This country's foreign policy
At this point, about the best comment I've heard anybody make about US foreign policy is that "Yeee-Haah! is not a foreign policy." (And yes, it was on a bumper sticker; but it's still good.) The Bush administration took the enormous world-wide outpouring of sympathy and good will after 9/11, and has turned it into a nearly global feeling of disgust and hatred at our foreign "policy."
Here, in a nutshell, is my view of how we ought to conduct our foreign policy:
The only way to make other people and nations stop doing things
to hurt us
is for us to stop doing things that make them hate us.
Our foreign policy now is, like everything else this government does, more concerned with how much profit it can make for politicians' investors than it is with how much good it can do for the world's people. This is wrong. It's also stupid. I pledge to work towards a US foreign policy that works to benefit the people of both the US and the rest of the world. Now, why didn't somebody think of that before?
The events of September 11, 2001
There are still a lot of unanswered questions about 9/11:
An enormous number of books, articles, web sites, etc., are dedicated to finding the truth behind the government's 9/11 fictions. The 9/11 Commission Report is so full of omissions and distortions that it's useless for answering these questions. The answers must be found.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich is investigating one question; he said, "I've indicated a long-standing interest in gathering information and trying to get to the bottom of exactly what happened with respect to all the stock activity that took place preceding 9/11." However, a full Congressional investigation of the events of 9/11 is needed, and I pledge to work towards making that happen.
The treatment of prisoners
The one single thing this nation is doing that, more than anything else, makes other people and nations hate us is our hideous treatment of prisoners in custody as "enemy combatants." Take, for example, the case of Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera Television cameraman (a journalist, in other words) who is being brutally mistreated because he is on a hunger strike to protest abusive treatment during more than six years in Guantanamo. You can learn more about his plight in the article "When We Torture" by Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times of February 14, 2008. He is, however, far from alone.
There are two fundamental problems with our leaders' mistreatment (that is, torture) of prisoners in their custody:
National defense
The phrase says it - national defense. Not national offense. Not global policeman. Not war after war after war to generate profit for multinational megacorporations. Actually, Cheney/Bush's war in Iraq is weakening our national defense, by chewing up people and equipment at such a ridiculous rate that we have nothing in reserve if a real threat to our national security should come along.
But worse - far worse - is the fact that the Iraq war and the hideously incompetent way it is being conducted have shown this nation's young people that serving in the military is a stupid thing to do. "Stop-loss" provisions, abysmal "care" in the military and veterans' hospitals, and a myriad of other things are guaranteeing that there will not be enough trained, competent soldiers to fight against a real threat when it arises.
The current administration has committed a lot of crimes, but this one could well mean the destruction of the United States if nothing is done about it. As a former Army officer, I know that without soldiers who are committed to the cause and the nation, we're defenseless. I pledge to work for legislation to require future administrations to manage the military with an eye to the future, as well as the present.
The United States and Israel
These days, anyone who criticizes the nation of Israel is accused of being prejudiced against the Jewish people - that is, of being anti-semitic. That's ridiculous. In fact, the nation of Israel is committing nearly as many crimes against the people whose territory it occupies in Palestine as the United States is commiting against the people of the nation it occupies, Iraq.
To see what I'm talking about, look at these two web sites:
*
B'Tselem,
a respected Israeli human rights organization
*
If Americans Knew,
a source of unbiased reporting about the Palestinian situation
(scroll down the home page, and look at the graphs)
The nation of Israel has far too much influence over the affairs of the United States. The main reason for this, of course, is the large number of people in this country who provide money and votes for candidates who support the nation of Israel. However, Israel must be called to account for its crimes in Palestine, just as the United States must be called to account for its crimes in Iraq.
For this nation to provide the current level of support for Israel is no longer acceptable - for moral reasons, as well as fiscal ones. I pledge to work to make our level of support for Israel proportional to its real needs, and also contingent on its taking steps to correct its actions with respect to the inhabitants of the areas it occupies.
The corporate takeover of this country
In 1886 the Supreme Court of the United States (or, depending on who you believe, one of their law clerks) made a huge blunder. In the Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case, they ruled that corporations had all the rights of "natural persons" under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. This has led to all sorts of perversions of the Constitution and the law that is based upon it. For example, courts have upheld the ludicrous position that corporate campaign contributions must be protected as free speech. For a good article on the history and implications of "corporate personhood," see the article The Santa Clara Blues.
You can read more about this abuse of justice and the damage that the perverted concept of corporate personhood has caused our country in my discussion of Corruption in Government. My pledge here is to work to eliminate this travesty, and restore corporations to their original position - servants of the people, not their bosses. You can find an excellent resource on this issue at the web site for POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy).
"Free" trade
This follows right along after corporate corruption, because it it is the major tool used by the multinational megacorporations to secure their power from government interference. First of all, the term "free trade" is a lie, used to cover up the fact that what's being pushed is managed trade - managed for the benefit of the megabuck megacorps.
Just one example: Chapter 11 of the NAFTA treaty allows corporations of one nation to sue governments (at any level) in another nation if actions of that government reduce that corporation's profits. This provision has been used, many times, to undermine environmental regulations - see the article about NAFTA Chapter 11 on the Public Citizen web site.
I pledge to work against the managed trade agreements that are dishonestly labelled "free trade agreements" - to rescind the ones we have and to prevent the enactment of new ones.
The election process in this country
The so-called "Helping America Vote Act" was supposedly a way to remedy the worst excesses of the fraudulent elections that put Cheney and Bush into office in 2000 and 2004. It has actually made elections easier to rig, rather than harder. (See blackboxvoting.org for more information.) Since it requires the use of easliy hackable electronic voting machines, elections are no longer determined by the people, but by the owners of the voting machine corporations.
America needs to get back to a balloting system that cannot be illegally influenced. Paper ballots are step toward fixing this problem. Others are independent oversight of the election process and harsh penalties for election officials who manipulate the elections with illegal techniques such as caging lists and unfair distribution of voting machines. I pledge to work for the adoption of all these measures.
A woman's right to choose
Women have an inherent and inalienable right to determine what happens to their own bodies. During the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, when anti-choice groups from around the country descended on Houston to "end abortion," I was there - defending Houston women's right to choose - and I will continue to do that, at every possible opportunity.
Rather than trying to end abortion, we need to end the need for abortion - first by giving our children complete, accurate, and positive sex education, including comprehensive information about contraception, and second by making contraceptive medications and supplies available to everyone at minimal cost.
Firearm ownership
The 2nd amendment to the Constitution is clear - "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Other writings by the authors of that amendment make it clear that the "well regulated Militia" the amendment cites is none other than the citizenry of the nation - in other words, us.
I do not, however, go as far as to say that anyone should be able to own any kind of guns he or she wants. Firearms, like automobiles, are lethal weapons if used wrong. I favor training and licensing of anyone who wishes to carry and use a firearm, and forbidding ownership and use to people whose age, mental state, or past behavior show that they would pose a danger to people, animals, or property.
Education
Our children deserve the best education we can give them. This means, among many other things, that we have no right to teach a religious belief about the origins of life ("intelligent design") and call it science. We also have an absolute obligation to give our children complete, accurate, and truthful information about sex, human sexuality, and contraception - "abstinence education" is a joke, a sick, twisted joke that we're playing on our own children.
Another thing that needs to be remedied in our educational system is the emphasis on standardized testing as the only arbiter of everything from funding to school system management. This simplistic "solution" to the problem of education quality actually causes more problems than it solves - for example, for the last half of a school year, teachers have to teach the tests, rather than teaching the classes.
Health care
Every person in the United States deserves complete, comprehensive health care. More and more of your money is being vacuumed from your paychecks and pockets, and transferred into the pockets of the medical insurance corporations, the pharmaceutical corporations, the hospital corporations, the medical supplies and equipment corporations, and the medical establishment. It's gotten to the point where physicians are so hemmed in by the rules dictated by these interest groups that they can't make effective decisions about your health care based on your needs.
For politicians to use the health of Americans, especially American children, as a political football for their own selfish ends is nothing short of evil. (See the September 19, 2007, editorial cartoon by Ben Sargent of the Austin American-Statesman.) They rant about "socialized medicine," but there is no health care system in this nation more "socialized" than the one enjoyed by the members of the U.S. Congress themselves. I pledge to work towards a universal (meaning for all people) single-payer system similar to the ones that are so successful in nations like Canada and England.
Liberty
In this "sweet land of liberty," every person should be free to do as s/he wishes, as long as sh/e doesn't harm another person, another person's property, public property, or an animal without just cause, or deprive another person of his/her property by force, theft, or fraud. In fact, all laws against actions by individuals that do not do such harm should be eliminated. Some examples of this include:
As a step towards that end, incarcerated people whose offenses harm no one but themselves should be pardoned and released from the nation's prison system as soon as possible.
The criminal justice system
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