The worst thing about the Right in America is the hypocrisy about big government: that it is fine for military adventurism, social programming efforts like the War on Drugs or abstinence-only sex ed, or corporate welfare for the richest corporations, but deplorable if one poor person gains more than is appropriate by the standards of someone not directly involved in their lives. The worst thing about the Left is the hypocrisy about egalitarianism: the push for garnering unearned self-esteem through fiat from above, the gutting of gifted and talented programs, the smarmy identity politics that values categories more than people, the romanticization of the urban poor and sheer ignorance about the rural poor or laboring poor, the commodity fetishization coupled with an ignorance about who can afford such commodities (look at what Alice Waters has to say about poor people and food, for example).
If you read the above paragraph and said to yourself, "That's not me. I'm not like that," then whether you are Left or Right, you have more in common with each other than you do with your fellow Leftists/Rightists. It is astonishing that you would side with people who fit the above description over those for whom it disgusts. Join together. There are more of us than there are of them.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street
I was struck by the observation made in the following article: Occupy Wall Street vs. The Tea Party.
It seems to me that the Tea Party is a movement driven by Baby Boomers and the generation that preceded them. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is driven by Generation X and the Millennials. Why is this important? The Boomers inherited the post-New Deal corporate structures given to them as they became adults, and as they got older, they dismantled every protection invented during the crashes of 1907 and 1929. To them, the corporation was the vehicle for their successes, either as "company men" or as entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and financial innovators. Boomers invented the modern derivative markets, invented hedge funds, created credit default swaps. While Boomers went through a powerful teenage rebellious period (indeed, the term "teenager" was coined to describe Boomer teenagers), at maturity, they embraced the corporate lifestyle by co-opting it and making it their own. The CEO in jeans and a turtleneck is a Boomer icon. The "cowboy billionaire" is another.
To that generation, the only thing stopping the meteoric rise to wealth was government regulation. Whatever youthful rebellion still lingered in the Boomers in the Carter era was purged in the Reagan era. Boomers reacted to Ronald Reagan as powerfully as they did to JFK, but for totally opposite reasons. JFK saw their youthful idealism and capitalized upon it. Reagan saw that they were tired of Watergate/Vietnam introspection, tired of the Civil Rights movement, tired of rebellion, and capitalized upon that exhaustion.
Lenny Bruce once pointed out that Vietnam protestors were not really protesting against the war in Vietnam, but against the local policemen. Since Vietnam was far away, and the cop on the other end of the barricades with the truncheon and tear gas was right there, it was an easy cognitive shift to protest the person causing the protestor pain, rather than the nominative cause of the protest. Boomers, left and right were protesting the government. The government was the enemy.
The prosperity of the 1980s was the prosperity of dismantling all the wealth stored away for the future by the New Deal structures, and devouring it whole as soon as it could be liberated from long-term investment. This generated a lot of new wealth, at the expense of infrastructure, the commons, and long-term development. From this perspective, government was the enemy, as it kept wealth in public rather than private hands. The "guns and butter" of Eisenhower through Nixon, by the time of Reagan had become "guns and no butter". Why keep any social programs that didn't help affluent Boomers? With infinite promise of material gain, why allow any barriers to that potential gain to remain?
The economic crisis of 2007-8 showed what would happen if corporations were promoted at the expense of reasonable government regulation keeping their competition fair. Just as every crisis beforehand, a bubble was formed through a small group of actors working in their own inflated self-interest at the expense of the public good, and like every crisis before it, it popped and hurt a lot of people more than it hurt the actors who caused the bubble.
In the ruins of the old economy, the Boomers are furious at the government, because they've been furious at the government all their lives. Because they are facing retirement and old age, they are expressing that rage in a conservative idiom. Hence the Tea Party.
Generation X, on the other hand, grew up in the shadow of the Boomers. They reached adulthood just in time to watch the Boomers pull up the ladder the Boomers used to ascend, before they could use it to pull themselves up too. Boomers educated on their parents' GI Bill became deans of universities and dismantled the scholarships they themselves used, replacing them with easily-available loans, and let the tuition costs skyrocket. Educated themselves, Boomers insisted on educating their children, but under very different financial conditions than they themselves had.
Now, Millennials are the most educated generation ever, but come into the world $250,000 in debt, with new Boomer-written bankruptcy laws that do not allow them to ever evade their student loan debt. They graduate into a world where there are not nearly enough jobs for them, since the corporations run by Boomers have outsourced to the Pacific Rim and South Asia. The gutted infrastructure of this country lies in ruins, and the future promised to them is gone. They are waking up from a beautiful dream fed to them by a media culture fed to them by Boomers, and they are enraged. They are angry at the corporations that dominate their lives, from the bank that owns their student loans, mortgages (or that denies them a mortgage) and auto loans. They are angry at the corporations that moved the jobs they were promised overseas. They are angry at the cowboy billionaires and the rockstar CEOs, even while they are enamored of the myriad of commodities these corporations have dangled before them. Why?
The Boomers rebelled against their exhausted parents, and looked for ways to express that rebellion. They found modes of expression that were, at the time of discovery, too marginalized to be commodities. Blue jeans were worn by shop stewards and miners. Rhythm and blues was a form of music marginalized even within the marginalized African-American community. Volkswagens were too cheap to be part of 1950s car culture. The Boomers turned these things into the language of their rebellion. The older Boomers and those from a generation previous realized fairly quickly that by commodifying these expressions, they could commodify rebellion itself. The Boomers eagerly turned their rebellion into a series of commodities that would express their rebellion for them, exploiting rebellion into a demand for commodities that expressed that rebellion for them. By the 1970s, they had co-opted rock and roll into the ultimate commodity.
That proved so resilient that they were able to commodify punk rock, which was an attempt to shake off commodification of rebellion. They raised a generation who could only express rebellion by purchasing commodities that expressed that rebellion for them. Expression through purchasing commodities that express rebellion is not entirely satisfying. It created a powerful love/hate relationship with the commodities in question.
Millennials are drowning in debt. They are slaves to their car loans, mortgages (if they are lucky enough to qualify for them) and student loans, even when they cannot find jobs. They do not see business and corporations as part of themselves, as Boomers do. They see corporations and the commodities they disperse as the makeup of the universe that dominates them, for evil and for good. But the corporations who were at the center of the crash of 2007-8 who ended up benefiting from the crash (or at least were not punished for egregious mistakes) are the target of enormous hate. Corporations who outsource jobs overseas, who pollute our soil and water and air, who keep them in debt with arbitrary interest rates, are the subject of great anger. They see a gutted government that no longer controls our destiny, and they see a myriad of corporations who have seized that power from the government and now own the government. That makes them want to Occupy Wall Street.
That is why the Tea Party is the expression of the Boomers and the generation before them, and why Occupy Wall Street is the expression of Generation X and the Millennials. Boomers are afraid of growing old in a world that despises them, and Millennials despise Boomers and the world they have created/ruined.
That is why, although the two groups have a lot of common ground, and if they could agree that they should be equally skeptical of and vigilant towards government and corporations, while they might be on the same page, they face a generation gap much harsher than what Boomers faced with their parents.
It seems to me that the Tea Party is a movement driven by Baby Boomers and the generation that preceded them. Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is driven by Generation X and the Millennials. Why is this important? The Boomers inherited the post-New Deal corporate structures given to them as they became adults, and as they got older, they dismantled every protection invented during the crashes of 1907 and 1929. To them, the corporation was the vehicle for their successes, either as "company men" or as entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and financial innovators. Boomers invented the modern derivative markets, invented hedge funds, created credit default swaps. While Boomers went through a powerful teenage rebellious period (indeed, the term "teenager" was coined to describe Boomer teenagers), at maturity, they embraced the corporate lifestyle by co-opting it and making it their own. The CEO in jeans and a turtleneck is a Boomer icon. The "cowboy billionaire" is another.
To that generation, the only thing stopping the meteoric rise to wealth was government regulation. Whatever youthful rebellion still lingered in the Boomers in the Carter era was purged in the Reagan era. Boomers reacted to Ronald Reagan as powerfully as they did to JFK, but for totally opposite reasons. JFK saw their youthful idealism and capitalized upon it. Reagan saw that they were tired of Watergate/Vietnam introspection, tired of the Civil Rights movement, tired of rebellion, and capitalized upon that exhaustion.
Lenny Bruce once pointed out that Vietnam protestors were not really protesting against the war in Vietnam, but against the local policemen. Since Vietnam was far away, and the cop on the other end of the barricades with the truncheon and tear gas was right there, it was an easy cognitive shift to protest the person causing the protestor pain, rather than the nominative cause of the protest. Boomers, left and right were protesting the government. The government was the enemy.
The prosperity of the 1980s was the prosperity of dismantling all the wealth stored away for the future by the New Deal structures, and devouring it whole as soon as it could be liberated from long-term investment. This generated a lot of new wealth, at the expense of infrastructure, the commons, and long-term development. From this perspective, government was the enemy, as it kept wealth in public rather than private hands. The "guns and butter" of Eisenhower through Nixon, by the time of Reagan had become "guns and no butter". Why keep any social programs that didn't help affluent Boomers? With infinite promise of material gain, why allow any barriers to that potential gain to remain?
The economic crisis of 2007-8 showed what would happen if corporations were promoted at the expense of reasonable government regulation keeping their competition fair. Just as every crisis beforehand, a bubble was formed through a small group of actors working in their own inflated self-interest at the expense of the public good, and like every crisis before it, it popped and hurt a lot of people more than it hurt the actors who caused the bubble.
In the ruins of the old economy, the Boomers are furious at the government, because they've been furious at the government all their lives. Because they are facing retirement and old age, they are expressing that rage in a conservative idiom. Hence the Tea Party.
Generation X, on the other hand, grew up in the shadow of the Boomers. They reached adulthood just in time to watch the Boomers pull up the ladder the Boomers used to ascend, before they could use it to pull themselves up too. Boomers educated on their parents' GI Bill became deans of universities and dismantled the scholarships they themselves used, replacing them with easily-available loans, and let the tuition costs skyrocket. Educated themselves, Boomers insisted on educating their children, but under very different financial conditions than they themselves had.
Now, Millennials are the most educated generation ever, but come into the world $250,000 in debt, with new Boomer-written bankruptcy laws that do not allow them to ever evade their student loan debt. They graduate into a world where there are not nearly enough jobs for them, since the corporations run by Boomers have outsourced to the Pacific Rim and South Asia. The gutted infrastructure of this country lies in ruins, and the future promised to them is gone. They are waking up from a beautiful dream fed to them by a media culture fed to them by Boomers, and they are enraged. They are angry at the corporations that dominate their lives, from the bank that owns their student loans, mortgages (or that denies them a mortgage) and auto loans. They are angry at the corporations that moved the jobs they were promised overseas. They are angry at the cowboy billionaires and the rockstar CEOs, even while they are enamored of the myriad of commodities these corporations have dangled before them. Why?
The Boomers rebelled against their exhausted parents, and looked for ways to express that rebellion. They found modes of expression that were, at the time of discovery, too marginalized to be commodities. Blue jeans were worn by shop stewards and miners. Rhythm and blues was a form of music marginalized even within the marginalized African-American community. Volkswagens were too cheap to be part of 1950s car culture. The Boomers turned these things into the language of their rebellion. The older Boomers and those from a generation previous realized fairly quickly that by commodifying these expressions, they could commodify rebellion itself. The Boomers eagerly turned their rebellion into a series of commodities that would express their rebellion for them, exploiting rebellion into a demand for commodities that expressed that rebellion for them. By the 1970s, they had co-opted rock and roll into the ultimate commodity.
That proved so resilient that they were able to commodify punk rock, which was an attempt to shake off commodification of rebellion. They raised a generation who could only express rebellion by purchasing commodities that expressed that rebellion for them. Expression through purchasing commodities that express rebellion is not entirely satisfying. It created a powerful love/hate relationship with the commodities in question.
Millennials are drowning in debt. They are slaves to their car loans, mortgages (if they are lucky enough to qualify for them) and student loans, even when they cannot find jobs. They do not see business and corporations as part of themselves, as Boomers do. They see corporations and the commodities they disperse as the makeup of the universe that dominates them, for evil and for good. But the corporations who were at the center of the crash of 2007-8 who ended up benefiting from the crash (or at least were not punished for egregious mistakes) are the target of enormous hate. Corporations who outsource jobs overseas, who pollute our soil and water and air, who keep them in debt with arbitrary interest rates, are the subject of great anger. They see a gutted government that no longer controls our destiny, and they see a myriad of corporations who have seized that power from the government and now own the government. That makes them want to Occupy Wall Street.
That is why the Tea Party is the expression of the Boomers and the generation before them, and why Occupy Wall Street is the expression of Generation X and the Millennials. Boomers are afraid of growing old in a world that despises them, and Millennials despise Boomers and the world they have created/ruined.
That is why, although the two groups have a lot of common ground, and if they could agree that they should be equally skeptical of and vigilant towards government and corporations, while they might be on the same page, they face a generation gap much harsher than what Boomers faced with their parents.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Text of Washington's 1796 Farewell Address, and a Contemporary Translation
Here is the original text of Washington's 1796 Farewell Address.
Here is a contemporary translation,written by the author of xkcd.
Please read them both. It is surprising how much language changes in two centuries. Please be indulgent of the xkcd author's use of contemporary slang. He is more interested in meaning than in style here.
Here is a contemporary translation,written by the author of xkcd.
Please read them both. It is surprising how much language changes in two centuries. Please be indulgent of the xkcd author's use of contemporary slang. He is more interested in meaning than in style here.
A Few Suggestions About the Farewell Party
The name, the Farewell Party, comes from Washington's Farewell Address of 1796, in which he warns America: "One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts." Washington was worried that the development of the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties would distort the democracy promised in the Constitution to such an extent that ultimately the people would be loyal to parties rather than to their nation, and be dependent upon party interlocutors to represent their political wills.
We have, in 2009, reached a point in our history, where two parties dominate almost all of federal politics. The Democratic Party was formed in the beginning of the nineteenth century to oppose the interests of Great Britain in the Americas, and to oppose the creation of a federal bank. The Republican party, comprised of Abolitionist Whigs, was formed in the years before the Civil War. Neither party currents stands for its original values nor original purpose. Currently, each party is a coalition of special interests, banded together not so much for a shared ideology as much as a hope that each party would uphold the interests of its adherents. Were each party to dissolve, its current adherents would probably not associate with each other politically. One cannot imagine Fiscal Conservatives and Post-Millenarian Evangelicals sharing a political party unless power were restricted into two narrow channels. Similarly, the majority of people voting Democrat have nothing in common except a fear of what happens when Republicans acquire power.
Divorced from its original purpose, each party exists only to defend itself against its opponent-- even when such a defense does harm to the nation as a whole. Each party solicits copious amounts of money from whatever sources prove the most lucrative, in order to fund its political campaigns. Most often, this money comes from lobbies that want those they sponsor to execute their own political agenda, making these politicians inherently beholden to their political and corporate benefactors.
Indeed many of these lobbies sponsor politicians from both parties, giving lie to the idea that the parties oppose one another. They share power. They share power, and they exclude any but themselves from participating in the process. This is toxic to any true democracy. The two parties have embodied a false dichotomy. This cannot continue. Neither party deserves your vote, and we are led to believe that voting for any candidate who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican is a wasted vote, "throwing a vote away".
Some of these sponsors actually count the votes. Many of the machines that count our votes are built by people predisposed to favor one candidate over others. One manufacturer of such machines actually promised the Republican Party in 2004 that they would deliver the State of Ohio to the Republicans. Such a voting system cannot be trusted to convey an accurate assessment of who voted for whom.
As a result of all of this, the majority of Americans elligible to vote are either Independent, or do not vote. Most have no faith that, even assuming their vote is accurately counted, their vote will have any real consequence. Most are aware that the two parties choose their candidates from a pool chosen by the parties and their sponsors. The individual voter has to weigh which corporate interests are most akin to their own, and vote accordingly. The candidate who opposes such a regime do not get enough campaign funds to win an election. There is a direct correlation between campaign funds and campaign victory. While the federal government does provide matching funds, the bulk of campaign funds comes from corporate and private interests.
In short, the two parties have a lock on all politics in the USA. They have shown, time and time again, that they are more interested in consolidating that power than they are in effecting the will of the people. They are inexorably corrupt, and need to be removed from power, and removed from the political landscape. I am not suggesting that they be abolished. I am suggesting that they be charged with corruption, and upon being found guilty, being dissolved. Were the Republican Party to be dissolved, it would be replaced by six or more parties, each representing the will of its adherents far more cleanly than the Republican Party does. Were the Democratic Party to be dissolved, it would be replaced by a few new parties, and many more Independents.
Each of the two parties is a coalition of allied groups. It would be better if each group represented its own interests cleanly and directly, without having to plead to a powerful organization for some representation in back-room deals.
I call this new party "The Farewell Party" partly out of reference to George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796, and partly because this party intends to dissolve if a) it ever has a successful presidential candidate elected, or b) or after the third non-Democrat non-Republican party gets its presidential candidate elected. Until then, we will exist as a reminder that the two nineteenth century parties that monopolize power between them have no further reason to exist in a free country in the twenty-first century.
At this point I will make a list of principles (in no particular order) that make sense for the Farewell Party in 2009:
Any electronic voting system requires a paper record for every vote. Any source code for any such machine must be made publicly available in an license deemed open-source by the Open Source Initiative(OSI).
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party should be held to account for their corruption, and if it can be shown that they have held on to power to the detriment of the country's well-being, be dissolved permanently, and should any new parties appear that are either old party in all but name, those should be dissolved as well. There will most likely be First Amendment issues involved in this move, which is why it should be shown that this dissolution is punishment for corruption charges. If a new party wishes to form from the ruins of these disgraced parties, it should justify its existence.
Corporations operating in the United States should write up corporate charters, each with a ten-year expiration date. A public hearing should be held to ratify each such charter, and a public hearing should be held to renew each such charter. Any complaints about the conduct of said corporation should be brought up during the renewal hearing, and if found legitimate, the corporation should be dissolved. Corporations chartered in the USA must obey the laws of the United States, even with regards to their foreign laborers, if such laws do not contradict the local laws. Corporations are afforded the same rights and responsibilities as individuals. This being the case, a felony, which currently disenfranchises an individual voter, should disenfranchise a corporation. The death penalty, which currently exists in 38 states, as well as the Federal Government and the US Military, should apply to any corporations who do business in those 38 states, or with the Federal Government or the US Military. The death penalty applied to corporations should apply to its board of directors and its CEO, and the corporation's charter should be permanently revoked, and any corporation which is the same as its executed predecessor in all but name should be banned from forming.
Copyright, which the Constitution assures us should only exist for a limited time, should extend for a small fraction of a human lifetime, say between 3 and 14 years depending on what is copyrighted. Software should be copyrighted for the least amount of time, and artistic works owned by the original artist should be copyrighted for the longest period of time.
Drugs prohibition should end immediately and forever. Any commodity made illegal because it competes with successful existing commodities should be legalized. Those that live by the free market should die by it if they cannot compete freely. Patents on medications should be abolished. Patents on software should be abolished. If this proves unconstitutional, then patents on software or medication should exist for 30 days after general release, and experimental medicines and software should not be protected by patent. The Constitution assures us that patents should only exist for a limited time. No patent should last longer than two decades, in any case.
A democracy cannot secure both liberty and secrecy. The Freedom of Information Act should be bolstered. No document should continue to be classified as secret (or any variation thereof) for more than two decades. A similar act to the FOIA should exist for corporations chartered in the
USA.
Cannabis products have many industrial, nutritional, and medicinal uses. Cannabis makes cheaper ethanol than corn does, cleaner plastics than petroleum does, and higher protein than flax seed does. Cannabis prohibition has proven a greater social evil than its proliferation, with the exception of its trade for psychotropic purposes, which hurts or kills thousands annually in North America. Cannabis grown for psychotropic purposes, henceforth in this document referred to as marijuana, cannot be sold, but only given away for free, and only among adults over the age of consent. It would be detrimental to the public good if marijuana were to become a mass-market commodity, and therefore, it will be free of price in perpetuity, as it is a weed that grows everywhere. This will probably require a Constitutional Amendment.
Government offices must use software whose source code is open to public inspection via ftp or other such method. All software must be open by OSI definition. We now know that even military software can be open-source, and still provide adequate security. In addition, electronic documents must be stored in an ISO-approved format, such as ASCII or Unicode, and be readable in a text editor.
All current and former military personnel are to receive high quality health and psychiatric care for free for the rest of their lives. Also, because no veteran should be homeless, all current and former military personnel should receive low-income housing for free, if necessary. Whether the rest of the population should also receive such care for free in perpetuity should be discussed.
Foreclosed homes should be made available to homeless people until such homes are resold. People temporarily housed in such a fashion should be evicted for damaging the property of these homes, if such damage exceeds their ability to repair.
Any campaign fraud should render a candidate ineligible to continue to be a candidate. Two distinct cases of fraud should render a candidate permanently ineligible to run for office in any capacity. Any act of election fraud should render its culprit disenfranchised permanently, and forever excluded from participating in any political capacity.
Every television or radio or cable channel license granted by the FCC requires that each channel should devote at least one hour of its broadcast day to the news. A communications company that owns more than one channel can exempt themselves by having one channel in each medium be a 24 hour news channel. Any pieces in any news program shown to have been produced by a corporation or political lobby to promote its political agenda must be labeled as such, or the license of the broadcaster will be revoked. Every film and television program must include its financial sponsors in its credits, visible to any who watch the program or film.
We have, in 2009, reached a point in our history, where two parties dominate almost all of federal politics. The Democratic Party was formed in the beginning of the nineteenth century to oppose the interests of Great Britain in the Americas, and to oppose the creation of a federal bank. The Republican party, comprised of Abolitionist Whigs, was formed in the years before the Civil War. Neither party currents stands for its original values nor original purpose. Currently, each party is a coalition of special interests, banded together not so much for a shared ideology as much as a hope that each party would uphold the interests of its adherents. Were each party to dissolve, its current adherents would probably not associate with each other politically. One cannot imagine Fiscal Conservatives and Post-Millenarian Evangelicals sharing a political party unless power were restricted into two narrow channels. Similarly, the majority of people voting Democrat have nothing in common except a fear of what happens when Republicans acquire power.
Divorced from its original purpose, each party exists only to defend itself against its opponent-- even when such a defense does harm to the nation as a whole. Each party solicits copious amounts of money from whatever sources prove the most lucrative, in order to fund its political campaigns. Most often, this money comes from lobbies that want those they sponsor to execute their own political agenda, making these politicians inherently beholden to their political and corporate benefactors.
Indeed many of these lobbies sponsor politicians from both parties, giving lie to the idea that the parties oppose one another. They share power. They share power, and they exclude any but themselves from participating in the process. This is toxic to any true democracy. The two parties have embodied a false dichotomy. This cannot continue. Neither party deserves your vote, and we are led to believe that voting for any candidate who is neither a Democrat nor a Republican is a wasted vote, "throwing a vote away".
Some of these sponsors actually count the votes. Many of the machines that count our votes are built by people predisposed to favor one candidate over others. One manufacturer of such machines actually promised the Republican Party in 2004 that they would deliver the State of Ohio to the Republicans. Such a voting system cannot be trusted to convey an accurate assessment of who voted for whom.
As a result of all of this, the majority of Americans elligible to vote are either Independent, or do not vote. Most have no faith that, even assuming their vote is accurately counted, their vote will have any real consequence. Most are aware that the two parties choose their candidates from a pool chosen by the parties and their sponsors. The individual voter has to weigh which corporate interests are most akin to their own, and vote accordingly. The candidate who opposes such a regime do not get enough campaign funds to win an election. There is a direct correlation between campaign funds and campaign victory. While the federal government does provide matching funds, the bulk of campaign funds comes from corporate and private interests.
In short, the two parties have a lock on all politics in the USA. They have shown, time and time again, that they are more interested in consolidating that power than they are in effecting the will of the people. They are inexorably corrupt, and need to be removed from power, and removed from the political landscape. I am not suggesting that they be abolished. I am suggesting that they be charged with corruption, and upon being found guilty, being dissolved. Were the Republican Party to be dissolved, it would be replaced by six or more parties, each representing the will of its adherents far more cleanly than the Republican Party does. Were the Democratic Party to be dissolved, it would be replaced by a few new parties, and many more Independents.
Each of the two parties is a coalition of allied groups. It would be better if each group represented its own interests cleanly and directly, without having to plead to a powerful organization for some representation in back-room deals.
I call this new party "The Farewell Party" partly out of reference to George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796, and partly because this party intends to dissolve if a) it ever has a successful presidential candidate elected, or b) or after the third non-Democrat non-Republican party gets its presidential candidate elected. Until then, we will exist as a reminder that the two nineteenth century parties that monopolize power between them have no further reason to exist in a free country in the twenty-first century.
At this point I will make a list of principles (in no particular order) that make sense for the Farewell Party in 2009:
Any electronic voting system requires a paper record for every vote. Any source code for any such machine must be made publicly available in an license deemed open-source by the Open Source Initiative(OSI).
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party should be held to account for their corruption, and if it can be shown that they have held on to power to the detriment of the country's well-being, be dissolved permanently, and should any new parties appear that are either old party in all but name, those should be dissolved as well. There will most likely be First Amendment issues involved in this move, which is why it should be shown that this dissolution is punishment for corruption charges. If a new party wishes to form from the ruins of these disgraced parties, it should justify its existence.
Corporations operating in the United States should write up corporate charters, each with a ten-year expiration date. A public hearing should be held to ratify each such charter, and a public hearing should be held to renew each such charter. Any complaints about the conduct of said corporation should be brought up during the renewal hearing, and if found legitimate, the corporation should be dissolved. Corporations chartered in the USA must obey the laws of the United States, even with regards to their foreign laborers, if such laws do not contradict the local laws. Corporations are afforded the same rights and responsibilities as individuals. This being the case, a felony, which currently disenfranchises an individual voter, should disenfranchise a corporation. The death penalty, which currently exists in 38 states, as well as the Federal Government and the US Military, should apply to any corporations who do business in those 38 states, or with the Federal Government or the US Military. The death penalty applied to corporations should apply to its board of directors and its CEO, and the corporation's charter should be permanently revoked, and any corporation which is the same as its executed predecessor in all but name should be banned from forming.
Copyright, which the Constitution assures us should only exist for a limited time, should extend for a small fraction of a human lifetime, say between 3 and 14 years depending on what is copyrighted. Software should be copyrighted for the least amount of time, and artistic works owned by the original artist should be copyrighted for the longest period of time.
Drugs prohibition should end immediately and forever. Any commodity made illegal because it competes with successful existing commodities should be legalized. Those that live by the free market should die by it if they cannot compete freely. Patents on medications should be abolished. Patents on software should be abolished. If this proves unconstitutional, then patents on software or medication should exist for 30 days after general release, and experimental medicines and software should not be protected by patent. The Constitution assures us that patents should only exist for a limited time. No patent should last longer than two decades, in any case.
A democracy cannot secure both liberty and secrecy. The Freedom of Information Act should be bolstered. No document should continue to be classified as secret (or any variation thereof) for more than two decades. A similar act to the FOIA should exist for corporations chartered in the
USA.
Cannabis products have many industrial, nutritional, and medicinal uses. Cannabis makes cheaper ethanol than corn does, cleaner plastics than petroleum does, and higher protein than flax seed does. Cannabis prohibition has proven a greater social evil than its proliferation, with the exception of its trade for psychotropic purposes, which hurts or kills thousands annually in North America. Cannabis grown for psychotropic purposes, henceforth in this document referred to as marijuana, cannot be sold, but only given away for free, and only among adults over the age of consent. It would be detrimental to the public good if marijuana were to become a mass-market commodity, and therefore, it will be free of price in perpetuity, as it is a weed that grows everywhere. This will probably require a Constitutional Amendment.
Government offices must use software whose source code is open to public inspection via ftp or other such method. All software must be open by OSI definition. We now know that even military software can be open-source, and still provide adequate security. In addition, electronic documents must be stored in an ISO-approved format, such as ASCII or Unicode, and be readable in a text editor.
All current and former military personnel are to receive high quality health and psychiatric care for free for the rest of their lives. Also, because no veteran should be homeless, all current and former military personnel should receive low-income housing for free, if necessary. Whether the rest of the population should also receive such care for free in perpetuity should be discussed.
Foreclosed homes should be made available to homeless people until such homes are resold. People temporarily housed in such a fashion should be evicted for damaging the property of these homes, if such damage exceeds their ability to repair.
Any campaign fraud should render a candidate ineligible to continue to be a candidate. Two distinct cases of fraud should render a candidate permanently ineligible to run for office in any capacity. Any act of election fraud should render its culprit disenfranchised permanently, and forever excluded from participating in any political capacity.
Every television or radio or cable channel license granted by the FCC requires that each channel should devote at least one hour of its broadcast day to the news. A communications company that owns more than one channel can exempt themselves by having one channel in each medium be a 24 hour news channel. Any pieces in any news program shown to have been produced by a corporation or political lobby to promote its political agenda must be labeled as such, or the license of the broadcaster will be revoked. Every film and television program must include its financial sponsors in its credits, visible to any who watch the program or film.
Brief Introduction
I think that there has to be a bridge party between the Democrats and the GOP. I meet a lot of disgruntled Democrats and a lot of disgruntled Republicans, both of whom feel that their party squeezed them out. The party of William F. Buckley has become the party of James O'Keefe, and the party of FDR has become the party of Larry Summers. Both sides have weeded out the reasonable people and are left with corporate stooges, inflexible ideologues, and idiots. Those who torture evade punishment. Those who speculate and ruin the economy are aided, our military and their families shoulder too much of the burden, but nobody wants to curtail our adventurism. Our jails are overflowing, but white-collar criminals retire with the wealth of Croesus. Our health care and education costs are spiraling out of control, and yet we hoard grain while people starve. Our liberties are being whittled away by a corrupt secrecy industry, where inept redundancy rules the day and yet fiscal hawks only care about discretionary spending. Those who care about actual liberty from both parties have a common bond. We should work together.
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