Don't let politics influence policy decisions....
There was a time when this might have been a widely-accepted rule of "good government." Not anymore.
Now, it would seem, every decision is based on politics - i.e., what will help the incumbents win the next election, rather than what is the true, just, and expedient policy. And of course, you can't run a business, a city, a county or a monolithic super-power under those conditions. We need to either abolish political parties, or establish a one-house Parliamentary government like Britain's, where leaders are still held to some standard of wisdom and honesty with the people.
Even the press and the other corporate media has become totally corrupt. You can number on the fingers of one hand the really good journalists in the mainstream media. Internationally, it is somewhat better, although every country has its "acceptable" areas of comment, and unless there is an organized Left, we'll hear nothing about the case for socialism, de-corporatization, de-militarization, banning nukes and GMO's, carbon taxes, etc. Even the old Utilitarian guides to good policy and "utility-maximization" or maximizing public good ("the greatest good for the greatest number", as Bentham put it) are gone - not refuted, just ignored.
And so, as I like to put it, imagine our political spectrum as an arc, or rainbow, covering 180 degrees from left to right. Zero is socialist utopia, total freedom, equality, diversity, etc., while 180 is totalitarian state capitalism, Orwell's 1984, or something of the sort. I put us at about the 155-170 range in the United States, today. That includes both major parties, the corporate media, and most of the public school curricula now in force. Those are the only ideas, the only part of the spectrum, the only paradigm that we're allowed to choose, or even know much about, unless we search it out on our own - something which the Internet has finally allowed us to do, may its name be praised.
And so, our totalitarian state is on the verge of collapse. There is, as Paul Roberts says, "No Way Out."
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As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap
No Way Out
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/23/no-way-out-2/
The year 2014 could be shaping up as the year that the chickens come home to roost.
Americans, even well-informed ones, don’t know all of the mistakes made by neoconized and corrupted Washington in the past two decades. However, enough is known to see that the US has lost economic and political power, and that the loss is irreversible.
The economic cost of this lost will be born by what remains of the middle class and the increasingly poverty-stricken lower class. The one percent will have offshore gold holdings and large sums of money in foreign currencies and other foreign assets to see them through.
In the political arena, the collapse of the Soviet Union presented Washington with the grand opportunity to reallocate the Pentagon budget to other uses. Part of the reduction could have been returned to taxpayers for their own use. Another part could have been used to improve worn out infrastructure. And another part could have been used to repair and improve the social safety net, thus insuring domestic tranquility. A final, but perhaps most important part, could have been used to begin repaying the Treasury IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund from which Washington has borrowed and spent $2 trillion, leaving non-marketable IOUs in the place of the Social Security payroll tax revenues that Washington raided in order to fund its wars and current operations.
Instead, influenced by neoconservative warmongers who advocated America using its “sole superpower” status to establish hegemony over the world, Washington let hubris and arrogance run away with it. The consequence was that Washington destroyed its soft power with lies and war crimes, only to find that its military power was insufficient to support its occupation of Iraq, its conquest of Afghanistan, and its financial imperialism.
Now seen universally as a lawless warmonger and a nuisance, Washington’s soft power has been squandered. With its influence on the wane, Washington has become more of a bully. In response, the rest of the world is isolating Washington."
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Pretty bad. And yet, like the pilot who brings a disabled plane out of a spin, and into a safe landing - preferably on the Hudson, right next to the UN Headquarters, it is possible to save us all. A safe landing is possible. Let me explain....
1. Carbon tax. This will end all the senseless debate over climate change, "regulation", corporate power, and associated issues. Let the markets work with full-cost pricing. Public utilities are NOT profit-maximizing commercial businesses. That's why they are regulated and have different principles of operation. It is their duty, qua Public Utilities, to maximize customer benefit, community benefit, and their own workers' benefit, and in Montana, that has always meant they are the best jobs around - until raiders destroyed Montana Power and the social compact it had operated under for the previous 90 years. We know that there are huge social and environmental costs to burning coal, as well as other fossil fuels. Simply include those costs in the price, and see how much of the "demand" remains. That is true market allocation of scarce resources..
2. Unilateral nuclear disarmament to the level believed to be necessary as a "deterrent" - say, 200 deliverable warheads. Once we have a parity with several other smaller countries, then we can reduce the numbers to zero in stages, based on building "confidence" of our common goals and motives. This means totally dismantling existing nuclear warheads, and burning the plutonium in reactors, or whatever (along with a ban on any further mining or processing of uranium, to phase out power reactors concurrently). Now, we are merely "archiving" them as "legacy" weapons, which can still be primed and used.
3. Ban GMO's and any other inappropriate technology which has been developed for purely commercial reasons, with no good scientific or philosophical oversight. The Precautionary Principle must apply in all cases. Whatever we don't know about the consequences of a new technology can hurt us. We simply must not be doing things which can't be undone, and which could have calamitous consequences.
4. Provide basic, military-style healthcare to everyone who wants and needs it. Supply any and all proven, effective, life-saving drugs at cost, or free to those who can't pay. Those who want private care can buy a largely unregulated version on whatever terms they like. This will allow for a real "free market" in medical supplies and services, which should bring down costs by 2/3 or more - at least for those really useful and necessary goods and services. Make any sort of "cost shifting" or compulsory "insurance" schemes illegal - they are mafia-style "protection rackets," and have no place in a free society.
5. Protect self-medication as a Constitutional Right. No one can be deprived of medicine or the treatment of his choice without due process of law. In other words, no laws which restrict such freedom to self-medicate are valid, and are hereby struck down. Anyone convicted under "substance abuse", sale, or possession of "dangerous drugs" laws is hereby pardoned. In the case of users or possessors (including small-scale dealers), they should also be paid the minimum wage for time served - as a sort of well-deserved reparations from our corrupt "criminal justice system."
6. Reform the welfare system under Utilitarian principles, or some more modern, humanistic system. There are many models in many parts of the world, but everyone would be encouraged to work, study, do community service, etc., and incentives would be built in to do more, rather than less or nothing, as is now the case, here. Everything in our dysfunctional Federal bureaucracy is designed to fail, and thus "demonstrate the evils of socialism."
7. Restore the status of corporations to mere business arrangements for a particular enterprise, with strict limitations as to what they can do, and how they do it. Enforce vigorously anti-trust laws - especially mergers and acquisitions - so that viable companies are not bought up and dismantled by vulture raiders. This is exactly what happened to Montana Power. It was not "de-regulation" which did it in; it was the repeal of the original social compact under which MPC existed, allowing it to sell off its assets to the highest bidder, ignoring its regulatory "book value" on which its revenues and profits were based.
The benefits of freer markets and competition among suppliers was entirely lost - the actual purpose of de-regulation, according to its proponents. And now, wind producers are still waiting in line while coal-fired power continues to dominate the supply side of the equation - totally wrong. Does no one understand this? Decentralized ("distributed") energy production and generation is the path to a sustainable future - avoiding perhaps half or more of present government expenditures in regulating and mitigating the effects of the oil, coal, and nuclear industries, and all the infrastructure based on them. This will all go away, along with the devastating effects to our economy and the planet inherent in this massive consumption of irreplaceable fossil fuels and a nuclear fuel cycle resulting in 10's of thousands of nuclear weapons, as well as disasters like Fukushima and Chernobyl.
8. Replace the Fed with a real central bank, and establish State Banks and hard currency in its place. Everything is on plastic, now, anyway. It shouldn't be difficult to devise a stable, non-inflationary, and non-exploitative system of "money" and exchange. Indeed, one can only marvel that this central "lifeblood of the economy" medium has become so corrupted, since it has always been well-understood. Here, again, politics (and money) has completely trumped sound policy, and our money is now the laughing stock of the world.
As Roberts describes, above, it's only a matter of a year or two until very little foreign trade will be conducted in dollars. Maybe that's a good thing. State banks will quickly correct this. Montana has an export economy. We can only benefit from sound currency, which is our own and based on some objective value - like our gold, platinum, wheat, coal, etc. We were rich, and funny-money has made us poor. Now, most of our resources are owned by out-of-state companies or oligarchs. But we can still control what happens within our own borders, if we assert that right (as every sane nation does).
9. Ultimately, we need a new Constitution, and model for local self-governance. We know that a free society works, and that all the supposed "benefits" of "a strong, central government" are more than outweighed by its costs in wars, police states, and the abuse of centralized wealth and power. Are we a Republic or an Empire? Now, it is clear that we are the latter, and with no legal or constitutional basis. But this can come later. All the corrections, above, can be made piecemeal and independently. We know what these concrete problems are, and how to fix them. Only our dysfunctional Federal Government stands in the way of doing so. The task, now, is to devolve and decentralize, while purging ourselves of the corporate and partisan conspiracies and rackets which have led to our ruin.
Conclusion
The dominant philosophy, now, is to centralize everything, entrench wealthy special interests with absolute power, and drive the current system (which nearly everyone understands is broken, and many think, unfixable) into successive crises with the hope that somehow, somewhere, "the good guys" will take over, much as Germany or Japan were rebuilt after WWII when their military dictatorships were defeated. The problem is, there is no one to defeat our own military dictatorship. We can only defeat ourselves, or fix it along the lines sketched out, above. Let's do it!
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