We live in a technical society. All of the technical rules and regulations are made by anonymous organizations funded by Big Business. They constantly lobby to increase the cost and complexity of everything from electrical wring in your house to the structural integrity of your automobile. They use safety as an excuse to make things more expensive for us all.
This is done completely out of sight, of even the U.S. Congress; which, after all, is made up almost exclusively of lawyers. No engineer would dare blow the whistle on his peers because he’d never get an engineering job again, or worse. The meek shall inherit the earth.
Special interests and political action groups have become the new pillars of the establishment in Washington. The general public seems content, and Congress is content – so why not just make it official and save everybody some tax money and increase the profits of corporations and the dividends of stockholders. That can be done easily enough by just outlawing all soft money contributions, and just giving everybody’s vote a weight proportionate to their wealth. Almost all the recent tax break went to the 1% of wealthiest
Americans. We can all see how much good it’s done for the economy, or jobs. Wall Street brokers are fully employed, but nobody else. Why not just give them the power they have already, and stop taxing the rest of us to hide their subterfuge behind a mind numbing facade of rules and regulations. Let’s just get back to they way it was in America before the patriots mucked it all up – “Taxation without representation.” Tea party!
Does nobody assume humankind is evolving, or different, or responsible? A federalist government can allow each state to develop its own program, say for Welfare – with little oversight. Then a few years later the federalist government can evaluate the fifty state programs, determine which is most effective and establish that program as a new standard. Then let the states go their own way, and so forth. This gives each region the freedom to determine it’s best destiny, while benefiting from the experience from all the others. California can leave the nation first; then Texas, so they can naturalize all their ten million illegal immigrants and deport all their other citizens to Mexico where they can be considered employed for just working one hour a week. Mexico has such low unemployment American industries are falling over themselves sending jobs there.
The role of the federal government must have a new focus, upon it’s Constitutional prerogative of defending the nation against all enemies foreign and domestic. The states have the infrastructure and the expertise to perform the other roles of government; and they should be allowed to do so. Conversely, they are less expert at matters of national and local defense and would best cede these obligations to the federal government so that a central coordinating authority can provide the best quality of homeland defense. It’ll never ever happen – makes too much sense. The Constitution has never, ever been quoted against domestic enemies – not even mafiosos, terrorists, or Republicans.
Military and federal employee promotions should be done on merit only. Promotion boards should know individuals by number only – no name, age, race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or other potentially discriminatory information will even be on the documents considered in promotions.
Medical documents notwithstanding, to be sure no intelligent or ambitious or talented individuals make it through the ranks. All service members are green, and we want to keep them that way.
Working for the government will become the most sought after job. Federal employees should be able to spend a year in a military branch of their choice (and vice versa), with appropriate training as necessary. Federal employees will also be able to transfer as frequently as military personnel do, worldwide. Likewise, if military personnel want to move around less frequently this will be arranged, with no penalties as far as pay and promotions go. What other job in the world lets you play soldier or sailor for a year’s sabbatical every now and then? Well other than Member of Congress, which opens up corporate Board slots and lobby jobs, and hundreds of other get-paid-a-fortune-but-do-nothing-at-all jobs in corporate America. We need our Royalty, just like the Brits.
Penalties in the form of reduction of federal funding should be meted out to the cities in proportion to the number of homeless people on the streets.
Immigration laws will be enforced much more strictly in areas with high unemployment, high poverty, and homelessness. A community has no business allowing thousands of illegal immigrants to have good jobs while thousands of American citizens are homeless. Businesses who hire these individuals should face severe penalties. They exert the power of super citizens on the government, so they should be held to much higher standards too. That includes the death penalty; three strikes and you’re out too. The Church’s original rules for the Inquisition will do just fine.
One of the wonderful things about the internet is immediate access to experts in any field or any location. It’s an intangible, but anybody in business knows how helpful this is. The government has no such infrastructure on the web – most of their web sites have no emails, and therefore no access. The business of the government would be greatly facilitated if they had such access to other federal agencies, and to their counterparts at the state and sometimes the local level. The government needs its own private web – why not use the Iridium constellation of satellites for this purpose? This would also make it a lot easier to maintain secure communications between the national labs and their counterparts in academia. No more hand signals to transmit national secrets; no more don’t ask don’t tell security checks. One click of the mouse, and it’s gone.
Given the major breaches in security at the national laboratories – the Chinese stole our nuclear weapons secrets and our rocket science – a comprehensive overhaul is needed. They should use the latest technology – retina scans, digital fingerprinting, and in some cases DNA testing – to attain the highest possible level of security. If the government uses enough of these devices the price may come down enough to where industry can use them too. That’s how the modem got started – the military paid billions to create it, then gave it to Rockwell for nothing so they could make trillions in instant profit.
We need an Amendment taking Social Security out of reach of Congress, under any circumstances, for ever. Just put it as an add on clause to the ban on gay marriages; legalizing any immigrant in America over a week, and across the board amnesty for the Bush Administration’s role in fantasizing about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.
Clearly Washington is controlled by special interests. They want outsourcing of jobs. So, Congress wants outsourcing. The only way out is for states to assert their constitutional rights. California has the 5th largest economy in the world. If they take actions to keep good jobs in California, there’s not a damn thing Washington can do about it – not in an election year. My advice to people is to contribute their money to your state and local politicians.
Money donated to any national campaign is totally wasted, unless you’re somebody like Bill Gates ~ who actually gets everything he wants without contributing a penny to anybody.
The real question is why industry is sending so many jobs overseas. The answer is that Global Warming is causing the Greenland ice cap to melt, which will shut off the Gulf Stream, which will drastically change the weather patterns of the rust belt – it’s cold now, but will be like Siberia soon. Industry knows this, and is sending the jobs away. The writing is on the wall for the rest of America too. With the Gulf Stream gone, far less moisture will go up the Atlantic Coast. The climate will be colder, too. Tobacco won’t grow in Virginia; cotton in Georgia; or citrus fruits in Florida. Much more moisture will drench the Gulf Coast states. The Texas citrus zone will be too wet, and any trade along the whole coast will be prohibitively expensive. This will strangle the prosperity of inland areas.
Most importantly, the extreme weather along the Gulf Coast – all the torrid energy hurricanes have to dissipate will all go straight into the Gulf – will make drilling for oil virtually impossible. So the major oil companies are furiously trying to extract every last drop while they still can. Likewise for points inland, in Louisiana especially.
The refineries in south Louisiana along the Mississippi in Baton Rouge will be useless too; as will the huge complex at Texas City near Houston. All these chemical and petrochemical facilities are being allowed to slump into total disrepair because the payback on regular maintenance is getting less and less profitable.
Why is industry being so obvious about outsourcing of jobs, in at best tentative economic conditions? Their model of business conditions takes into account the fact that the Maryland sized block of ice that sluffed off of Antarctica two years ago, according to the best scientific models, should not have happened for 10,000 years. So, they fear, the Greenland icecap
mishap could just as easily happen much sooner than later. Global competition is so fierce that a calamity of that scale, in the drastic affect it would have upon their American industries, could very well put a company out of business. It’s better to err on the cautious side and move the jobs now while it can be done at a measured pace.
The ironic part is that the error in the Antarctic ice cap model was introduced by the absence of the ozone layer, which allows high energy UV rays to impact Earth from the sun. There is no ozone hole over the north pole, so that error will not happen. However, industry is so paranoid about the whole Freon issue – their $1 trillion taxation without representation upon the civilized world, especially America – that they won’t even acknowledge the ozone layer is a problem at all. Again, they err on the cautious side, keep the lid on the Freon fiasco, and go about their ugly business.
The recent campaign finance laws have created a massive new loophole for corporate America. Several massive media consultants have raised $250 million for the Democratic cause, and they are using this money to pay for wall to wall advertising on – guess what – radio and TV stations they already own. So major corporate contributors around the nation ante up, giving the media even more ready cash to buy even more broadcast outlets to gain an even stronger monopoly on the media. So much for freedom of speech.
Washington’s leading politicians are in the habit of buying American’s votes with tax cuts. A tax cut now will only pump more money into the economy, forcing it to heat up even faster than the ultra low interest rates are starting to cause. Woe is me, but how will Washington win now – except by wholesale advertising to a nation prepped to be easily brainwashed by a whole social system that has custom made our collective psyche. They have always known they had this ultimate power, but never had reason to use it until now.
This trend toward kidnappings of civilians in Iraq has sent a clear signal to every law maker in the world. If you’re tough on terrorism, you will face the consequences. Most members of Congress are only there for a term or two, after which time they are fair game.
Their families, friends, businesses, and virtually every aspect of their lives can be wrecked by one clever terrorist. It’s quite a powerful incentive to toe the party line, and to exactly as their party line dictates ~ that’s the only way they can claim to be unaccountable for the actions on terrorists. So, these terrorists
have shifted power from a few thousand influential patriots in Washington to a two dozen policy makers at party headquarters – one dozen at each party. The curious part is that the terrorists seem quite insincere in their kidnappings, releasing their victims too quickly and going into negotiations too readily. It’s clear they have not done the kidnappings for ideological reasons, but are just acting on orders.
At least 99% of the policy makers in Washington are lawyers. They are of the generation just previous to mine, and are still awed by computers, cell phones, interstate highways, semi nudity on television, men on the moon, and modern multi level rock and roll music. Everything on this website is completely beyond their grasp because they haven’t a clue about what technology is, what it can do, or even what it does. They trust the technical societies to give them guidance in all such matters, blindly signing off on legislation because it’s been approved by this association or lobbied by that society. They cannot even make the connection that these associations and societies are themselves staffed by people from the major Fortune 500 firms that directly lobby such laws – to their face. (These large businesses are the only ones who can afford to give employees the time to participate in society business, go to meetings, and perform other functions on the clock.) Members of Congress think the special interests and industry groups are on opposite sides of the fence, when in fact they are one and the same.
The premier of Red China recently gave a news conference announcing they had to slow down their economy – week old news; then this afternoon the Bush Administration announced it would not address concerns for workers in China submitted by a petition from the AFL-CIO. They said such an investigation, even if it revealed problems, would only lead to economic isolationism – a path the U.S. will not take. Thus, by definition, they will support a lowering of wages in America to compete with the Chinese.
Ultimately, China will peg the worldwide standard for wage earners, bringing every worker in the world down to their level – because nobody anywhere can compete with a billion dirt cheap laborers.
Clearly Bush is nostalgic for his youthful days in China where, as son of the American ambassador, he was a member of the supreme elite in China – miles above even powerful Communist Party members.
Were somebody such as myself to come forward and say all these things to Congress, the very first thing they would do is refer the matter to counsel and tap their consultant and special interest lobby friends for their input. This input would be 150% diametrically opposed to the truth I have here said, and Congress would likely even consider arresting me for contempt. They would instead turn the matter over the FBI or Homeland Security, either one of which would lock me away for life. When they found out my medical history, I would be sent to an institution for the criminally insane and spend the rest of my days behind barbed wire with a bunch of real crazies. Those are the facts, and I should try and be man enough to face up to them.
Despite all its human flaws, the “NASA culture” has a strong can-do, will-do attitude that makes it possible for them to achieve what organizations ten times their size cannot. This sets a very bad standard for industry, giving the shareholders and investors a high expectation of their capabilities. Without the shining example of NASA, industry can plod along and people are perfectly content with shoddy products, nominal innovation, high prices, and poor customer support. I would even go so far as to say that the aerospace industry was to blame for the Challenger disaster, not NASA employees. Industry has motive, the employees do not.