry 1940's traffic is struggling to serve conditions in the 21st Century. Bridges are weakening, and even when reinforced, are too narrow to carry the traffic that funnels into them and become traffic bottlenecks. Highways that cross through cities are gridlocked, carrying ten times the traffic they were designed for. Water, telephone and electrical delivery systems are outdated and failing in many parts of the country.
What is the cost of gridlock? How many hours of productive time are lost with workers spending 2 or 3 hours each day sitting in their cars trying to get to work? Those are hours they could spend with their family or volunteering in their community. How many extra trucks are on the road everyday because traffic limits the number of miles and the number of deliveries any one truck can complete in a day?
A modern and robust infrastructure is required if we, as Americans, want to ensure our high standard of living. A dated and decaying infrastructure will drag us down and hinder the efficient running of our economy. The phone companies have done a good job of updating their infrastructure because there is a lot of money to be made there, but our electrical and water delivery systems are run by government-controlled utilities and there is no incentive for them to spend money and manpower on upgrades.
So now we find ourselves again in economic turmoil. Once again millions of Americans find themselves out of work and unable to support their families. And once again, the infrastructural framework of our country is in need of repair and rebuilding. So, let's spend that stimulus money on reinventing the WPA. Let's spend that money creating millions of jobs and give that money directly to the people who need it the most. No more of this trickle-down stuff, where we give the money to companies so they can hire new workers. Let's have the government give every American who wants to work a job building roads, building bridges, building subways and trains and monorails. Let's build the America that will carry us through the next 80 years.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Why I Stop at Red Lights at 3:00 am
Why do you follow the law?
Is it because you are a good citizen? Do you do it to build good Karma? Are you afraid of the consequences of being caught? Peer pressure? Is it okay to break a rule that you think is useless or unecessary?
Imagine this: It is 3 AM on a Tuesday and for some reason you are alone in your car, driving home from some event. You are near your home on familiar streets when you come to a traffic light and it changes to red before you. You are tired and ready to be home. After 30 seconds of waiting for the light to change you look to your left, up the street and there is not a car in sight. You look to your right and there are no other cars visible. A quick glance in your rear-view mirror shows you to be all alone at this intersection. So, what do you do? Do you cross on the red or do you wait for the light to change?
I mean, really, the traffic lights are meant to keep traffic safe, to prevent accidents at busy intersections and smooth the flow of traffic. Does this red signal really serve any of those purposes at 3 AM on a Tuesday?
So what do I do? I wait for that light to change. Obeying the law is part of our contract with our community. We, as citizens of a community, take much comfort from the knowledge that most of those around us obey the laws. It makes us feel safe when driving on the roads to know that a green signal means it is truly safe for me to drive through an intersection without fear of injury. Imagine what it might be like if people only obeyed the laws when it was convenient for them to do so. So, at 3 AM on that Tuesday I wait for the light to change because, if I don't, that way lies chaos and the end of civilization as we know it.
Of course, I sometimes have been known to exceed the speed limit by a little bit . . . .
Is it because you are a good citizen? Do you do it to build good Karma? Are you afraid of the consequences of being caught? Peer pressure? Is it okay to break a rule that you think is useless or unecessary?
Imagine this: It is 3 AM on a Tuesday and for some reason you are alone in your car, driving home from some event. You are near your home on familiar streets when you come to a traffic light and it changes to red before you. You are tired and ready to be home. After 30 seconds of waiting for the light to change you look to your left, up the street and there is not a car in sight. You look to your right and there are no other cars visible. A quick glance in your rear-view mirror shows you to be all alone at this intersection. So, what do you do? Do you cross on the red or do you wait for the light to change?
I mean, really, the traffic lights are meant to keep traffic safe, to prevent accidents at busy intersections and smooth the flow of traffic. Does this red signal really serve any of those purposes at 3 AM on a Tuesday?
So what do I do? I wait for that light to change. Obeying the law is part of our contract with our community. We, as citizens of a community, take much comfort from the knowledge that most of those around us obey the laws. It makes us feel safe when driving on the roads to know that a green signal means it is truly safe for me to drive through an intersection without fear of injury. Imagine what it might be like if people only obeyed the laws when it was convenient for them to do so. So, at 3 AM on that Tuesday I wait for the light to change because, if I don't, that way lies chaos and the end of civilization as we know it.
Of course, I sometimes have been known to exceed the speed limit by a little bit . . . .
Monday, January 12, 2009
Illegal Immigration
If I were President, I would represent and protect all Americans, but wouldn't do too much for those who are not.
Yes, I know. We are a nation of immigrants. The strength upon which America's greatness is built is the diversity of it's peoples. There are only about 3 million Native Americans out of our national population of over 300 million who did not descend from relatives who emigrated to America at one time or another. Personally I am only a third-generation American, descending from Grandparents who came to this country from Russia and Hungary. My wife's mother was born in Germany and came to America at the age of 17. That doesn't make us less American than those who came over on the Mayflower; If anything, it makes us more thoroughly American, another fiber in the fabric of America.
I have no problem with the current generation of immigrants to our country. I understand their desire to find a better life like my mother-in-law, or to flee persecution and find safety like my grandfather. I understand the great lure of the promise of America, where wages are higher, living conditions are better, and freedoms are broader than the countries from which they travel.
I do have a problem, though, with those who come here and stay here unlawfully. My grandfather came to America in 1906 on a steamer ship and was processed with the throngs at Ellis Island. My mother-in-law obtained a visa to work in the U.S. as an au pair for a family in California, and when she met her future husband and decided to stay in the country she followed the steps to obtain permanent residency status and be issued her green card. My issue is with those who enter the country illegally and stay here illegally.
I'm not necessarily one of those who believes that illegals take more from the economy than they add to it. That's not the basis of my argument with them, and to be honest, the book is still open on that question. I don't believe that they drive down the price of labor and steal jobs from legal Americans either. I think you would be hard-pressed to find any white or black citizen willing to work in the produce fields at any price, or who would be satisified to work for years at a restaurant as a dishwasher.
My problem with them is that by entering the country illegally they are de facto criminals. They knowingly broke the law to get here. Their very existence here is an affront to those of us here legally. And what's worse, after they establish themselves, they think that they have rights here. A right to work, a right to collect social services, a right to seek medical care they cannot pay for, a right to be represented, and a right to stay here.
In May 2006 immigrant's rights groups staged "The Great American Boycott, A Day Without An Immigrant", urging all immigrants to not work that day, not buy anything or sell anything. It was to show the extent to which the American economy benefits from the contributions from illegal immigrants, and to demand legislation for amnesty for those illegals and a way to formalize their status here.
Are you kidding me! That's like crack dealers withholding their drugs for a day, forcing hundreds of thousands of addicts to emergency rooms with withdrawal symptoms to prove the drug dealer's value to society and then demanding the legalization of their crack dealing. The police and immigrations enforcement should have cordoned off the streets and funneled them onto buses bound for the nearest border.
They thought that by showing their numbers that politicians would be forced to consider their demands. Well, the politicians don't represent them, they represent their constituents, those who are citizens here legally. I hope the immigrant's rights groups didn't mean to imply that all those millions of illegal aliens would somehow register to vote illegally and demand their rights at the ballot box. I hope that politicians are smart enough to not be influenced by the tactics of people who are already acting criminally just by their presence here.
So, how do you solve the problem of illegal immigration? By taking away what they came here for. Many states, including California where I live, have legislation in place that requires you show proof of your right to work in this country. The problem is that there is no meaningful enforcement mechanism for these laws. Business complains that the burden of enforcing immigration laws falls on them. Likewise, schools, hospitals and public service departments have all complained that they don't want to be placed on the front-lines of the immigration battle by being tasked with proving residency before providing services. Stemming the tide of illegal immigration is a huge job, and everyone will have to do some of the work whether they want to or not. If illegals cannot find a job here, if they are turned away from schools and public government services, if we take away the very things that they came here unlawfully to obtain, they will stop coming. They will go back.
If I were President I would enforce the immigration laws of this country and insist that everyone else does, too. And oh, yeah, I would change that stupid provision of the law that says that any baby born in America is a citizen. I would change it to say that any baby born here to a mother here legally is entitled to citizenship. No more 'anchor babies'.
Yes, I know. We are a nation of immigrants. The strength upon which America's greatness is built is the diversity of it's peoples. There are only about 3 million Native Americans out of our national population of over 300 million who did not descend from relatives who emigrated to America at one time or another. Personally I am only a third-generation American, descending from Grandparents who came to this country from Russia and Hungary. My wife's mother was born in Germany and came to America at the age of 17. That doesn't make us less American than those who came over on the Mayflower; If anything, it makes us more thoroughly American, another fiber in the fabric of America.
I have no problem with the current generation of immigrants to our country. I understand their desire to find a better life like my mother-in-law, or to flee persecution and find safety like my grandfather. I understand the great lure of the promise of America, where wages are higher, living conditions are better, and freedoms are broader than the countries from which they travel.
I do have a problem, though, with those who come here and stay here unlawfully. My grandfather came to America in 1906 on a steamer ship and was processed with the throngs at Ellis Island. My mother-in-law obtained a visa to work in the U.S. as an au pair for a family in California, and when she met her future husband and decided to stay in the country she followed the steps to obtain permanent residency status and be issued her green card. My issue is with those who enter the country illegally and stay here illegally.
I'm not necessarily one of those who believes that illegals take more from the economy than they add to it. That's not the basis of my argument with them, and to be honest, the book is still open on that question. I don't believe that they drive down the price of labor and steal jobs from legal Americans either. I think you would be hard-pressed to find any white or black citizen willing to work in the produce fields at any price, or who would be satisified to work for years at a restaurant as a dishwasher.
My problem with them is that by entering the country illegally they are de facto criminals. They knowingly broke the law to get here. Their very existence here is an affront to those of us here legally. And what's worse, after they establish themselves, they think that they have rights here. A right to work, a right to collect social services, a right to seek medical care they cannot pay for, a right to be represented, and a right to stay here.
In May 2006 immigrant's rights groups staged "The Great American Boycott, A Day Without An Immigrant", urging all immigrants to not work that day, not buy anything or sell anything. It was to show the extent to which the American economy benefits from the contributions from illegal immigrants, and to demand legislation for amnesty for those illegals and a way to formalize their status here.
Are you kidding me! That's like crack dealers withholding their drugs for a day, forcing hundreds of thousands of addicts to emergency rooms with withdrawal symptoms to prove the drug dealer's value to society and then demanding the legalization of their crack dealing. The police and immigrations enforcement should have cordoned off the streets and funneled them onto buses bound for the nearest border.
They thought that by showing their numbers that politicians would be forced to consider their demands. Well, the politicians don't represent them, they represent their constituents, those who are citizens here legally. I hope the immigrant's rights groups didn't mean to imply that all those millions of illegal aliens would somehow register to vote illegally and demand their rights at the ballot box. I hope that politicians are smart enough to not be influenced by the tactics of people who are already acting criminally just by their presence here.
So, how do you solve the problem of illegal immigration? By taking away what they came here for. Many states, including California where I live, have legislation in place that requires you show proof of your right to work in this country. The problem is that there is no meaningful enforcement mechanism for these laws. Business complains that the burden of enforcing immigration laws falls on them. Likewise, schools, hospitals and public service departments have all complained that they don't want to be placed on the front-lines of the immigration battle by being tasked with proving residency before providing services. Stemming the tide of illegal immigration is a huge job, and everyone will have to do some of the work whether they want to or not. If illegals cannot find a job here, if they are turned away from schools and public government services, if we take away the very things that they came here unlawfully to obtain, they will stop coming. They will go back.
If I were President I would enforce the immigration laws of this country and insist that everyone else does, too. And oh, yeah, I would change that stupid provision of the law that says that any baby born in America is a citizen. I would change it to say that any baby born here to a mother here legally is entitled to citizenship. No more 'anchor babies'.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Prisons
If I were President, I'd make the prison system a for-profit enterprise.
Here are the sad facts:
There are a lot of factors that go into making up these shocking numbers. Yes, we have a lot of laws. Yes, the same freedoms that we enjoy as Americans make it easier to comtemplate "bending the rules", in the name of equality for all and free speech. Stricter sentencing guidelines require those sent to prison to stay there for longer periods of time. Poor rehabilitation techniques result in a high recidivism rate.
This is too big a subject for me to cover in this brief blog entry, but I'll tell you what I would do if I were President: I'd put them to work. I could write entire essays on why so many Americans go to prison, and write other essays on why so many go back again and again, and maybe some day I will write those essays, but today I'll ignore all the causes and talk about the reality of the present.
As more and more Americans go to prison, more and more prisons must be built to accomodate them. More guards must be employed and more and more dollars are spent on this unproductive part of our country's economy. It costs $88 per day for each prisoner, over $60 Billion a year! I say, lease them out and make them pay for their keep.
These prisoners mostly spend their days locked in their cells or exercising in the prison yard. Some of them work within the prison in the kitchen or the laundry, or even making license plates. They are paid between $0.25 and $1.25 and hour for their work, money which they can spend at the prison canteen to buy small luxuries.
What's wrong with leasing prisoners out to American business and forcing them to contribute something positive to our economy? Factory owners could staff their production lines with prison labor, and the wages would go to the prison to pay for the cost of the prisoner's incarceration. It's a win-win-win situation, where the factory owners pay lower wages for labor, taxpayers are relieved of the cost of supporting the prison system, and criminals earn job skills and experience in the workplace.
This might even be a solution to our illegal immigration problem, too. If cheap prison labor is readily available it might drive immigrants out of the jobs for which they come to America. Why not let rapists and murderers pick our lettuce? Why not let drug pushers wash dishes and mop the floors at Dennys? Why not have embezzling CEOs working the sewing machines in the fashion district, turning out High School Musical 3 fashion tees?
Of course, not all jobs are appropriate for all classes of prisoners, and not all prisoners will want to do all types of jobs. There would need to be guidelines about which types of criminals would be allowed to work which types of jobs. Dangerous criminals would need to stay in a controlled environment, so perhaps some factories might build their plants adjacent to maximum-security prisons to take advantage of the ready labor pool.
This system could be the basis for completely revamping our criminal justice system. Instead of criminals being sentenced to "do their time" and wait out a period of years and months before being released, criminals would be forced to "pay their debt to society" and be sentenced in dollars and would not be released until they had done the work to "pay their sentence." There would be different pay rates for different jobs, with the more undesireable jobs paying higher rates than the easy ones. A low-risk prisoner could hold a road-work sign for $3 per hour, or he could be the one working the jack-hammer, breaking up the roadway for $7 per hour. It's up to him how hard he wants to work and how quickly he wants to be released. Prisoners could be rewarded for good behavior (and a strong work ethic) by getting a raise or being promoted to a better-paying position, effectively shortening their time behind bars. Those who refuse to work, or who don't work hard enough can have their pay docked or be demoted to a truly undesirable job, like digging ditches or doing brush clearance.
The companies who benefit from this arrangement would have responsibilities, too. They would be required to bear the cost of security to prevent escapes and protect the public. Companies would be required to hire any prisoner who had completed his sentence working for that company, and to pay him 150% of his last wage as his new pay rate. This assures that the criminals will have jobs waiting for them when they leave prison, and have a place to apply the job skills they learned while inside.
If I were President, criminals would truly pay their debt to society.
Here are the sad facts:
- 1 out of every 133 Americans is behind bars.
- The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's incarcerated population.
- On a percentage basis, England imprisons 1/6th the percentage of its citizens compared to the U.S.
- Only China approaches the U.S. in terms of the percentage of its population imprisoned, and most of those are political prisoners.
There are a lot of factors that go into making up these shocking numbers. Yes, we have a lot of laws. Yes, the same freedoms that we enjoy as Americans make it easier to comtemplate "bending the rules", in the name of equality for all and free speech. Stricter sentencing guidelines require those sent to prison to stay there for longer periods of time. Poor rehabilitation techniques result in a high recidivism rate.
This is too big a subject for me to cover in this brief blog entry, but I'll tell you what I would do if I were President: I'd put them to work. I could write entire essays on why so many Americans go to prison, and write other essays on why so many go back again and again, and maybe some day I will write those essays, but today I'll ignore all the causes and talk about the reality of the present.
As more and more Americans go to prison, more and more prisons must be built to accomodate them. More guards must be employed and more and more dollars are spent on this unproductive part of our country's economy. It costs $88 per day for each prisoner, over $60 Billion a year! I say, lease them out and make them pay for their keep.
These prisoners mostly spend their days locked in their cells or exercising in the prison yard. Some of them work within the prison in the kitchen or the laundry, or even making license plates. They are paid between $0.25 and $1.25 and hour for their work, money which they can spend at the prison canteen to buy small luxuries.
What's wrong with leasing prisoners out to American business and forcing them to contribute something positive to our economy? Factory owners could staff their production lines with prison labor, and the wages would go to the prison to pay for the cost of the prisoner's incarceration. It's a win-win-win situation, where the factory owners pay lower wages for labor, taxpayers are relieved of the cost of supporting the prison system, and criminals earn job skills and experience in the workplace.
This might even be a solution to our illegal immigration problem, too. If cheap prison labor is readily available it might drive immigrants out of the jobs for which they come to America. Why not let rapists and murderers pick our lettuce? Why not let drug pushers wash dishes and mop the floors at Dennys? Why not have embezzling CEOs working the sewing machines in the fashion district, turning out High School Musical 3 fashion tees?
Of course, not all jobs are appropriate for all classes of prisoners, and not all prisoners will want to do all types of jobs. There would need to be guidelines about which types of criminals would be allowed to work which types of jobs. Dangerous criminals would need to stay in a controlled environment, so perhaps some factories might build their plants adjacent to maximum-security prisons to take advantage of the ready labor pool.
This system could be the basis for completely revamping our criminal justice system. Instead of criminals being sentenced to "do their time" and wait out a period of years and months before being released, criminals would be forced to "pay their debt to society" and be sentenced in dollars and would not be released until they had done the work to "pay their sentence." There would be different pay rates for different jobs, with the more undesireable jobs paying higher rates than the easy ones. A low-risk prisoner could hold a road-work sign for $3 per hour, or he could be the one working the jack-hammer, breaking up the roadway for $7 per hour. It's up to him how hard he wants to work and how quickly he wants to be released. Prisoners could be rewarded for good behavior (and a strong work ethic) by getting a raise or being promoted to a better-paying position, effectively shortening their time behind bars. Those who refuse to work, or who don't work hard enough can have their pay docked or be demoted to a truly undesirable job, like digging ditches or doing brush clearance.
The companies who benefit from this arrangement would have responsibilities, too. They would be required to bear the cost of security to prevent escapes and protect the public. Companies would be required to hire any prisoner who had completed his sentence working for that company, and to pay him 150% of his last wage as his new pay rate. This assures that the criminals will have jobs waiting for them when they leave prison, and have a place to apply the job skills they learned while inside.
If I were President, criminals would truly pay their debt to society.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Who Do You Want To Answer The Phone at 3AM?
Apparently, Barack Obama was listening to those campaign ads, too.
Remember back in late spring when Hillary Clinton was still battling Obama for the Democratic nomination, she ran a very effective TV ad attacking Obama's lack of experience?
"It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep," the announcer says. "But there's a phone in the White House, and it's ringing — something's happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call."
Yesterday, Barack Obama announced Hillary Clinton as his choice for Secretary of State, arguably one of the most important cabinet positions in any President's administration. Her job will be acting as the "voice of America" to the world's governments, meeting face-to-face with foreign heads of government and carrying the official position of the United States to them.
At the very least, Obama is certainly surrounding himself with experienced people to counsel him as President. Hillary finds herself in a very influential position on the world stage. Presumably, Barack will forward the White House phone at night to Hillary's number.
Remember back in late spring when Hillary Clinton was still battling Obama for the Democratic nomination, she ran a very effective TV ad attacking Obama's lack of experience?
"It's 3 a.m., and your children are safe and asleep," the announcer says. "But there's a phone in the White House, and it's ringing — something's happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call."
Yesterday, Barack Obama announced Hillary Clinton as his choice for Secretary of State, arguably one of the most important cabinet positions in any President's administration. Her job will be acting as the "voice of America" to the world's governments, meeting face-to-face with foreign heads of government and carrying the official position of the United States to them.
At the very least, Obama is certainly surrounding himself with experienced people to counsel him as President. Hillary finds herself in a very influential position on the world stage. Presumably, Barack will forward the White House phone at night to Hillary's number.
Monday, November 24, 2008
You Say You Want A Revolution? (We All Want To Change The World)
In the presidential election of 2000 Al Gore collected more votes than George Bush, but Bush won the election. And life went on.
In the popular vote Gore tallied 48.38% of the total votes nationwide and Bush tallied 47.87%, but U.S. Presidential elections aren't decided by counting the votes at the ballot box. Presidential elections are decided by earning electoral votes. The electoral college process is designed to ensure that each of the 50 states reserves their full voice in a national election, with each state having the number of votes that represents its proportional size of the national population. California had about 10% of the national population at the last census, so California owns 10% of the total electoral votes. In this way California is limited in its ability to affect the national election. If 75% of California's voters show up at the polls and all vote for Gore, that's a lot of popular votes in Gore's column, but he doesn't get more electoral votes because of it.
In 2000, with every state decided except for Florida, Gore had 266 electoral votes and Bush had 246. 270 were needed to win the election, so Florida's 25 electoral votes would decide the contest. At the end of the day, no one knew who had won. The first count showed Bush had won by only 2,000 votes. A recount the next day narrowed his lead to only 500 votes. Florida, at Gore's request, started a third count of the votes, this time inspecting ballots by hand and not mechanically. Gore's team argued that George Bush's brother, Jeb, the Governor of Florida had influenced the election by not allowing over 58,000 Floridian's to vote, most of them blacks and latinos who would favor Democrats. Ultimately the election wasn't decided until more than a month later, and it was decided when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the recount process to be stopped and the election results to be certified in Bush's favor.
And life went on.
It's an amazing thing that life went on. We were choosing who would be the most influential person on the planet for the next 4 years, the new leader of the free world. Americans woke up that morning of December 12th to read their papers over their morning coffee and find out how this decision had been decided by the courts, not the voters, and each of them got dressed and went to work, just like any other day. In most other parts of the world there would have been wide-spread rioting, demonstrations, and possibly revolution.
In December, 2007, Presidential elections were held in Kenya. The incumbent, Mwai Kibaki of the Party of National Unity (PNU) was running against Raila Odinga of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). As results came in during the day, it was clear that there was a huge shift of power under way. Out of 190 Ministers of Parliment defending their seats only 71 were re-elected. The ODM ended up winning 115 seats in Parliment out of 207, and the PNU only won 43. As it became clear that the results were going against him, Kibaki ordered the media to stop reporting election results. 2 days later the election commission declared Kibaki the winner by about 2% of the total votes and he was sworn in immediately. Odinga protested that the results were obviously fraudulent and all hell broke loose. Life did not go on.
Kenya, like much of Africa, is still very tribal. Kibaki was Kikuyu and Odinga was Luo. While the Luo are one of the more populous tribes in Kenya, the Kikuyu have traditionally been the more priviliged group. Odinga called on his Luo supporters to protest the results and they did; Not by signing petitions or holding a candle-light vigil in front of the Presidential mansion, but by rioting and taking out their aggressions on their Kikuyu neighbors with their pangas (machetes). All across Kenya from the agricultural regions in the West to the large cities of Nairobi and Mombasa violent rioting was carried out. Bands of panga-wielding men wandered the alleyways of Nairobi's slum neighborhoods attacking Kikuyu when they found them, dragging them out of matatu taxis and chasing them through the streets. Homes and businesses were burned. A church in Western Kenya sheltering 200 Kikuyu was set on fire, killing 35 inside. In the end, over 800 people were killed and over 600,000 were displaced in the month of violence.
But here in America in December of 2000 life went on. Why did the people of America not rise up in anger? Why did the tribal Democrats not strike out at the tribal Republicans? Why didn't a tide of angry people descend on Florida and sieze the ballots from the state elections office? What does it take to incite the apathetic people of America to rise up against their government?
Maybe nothing will ever incite the American people to such passion, and that's dangerous. This country was founded in revolution against the British monarchy. George Washington and the other founding fathers of our nation were officers in the British army and sworn to their king. When they decided to declare independence from Britain, they knew that their actions were treason. If they failed in their efforts they would have been hung as traitors and ended up not even a minor footnote in some British history text. It takes amazing courage to stand up against your country, a courage that America lacks today.
Our founding fathers understood that the government should serve the people, and that the people should be able to change a government that doesn't represent them. The Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear arms. States can form militias and individuals can protect themselves. Our representative government was formed in a way that the people could peaceably overturn an unpopular government by election, but allowed for the populace to wrest it away by more forcible means if necessary. Sadly, Americans have lost their will to exercise this power.
I am not advocating violence. I don't call on the people of America to rise up and throw the bum out of the White House by violence. I, too, have sat idly by. I knew that the Florida election results were probably rigged (by both sides) and I did nothing about it. I felt (and still feel) that our invasion of Iraq was lawless, foolish, and would cause irreparable harm to the United States, and I went to work the next day. I didn't feel that my one voice would make any difference, so I did nothing.
Peaceful change of government is something that we take for granted here in America, and it's a wonderful thing. In 60 years of independent rule the 53 nations of Africa have only had a peaceful change of government by election a handful of times. Coup, corruption and violent dictatorship are the rule, even today. I don't wish that on our nation.
Protest is organic, not manufactured. One voice alone, standing on a soap box in the middle of the street will go unnoticed, but if everyone with a grievance goes out alone into the street, they might find themselves surrounded by the supporting voices of all the others who feel the same. We don't need to wait for the first Tuesday in November every fourth year to add our one voice to the din at the ballot box. Americans owe it to their country to make their voice heard whenever there is something worth saying.
Just because Americans have lost the will to rise up in arms against their government doesn't mean that we shouldn't rise up at all. Make your voice heard.
In the popular vote Gore tallied 48.38% of the total votes nationwide and Bush tallied 47.87%, but U.S. Presidential elections aren't decided by counting the votes at the ballot box. Presidential elections are decided by earning electoral votes. The electoral college process is designed to ensure that each of the 50 states reserves their full voice in a national election, with each state having the number of votes that represents its proportional size of the national population. California had about 10% of the national population at the last census, so California owns 10% of the total electoral votes. In this way California is limited in its ability to affect the national election. If 75% of California's voters show up at the polls and all vote for Gore, that's a lot of popular votes in Gore's column, but he doesn't get more electoral votes because of it.
In 2000, with every state decided except for Florida, Gore had 266 electoral votes and Bush had 246. 270 were needed to win the election, so Florida's 25 electoral votes would decide the contest. At the end of the day, no one knew who had won. The first count showed Bush had won by only 2,000 votes. A recount the next day narrowed his lead to only 500 votes. Florida, at Gore's request, started a third count of the votes, this time inspecting ballots by hand and not mechanically. Gore's team argued that George Bush's brother, Jeb, the Governor of Florida had influenced the election by not allowing over 58,000 Floridian's to vote, most of them blacks and latinos who would favor Democrats. Ultimately the election wasn't decided until more than a month later, and it was decided when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the recount process to be stopped and the election results to be certified in Bush's favor.
And life went on.
It's an amazing thing that life went on. We were choosing who would be the most influential person on the planet for the next 4 years, the new leader of the free world. Americans woke up that morning of December 12th to read their papers over their morning coffee and find out how this decision had been decided by the courts, not the voters, and each of them got dressed and went to work, just like any other day. In most other parts of the world there would have been wide-spread rioting, demonstrations, and possibly revolution.
In December, 2007, Presidential elections were held in Kenya. The incumbent, Mwai Kibaki of the Party of National Unity (PNU) was running against Raila Odinga of the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM). As results came in during the day, it was clear that there was a huge shift of power under way. Out of 190 Ministers of Parliment defending their seats only 71 were re-elected. The ODM ended up winning 115 seats in Parliment out of 207, and the PNU only won 43. As it became clear that the results were going against him, Kibaki ordered the media to stop reporting election results. 2 days later the election commission declared Kibaki the winner by about 2% of the total votes and he was sworn in immediately. Odinga protested that the results were obviously fraudulent and all hell broke loose. Life did not go on.
Kenya, like much of Africa, is still very tribal. Kibaki was Kikuyu and Odinga was Luo. While the Luo are one of the more populous tribes in Kenya, the Kikuyu have traditionally been the more priviliged group. Odinga called on his Luo supporters to protest the results and they did; Not by signing petitions or holding a candle-light vigil in front of the Presidential mansion, but by rioting and taking out their aggressions on their Kikuyu neighbors with their pangas (machetes). All across Kenya from the agricultural regions in the West to the large cities of Nairobi and Mombasa violent rioting was carried out. Bands of panga-wielding men wandered the alleyways of Nairobi's slum neighborhoods attacking Kikuyu when they found them, dragging them out of matatu taxis and chasing them through the streets. Homes and businesses were burned. A church in Western Kenya sheltering 200 Kikuyu was set on fire, killing 35 inside. In the end, over 800 people were killed and over 600,000 were displaced in the month of violence.
But here in America in December of 2000 life went on. Why did the people of America not rise up in anger? Why did the tribal Democrats not strike out at the tribal Republicans? Why didn't a tide of angry people descend on Florida and sieze the ballots from the state elections office? What does it take to incite the apathetic people of America to rise up against their government?
Maybe nothing will ever incite the American people to such passion, and that's dangerous. This country was founded in revolution against the British monarchy. George Washington and the other founding fathers of our nation were officers in the British army and sworn to their king. When they decided to declare independence from Britain, they knew that their actions were treason. If they failed in their efforts they would have been hung as traitors and ended up not even a minor footnote in some British history text. It takes amazing courage to stand up against your country, a courage that America lacks today.
Our founding fathers understood that the government should serve the people, and that the people should be able to change a government that doesn't represent them. The Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear arms. States can form militias and individuals can protect themselves. Our representative government was formed in a way that the people could peaceably overturn an unpopular government by election, but allowed for the populace to wrest it away by more forcible means if necessary. Sadly, Americans have lost their will to exercise this power.
I am not advocating violence. I don't call on the people of America to rise up and throw the bum out of the White House by violence. I, too, have sat idly by. I knew that the Florida election results were probably rigged (by both sides) and I did nothing about it. I felt (and still feel) that our invasion of Iraq was lawless, foolish, and would cause irreparable harm to the United States, and I went to work the next day. I didn't feel that my one voice would make any difference, so I did nothing.
Peaceful change of government is something that we take for granted here in America, and it's a wonderful thing. In 60 years of independent rule the 53 nations of Africa have only had a peaceful change of government by election a handful of times. Coup, corruption and violent dictatorship are the rule, even today. I don't wish that on our nation.
Protest is organic, not manufactured. One voice alone, standing on a soap box in the middle of the street will go unnoticed, but if everyone with a grievance goes out alone into the street, they might find themselves surrounded by the supporting voices of all the others who feel the same. We don't need to wait for the first Tuesday in November every fourth year to add our one voice to the din at the ballot box. Americans owe it to their country to make their voice heard whenever there is something worth saying.
Just because Americans have lost the will to rise up in arms against their government doesn't mean that we shouldn't rise up at all. Make your voice heard.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Hydrogen
If I were President, I would start building the nation's hydrogen infrastructure.
Everyone agrees we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Many agree that we need to reduce our dependence on oil altogether. Oil is a finite resource; There's only so much oil in the earth's crust and after we've pumped the last of it out it will be gone forever. When will that happen? No one knows for sure, but no one wants to be here when it happens.
What is certain is that right now the United States uses 25% of all the oil used in the world and if that were to suddenly disappear we would be in a world of hurt. We use more oil than we produce, and we use more than we can produce even if we "drill, baby, drill." Many say that the war in Iraq was never about WMDs, terrorist threats or freedom for the Iraqi people, but that the U.S. is there to secure oil supplies for the U.S. in the future. It wouldn't be the first war fought over oil.
Most everyone knows that Japan attacked U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, but almost no one remembers that this was in response to an oil embargo that the U.S. placed on Japan in July, 1941. At the time the U.S. was the world's largest oil producer and Japan, a tiny nation without much in the way of natural resources of its own, was as dependent on our oil then as we are dependent on oil imports now. Faced with the lack of oil starving their industrial capacity to a standstill they felt they had no choice but to fight us.
If the middle east were to suddenly cut off our oil supplies, don't you think we would go to war over it, too?
Our alternatives are to project our military might around the world to protect our oil interests, or to eliminate our reliance on oil and therefore eliminate the threat of having our livelihood in other nation's hands.
I'm a firm believer in hydrogen as the fuel of the future. The recipe is pretty simple: crack water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen and release the oxygen. There have been large-scale experiments that show that the heat and energy of the sun can be used to crack water in a hydrogen factory. When you 'burn' the hydrogen fuel, the exhaust is clean water vapor. Sounds great, huh?
Well, it is great. There's no catch. Let's start today.
Ah, there's the catch. You can't just start today. First of all there needs to be an agreement between the government and automakers that this will be done, and done quickly. It takes automakers 5 - 20 years to develop a new technology for the market, so don't rush down to your Ford dealer just yet. Automakers and the government will need to decide on standards for safety and utility. It won't do any good if Ford's fuel tanks take a different nozzle than Chevrolet's.
Speaking of nozzles, there's no use buying a new hydrogen car if there's no place to fuel up. Imagine what our country looked like in 1908 when Henry Ford started building his Model T automobiles. Gasoline and benzene were little used up until then, and were the almost worthless by-products of oil refining. Entrepreneurial market owners set up filling stations for passing motorists, pumping the fuel into a measuring bucket and then pouring it through a funnel into the tank. As a car owner it was an adventure to drive away from your known area because you couldn't count on finding a place to fuel on your route. As the popularity of the automobile grew more and more filling stations sprouted up filling the needs of the market.
That was a different situation than we find ourselves in now. Americans are dependent on their cars for every facet of their life and no one will buy a hydrogen car if there aren't at least 2 fuel stations, one near their home and the other near their work. It took over 30 years for our current gasoline infrastructure to get to that point. We can't afford to take as long to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
Building an infrastructure entails building both the manufacturing capacity and the means of distribution. Our oil infrastructure includes deep water ports and off-shore oil transfer platforms, high-capacity pipelines to move the oil to refineries around the country, a fleet of tens of thousands of oil tanker trucks to move the product to fuel stations, and hundreds of thousands of gas stations to get the gasoline into your tank. All of this will need to be duplicated to some extent to make hydrogen fuel readily available.
Oil is also used for other purposes than to produce gasoline. It is used to heat homes, power manufacturing, and fuel aircraft too. How much research and experimentation would you want done before you felt safe flying on a hydrogen-powered jet aircraft?
All of this takes time. It will take years to build the infrastructure, years to design and manufacture the hydrogen cars, years to refit home furnaces and other oil-users to work with hydrogen. Many experts think that the oil crisis will peak in the next 5 to 10 years, when the rest of the world demands as much oil as the U.S. does, and there won't be enough to go around. That's how much time we have to end our reliance on oil, 5 to 10 years.
Can it be done? America is a can-do type of country and if anyone can accomplish this, we can do it together. But it needs to start now. Who should do the work? Should we cede future profits to the big oil companies because they provide the basic framework for the old system? Of course, the big oil companies have made hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in good times and in bad, and maybe they're in the best position to bear the cost of this conversion. It will be a new world out there, and there will be fortunes to be made.
Everyone agrees we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Many agree that we need to reduce our dependence on oil altogether. Oil is a finite resource; There's only so much oil in the earth's crust and after we've pumped the last of it out it will be gone forever. When will that happen? No one knows for sure, but no one wants to be here when it happens.
What is certain is that right now the United States uses 25% of all the oil used in the world and if that were to suddenly disappear we would be in a world of hurt. We use more oil than we produce, and we use more than we can produce even if we "drill, baby, drill." Many say that the war in Iraq was never about WMDs, terrorist threats or freedom for the Iraqi people, but that the U.S. is there to secure oil supplies for the U.S. in the future. It wouldn't be the first war fought over oil.
Most everyone knows that Japan attacked U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, but almost no one remembers that this was in response to an oil embargo that the U.S. placed on Japan in July, 1941. At the time the U.S. was the world's largest oil producer and Japan, a tiny nation without much in the way of natural resources of its own, was as dependent on our oil then as we are dependent on oil imports now. Faced with the lack of oil starving their industrial capacity to a standstill they felt they had no choice but to fight us.
If the middle east were to suddenly cut off our oil supplies, don't you think we would go to war over it, too?
Our alternatives are to project our military might around the world to protect our oil interests, or to eliminate our reliance on oil and therefore eliminate the threat of having our livelihood in other nation's hands.
I'm a firm believer in hydrogen as the fuel of the future. The recipe is pretty simple: crack water into hydrogen and oxygen, store the hydrogen and release the oxygen. There have been large-scale experiments that show that the heat and energy of the sun can be used to crack water in a hydrogen factory. When you 'burn' the hydrogen fuel, the exhaust is clean water vapor. Sounds great, huh?
Well, it is great. There's no catch. Let's start today.
Ah, there's the catch. You can't just start today. First of all there needs to be an agreement between the government and automakers that this will be done, and done quickly. It takes automakers 5 - 20 years to develop a new technology for the market, so don't rush down to your Ford dealer just yet. Automakers and the government will need to decide on standards for safety and utility. It won't do any good if Ford's fuel tanks take a different nozzle than Chevrolet's.
Speaking of nozzles, there's no use buying a new hydrogen car if there's no place to fuel up. Imagine what our country looked like in 1908 when Henry Ford started building his Model T automobiles. Gasoline and benzene were little used up until then, and were the almost worthless by-products of oil refining. Entrepreneurial market owners set up filling stations for passing motorists, pumping the fuel into a measuring bucket and then pouring it through a funnel into the tank. As a car owner it was an adventure to drive away from your known area because you couldn't count on finding a place to fuel on your route. As the popularity of the automobile grew more and more filling stations sprouted up filling the needs of the market.
That was a different situation than we find ourselves in now. Americans are dependent on their cars for every facet of their life and no one will buy a hydrogen car if there aren't at least 2 fuel stations, one near their home and the other near their work. It took over 30 years for our current gasoline infrastructure to get to that point. We can't afford to take as long to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
Building an infrastructure entails building both the manufacturing capacity and the means of distribution. Our oil infrastructure includes deep water ports and off-shore oil transfer platforms, high-capacity pipelines to move the oil to refineries around the country, a fleet of tens of thousands of oil tanker trucks to move the product to fuel stations, and hundreds of thousands of gas stations to get the gasoline into your tank. All of this will need to be duplicated to some extent to make hydrogen fuel readily available.
Oil is also used for other purposes than to produce gasoline. It is used to heat homes, power manufacturing, and fuel aircraft too. How much research and experimentation would you want done before you felt safe flying on a hydrogen-powered jet aircraft?
All of this takes time. It will take years to build the infrastructure, years to design and manufacture the hydrogen cars, years to refit home furnaces and other oil-users to work with hydrogen. Many experts think that the oil crisis will peak in the next 5 to 10 years, when the rest of the world demands as much oil as the U.S. does, and there won't be enough to go around. That's how much time we have to end our reliance on oil, 5 to 10 years.
Can it be done? America is a can-do type of country and if anyone can accomplish this, we can do it together. But it needs to start now. Who should do the work? Should we cede future profits to the big oil companies because they provide the basic framework for the old system? Of course, the big oil companies have made hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in good times and in bad, and maybe they're in the best position to bear the cost of this conversion. It will be a new world out there, and there will be fortunes to be made.
Friday, November 14, 2008
America the Terrorist?
If I were President, I don't know how I could end the war in Iraq.
Way back when, in the scary days at the end of 2001 when America was still reeling from 9-11 and we were starting to deal with the realization that the world had changed forever I already knew it was wrong. As President Bush rallied the troops and tried to build up support for military action in Iraq, I told those around me that it was a mistake.
You need to look at 9-11 from Al Qaeda's point of view to understand why it happened. In their minds they weren't throwing the first stone in this battle, they were fighting back. For thousands of years life has been largely the same in the middle east. Small tribes of nomads wandering the desert, trading at the oases and living a simple but satisfying life. But now, in the waning days of the 20th century they find their culture under attack. Bombarded by American television and American influence, the newest generation of Arabs want their MTV, Coca-Cola, Big Macs and I-Pod. How are you going to keep Omar on the farm after he's seen the big city? American companies, having saturated the local market can no longer grow their business in the United States. Coke and Pepsi aren't going to find any new customers in the U.S., but their stockholders demand continued growth, so they look outside of our borders for new customers. Many nations around the world are Americaphiles and gladly absorb our culture and long for more. But insular Arabia looks on the invasion of American culture as an attack on their own. Not every country wants to move from the third world to the first; not every country wants progress. No country should be dragged into the 21st century kicking and screaming. Our desire to grow American business was perceived as an attack on their very way of life. Al Qaeda wasn't attacking us, they were striking back, telling us to leave them alone.
It was a cowardly and dastardly attack by Al Qaeda that killed over 3,000 Americans that day, and if the United States had dropped half a dozen tactical nuclear warheads on Southern Afghanistan and flattened those mountains where the terrorists were hiding into a pile of glowing rubble, the world would have shook its head in disapproval but they would have understood our response and accepted it. But that's not what we did.
We turned our focus to Iraq in some bizarre attempt to explain that Saddam Hussein had sponsored the terrorism and posed a greater threat to the world. Bush tried to marshall support in the United Nations for joint action against Iraq and was almost universally denied. With the exception of Great Britain and a few other nations that might uncharitably be described as U.S. lapdogs, the rest of the world refused to accept our arguments for action against Iraq. In an unprecedented move, Bush unilaterally decided to send U.S. troops across the borders of a sovereign nation in agression.
Unprecedented, I say, because you could make the argument that the U.S. has always been drawn into war against our will. Certainly in the 20th Century we were never guilty of striking first. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor is unambiguous, and although we might have been able to stay out of World War I a little longer than we did, German actions against us would have made our entry inevitable. In Korea, Vietnam and Kuwait we went to the defense of Democracies under attack. We've acted in concert with the United Nations to protect peoples around the world. Our secret actions to bring about "regime change" are not above reproach (Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Iran (remember the Shah?)), but don't rise to the level of waging all-out war. In the 19th Century the examples aren't as clear cut. The Mexican War was a border dispute that got way out of hand. We probably shouldn't have had a war-ship in Havana harbor at the start of the Spanish American War, but Cuba nearly borders on the U.S., too.
The United States, as the last remaining Super-Power, needs to be big enough to let the other guy strike the first blow before we strike back. Yes, we were struck on 9-11, but not by Iraq. We knew who was responsible for those terrorist acts, and it wasn't Saddam Hussein. If we had dropped those nukes on September 13th, we would have been striking back. Even when we eventually sent troops into Afghanistan to try and root-out Osama Bin-Laden we were striking back. But we weren't striking back when we sent troops into Iraq in March of 2003, some 18 months after 9-11, it was a pre-emptive action to protect us against some perceived threat of attack.
Perceived threat? Pre-emptive action? What a dangerous precedent to set!
I truly believe that George Bush was sincere in his belief that Iraq might have nuclear weapons. To deny that you would have to believe that Bush was looking for some way to write a more favorable account of his presidency, to be remembered as the strong president who led America back to safety and security, not the one who presided over it's downfall into fear. But even allowing for his sincerity in his reasoning for invasion, if the perceived threat of nuclear attack from another nation is justification for pre-emptive attack, shouldn't we have invaded North Korea first? It's indisputable that North Korea has nuclear weapons and long range missiles capable of delivering them. They have a long history as a rogue nation and are the leader of the Axis of Evil. So, President Bush, why haven't we attacked them? Maybe it's the willingness of China to act in protection of North Korea that discouraged our action there, where Iraq had no such ready and powerful protector.
Our invasion of Iraq in opposition to the United Nation's vote sent a message to the world. The United States was no longer the great protector of the world, we were now the biggest bully on the block. Crossing the borders of a sovereign nation in aggression with the expressed intent of overthrowing a sitting government to protect ourselves against some imagined future attack let the world know that no one was safe. If we could invade Iraq, what's to stop us from invading Venezuela? Uganda? Indonesia? Now that we've set the precedent that pre-emptive action is justified, how can we protest when China, Russia or North Korea use the same justification?
In addition to being unprecedented, it was poorly thought out. Even back then I could see that there was no good way for this to end. The modern nation of Iraq was carved out by the League of Nations after World War I and bound together disparate people within its boundaries. Both Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims have large populations there. Think of the difference between them as the same with Catholics and Protestants; They don't get along together too well. For better or worse, Saddam united them into one powerful country under his violent and despotic rule. Iraq was more modern and western-leaning than most other countries in the region, which are predominantly fundamentalist Moslem nations. The majority of the population in Iraq are Shi'ites, and like the Shia' of Iran, would favor a fundamentalist state. What did Bush think was going to happen when he overthrew Saddam? Did he not see that the majority of Iraq's peoples, free from the liberalizing influence of Saddam would choose to live in a fundamentalist Moslem state?
As we quickly overthrew Saddam's government and the future threat of attack from Iraq was no longer an issue, Bush's message changed. Saddam Hussein had been a brutal and violent dictator and the Americans were there to give freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq.
Well, who said they wanted freedom and democracy? How was it our job to give it to them? There's no doubt that Saddam Hussein murdered tens of thousands, maybe even millions of his own citizens. That's brutal, no doubt. But if the Iraqi people were so repressed, if they longed for freedom from this brutality, why didn't we merely support them in rising up in rebellion against their oppressor? Freedom doesn't come cheap. It's payed for with the lives and blood of those willing to stand up against injustice. That's how America payed for its freedom. What's the value of freedom when it is given to them? When they didn't pay the cost themselves? Is it any wonder that they aren't banding together in patriotism under their new flag? All that is holding the promise of democracy together in Iraq is the continued presence of the U.S. military; when we eventually leave the country will naturally devolve into the fundamentalist Islamic state that it wants to be, and they'll be no great friend to the United States, their "liberators." Once started, there was no good way for this to end.
If I were President, I don't know what I would do in Iraq. We'll only leave the country worse than we found it.
Way back when, in the scary days at the end of 2001 when America was still reeling from 9-11 and we were starting to deal with the realization that the world had changed forever I already knew it was wrong. As President Bush rallied the troops and tried to build up support for military action in Iraq, I told those around me that it was a mistake.
You need to look at 9-11 from Al Qaeda's point of view to understand why it happened. In their minds they weren't throwing the first stone in this battle, they were fighting back. For thousands of years life has been largely the same in the middle east. Small tribes of nomads wandering the desert, trading at the oases and living a simple but satisfying life. But now, in the waning days of the 20th century they find their culture under attack. Bombarded by American television and American influence, the newest generation of Arabs want their MTV, Coca-Cola, Big Macs and I-Pod. How are you going to keep Omar on the farm after he's seen the big city? American companies, having saturated the local market can no longer grow their business in the United States. Coke and Pepsi aren't going to find any new customers in the U.S., but their stockholders demand continued growth, so they look outside of our borders for new customers. Many nations around the world are Americaphiles and gladly absorb our culture and long for more. But insular Arabia looks on the invasion of American culture as an attack on their own. Not every country wants to move from the third world to the first; not every country wants progress. No country should be dragged into the 21st century kicking and screaming. Our desire to grow American business was perceived as an attack on their very way of life. Al Qaeda wasn't attacking us, they were striking back, telling us to leave them alone.
It was a cowardly and dastardly attack by Al Qaeda that killed over 3,000 Americans that day, and if the United States had dropped half a dozen tactical nuclear warheads on Southern Afghanistan and flattened those mountains where the terrorists were hiding into a pile of glowing rubble, the world would have shook its head in disapproval but they would have understood our response and accepted it. But that's not what we did.
We turned our focus to Iraq in some bizarre attempt to explain that Saddam Hussein had sponsored the terrorism and posed a greater threat to the world. Bush tried to marshall support in the United Nations for joint action against Iraq and was almost universally denied. With the exception of Great Britain and a few other nations that might uncharitably be described as U.S. lapdogs, the rest of the world refused to accept our arguments for action against Iraq. In an unprecedented move, Bush unilaterally decided to send U.S. troops across the borders of a sovereign nation in agression.
Unprecedented, I say, because you could make the argument that the U.S. has always been drawn into war against our will. Certainly in the 20th Century we were never guilty of striking first. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor is unambiguous, and although we might have been able to stay out of World War I a little longer than we did, German actions against us would have made our entry inevitable. In Korea, Vietnam and Kuwait we went to the defense of Democracies under attack. We've acted in concert with the United Nations to protect peoples around the world. Our secret actions to bring about "regime change" are not above reproach (Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Iran (remember the Shah?)), but don't rise to the level of waging all-out war. In the 19th Century the examples aren't as clear cut. The Mexican War was a border dispute that got way out of hand. We probably shouldn't have had a war-ship in Havana harbor at the start of the Spanish American War, but Cuba nearly borders on the U.S., too.
The United States, as the last remaining Super-Power, needs to be big enough to let the other guy strike the first blow before we strike back. Yes, we were struck on 9-11, but not by Iraq. We knew who was responsible for those terrorist acts, and it wasn't Saddam Hussein. If we had dropped those nukes on September 13th, we would have been striking back. Even when we eventually sent troops into Afghanistan to try and root-out Osama Bin-Laden we were striking back. But we weren't striking back when we sent troops into Iraq in March of 2003, some 18 months after 9-11, it was a pre-emptive action to protect us against some perceived threat of attack.
Perceived threat? Pre-emptive action? What a dangerous precedent to set!
I truly believe that George Bush was sincere in his belief that Iraq might have nuclear weapons. To deny that you would have to believe that Bush was looking for some way to write a more favorable account of his presidency, to be remembered as the strong president who led America back to safety and security, not the one who presided over it's downfall into fear. But even allowing for his sincerity in his reasoning for invasion, if the perceived threat of nuclear attack from another nation is justification for pre-emptive attack, shouldn't we have invaded North Korea first? It's indisputable that North Korea has nuclear weapons and long range missiles capable of delivering them. They have a long history as a rogue nation and are the leader of the Axis of Evil. So, President Bush, why haven't we attacked them? Maybe it's the willingness of China to act in protection of North Korea that discouraged our action there, where Iraq had no such ready and powerful protector.
Our invasion of Iraq in opposition to the United Nation's vote sent a message to the world. The United States was no longer the great protector of the world, we were now the biggest bully on the block. Crossing the borders of a sovereign nation in aggression with the expressed intent of overthrowing a sitting government to protect ourselves against some imagined future attack let the world know that no one was safe. If we could invade Iraq, what's to stop us from invading Venezuela? Uganda? Indonesia? Now that we've set the precedent that pre-emptive action is justified, how can we protest when China, Russia or North Korea use the same justification?
In addition to being unprecedented, it was poorly thought out. Even back then I could see that there was no good way for this to end. The modern nation of Iraq was carved out by the League of Nations after World War I and bound together disparate people within its boundaries. Both Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims have large populations there. Think of the difference between them as the same with Catholics and Protestants; They don't get along together too well. For better or worse, Saddam united them into one powerful country under his violent and despotic rule. Iraq was more modern and western-leaning than most other countries in the region, which are predominantly fundamentalist Moslem nations. The majority of the population in Iraq are Shi'ites, and like the Shia' of Iran, would favor a fundamentalist state. What did Bush think was going to happen when he overthrew Saddam? Did he not see that the majority of Iraq's peoples, free from the liberalizing influence of Saddam would choose to live in a fundamentalist Moslem state?
As we quickly overthrew Saddam's government and the future threat of attack from Iraq was no longer an issue, Bush's message changed. Saddam Hussein had been a brutal and violent dictator and the Americans were there to give freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq.
Well, who said they wanted freedom and democracy? How was it our job to give it to them? There's no doubt that Saddam Hussein murdered tens of thousands, maybe even millions of his own citizens. That's brutal, no doubt. But if the Iraqi people were so repressed, if they longed for freedom from this brutality, why didn't we merely support them in rising up in rebellion against their oppressor? Freedom doesn't come cheap. It's payed for with the lives and blood of those willing to stand up against injustice. That's how America payed for its freedom. What's the value of freedom when it is given to them? When they didn't pay the cost themselves? Is it any wonder that they aren't banding together in patriotism under their new flag? All that is holding the promise of democracy together in Iraq is the continued presence of the U.S. military; when we eventually leave the country will naturally devolve into the fundamentalist Islamic state that it wants to be, and they'll be no great friend to the United States, their "liberators." Once started, there was no good way for this to end.
If I were President, I don't know what I would do in Iraq. We'll only leave the country worse than we found it.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Human Rights
If I were President, I would abolish the death penalty.
Personally I support the concept; I believe that there are some people who have proven that they have absolutely no value to the human race and aren't worth the cost to keep them alive. That belief, unfortunately, is not the basis for the death penalty. It is meant to act as a deterrent to the worst types of crime. If a criminal knows that his very life would be in danger for doing certain acts, that it would change his behavior. Obviously, the theory is flawed. Our most violent criminals know that a death sentence means many years of appeals and challenges, not immediate execution. The average time on death row before execution is over 12 years, which means that many prisoners spend much longer, even decades, before they receive justice. There are currently over 3,200 prisoners on death row awaiting execution. Only 42 were put to death in 2007. If I were a criminal, I would like those odds.
You want a deterrent? Have the bailiff shoot them outside the courtroom immediately after sentencing. That would make even the most hardened sociopaths take pause.
But that's not why I would abolish the death penalty. The fact of the matter is that most of the world has come to agree that protecting human rights is important, and that the most basic of human rights is the right to one's life. The death penalty is little more than the state-sanctioned murder of one's own citizens. Around the world almost every civilized country has abolished the death penalty as a violation of human rights.
In 2007 the countries with the most executions were:
Personally I support the concept; I believe that there are some people who have proven that they have absolutely no value to the human race and aren't worth the cost to keep them alive. That belief, unfortunately, is not the basis for the death penalty. It is meant to act as a deterrent to the worst types of crime. If a criminal knows that his very life would be in danger for doing certain acts, that it would change his behavior. Obviously, the theory is flawed. Our most violent criminals know that a death sentence means many years of appeals and challenges, not immediate execution. The average time on death row before execution is over 12 years, which means that many prisoners spend much longer, even decades, before they receive justice. There are currently over 3,200 prisoners on death row awaiting execution. Only 42 were put to death in 2007. If I were a criminal, I would like those odds.
You want a deterrent? Have the bailiff shoot them outside the courtroom immediately after sentencing. That would make even the most hardened sociopaths take pause.
But that's not why I would abolish the death penalty. The fact of the matter is that most of the world has come to agree that protecting human rights is important, and that the most basic of human rights is the right to one's life. The death penalty is little more than the state-sanctioned murder of one's own citizens. Around the world almost every civilized country has abolished the death penalty as a violation of human rights.
In 2007 the countries with the most executions were:
- China (At least 470, possibly as many as 5,000)
- Iran (Over 370)
- Saudi Arabia (Over 143)
- Pakistan (Over 137)
- United States (42)
Does the United States really want to be grouped together with countries like China, Iran and Pakistan in the eyes of the world? Most Americans think of the United States as a well-respected member of the world community, and as the leading proponent of human rights protection. The rest of the world looks at the United States as colossal hypocrites, espousing human rights protections to the rest of the world while murdering their own citizens. It would come as quite a surprise to most Americans to find this out. Well, surprise! Wake up America.
As we loudly champion the cause of human rights around the globe, the rest of the world shakes its head in disbelief at the 250 prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay for years without access to due process. The United States, ignoring our own constitutional protections, acted as police, judge and jury, apprehending these people who we decided may be a threat to us and holding them in prison for years without the chance to defend themselves, to prove their innocence, or to complete their 'sentence' and be set free. We, the great champion of human rights, have regularly used torture on these prisoners in an effort to extract information from them. We argue that the great threat to our nation from these terrorists justifies our actions.
How would we Americans feel if U.S. citizens were held by a foreign government and treated the same way?
Sometimes you have to go along to get along, and it's time for America to cease our arrogant stance before the world and act more like the responsible world citizen that we want to be.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Ear-marking
If I were president, I'd veto any bill that came across my desk with earmarking. The government would come to a stand still and nothing would get done until one of two things occurred:
- Congress starts writing straight-forward bills that don't have tons of pork nailed on to them. OR
- Congress finally gives me (the President) the line item veto.
Every president since Reagan in 1986 has asked for the line item veto, the ability to strike out certain provisions of a bill while signing the rest of it into law. In 1996 Congress gave Bill Clinton this power in an effort to control pork barrel spending, and it worked. The Federal government was able to run at a profit during Clinton's presidency, actually spending less than it earned and reducing the national deficit. The power of the line item veto was ruled unconstitutional and taken away by the Supreme Court in 1998 in a case brought by Rudy Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City.
Some argue that the line item veto puts too much power in the hands of the president, but I say that the president has too little power now to stop Congress's wild spending. The president has no choice but to sign bills that are earmarked with billions of dollars of wasteful spending; these bills are the way our government does business and the president would be hugely unpopular if he brought the workings of our nation to a halt.
I'm willing to be hugely unpopular. (Some would argue that I've already reached that goal.) The uproar caused by this stalemate between Congress and the President would make for some very good TV, and focus attention on the shameful waste that attends the running of our government. Congress would be happy to draft a constitutional amendment giving the power of the line item veto to the President, if only to shift the blame from Congress to the Presidency. Passage of a constitutional amendment requires approval by 2/3s of the states, but passage should be easy because 43 of the 50 State Governors already have the line item veto, including the Governer of New York. (I'm talking to you, Giuliani.)
Let me, as your President, take the heat for cutting out all of those billions of dollars meant to reward lobbyists, political supporters and to pander to a Congressman's home state. Each Congressman can show how it's not his fault, the bill was passed with his amendments but that damned President struck-out those lines from the bill before signing it.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Donkeys and Elephants, Economically Speaking
How the economy works.
- Companies make jobs.
- Jobs pay people.
- People buy things from companies.
Republicans say:
- If companies don't make money they will fail.
- If companies fail, their employees will lose their jobs.
- If they lose their jobs employees will not have money to spend to buy things from companies.
- If people don't buy things from companies, more companies will fail.
Democrats say:
- If people don't have enough money they won't buy things from companies.
- If companies don't make money they will fail.
- If companies fail, their employees will lose their jobs.
- If they lose their jobs employees will not have money to spend to buy things from companies.
See any similarities?
The main difference in economic philosophy between Dems and Reps is that Republicans think protecting companies is the key and Democrats think helping individuals the most important.
Republicans think that giving tax breaks to big business will allow them to be more profitable, growing their business and thereby creating more jobs. Pour money in at the top and it will trickle down through the economy. When the fat-cat CEO of Exxon makes more money, he will buy more Big Macs and create new jobs at McDonalds.
Democrats think that you shore-up a shaky economy by building up the foundation, the hundreds of million individual bricks upon which the economy is built. They favor reducing taxes for individual taxpayers, giving them more money out of each paycheck to spend in the market. If I pay $20 less per week on taxes I will spend that extra money buying Big Macs for me and my family, preserving the job of the teenager in the paper hat behind the counter so that he too can do his part to support the national economy.
By the way, $20 per week is about $1,000 per year; That's how much most people will end up saving from a middle-class tax cut.
Both plans have merits and flaws. The Republican's plan makes sure that companies are profitable, but doesn't insure that employees share in the wealth. Companies can also become more profitable by moving their jobs to India, increasing Chicken McNugget sales in Indian McDonalds (where they don't eat beef), but doing nothing to help the American economy. The Democrat's plan gives individuals more money to spend, but if they spend it all on Big Macs instead of spending it on a car payment then the auto industry will suffer anyway and the downward spiral continues. Is that extra $80 per month enough to convince Mr. Burger-Flipper to finally buy that new Ford Focus? Is there any way to compel him to do so?
While neither solution is perfect, I have more faith in the American worker to solve this problem from the bottom up than I do in American Big Business to solve it from the top down.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Donkeys and Elephants, Continued
So, Republicans think government should be as small as possible, and Democrats think government has a duty to be responsible for a greater number of issues. There's good arguments for the positions of both sides.
For example, some projects are so big and so important that only the government can take them on. How do you get the states to agree to cooperate in the building of an interstate highway system? If California builds a multi-lane highway to the Arizona border and Arizona doesn't meet us there it really doesn't work, does it?
There are only 16 deep-water ports on the West Coast of the U.S., half of them in California. These ports are the main import and export portals for the U.S. to half of the world. They are choke points that are crucial to a large part of American commerce. Should California alone bear the cost of building and maintaining these facilities that benefit everyone in the U.S.?
It's clear to both sides that the above examples fall under the purview of the Federal government to at least assist in guaranteeing these important parts of the nation's infrastructure. Not everything is this clear cut. Back in 1979 the Federal government agreed to loan Chrysler $1.5 billion to prevent the automaker from declaring bankruptcy. The argument was that America's auto industry deserved government protection because of its importance to the American economy. Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depended on auto manufacturing and if those people all lost their jobs the economy would lose all of the money that those workers would spend each month, dragging the country further into a recession. To protect the economy and the American auto industry Federal lawmakers bailed-out Chrysler. Not so clear cut. Here we are now, almost 30 years later and the government is guaranteeing $700 billion to bail-out the financial industry.
In general, Republicans would argue that the government has no place in the market; They believe that market forces should be left alone to determine winners and losers in business and that government regulation and action interfere with the proper workings of the economy. Regulation is guardedly necessary to protect consumers where the market is very closed, such as public utilities where the danger of monopoly is too high, and in areas of public safety such as food and drug safety. A strictly Republican viewpoint would have let Chrysler fail in 1979, and let the nation fall into another depression here in 2008 due to the poor lending practices and investment practices in the financial sector. It's just the market at work, and sometimes losers are big losers and pull a lot of people down with them.
Of course, philosophy is only a guide to one's behavior and the harm caused to our nation as a whole would be too severe to stand by idly on Republican principles and merely watch it happen due to market forces. It is evident from this example that both Democrats and Republicans feel a sense of social responsibility to protect the citizens of the country they serve, but disagree as to the level at which actions are required.
In the movie Indecent Proposal, a billionaire offers a young couple $1 million if the wife would spend the night with him. The couple agonizes over their decision because $1 million would change their life, and it's only for one night, and it won't really mean anything, will it? I say, once you make that decision you have admitted that you are a whore, the rest is just about negotiating the price. Republicans will do it once, but only if the money is really worth it and they don't get too dirty, while Democrats aren't beyond tricking on the streets from time to time when they need a fix.
Wow, did that metaphor get out of hand! Let me clarify. I'm a Democrat myself and I don't mean to imply that my party sells favors for money. It's just that the level of need doesn't need to reach the dire levels that compel Republicans to act to help the country. Democrats think that personal rights need government protection. In the same way that racial discrimination was wrong and required legislation to protect the rights of people of all colors, the Dems want to ensure the rights of all Americans to be treated equally, at the workplace, in the market, and at home behind the privacy of their own walls. Democrats see an inequity in that not every American has access to quality health care and think that the government should act to make that happen. Democrats worry about the least fortunate in our society and think that the government has a responsibility to help look after those who can't (or won't) care for themselves. Welfare, food stamps, medicaid and disablity payments are a step away from Socialism, the Republican would say. Take away their crutches and force them to walk again and carry their own weight.
So, what do you think? Should the government step all the way back and keep its hands out of the American pie, or is the government in the best position to act as a referee and keep the game fair for everyone?
In my next post I'll discuss the basic economic philosophies of each party.
For example, some projects are so big and so important that only the government can take them on. How do you get the states to agree to cooperate in the building of an interstate highway system? If California builds a multi-lane highway to the Arizona border and Arizona doesn't meet us there it really doesn't work, does it?
There are only 16 deep-water ports on the West Coast of the U.S., half of them in California. These ports are the main import and export portals for the U.S. to half of the world. They are choke points that are crucial to a large part of American commerce. Should California alone bear the cost of building and maintaining these facilities that benefit everyone in the U.S.?
It's clear to both sides that the above examples fall under the purview of the Federal government to at least assist in guaranteeing these important parts of the nation's infrastructure. Not everything is this clear cut. Back in 1979 the Federal government agreed to loan Chrysler $1.5 billion to prevent the automaker from declaring bankruptcy. The argument was that America's auto industry deserved government protection because of its importance to the American economy. Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depended on auto manufacturing and if those people all lost their jobs the economy would lose all of the money that those workers would spend each month, dragging the country further into a recession. To protect the economy and the American auto industry Federal lawmakers bailed-out Chrysler. Not so clear cut. Here we are now, almost 30 years later and the government is guaranteeing $700 billion to bail-out the financial industry.
In general, Republicans would argue that the government has no place in the market; They believe that market forces should be left alone to determine winners and losers in business and that government regulation and action interfere with the proper workings of the economy. Regulation is guardedly necessary to protect consumers where the market is very closed, such as public utilities where the danger of monopoly is too high, and in areas of public safety such as food and drug safety. A strictly Republican viewpoint would have let Chrysler fail in 1979, and let the nation fall into another depression here in 2008 due to the poor lending practices and investment practices in the financial sector. It's just the market at work, and sometimes losers are big losers and pull a lot of people down with them.
Of course, philosophy is only a guide to one's behavior and the harm caused to our nation as a whole would be too severe to stand by idly on Republican principles and merely watch it happen due to market forces. It is evident from this example that both Democrats and Republicans feel a sense of social responsibility to protect the citizens of the country they serve, but disagree as to the level at which actions are required.
In the movie Indecent Proposal, a billionaire offers a young couple $1 million if the wife would spend the night with him. The couple agonizes over their decision because $1 million would change their life, and it's only for one night, and it won't really mean anything, will it? I say, once you make that decision you have admitted that you are a whore, the rest is just about negotiating the price. Republicans will do it once, but only if the money is really worth it and they don't get too dirty, while Democrats aren't beyond tricking on the streets from time to time when they need a fix.
Wow, did that metaphor get out of hand! Let me clarify. I'm a Democrat myself and I don't mean to imply that my party sells favors for money. It's just that the level of need doesn't need to reach the dire levels that compel Republicans to act to help the country. Democrats think that personal rights need government protection. In the same way that racial discrimination was wrong and required legislation to protect the rights of people of all colors, the Dems want to ensure the rights of all Americans to be treated equally, at the workplace, in the market, and at home behind the privacy of their own walls. Democrats see an inequity in that not every American has access to quality health care and think that the government should act to make that happen. Democrats worry about the least fortunate in our society and think that the government has a responsibility to help look after those who can't (or won't) care for themselves. Welfare, food stamps, medicaid and disablity payments are a step away from Socialism, the Republican would say. Take away their crutches and force them to walk again and carry their own weight.
So, what do you think? Should the government step all the way back and keep its hands out of the American pie, or is the government in the best position to act as a referee and keep the game fair for everyone?
In my next post I'll discuss the basic economic philosophies of each party.
Friday, November 7, 2008
Donkeys and Elephants
I would bet that if you asked 100 Americans "What is the main difference between the Democratic party and the Republican party?", you would be hard pressed to get even one reasoned and intelligent reply. You would find that most people would define their own party as sane and realistic, and their opponents as either "bleeding-heart socialist liberals" or "born-again right-wing whackos".
I think that most people choose their party affiliation based on that party's position on only one or two issues. Which issues, you ask? Different issues for different people. For many people abortion rights is a key issue and is the main factor in aligning with one party or another. My wife is a physical therapist and to a large part makes her decision based on health care policies. Many people support the party that best protects their livelihood; The Democrats are generally more supportive of personal injury lawyers and the adversarial civil law arena, so many personal injury lawyers are Democrats. Republicans generally favor lower tax rates, so people who make a lot of money (and therefore pay a lot of taxes) often identify as Republican based on tax policy.
To me, there's a very simple philosophical difference between the parties. In general, Republicans believe that government should be as small as possible, and Democrats believe that government has a greater level of responsibility to provide services to its citizenry that cannot be provided by the private sector alone. It's that simple.
This country was founded on State's rights. The original 13 colonies were rebelling against over-bearing rule from a distant king. They didn't fight for independence only to bind themselves under the power of a new ruler, not so distant. The Constitution, the Federal Constitution that set forth the powers of the new national government was designed to make the Federal government limited in scope and power. The individual colonies didn't share an identity beyond thier colonial borders other than as subjects of the King, whose power they sought to throw off. They banded together as a union of independent states for their mutual protection against Britain's vengeance and opposition. The people of Pennsylvania didn't give a whit about the people of New York, but they needed to count on the help of New Yorkers if Pennsylvania needed to fight against the British.
Look at the name of our country. "The United States of America." America was the name that the New World was known by. The founding fathers were much more interested in the independent States being united for only limited purpose. States. United. In America.
Don't misunderstand me. The founding fathers knew that this new union was based on a mutual desire to rebel against an unfair and oppresive rule. They didn't want any of the colonies to repeat in miniature the policies and power of a monarchy. Together, representatives from each of the colonies agreed that the people should have the right to choose their leaders and to remove them. That people should be free to speak their mind without fear of government retribution. That power should not be too concentrated in any one person or institution, but that there should be checks and balances to the use and abuse of power. That those charged with enforcing the laws aren't the same as those who make the laws. That all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights. Good stuff, huh?
The States didn't want some far-off ruler telling them what they could and couldn't do, but they agreed that there would need to be an overriding government presiding over the Union so that there was a fair and equitable procedure to allow each State to weigh-in on matters of importance to the Union as a whole. Still, the intention was clear that the power should rest mainly with each State and that the role of the Federal government should be limited. The actions of the Federal government should only be to address issues regarding the Union as a whole, such as military protection and defense.
Up to this point, both Democrats and Republicans agree. The point of contention between them is which issues affect the Union sufficiently to warrant action. No one questions that the Federal government should oversee and direct the military for our national defense. This doesn't preclude each and every state from organizing and maintaining their own state militia. Running the military is an expensive proposition so the Federal government requires each and every citizen to pay a portion of their income as taxes. Every American benefits from our common defense. Not all issues are so clear cut.
In my next entry we'll get into the nuts and bolts of what the government should be doing for its citizens.
I think that most people choose their party affiliation based on that party's position on only one or two issues. Which issues, you ask? Different issues for different people. For many people abortion rights is a key issue and is the main factor in aligning with one party or another. My wife is a physical therapist and to a large part makes her decision based on health care policies. Many people support the party that best protects their livelihood; The Democrats are generally more supportive of personal injury lawyers and the adversarial civil law arena, so many personal injury lawyers are Democrats. Republicans generally favor lower tax rates, so people who make a lot of money (and therefore pay a lot of taxes) often identify as Republican based on tax policy.
To me, there's a very simple philosophical difference between the parties. In general, Republicans believe that government should be as small as possible, and Democrats believe that government has a greater level of responsibility to provide services to its citizenry that cannot be provided by the private sector alone. It's that simple.
This country was founded on State's rights. The original 13 colonies were rebelling against over-bearing rule from a distant king. They didn't fight for independence only to bind themselves under the power of a new ruler, not so distant. The Constitution, the Federal Constitution that set forth the powers of the new national government was designed to make the Federal government limited in scope and power. The individual colonies didn't share an identity beyond thier colonial borders other than as subjects of the King, whose power they sought to throw off. They banded together as a union of independent states for their mutual protection against Britain's vengeance and opposition. The people of Pennsylvania didn't give a whit about the people of New York, but they needed to count on the help of New Yorkers if Pennsylvania needed to fight against the British.
Look at the name of our country. "The United States of America." America was the name that the New World was known by. The founding fathers were much more interested in the independent States being united for only limited purpose. States. United. In America.
Don't misunderstand me. The founding fathers knew that this new union was based on a mutual desire to rebel against an unfair and oppresive rule. They didn't want any of the colonies to repeat in miniature the policies and power of a monarchy. Together, representatives from each of the colonies agreed that the people should have the right to choose their leaders and to remove them. That people should be free to speak their mind without fear of government retribution. That power should not be too concentrated in any one person or institution, but that there should be checks and balances to the use and abuse of power. That those charged with enforcing the laws aren't the same as those who make the laws. That all men are created equal, endowed with certain unalienable rights. Good stuff, huh?
The States didn't want some far-off ruler telling them what they could and couldn't do, but they agreed that there would need to be an overriding government presiding over the Union so that there was a fair and equitable procedure to allow each State to weigh-in on matters of importance to the Union as a whole. Still, the intention was clear that the power should rest mainly with each State and that the role of the Federal government should be limited. The actions of the Federal government should only be to address issues regarding the Union as a whole, such as military protection and defense.
Up to this point, both Democrats and Republicans agree. The point of contention between them is which issues affect the Union sufficiently to warrant action. No one questions that the Federal government should oversee and direct the military for our national defense. This doesn't preclude each and every state from organizing and maintaining their own state militia. Running the military is an expensive proposition so the Federal government requires each and every citizen to pay a portion of their income as taxes. Every American benefits from our common defense. Not all issues are so clear cut.
In my next entry we'll get into the nuts and bolts of what the government should be doing for its citizens.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Too Little, Too Late?
Why start a blog about my political views 2 days after the historic election? Maybe I didn't want to give all my good ideas away to John McCain and spoil Obama's party. Maybe I'm not 2 days too late, but starting very early for 2012. Maybe it's because I believe that a good idea is still a good idea, even if it's not timely to the current debate. Whatever. During the coming weeks, months and years I intend to use this blog to record my views and ideas on how to improve America, to restore our image around the world, and trim the dead-weight that is dragging us down.
A little about me:
My name is Randy Shore. I'm roughly the same age as our President-Elect and I live in Ventura, California. I'm a database programmer and SQL developer, working 4 days each week for a Bay-area law firm and doing independent consulting work on Fridays. I'm one of those lucky people you've heard about who telecommute, working from my home and connecting to my office over the internet. I'm in that group of the top 5% of U.S. wage earners who pay over half of all the nation's taxes, and yet I'm still a Democrat. I have 2 young sons, Brodie, age 9 and Nik, almost 5 years old. I'm happily married to my first wife, Marion, and don't anticipate the need to trade her in on a newer model in the future. I mow my own lawn, attend PTA meetings, volunteer in my community (although not as much as I might,) and coach my son's soccer team. We cook our own meals and eat breakfast and dinner together as a family at the table in our kitchen. We have 2 cars parked inside of our two-car garage, a 1996 Chrysler mini-van that we've put 147,000 miles on, and a new Honda Civic that we bought this year, replacing the 1994 Saturn that we had owned for 14 years. My wife and I haven't had a "date" in years; we enjoy spending time with our children and would rather cuddle on the couch and watch what we've TIVO'd than go see a movie. I've seen 2 movies in the last 3 years, and both of those were matinees and animated.
Am I Joe Six-Pack? Maybe. Joe Six-Pack doesn't need to wear a hard-hat and carry a metal lunch pail to the plant each day to represent America; he just needs to work hard every day, add more to his country than he takes from it, and love America enough to want to make it better. Yeah. That's me.
A little about me:
My name is Randy Shore. I'm roughly the same age as our President-Elect and I live in Ventura, California. I'm a database programmer and SQL developer, working 4 days each week for a Bay-area law firm and doing independent consulting work on Fridays. I'm one of those lucky people you've heard about who telecommute, working from my home and connecting to my office over the internet. I'm in that group of the top 5% of U.S. wage earners who pay over half of all the nation's taxes, and yet I'm still a Democrat. I have 2 young sons, Brodie, age 9 and Nik, almost 5 years old. I'm happily married to my first wife, Marion, and don't anticipate the need to trade her in on a newer model in the future. I mow my own lawn, attend PTA meetings, volunteer in my community (although not as much as I might,) and coach my son's soccer team. We cook our own meals and eat breakfast and dinner together as a family at the table in our kitchen. We have 2 cars parked inside of our two-car garage, a 1996 Chrysler mini-van that we've put 147,000 miles on, and a new Honda Civic that we bought this year, replacing the 1994 Saturn that we had owned for 14 years. My wife and I haven't had a "date" in years; we enjoy spending time with our children and would rather cuddle on the couch and watch what we've TIVO'd than go see a movie. I've seen 2 movies in the last 3 years, and both of those were matinees and animated.
Am I Joe Six-Pack? Maybe. Joe Six-Pack doesn't need to wear a hard-hat and carry a metal lunch pail to the plant each day to represent America; he just needs to work hard every day, add more to his country than he takes from it, and love America enough to want to make it better. Yeah. That's me.
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