This blog originally posted at brainspank.org on 6/17/2010
A manifesto of sorts. How to solve our own ugly, seemingly insurmountable problems as a nation and perhaps do as much for the rest of the world at the same time. I’m quite cognizant of how ambitious it may sound, yet things, answers, need not always be so convoluted. Simple answers for stupid questions indeed. I kicked this around for a few days with the object being what exactly would I do If I could. Turned out to be reasonably simple. Let us, shall we?
In the particular order of urgency.
- Get the fuck out of the Middle East. We have consistently and maddeningly failed to effect change for the better there for decades at enormous expense in money and lives. "Blood and treasure", the nomenclature neocons and hawks are so very fond of. Walk away from Israel, pull completely out of Iraq, Afghanistan and leave Iran the hell alone (they just aren’t a credible threat to us). Let Iran and Israel diddle themselves, posture and puff and fuck with each other until the cows come home. If one turns the other’s sand into glass, so be it. Might just have been an inevitable conclusion anyway. I’m sick and tired of discrimination and ideology rooted in such archaic concepts as religion. My God can beat up your God is so nineteenth century. Our involvement has historically forced a bad situation to flirt with a heavy petting, worse case scenario. See above. We’ll fuck it up long before we solve it.
We give more foreign aid money to Israel than we do to every other nation on the planet combined. Why? Why do we do that? They aren’t starving. They aren’t plagued by disease. We give them money to kill people. That’s what they do with it. They bully and discriminate and kill with your money. My money.
They are assholes. Oppressors. And so are we. We had no reason to go into Iraq. Tell me different and we’ll play spot the right wing retard. There is no longer any reason for our involvement in Afghanistan. There may have been at one time, but that didn’t bear fruit, did it? Dick-in-Bush dropped the ball spectacularly. We can’t even say whether Bin Laden is still alive. We sure as hell can’t say with a straight face that he was behind 9/11. Now we spend our "blood and treasure" kicking one hornet’s nest after another, making no progress and galvanizing an entire generation to oppose us with no real fear of death.
Things are great, couldn’t be better. Better......start this again.
Upside, being we’d save about ten billion a month. We’d stop pissing in the ears, the mouths and up the noses of people who don’t deserve any such thing and be able to afford health care for every man, woman and child in this country. Education? Infrastructure? Walk in the park. All of the sudden, plenty of money. See how easy this is already? Israel would be forced to walk back it’s incendiary dickheadedness and perhaps concede a little humility in the spirit of humanity. Agree to talk to and treat Palestinians like human beings as opposed to say, cattle to be loaded onto boxcars to be gassed.
I’m no anti-semite but unchecked Zionism is indistinguishable from apartheid. Israel can piss up a rope, at least until she learns some table manners. They just don’t deserve a seat at the grownup table.
Moving right along........
2)Alternative energy like yesterday. This includes hemp production, the most viable replacement for ALL products petroleum, not just energy. Plastics, textiles, lubricants, even concrete. No pesticides, renewable every sixteen weeks or so......not deleterious to to topsoil. Foodstuffs even, high in protein and anti oxidants. Strongest natural fiber known to man. Makes Cotton look Fisher Price. And of course, solar, wind, tide......the goddamn sun, it’s all there and don’t you try tell me it’s not technologically or monetarily feasible. It is, and has been for years. IT IS ALL THERE. All that is missing is the education and subsequent will of the people.
We could walk away from fossil fuels almost completely in a handful of years. With plants that ingest carbon and produce oxygen and passive systems that don’t pollute. Imagine. It really is this easy. Really.
- REAL campaign finance reform. Publicly funded elections and I mean exclusively publicly funded.. Each candidate has exactly the same amount of money to spend provided by we the people. Equal airtime, no private contributions and corporations expressly and legally forbade from any participation at all, not the least of which is monetary. Big energy, big pharma and big money and all the rest barred from the process forever. This really is our best hope. It is our singular hope. It will never happen and so, things will never change. I remind you thus, lest you think me naive.
Any church that even attempts to proselytize political, will pay taxes on every single goddamn dime placed in the collection plate until they prove they’ve grown up and left the game of jingoistic, hypocritical moralizing behind. Organized religion has never done more good than harm. I fucking hate churches and their obviously undeserved tax exempt status, yet blatant and bold fuckery.
- Abolish all drug prohibition. The most lucrative legal cash crop in California is citrus, clocking in at aprox. $1.5 billion a year. Marijuana by contrast is around $17 billion a year. In California alone bitches. We incarcerate more people per capita in this country than ANY nation on earth, the majority being non-violent drug offenders. People can and will abuse substances whether legal or not. It’s analogous to preaching abstinence only to teenagers. To do so is pissing in the wind of millions of years of instinct to procreate. Mankind has sought to self medicate since we first crawled out of the soup and discovered the coca plant which eventually begat the bong and then the crack pipe. The war on drugs is an abject and embarrassing failure and a massive financial rabbit hole. They’re not criminals when they begin their institutionalization but they sure as fuck are by the time they hit the streets their first time out. Therefore and hence, the majority of "offenders" will return to the institutions. There is no such thing as rehabilitation in the United States prison system. The default has long since become recidivism.
Addicts will be addicts whether their poison is legal, sanctioned, or not.
Tax it. Regulate it. Stand a far a better chance of keeping it out of the hands of children.
- End the grip of the military industrial complex. America is actually wealthy as all get out. We crap cash. We swim in the filthy lucre. The largest industry in the world is the ability to manifest death. We as country spend nearly half of every dollar spent on just that. Talk about a nation dedicated to war. Ten times the expenditure of our nearest competitor; that would be China, who by the way, has four or five times our population and they’re doing a hell of a lot better than us thank you very much. They practically own us for fucks sake but they aren’t dancing in the streets because we’re barely worth shit anymore and they’re stuck with us. We have become the turd in their punchbowl.
We’ve never really been a democracy, at best, we may have been able to define ourselves as a republic, I’ll settle for that. I cannot bear that what we are and have been for some time is a plutocracy that insists on making nice with a backward ass "Christian" theocracy. The reason the corporations adore the religious zealots so is because they are so pliable. So easily manipulated into acting counter to their own interests. I want to throw fossils at creationists like Lewis Black. I can’t stand them. On one hand, you know, whatever gets you through the night, on the other, you really must be fucking kidding me.
- Suspend whatever broadcast license Fox News, Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck et al. hold that enables them to perpetuate such profligate, heinous, insidious, inflammatory bullshit. They’re welcome to their opinions, interpretations even, but abject lies on the public airwaves will henceforth not be tolerated. Dan Rather got fired, so did Bill Maher. Helen Thomas resigns in shame but these assholes still have access to American living rooms every goddamn day where they vomit the most toxic, vile effluvium with gleeful and wanton disingenuousness. Fuck that shit. Free speech is not a license to lie over and over and over again.
The answers are simple, the Devil is in the implementation. All these things are interdependent of and on each other. No single item can be completely efficacious without a congruent and concerted enactment of the others. I understand this. Yet what I’m proposing here is so gorgeously simple. Such a clear path toward most of us being able to get on with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness........ I couldn’t resist sharing my grandiose little pipe dream with the rest of you.
Drinks for my friends.