Senate shows us they represent lobbyists and not citizens

The American Dream is over folks. This shows that the Liberal Democrats are just as paid off by corporations as Conservative Republicans, and have just as little desire to represent the people. Maybe now more of you will join me in voting third party (independent, green, libertarian, etc) in the mid-term congressional elections in 2010 and the presidential election in 2012.

I love that this was caught on film. It’s an excellent example of the attitude of our lawmakers. Having been paid off by the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and then making sure that only they are represented in the discussion of health care reform, citizens stand up and demand “their” representatives to represent their needs, and the response is that “we need more police” to shut them up. It’s Animal Farm. “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

See also: Single Payer Action

Republican Mantra: Our Children and Grandchildren

It makes me so angry when I hear Republicans (mostly) talking about how “our children and grandchildren are going to have to pay for this” as an argument against President Obama’s plans for alternative energy, education, and health care.

I think if my children and grandchildren could grow up in a country where they could breathe, afford to go to college, find a job, and get insurance, that they would be glad to pay for that, versus growing up in a country which, as of now, looks as if it will have clouds of coal and oil fumes to blind and choke my children and grandchildren, who won’t be able find jobs, or afford college, health care, or possibly even food or gas.

I’ve been watching C-SPAN, and almost every Republican repeats this “it’s not fair for our children and grandchildren to have to pay for this” mantra, almost every time they speak. I know what they are really saying: it’s not fair for THEIR children and grandchildren to have to pay to fix the world that THEIR greed and selfishness and shortsightedness have created, even if it means a lower standard of living for MY/OUR children and grandchildren.

These guys weren’t arguing when Bush spent hundreds of billions on the Iraq war, or when the bailout for their rich embezzler banker buddies got hundreds of billions, but when it comes to hundreds of billions to make a better life for the core of America, the working class, the middle (and increasingly lower) class, “NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS!”

They didn’t seem to be worried about the National Debt before, BUT…

When they hear that it might be spent on solar, wind, and hydrodynamic energy to compete with the coal and oil guys who bribe them to make policies that benefit them, they stand up against spending. When they hear that the big business lobbyists might have to pay taxes to provide health care for the workers who make them rich and die from lack of insurance and retirement benefits (which were reduced over decades to increase the business owners already tidy profits) they stand up against spending.

When they hear that the taxes of the rich might help my poor son go to college to get a good job to not be poor someday, and to compete with their son who is put through the best schools because they profited from friendships with big business that I and my fellow Americans have worked so hard for for so little compensation, and that OUR children and grandchildren, if educated, might want jobs someday that their big business buddies plan on farming to third world countries to save money, they stand up against spending.

Well, I am glad for one that they are standing up! I wish they were standing in line at the unemployment or welfare office, so they would see the need to spend money on PEOPLE!

(You probably thought I was going to say I wish it was against a wall in front of a firing squad, or in a line at a guillotine, or underneath the nooses hanging from the gallows!)

I say, debt be damned!

If Obama wants to spend a trillion a year for 10 years, and it means we can get away from being the bend-over bitches of the middle eastern oil barons, create jobs for our record numbers of unemployed people, and ensure college and health care for at least some of our children and grandchildren, shouldn’t we do it?

These are the same guys who are probably always saying things like “you gotta spend money to make money”.

Well, guess what? Spending money in Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran is not going to make us any money.

It might make your defense contract buddies or your oil stock buddies or you money, but most of us are not seeing a dime.

OUR children and grandchildren need education, jobs, health care, and a clean environment, not more terrorists avenging their dead family members!

An Energy / Financial / Environmental Crisis Survey, by Me

Follow this link to take my survey, hosted on PollDaddy.com: SURVEY

There are roaches in the walls of America; let’s clean them out!

When I contemplate the sad state of America today, the first thing that comes to mind is our political system.

We call ourselves a democracy, but are far from democratic. In a democracy, citizens vote on issues, taking an active role in decision making.

We are supposedly a republic, which is a representative democracy where citizens elect officials based on their platforms and promises, according to which candidates best represent their beliefs, and thus are most likely to vote the way that the constituents who elect them would vote.

We are actually more of an oligarchy, where  the majority of power is held by a small group of people from certain families, communities, universities, and secret societies, and the monopoly of power is kept from the common people, with the rich and powerful controlling the military and law enforcement to protect them from retribution, all the while making decisions which are beneficial to the business interests that pay for their campaigns and support their opulent lifestyles with bribes once in office, rather than enacting legislation to protect and serve the workers of the lower and middle classes.

We are obviously not a meritocracy, wherein persons are elected or appointed and given power and responsibility based on talent and ability! If this were the case, we would see a lot less corruption and ineptitude in the daily news stories of our politicans’ exploits…

I think the main problem with our political process is that it’s designed so that being corrupt and getting paid off are too easy, and there are many rich and powerful interests lobbying the politicians to ensure that it remains that way.

If we reformed the nature of political positions to make them more transparent and accountable, then mostly only people who wanted to represent the people would bother getting into politics, with the exception of a few who are willing to work harder at being sneaky and underhanded.

I doubt that this will ever happen without a violent revolution, as the people responsible for reform are the same people who profit from corruption. However, for the sake of argument, I offer the following suggestions:

I suggest that politicians be held legally accountable for their platforms and the promises they make when campaigning, and that they be immediately terminated if they do not fulfill the duties specified in their contracts, JUST AS ANY OTHER EMPLOYEE WOULD! After all, the elected officials in our government are not supposed to be our bosses, but rather our servants.

If a person interviews for a job and is hired, but fails to perform the duties that they have accepted, in a timely and reasonable fashion agreed upon with the employer, the person is fired.

For example, let’s say that an employee is hired on at a convenience store. In the job interview, the candidate agrees to perform transactions, stock products, and clean. Once hired, the person talks to friends on the phone, steals money from the cash register, and deals drugs from the establishment, while neglecting their job. In almost every case, the person would be promptly fired, even if it leaves the team short-handed.

Why is it then that when a candidate for office makes campaign promises and then doesn’t keep them that they get to keep getting paid for 2 to 4 years, even if they are not doing the job they were hired to do, and that they then might even keep the job longer unless another interviewee can convince the employer (the American people) that they would be a better employee?

I think that any politicians that are not doing exactly what they said they would should be immediately fired, every time, PERIOD.

Then we can interview some new candidates, and have them sign legally-binding contracts that they will have to abide by, or they too will be terminated.

The contracts for publicly held offices should be specific, stating how the candidates will vote on key issues (yes or no), and how much money they will spend on various projects and expenses.

Then, each president, senator, house representative, governor, secretary, committee member, etc. would be required to keep a publicly viewable log on their website showing when they were in session, when they were not in attendance for important decisions, how they voted on each topic, and how much of our money they agreed to spend on what.

To take this accountability and transparency one step further, holders of public offices should be required to take input from their constituents on each issue, perhaps with voters logging in with distinct ID numbers and casting their voted directly. In that way, corruption by lobbyists and other bribery would be blatantly obvious, assuming that it made them vote differently than a majority of the people that they supposedly represent asked them to, which is usually the case.

Until this kind of reform is carried out, I am certain that corruption will continue to proliferate in the American political system.

Global Pulse – 1/08/09 The Color of Stimulus: Green

Gas Companies, Car Companies, Government screwing Drivers

On the heels of every other company in America jumping on the “we lost all of our/your money, please save us” bandwagon, auto makers are asking for handouts to keep from going under. Republicans and Democrats seem to be taking notice. Most notably, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and President-elect Barack Obama (in a White House visit with George W. Bush), among others, are proposing the use of $25 billion of the $750 bailout to keep US car makers GM, Ford, and Chrysler afloat.

Not to be insensitive to those who are employed by the auto industry or who have stock in it, I think this is a step backward. Why bolster companies who provide products that most consumers can’t afford and which lack the features that most consumers want?

Instead of subsidizing automakers, who are the lapdogs of the oil companies (which is best for the politicians who get paid by oil lobbyists), we could do what is best for the people (in the long-run), and let car companies fail unless they quit bragging about 30 MPG and convert us to plug-in hybrids with Flex-Fuel tanks, which would easily give us over 100 MPG average.

It’s shameful that car companies brag about 30 MPG on TV ads, and more shameful that most Americans fall for it. It’s comparable to if Apple and Microsoft were touting pen and paper as the latest technology. But what is most shameful of all is the way that the American government continues to legislate against improvements in fuel economy and implementations of alternative energy, falling back on tried and true excuses such as “doesn’t meet Department of Transportation standards”. Well, if other countries are using Toyota Priuses in electric only mode, for example, and even using cars with technologies based on air and water that get 100s of MPG of gas, and it’s working for them, perhaps the standards need to be reviewed and revised…

There is a lot of talk in the media, both on television and online, from major outlets and individuals, about electric power for cars, including both hybrid and plug-in technologies. While I definitely think that electric power for cars is an important move forward for affordability and ecology, I feel that while these technologies are being improved and gradually implemented, there is another, immediately available option which is not receiving adequate attention.

Car companies spend millions, if not billions of dollars annually on glitzy Hollywood ads full of dazzling computer generated imagery and celebrity voice-overs for their obsolete 30 MPG vehicles. If they would trim their bloated advertising budgets, they could spend about $100 per vehicle to put Flex Fuel tanks to use E-85 (15% gas, 85 % ethanol) NOW!

And instead of our government subsidizing the failing auto companies with billions of dollars to keep making 30 MPG guzzlers (which Republicans and Democrats both support), we could instead spend the money converting our nation’s gas stations to Flex-Fuel, for $20,000 – $60,000 per station, according to an article from Fareed Zakaria, published in Newsweek, entitled “Imagine: 500 MPG”.

Here is a quote from Zakaria’s article:

The current crop of hybrid cars get around 50 miles per gallon. Make it a plug-in and you can get 75 miles. Replace the conventional fuel tank with a flexible-fuel tank that can run on a combination of 15 percent petroleum and 85 percent ethanol or methanol, and you get between 400 and 500 miles per gallon of gasoline. [BLOGGER'S NOTE: by "400-500 MPG of gasoline", he means ~100 MPG of E-85 mix]

While I don’t think GM deserves any praise for the Volt concept, especially after burying their electric car almost 20 years ago, probably due to pressure from oil companies, I must give them accolades for adopting Flex-Fuel on some of their vehicles. They are also trying to increase the number of Flex-Fuel filling stations, namely working with big retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to get pumps installed.

If we could get our government and American automakers to stop answering to oil companies, who want poor gas mileage and high gas prices to gouge us at the pump, and get them to start answering to us, the consumers, we could get the “big three” (GM, Ford, & Chrysler) to start making all their vehicle models plug-in hybrids with Flex-Fuel tanks.

Then we wouldn’t need to subsidize them to keep making cars no one is buying. Everyone would start buying their cars. And if the government is going to subsidize them to adopt these alternative technologies, they could subsidize them with conditions. For example, if GM, Ford, & Chrysler get X number of billion dollars of taxpayer funding to convert to plug-in hybrids with Flex-Fuel tanks, then they agree to also start putting up solar panels and wind turbines to create environmentally friendly electricity for vehicle fueling stations, thereby creating a self-reinforcing cycle of improvement for consumers’ finances and for the environment.

We could apply the same model to electric companies providing power to residences and businesses.

All it takes is enough pressure from the consumers (boycotts, bargain shopping, voting) to break the greedy cycle of the politicians, auto makers, and utility providers serving the oil companies and vice versa.

Another way we could reform the auto industry is to manufacture less cars, putting only a few examples of each vehicle at dealerships, and sell custom-designed made to order vehicles via the internet or computerized kiosks at dealerships, or with the assistance of a salesperson entering preferences and assisting with orders. After all, for most of the population, vehicles are too expensive to be considered impulse items; there is no need to every color and flavor readily in stock at the check-out counter.

And if this means that some assembly workers and sales people lose their jobs, the government could help to convert them over to builders, maintainers, and operators of new mass transit. Imagine if all of America was covered in high-speed, low-energy bullet trains and nice new buses…

TO READ MORE, FOLLOW THE LINKS BELOW…

Plan Gives GM, Ford, Chrysler $25 Billion
Hybrid Car Blog – Prius VS Volt
California Cars Initiative – 100 MPG + Hybrids – Fareed Zakaria – Imagine
c|net – Hacking your Prius
c|net – Coming Soon – 100 MPG+
Hack Your Hybrid—Activate EV Stealth Mode, Get Rid of the BEEP, and More!
Coastal Tech – Electric Only Mode
GM CEO: U.S. needs 10 times more ethanol stations

FRONTLINE: Sick Around The World

In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland — deliver health care, and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.

Watch the entire program online here.

Synopsis from [ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/synopsis.html ] :

Reid’s first stop is the U.K., where the government-run National Health Service (NHS) is funded through taxes. “Every single person who’s born in the U.K. will use the NHS,” says Whittington Hospital CEO David Sloman, “and none of them will be presented a bill at any point during that time.” Often dismissed in America as “socialized medicine,” the NHS is now trying some free-market tactics like “pay-for-performance,” where doctors are paid more if they get good results controlling chronic diseases like diabetes. And now patients can choose where they go for medical procedures, forcing hospitals to compete head to head.

While such initiatives have helped reduce waiting times for elective surgeries, Times of London health editor Nigel Hawkes thinks the NHS hasn’t made enough progress. “We’re now in a world in which people are much more demanding, and I think that the NHS is not very effective at delivering in that modern, market-orientated world.”

Reid reports next from Japan, which boasts the second largest economy and the best health statistics in the world. The Japanese go to the doctor three times as often as Americans, have more than twice as many MRI scans, use more drugs, and spend more days in the hospital. Yet Japan spends about half as much on health care per capita as the United States.

One secret to Japan’s success? By law, everyone must buy health insurance — either through an employer or a community plan — and, unlike in the U.S., insurers cannot turn down a patient for a pre-existing illness, nor are they allowed to make a profit.

Reid’s journey then takes him to Germany, the country that invented the concept of a national health care system. For its 80 million people, Germany offers universal health care, including medical, dental, mental health, homeopathy and spa treatment. Professor Karl Lauterbach, a member of the German parliament, describes it as “a system where the rich pay for the poor and where the ill are covered by the healthy.” As they do in Japan, medical providers must charge standard prices. This keeps costs down, but it also means physicians in Germany earn between half and two-thirds as much as their U.S. counterparts.

In the 1990s, Taiwan researched many health care systems before settling on one where the government collects the money and pays providers. But the delivery of health care is left to the market. Every person in Taiwan has a “smart card” containing all of his or her relevant health information, and bills are paid automatically. But the Taiwanese are spending too little to sustain their health care system, according to Princeton’s Tsung-mei Cheng, who advised the Taiwanese government. “As we speak, the government is borrowing from banks to pay what there isn’t enough to pay the providers,” she told FRONTLINE.

Reid’s last stop is Switzerland, a country which, like Taiwan, set out to reform a system that did not cover all its citizens. In 1994, a national referendum approved a law called LAMal (“the sickness”), which set up a universal health care system that, among other things, restricted insurance companies from making a profit on basic medical care. The Swiss example shows health care reform is possible, even in a highly capitalist country with powerful insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Today, Swiss politicians from the right and left enthusiastically support universal health care. “Everybody has a right to health care,” says Pascal Couchepin, the current president of Switzerland. “It is a profound need for people to be sure that if they are struck by destiny … they can have a good health system.”

V, for Vote – Remember, Remember, the 4th of November!

V for Vote