*Kakistocracy is government by the very worst,
least principled, and most incompetent people. You will
be forgiven for thinking that the word, kakistocracy,
perhaps derives from the word, "caca", itself derived
from the Latin, "cacare". In fact, kakistocracy derives
from the Greek, kakos, meaning "bad".)
Let me make myself clear from the outset: I am not
running for President of the United States, I just am
*not doing* it, though I am constitutionally fully
qualified, and, truth to tell, would be much better for
the country in many ways, on many levels, than the
current, thug occupant of the White House (notice that I
do not refer to him as "President"). But, no, I really
and truly do not aspire to be President of this
godforsaken Kakistan masquerading as the USA.
Now that that crucial non-announcement is out of the
way, permit me to set forth a couple of the many reasons
for my subdued, cyberspace non-campaign for the Oval
Office.
To begin with, I find that I am simply unable to be like
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain, and go
running after obscenely big bucks from the Fortune 500,
and to go suck up to NeoCon-Zionist PACs like AIPAC
(American Israel Public Affairs Committee), and to
participate in those silly, so-called Presidential
"debates", where a great many, extremely important
policy issues are rarely or never mentioned, and where
the level of debate is usually so jingoistic, shallow
and superficial, that the level of the discussion
usually doesn't even begin to address fundamental,
substantive issues of cause and effect on a whole broad
range of pressing policies.
Moreover, it is obvious to anyone who cares to see that
the entire electoral political system in this country,
as presently constituted/instituted/arranged/rigged by
the Democratic and Republican parties, is so massively,
criminally corrupt that whoever attains the White House
is more akin to a Mafia Don, than to an enlightened,
well-intentioned leader of a fair, free and open
Republic. In the present system, the President is
basically the boss of a national criminal syndicate that
aspires to totalitarian, global control. The Attorney
General (someone like Alberto Gonzalez, for instance) is
so mobbed up that he's akin to a Mafia consigliere. The
IRS and the federal courts and prison system are like
the mob's muscle. The FBI and Homeland Security are like
hit men and street corner punks and toughs, carrying out
the violent wishes of whatever Ivy League thug or goon
currently occupies the Oval Office. The Federal
government itself is a sort of vast, global, money
laundering operation, spewing out paper money, fiat
dollars, aka Federal Reserve notes, by the hundreds of
billions and trillions, resembling nothing so much as a
Federal Mafia or National Criminal Syndicate,
headquartered in the District of Columbia, with a
self-issued, self-validated "legal" license to maraud,
ravage and plunder whoever, whatever, whenever and
wherever it pleases. These thoughts are not unique to
me; many millions of people in this country and right
around the world have come to similar realizations.
So who wants to be a Federal Mafia Don? Certainly not
me. I am reminded of the work of
Laura
Knight-Jadczyk at
Sott.net
who has tirelessly pointed out the great harm that
psychopaths and sociopaths have done throughout history,
including in the present day, and how they insinuate
themselves into positions of power and influence, by
hook and by crook, using guile, deceitfulness, mendacity
and outright wholesale theft and murder, to clamber to
the top of the heap in government, the military, high
finance, industry, marketing, journalism, academia and
religion. And there they wreak their terrible will and
hatch and carry out their violent plots and schemes for
exploitation, destruction and global control and
plunder.
You know who I'm talking about. The names and activities
of these people are regularly splashed across the pages
of daily newspapers and television broadcasts, and drip
bloodily off the pages of our history books. What they
do and who they are are clearly apparent, to one and
all. They are a minority of the population and yet they
lord it over the rest of humanity - who acquiesce in
their power plays and exploitive policies, or even
outright support them in their harebrained rantings and
ravings and cockamamie schemes of national domination
and world conquest. We keep tossing up these maniacs,
century after century, millennium after millennium.
Alexander, the Caesars of Imperial Rome, Attila, Genghis
Khan, The Roman Catholic Popes and Inquisitors of the
Middle Ages, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin,
Pol Pot, George Bush, Dick Cheney - the karmic wheel of
history keeps turning and churning and we, the human
species, keep spewing these monsters out of our loins.
And they raise armies and set off to conquer and spoil,
filling their torture dungeons and prisons with hapless
victims of their iron rule, leaving behind a mountain of
corpses on the killing fields that trail behind in their
ignominious wake. And, alarmingly, these monsters never
lack for legions of fawning lickspittle toadies,
sycophants, desperate "wannabes", and obsequious brown
nosers, eager to go along, grateful to get along, who
conspire and cooperate with them to carry out their
hideously dark plots and nefarious schemes. You can see
that in the United States right now - people like Nancy
Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, John McCain,
Barack Obama, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez, General
Petraeus, Ben Bernanke and Michael Chertoff are just
that sort of individual, and there are literal swarms of
other lesser knowns who aid and abet these dark
underlings in their myriad, ongoing, unconstitutional,
massively criminal endeavors.
Exhibit "A"
Massively criminal? What's he talking about? I can hear
you thinking the question aloud. Permit me to illustrate
my point with an exquisitely simple civics exercise:
take a dollar bill out of your wallet and read all the
wording on it very carefully. You will search in vain
for the words silver or gold. Now take out your trusty
U.S. Constitution and read Article 1, Section 10,
Paragraph 1:
"No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or
confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal;
coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold
and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any
bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing
the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of
nobility."
Got that? "No state shall ... make anything but gold and
silver coin a tender in payment of debts..." This
article of the U.S. Constitution has never been
rescinded or abolished, so it is still in force. Yet
though the modern Federal Reserve Notes plainly state
that they are legal tender for payment of all debts,
public and private, you will search in vain for any
wording pertaining to gold or silver, because the
Federal Reserve Note was removed from the
constitutionally mandated gold and silver standard
decades ago. Ergo, the Federal Reserve Notes are
unconstitutional money, which is to say that they are
COUNTERFEIT currency, because they are not silver or
gold, or backed by silver or gold, as legally required
by the U.S. Constitution.
Which is another way of saying that in a profound sense
our entire economy is counterfeit, based as it is on
mounds of counterfeit, fiat paper dollars, endlessly
printed up by the billions and trillions. In fact, that
ominous creaking sound that you hear out the window,
that bone chilling popping and crackling sound you hear
gaining volume in the distance is the impending collapse
of this entire fake, sham, counterfeit economy based on
fake, counterfeit, fiat Federal Reserve bank currency.
Think I'm wrong?
Just wait. Wait for the mortgage crisis to reach full
gale force. Wait for the credit (really massive debt)
crisis to swamp other sectors of the economy. Wait for
the trillions of dollars worth of incredibly intricate,
fake, counterfeit, bogus financial instruments and paper
investments to collapse of their own insane weight and
utter and total, intrinsic worthlessness. Wait for the
hurricane of runaway inflation and debasement of the
U.S. Federal Reserve Notes to hit the domestic economy,
as $4.00 per gallon gasoline becomes a wistful,
nostalgic memory. Wait for the trillions of dollars of
phony-baloney Federal debt to drag the economy down and
strangle it to death. Just you wait. That's what happens
when a country relies on phony, paper, counterfeit
currency, like the U.S. Federal Reserve Notes - which
are backed by nothing more nor less than high speed
printing presses cranked up into hyper-drive, spitting
out dollars by the hundreds of billions, and trillions,
and inflating the currency beyond all reason. That's
what really forms the bedrock of our national economy at
present: high speed printing presses churning out paper
money by the ton. That's it in a nutshell. All the rest
is commentary.
That's the reality of where we are and it's all about to
come crashing down around our ears. That's my exhibit
"A".
That one, salient fact by itself conclusively
demonstrates that this country is not now under
Constitutional rule and has not been for decades. We're
in the twilight zone, where down is up, black is white,
and false is real. Almost no one even mentions this
glaring reality, or its profound implications.
Gatekeepers of both Left and Right have been totally
silent on this issue for decades, as befits their bought
and sold political status. The mainstream news media,
and a good portion of the alternative news media, as
well, remain absolutely silent on this issue. And so the
massive criminality rolls onward toward the inevitable
catastrophic, crash ending.
I wrote my Congressman a nice letter, asking him to
please explain what a U.S. dollar is, from a legal
standpoint. HE NEVER REPLIED. He cannot, because he
cannot tell the truth. No one in the government can,
because the modern U.S. dollar (Federal Reserve Note) is
an illegal, unconstitutional, counterfeit sham, and has
been for decades. And they cannot admit that, because it
would mean game over, pandemonium, revolutionary chaos.
So, for these reasons, and many others, a few of which I
will enumerate below, I find that I cannot offer myself
as a candidate for President of the United States of
America at the present time. Notice that I explicitly
reserve the right to also *not run for President* again
in the future. Judging by the fact that so very few
sane, rational people make a serious bid for the
Presidency, I can only surmise that virtually everyone
else in the country who thinks about any of these solemn
issues in any depth is in essential accord with me and
arrives at much the same conclusion. To wit: if the
United States federal government is a massive con, a
counterfeit sham, a huge, global, murderously violent,
criminal enterprise operating under questionable color
of flagrantly unconstitutional, so-called "law", then
what person in their right mind would aspire to be Top
Dog and Chief Executive of that insanity and mayhem? The
answer is: most normal, sane persons assuredly wouldn't.
And that is why the psychopaths and their hangers-on
have the political field wide open for themselves.
Nevertheless...
Still, it is fun to play the game of "What if?" and muse
about the possibilities, if the situation weren't so
diabolically, chaotically, murderously, criminally
corrupt. Supposing the political playing fields were not
criminally rigged, supposing that elections were not
fixed, and that a person with instincts of genuine
service to the nation and the planet were able to get
near the levers of power, as in: to be elected to the
Presidency of the United States of America; and
supposing further that such a person would not be
physically exterminated as John Kennedy was, as Dr. King
was, as Robert Kennedy was, as Malcolm X was, as so many
others have been .. in that unlikely scenario, what
might occur? Because, you see, we all know that there
are a lot of rules, both spoken and unspoken, and if a
President, especially a President, gets too far out of
bounds of the ruthlessly violent status quo, that he
will be blown away. The CIA or the FBI or the Mafia or
any other of the violent players in the political arena
will send an assassin or team of hit men and will take
care of the "problem". They'll make a scare crow out of
him, like they did to John F. Kennedy. They'll blow his
brains out in prime time. And then the "cleaners" will
enter the scene to "sanitize" the obvious, murderous
power play - the whole bloody hit will be "laundered" by
mainstream journalists, law enforcement authorities,
other scheming, lying, corrupt politicians, and academic
historians at the nation's major universities. And that
will be that.
So that is yet one more reason that: I am *not* running
for President, and if *not* elected, will *not* serve.
But why should I let such a minor detail stop me from
telling you some of the sorts of policies that I would
pursue if I were to mysteriously awaken one morning
sitting behind that big, Presidential desk in the Oval
Office? Why let such a trifling triviality prevent me
from presenting for your consideration some of the
eminently qualified and really good, decent, talented
and intelligent people that I would most assuredly call
to government service, as I set about righting the ship
of state, after so many years of malicious, nay, darkly
malevolent misgovernment?
My First Official Act
As President, I would order the Secretary of the
Treasury to immediately make preparations to resume
issuing Constitutional dollars backed by silver and
gold, and reinstate gold and silver coin as lawful
currency. For Secretary I would most certainly call on
someone like
Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary
of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and
founder of
solari.com She has the requisite professional
formation in the world of high finance, and has the best
interests of the working people of the United States at
heart. I agree with her philosophy of building a strong
national economy based on strengthening the economic
well-being and viability of local communities. She has
demonstrated that she possesses the grit and
determination required to coordinate policy at a high
level. Her vision of what constitutes a sound,
functional economic order is the direction this country
needs to turn. If the nation's communities are not
flourishing, then how can the nation possibly prosper?
Catherine Austin Fitts also has a thorough understanding
of the depth of the criminal corruption that exists at
the heart of the present political and economic system.
She understands the ruthless nature of the Federal Mafia
that currently holds the reins of power in Washington,
DC. She knows the players and their violent
propensities. She is no shrinking violet. I like her
moxie. She would be in my cabinet.
I might appoint Congressman Ron Paul, of Texas, to work
closely with Catherine Austin Fitts to oversee the
orderly, and expeditious dismantling of the Federal
Reserve systems, the issuing of a sound, Constitutional
currency, and to work under Secretary Fitts' supervision
to facilitate the creation of an ethical, constitutional
banking system that meets the life needs of the working
people and productive classes of this country.
Congressman Paul has demonstrated time and again that he
has a profound grasp of how the Federal Reserve system,
and the big banks, have jointly conspired to take down
the economy from the inside, for the extreme enrichment
of the ultra-wealthy few, to the tremendous detriment,
and relative impoverishment of the many. He understands
better than most what is broken, and he knows some of
the steps that need to be taken to address the problem.
Concomitantly, I would also ask Congressman Paul to put
together an expert team to dismantle the IRS (Internal
Revenue Service), and to set up an equitable tax or
revenue department in its place that complies with the
letter of the Constitution. The IRS has become a huge,
rogue bureaucracy that has overstepped its
constitutional, tax gathering bounds and has become an
oppressive agent in conflict with the people of the
United States. So my administration would abolish the
IRS effective immediately. Several innovative policy
changes that I set out in the sections farther below
would more than make up for the loss of revenue
occasioned by removing the IRS' jack boot from the
people's collective neck. (For example, trillions of
dollars would be saved by putting an immediate halt to
self-destructive, imperial warfare. An enormous chunk of
the Federal budget is devoted to massive military
spending in support of ruinous imperial projects - think
wars in Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.)
Notice that while the first two appointments are
Republican, they are not from the NeoCon wing of the
party, and that is crucial.
The Problem of Corporate Government
There has been an unfortunate drift in public policy,
over the last century and a half or so, towards
government that is increasingly "of the corporations, by
the corporations and for the corporations". So much so,
that at present the system of governance in the United
States is really a corporate government. We see this on
every hand, in the enormous and still growing
multi-trillion dollar military-industrial complex, in
the way that huge agricultural concerns such as
Monsanto, Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland drive food
and agricultural policy, in the way that the petroleum
industry influences foreign policy and plunders the
national economy through extortionate pricing, and in
the way that the Federal Reserve Banks have hijacked the
national currency, and thereby exercise effective
control over the national economy. These few examples
could be multiplied and extended in great detail, but
they suffice to illustrate the point.
In a Sauder administration, the policy emphasis would be
shifted away from catering to the interests of
mega-corporations and their perceived need to earn a
huge financial profit at any social or environmental
cost, and would be redirected toward meeting the life
needs of flesh and blood human beings. This doesn't
happen in our political system at present, because of
the enormous power that large corporations have over
policy making. The headlines are saying that Barack
Obama will likely spend $500 million dollars on his
presidential campaign. In the real world, who has that
sort of money, outside of George Soros, Bill Gates and
Warren Buffett? Answer: practically speaking the only
place you can get that kind of money is from large
corporations, because outside of a relatively small
number of individual multi-billionaires, it is only the
big corporations who control huge chunks of money like
that. So if they give Senator Obama, or John McCain,
half a billion dollars, will they not have an inordinate
influence on policy-making and policy implementation if
he becomes President? Of course they will! In the real
world, in the political world as it actually is, that is
how the system currently works. Does that dynamic
constitute bribery? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking
it does represent large amounts of cash in exchange for
personal political favors. It is another way of saying
that the Federal government is up for bid, that it can
be, and is, bought and sold, that mega-corporations buy
the policies and politicians that they desire. It is
political prostitution. You can think of the Federal
government as one huge, multi-trillion dollar brothel,
where for $500 million you can dally in luxurious
leisure with the occupant of the Oval Office for four
long years. Senators, Congressmen and Congresswomen are
also for hire, for two year, or six year dalliances,
according to your pleasure. And thus we have Nancy
Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and so on.
I would instruct my Attorney General to aggressively
clip the wings of the Fortune 500, using every
anti-trust provision, and every other provision of the
Federal Code available, to ensure ethical and fair
business practices, including environmental regulations,
fair lending laws, truth in advertising laws, and more.
I am inclined to give someone like Ralph Nader first
crack at the job and instruct him to clean house on Wall
Street. There are laws on the books now that could curb
many of the excesses we see in the business world. The
problem is that unconstitutional Corporate Government
(Corp-gov) is in cahoots with the corrupt corporate
world and both sides benefit from their mutual
criminality, and it is, indeed, mutual criminality on a
mind-numbing, massive scale.
One of the biggest economic engines driving the
corporate and banking industries at this juncture is
massive profits from narcotrafficking and black market
weapons smuggling. The reality of the situation is that
in excess of
$1 trillion dollars per annum from narcotics and
arms trafficking are being laundered through the
operations of the big banks and corporations, many of
them in this country. Massive profits from the illicit
drug traffic are a major source of capital in the
present economic order. Narcotrafficking is enormously
huge business and both the corporate sector and the
government sector have their hands in the cookie jar,
working closely with criminal syndicates of all
nationalities and ethnicities - Colombian cocaine
cartels, Mexican narcosyndicates, the Japanese Yakuza,
the Sicilian Mafia, the Russian-Ukranian-Israeli mob,
etc. And the international smuggling of black market
weaponry is closely tied in with narcotics trafficking.
The tentacles from this nefarious mess reach into
government and intelligence agencies, corporate
boardrooms and glass-and-steel banking towers all over
the country. I would give my Attorney General a broad
mandate to clean house and aggressively prosecute black
market weapons and narcotics trafficking, because the
criminal syndicates who mastermind these operations are
so destructive of constitutional government, the
national economy and civil order.
I want to add parenthetically here, that, paradoxically,
at one and the same time, I would move to decriminalize
personal use by private individuals of substances such
as marijuana, cocaine, heroin and the like. Where
individuals have chemical or substance abuse issues my
administration would place an emphasis on treatment, as
opposed to incarceration. That is to say, the emphasis
would be primarily on addictive substance abuse as a
public health issue (see health policy section below for
more on addict rehabilitation), as opposed to a law
enforcement issue. To be sure, individuals committing
crimes as a consequence of substance abuse would still
face the consequence of their crimes, but the mere
possession in and of itself of, say, an ounce of
marijuana, or a hit of LSD, would not be automatic cause
to send someone to the state penitentiary for a lengthy
prison term. There are very large numbers of people
rotting in jail in this country right now for just that
sort of so-called "offense", and it's insane. Smoking
pot, as one example, is no more a danger to society than
drinking a martini or a shot of whiskey - in fact, hard
liquor is very damaging to human health. Countless
crimes are committed each year by people who are
intoxicated by alcohol, and thousands of people are
slaughtered on the highways every year by drunk drivers,
yet alcohol consumption is legal.
So I would want to greatly draw down the numbers of
people who have been incarcerated for essentially
victimless crimes such as marijuana possession or
entheogen use (more about entheogens below). More than
two million people are incarcerated at present in the
USA, a great many of them for nonviolent drug or
narcotics offenses. That is a senseless waste of human
potential. We need those people on the outside,
contributing their life energy to society. I hasten to
say that I recognize that prisons do have a place in the
social order; that there are some people who are
criminally incorrigible and who absolutely must be shut
away from the rest of society, for the greater good.
People who murder, who rob and steal, and so forth, are
deservedly physically separated from society. And the
criminal justice system will take care of them.
By legalizing substances such as marijuana and cocaine,
and treating addictive problems as a public health and
public education issue, as opposed to a criminal matter,
criminal activity associated with the drug trade will be
sharply diminished, and when the market adjusts to the
new juridical reality supply and demand will be met as
they are with other commodities on the open market.
Cocaine and marijuana were legal in this country for a
long time earlier in our history, and I don't see why
people who desire them should be subject to criminal
arrest. I suppose the state could put a luxury or
consumption tax on their commercial sale as it does with
liquor and tobacco products. Those who don't wish to
partake of marijuana or cocaine can restrict themselves
to cigarettes and booze (whiskey, beer, wine). If they
overdose from cigarettes (lung cancer, emphysema) or
alcohol (cirrhosis of the liver) they will simply have
to suffer the painful consequences.
You see, the sort of business model that currently
prevails on Wall Street is vulture capitalism. One of
the darkest secrets in high finance is that some of the
most prominent businesses and banks in the country have
made a killing laundering vast sums of money derived
from the illicit trade in narcotics. This type of
business model is predatory, it does not foster economic
development or strengthen the nation; on the contrary,
it has greatly weakened the country and created great
suffering for many people here, and all around the
world. By unleashing someone like Ralph Nader to clean
out the corruption on Wall Street, the rushing torrent
of narco-dollars would be stanched and profit in the
world of high finance would have to be generated by the
provision of genuine goods and services that answer to
real, human life needs. That is what business is
supposed to do. At present, unbridled greed and
criminality, theft and banditry, on a vast,
globe-spanning scale, have run amok in the business and
banking world.
A great, international crisis is presently descending on
the Earth as a direct consequence of this deeply flawed
business and economic model which has as its prime
directive the predatory accumulation of astronomical
amounts of capital in very few hands without regard to
wider human and environmental costs. And so we see that
about one-third of the human race are barely eking out
an inhumane subsistence on just two or three dollars a
day or less. A couple of billion people are suffering
miserably like that, on a planet that has so much
natural abundance.
A Sauder administration would act creatively and
proactively to begin to turn the economic tide away from
centuries of deprivation, slavery, indebtedness and
hopelessness, to better the living conditions for the
great masses of humankind, billions of whom are
suffering unimaginably, as we head deeper into the 21st
century.
How Would I Do That?
Epidemic, rampant warfare is one of the single greatest
factors standing in the way of the full flowering of the
human species' potential on this planet, in all of its
manifestations. War wastes material resources, fouls the
environment, slaughters millions of people, creates
enormous anxiety and suffering, contributes to
international chaos, and creates a species-wide
spiritual malaise that redounds to the detriment of the
entire planetary order. Accordingly, one of my very
first acts as Commander in Chief of the military would
be to unilaterally pull the plug on the insane,
counterproductive, imperial wars of conquest in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The USA unilaterally started those wars;
the Pentagon unilaterally invaded two sovereign nations
that had done nothing to the United States government or
the people of this country. So I would issue a direct
command to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense
Secretary to begin pulling out of both theatres. Just
begin drawing down the troops and leave. Period. End of
discussion. Would that leave Iraq and Afghanistan in
fragmented turmoil and at the mercy of warlords and
rival armed factions? Yes, it would. But, realistically,
that is the case now, with the Taliban resurgent in
Afghanistan and an anarchic equilibrium in Iraq, where
the Pentagon forces withdraw to their bases at sundown
and cannot even totally control the streets of Baghdad
after years of fighting. Besides, if there is chaos in
Iraq and Afghanistan the situation is chaotic precisely
because of the military invasion and continuing military
occupation by Pentagon forces. So I would withdraw the
troops. The invasions should never have occurred in the
first place. I would assuredly not attack Iran, and I
would not waste any time in bringing the madman of the
Caucasus, Mikheil Saakashvili, to heel. I might invite
him to the White House and and lay out the geopolitical
facts of life for him, right there in the Oval Office.
There is a place for a national military force, and that
place is at home, defending the national territory and
borders. As President I would move vigorously to shore
up constitutional, republican government against the
neofascist, police state excesses and inroads of recent
decades and eliminate the unconstitutional, imperial
governmental apparatus and militaristic excesses that
have so damaged the Republic and our constitutional
system of governance.
I might appoint someone like
Maj. General Antonio Taguba as my Secretary of
Defense. He has shown an understanding that torture is
illegal and unethical, and morally wrong. He addressed
the issue from within the military while still in
uniform. I want a man who has this fundamental
understanding to instill this in the entire chain of
command, from top to bottom, down to the front lines,
all the way from Annapolis, West Point and Colorado
Springs, right down to the level of the fox hole,
cockpit and enlisted personnel's quarters.
National self-defense is justified; aggressive, imperial
invasion of other sovereign nations is not. Nazi war
criminals were hanged at Nuremburg for waging aggressive
warfare; i.e., for the same class of crime as that
committed by the current Bush administration. I would
order the Attorney General to send the U.S. Marshals
Service to arrest the principle architects of, and
official apologists for, the invasions and military
occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the
accompanying torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other
secret prisons, and remand those miscreants (George
Bush, Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto
Gonzalez, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin
Powell, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, et al) under
heavily armed guard to the custody of the International
Tribunal in the Hague to be brought up for public trial
on war crimes charges and crimes against humanity.
Torture is inhumane and illegal under international law
and the United States Constitution. I would order the
Secretary of Defense to ferret out all of those who gave
the orders for, or carried out, the torture at
Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and
elsewhere, and hold court martial proceedings. Those who
were found guilty would be jailed in the military's
brigs and prisons, and in some cases turned over to
International Tribunals for further trial and
punishment. My administration would not shrink from
imprisoning flag officers, if they countenanced torture.
The ordering of torture, and the commission of it,
constitute a grave, criminal violation of the officer's
code of conduct. My administration would honor the
international treaties pertaining to the laws of war,
including the provisions guaranteeing the humane
treatment of prisoners of war. Any officer who cannot
abide by those solemn obligations has no business
putting on the uniform and should seek another line of
work.
As Commander in Chief my military policy would be
focused on effective national defense, not on
profligately expensive, never-ending imperial warfare. I
would begin returning troops from Korea, Japan, Germany
and elsewhere immediately. The Korean and Second World
wars ended in mid-20th Century. A sovereign Republic,
secure in its own borders, has no need to garrison a
standing army abroad. I would halt all military aid to
Israel. Why should the United States subsidize or
support in any way the ongoing Israeli pogrom and
aggression against the Palestinian people and nation? A
nuclear state such as Israel, with a modern military,
has no need for billions of dollars of military
assistance from the USA. The Koreans, Japanese, Germans
and Israelis will have to make their own security
arrangements.
Barack Obama has recently announced his intention to
pursue global nuclear disarmament if he is elected
President. I applaud those sentiments, if he is sincere.
I would attempt the same thing if I were President. In
fact, I would conspicuously, publicly expose the Israeli
nuclear arsenal as a first step before organizing any
global, nuclear disarmament regime. As long as there are
undeclared nukes floating around, any nuclear
disarmament accord is subject to spectacular failure. I
like Ronald Reagan's line about nuclear disarmament
accords: "Trust, but verify."
I would want to draw in
Gene Sharp, perhaps the greatest expert in the world
on the theory of the politics of nonviolence, and have
him work with other experts in developing creative,
nonviolent methods and institutions dedicated to
resolving political disagreements short of armed
conflict. War is an incredibly destructive human
institution and I am biased towards sharply reducing its
incidence to as close to zero as possible, while
simultaneously exploring ways to foster the development
of international regimes and structures that emphasize
mutually beneficial cooperation as a means for nations
to achieve their objectives. We are all on this planet
together. The military technology that has been
developed over the last century is so destructive, and
the consequences of its use are so dire, that the time
has come for human societies on this planet to establish
a new way of relating to one another. We categorically
must find ways of resolving our disagreements and
squabbles short of blowing one another to kingdom come.
I am inclined to have Gene Sharp establish a National
Institute for the Nonviolent Resolution of International
Conflict. In theory, that was the sort of thing that the
United Nations was established to carry out, but the
U.N. is so riven with corruption and infighting that it
presently has limited utility as a mechanism for
fostering world peace.
I have to emphasize that I am opposed to the Big Brother
approach to planetary peace, wherein tranquility reigns
because everyone is cowed into fearful submission to the
transnational, technocratic elite who control the Big
Brother surveillance computers and data banks, and have
their fingers perpetually poised to taser, shoot or
imprison anyone who gets out of line. The type of
planetary peace that I envision springs from a global
order that is not violently imposed by Big Brother
tyrants, but, on the contrary, stems from a mutual,
rational, conscious decision of the global community as
a whole to join together in a spirit of international
cooperation, so that the entire human race can advance
together in harmony, prosperity and joy to realize the
innate potential of all individuals and peoples on
Earth. The truth is that I am not alone in that view!
Untold millions of people on this planet share that same
vision. Regrettably, however, there is a tyrannical,
sociopathic element abroad in the world who have
injected themselves into positions of disproportionate
influence and power in many countries, and who are hell
bent on continuing and intensifying an endless cycle of
war, chaos and international mayhem.
I am mindful that George Washington himself, before
leaving office, strongly warned against entering into
entangling alliances with foreign powers. The United
States sends billions of dollars of foreign and military
aid to the tiny nation of Israel every year. With George
Washington's sage counsel in mind, I would summon the
Israeli ambassador and personally inform him that there
had been a change in policy, that all military and
foreign aid to Israel was being summarily halted, due to
continuing human rights violations by the Israeli state
against the Palestinian people, and due to massive,
illegal theft and destruction of Palestinian land,
property and resources by Israel, as well as for
repeated, illegal aggressions against the people and
territory of Lebanon. I would immediately open a direct,
diplomatic dialog with Hamas and Hezbollah, and seek to
normalize relations with the Iranian government. I would
also open diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba. The
embargo against the Cuban regime lacks common sense and
is counterproductive to our national interest.
I would send Jimmy Carter to the Middle East as my
personal delegate, as a special ministre chargé
d'affaires carrying a specific Presidential brief to
dictate the following: 1) withdrawal of all Israeli
military and police units from Palestinian land; 2)
repatriation of Jewish settlers from Palestinian land
back to Israeli territory; 3) return of every last bit
of stolen Palestinian land and property; 4) major
reparation payments by Israel to the Palestinians for
six decades of ethnic cleansing, and here we're
certainly talking about a great many billions of
dollars; 5) unconditional surrender of Israeli
political, military and police officials responsible for
the genocidal pogrom against the Palestinians and the
illegal invasions of Lebanon, and the delivery of those
individuals to the International Tribunal in the Hague
for public trail on charges of crimes against humanity
and war crimes; 6) and, finally, to carry out all of the
foregoing as a prelude to full integration of both
Palestinians and Jews into a new society, after the Jews
have made all required reparations and restitution for
the havoc they have caused, a new society in which
Palestinians and Jews both enjoy full civil liberties, a
new Palestine, yes, Palestine, free of the insidiously
racist, corrupting influence of Zionism. The simple
truth is that the hyper-violent, political experiment
known as Israel is a racist, terror exporting state and
it has run its hideous course. The United States has
both a unique right, and also an unfortunate historic
responsibility to act in this manner, given the massive
military, intelligence and foreign aid that the U.S. has
poured into Israel over the last sixty years. It is
likely that many Israeli war crimes and crimes against
humanity would have been lesser in severity, and some of
them might not even have occurred at all, without the
massive support of the USA for the Israeli state and its
appalling, criminal policies against the Palestinian and
Lebanese people. My administration would act decisively
to begin righting these wrongs.
The Black Budget Problem and the Missing
Trillions of Dollars
The work of Catherine Austin Fitts, and others, has
revealed that
trillions of dollars have been "misallocated" in
Pentagon accounts in recent years. There is rampant
criminality at the Pentagon. The scale of the theft is
so massive that it is absolutely unparalleled in the
history of this country, or of any other. I would
instruct the Attorney General to begin an immediate,
high level, criminal investigation to recover the
missing funds and criminally prosecute the thieves who
stole it.
It is well-known that the world of so-called Black
Operations operates off the books, out of effective
Congressional oversight, or even out of effective
oversight by the official military chain of command. I
would put a stop to this. This shadow military structure
cannot be permitted in a free Republic. Not only is it
destructive of the common purpose of the public
treasury, but it is unconstitutional and threatens the
legal foundation of the Republic itself.
Recently we have seen the barest inkling of this problem
in the mainstream news media, with disturbing
allegations in the alternative media of a separate
nuclear chain of command in the military,
allegedly under the directionof Vice-President
Cheney's office. As Commander in Chief I would have such
insubordinate officers court martialed. If officers want
to operate outside of the lawful chain of military
command, they have no business wearing the uniform and I
would weed them out, pronto. If I had conclusive proof
that behind my back my Vice-President had set up a
separate, secret, illegal, unconstitutional chain of
military command answerable to himself, and was
secretively flying nuclear weapons around the country
without my knowledge or consent, in violation of his
oath of office, as appears likely to have happened last
year in the infamous Minot AFB-Barksdale AFB nuclear
missile flap, I would instantly have him summarily
arrested and physically confined as a clear and present
danger to the Republic. If the Vice-President wants to
be Commander in Chief, there is a lawful,
constitutionally mandated process for attaining that
title, and if he cannot abide by the Constitution that
he swore an oath to uphold and defend, then he has no
business occupying the Vice-Presidency.
The Shadow Government, the 9/11 Attacks and
1960s Assassinations
The matter of the missing trillions of dollars at the
Pentagon naturally raises the question as to just how
far the Shadow Government's reach extends, and how grave
the damage is that it has done to constitutional
government in the United States of America. A huge body
of evidence suggests that there is a shadowy, sinister
group working behind the scenes in the USA and
internationally to set in place a global, totalitarian
system of rigid social, political and economic control.
They have been hard at work for decades. It is not easy
to subdue an entire planet and bring it under the
absolute control of a relatively small group of
self-selected controllers. Nevertheless, if you look at
history you can see a definite trajectory down through
the years where greater and greater wealth, and greater
and greater power, is slowly being aggregated and
concentrated in just a few hands, and where the great
masses of the population, by the hundreds of millions
and billions, are being systematically politically
corralled and economically exploited and controlled -
all in the name of preserving and defending their
security and freedom, of course.
Much evidence suggests that a shadowy nexus of fascist
political interests (it matters not one whit, whether
they call themselves Democrats or Republicans or
Socialists or Communists or something else), criminal
syndicates, Fortune 500 corporations and military
industrialists, powerful banking dynasties, mass media
and telecommunications conglomerates, nefarious
intelligence agencies and various powerful religious and
fraternal factions have jointly conspired to slowly, but
surely, destroy pluralistic, free and open social and
governmental systems and structures in order to
establish an iron authoritarian or totalitarian rule
over as much of the world as possible. Their project has
its fits and starts, it lurches forward, suffers
reverses, makes big gains, and then loses ground, but it
is relentless. These people never stop coming, they are
sociopathic and their urge to acquire and retain power
at any cost is draining the human race of its life force
and promise, and turning this world into an open air
prison planet. There is a pronounced unfeeling, inhumane
or even non-human quality to their agenda. The
assassinations of the 1960s, when John F. Kennedy,
Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm "X" were
gunned down, was part of their drive to planetary
control. They had to rip the guts out of the body
politic of the United States for their push for global
domination to go forward, and so they did that. They
sent out their assassins and gunned down prominent
public figures right in public, in prime time so to
speak, as scare crows to others looking on. They sent a
bloody telegram that would be universally understood.
And they have committed assassinations and caused mayhem
in many other countries around the world, in Central
America, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and so
forth.
The same group, or one or more factions of it, carried
out the so-called 9/11 attacks in the USA in 2001. Many
websites and books have sprung up that definitively put
the lie to the absurd propaganda spouted about 9/11 by
the Bush administration and the mainstream news media.
There can be no question that the United States
government is lying about the attacks that occurred on
11 September 2001. I am thinking of websites such as
Pilots for 911 Truth,
Architects & Engineers For 9/11 Truth,
Scholars
For 9/11 Truth & Justice,
Patriots Question 9/11,
9-11
Review and authors such as
David Ray Griffin,
Jim Marrs and
Laura Knight-Jadczyk who provide a wealth of data
and information that lay bare the total mendacity and
deceitfulness of the United States government.
The intent behind the 9/11 attacks was the same as
before - to eviscerate and weaken constitutional
government, and traumatize the mass mind or mass
consciousness of the public, the better to consolidate
and extend authoritarian social control over the USA,
and as much of the rest of the world as possible, via
insidiously misnamed measures such as Patriot Acts I and
II, the Military Commissions Act, and a host of other
draconian laws, regulations, Executive Orders, judicial
decisions and police actions, which, taken together,
have effectively neutered the United States Constitution
and rendered it null and void, for most practical
purposes, introducing to the United States a novel form
of government which at this point is best described as a
kind of red-white-and-blue police state or dictatorship,
with a thin, rapidly decaying, cosmetic veneer of
constitutional legality. Many commentators and figures
in the alternative Internet media have described this
slow motion coup d'etat. Alex Jones, of
infowars.com and prisonplanet.com has been in the
forefront, as have Laura Knight-Jadczyk of
Sott.net
and Uri Dowbenko of
conspiracyplanet.com as well as Michael Rivero of
whatreallyhappened.com and Jeff Rense of
rense.com
I would be remiss if I failed to mention the prolific
David Icke, as well, at
davidicke.com who has described in great detail the
international, global dimensions of the dictatorship
that is being clamped down on the whole planet.
On the fringes of the mainstream, Paul Craig Roberts,
Ronald Reagan's former Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury, has also been very outspoken about the
collapse of constitutional government in the USA and the
take over of political power by NeoCon brown shirts and
thugs. His essays have been appearing in recent years at
such sites as Justin Raimundo's
antiwar.com and Alex Cockburn's
counterpunch.org Paul Craig Roberts has had the
courage and intellectual honesty to admit that the 9/11
attacks appear likely to have been orchestrated from
within the power establishment of the United States. I
admire him for having the starch in his spine to break
with the mainstream media pack and tell the truth about
the ugly pall that has come over this country and this
planet.
Of course I would want this man, Paul Craig Roberts, in
my administration. I would want him by my side as I move
quickly to rescind Patriot Acts I and II, rescind the
Military Commissions Act, restore Habeas Corpus rights
and strip the telecommunications companies of their
immunity from criminal prosecution for violating the
people's Fourth Amendment rights to be secure against
unlawful intrusion into their private affairs and
personal communications. A civilized country absolutely
must guarantee its citizens the right to legally contest
their detention by the police and judicial system, and
to prevent unwarranted violation of the sphere of their
personal and private lives.
I would put a stop to the childish, mindless, ridiculous
emptying of pockets and taking off of shoes before
boarding an airplane, and throwing out of bottles of
after shave lotion and tubes of toothpaste and shampoo
as threats to national security. To be sure, there are
extremely dangerous terrorists in this country, and they
are the thugs responsible for the 9/11 atrocities and
the illegal wars and egregious violations of civil
liberties and human rights that they have unleashed on
this country and the world, using the 9/11 attacks and
other false-flag provocations as justification. These
terrorists have known names and addresses; they are
entrenched in the National Security (sic) apparatus of
the United States and Israel and various NeoCon-Zionist
think tanks and organizations. They are of both
Democratic and Republican party affiliations and hold
both Israeli and U.S. citizenship. In fact, a fair
number of them are of dual United States-Israeli
citizenship. They have many violent accomplices of other
nationalities. The Council on Foreign Relations, the
Bilderburger meetings, the Knights of Malta, the
Trilateral Commission, the Bohemian Grove fraternal
gatherings and other similar conclaves and organizations
around the world are attended by, and/or made up, of the
wealthy, influential individuals who jointly comprise
what many have labeled the so-called "Illuminati elite"
who are behind the drive to enslavement of the global
population into an international, Big Brother type of
totalitarian control system. You do understand the
ultimate purpose of the spy cameras that have popped up
all over the world like mushrooms in the last ten years,
do you not? And of the tightening control of travel,
both domestically and internationally? And of the global
debt squeeze which is driving untold millions of people
to rack and ruin? And of the pervasive surveillance of
the Internet and telephone networks? And extortionately
high rates of taxation? And of the steadily growing
intrusion of the state into more and more areas of daily
life that were formerly private? And of the imperial
warfare raging in the Middle East?
I therefore propose to establish a National Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and give these thugs and goons
an opportunity to make a full and complete confession of
all of their murderous crimes and evil plots against
constitutional order and public safety. For those who
renounce and repent of their misdeeds, confess fully,
and show contrition, we will offer conditional pardons
and conditional amnesty on strict terms dictated and
monitored by the state; to them we will show conditional
mercy. For those who do not avail themselves of our
gracious offer of conditional mercy in exchange for a
full and contrite confession, we will offer swift
criminal indictment and a fair trial, and if found
guilty, the state will not shrink from imposing lengthy
prison terms and even capital punishment, where the
offense is sufficiently notorious and heinous.
I want to have people like Paul Craig Roberts, David Ray
Griffin, Wayne Madsen, Cynthia McKinney, Francis A.
Boyle, Peter Dale Scott and Jim Marrs on the National
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and others whom
they might recommend. I want them to be rigorous,
thorough and efficacious in their investigation and
deliberation. The Commission will have full subpoena
power and the authority to issue criminal warrants for
felony arrest of any of its targets who do not cooperate
fully and completely with its inquiries. It will have a
broad mandate to investigate the 1960s assassinations,
the Iran-Contra affair, the attack on the USS Liberty by
the Israeli military in 1967, the 9/11 attacks, the
anthrax attacks of late 2001, CIA and DoD torture, the
missing trillions of dollars at the Pentagon, HUD and
other federal agencies, and the Iraq and Afghanistan
invasions and military occupations. The Commission will
have the full law enforcement power of the United States
government at its disposal to seek out the guilty
wherever they might be and bring them to justice.
Native American Policy
For centuries the U.S. Government has willfully
exploited Native Americans and systematically violated
the treaties it made with them. I would caucus
personally with the Hopi Elders and traditional Native
American leaders of the Cherokee, Navaho, Sioux, and
other nations and seek their advice as to how to mend
relations between the Native peoples of this continent
and the Federal government and how best to improve
economic prospects and living conditions on the many
Native American reservations and lands sprinkled across
the continent. Many of the so-called tribal councils are
criminally corrupt, and working in cahoots with the
criminally corrupt regime currently in power in
Washington, DC, to the great detriment of countless
thousands of people in Indian country all across the
continent. Countless billions of dollars have been
criminally confiscated and held back from Native
Americans; this money is legally due to them as payment
for timber, fish, oil, natural gas, real estate and
other resources. I would order the Secretary of the
Interior to aggressively search out these monies and
release them to the individuals and families to whom
they are due and payable.
I would want someone like Lila Bird as Secretary of the
Department of the Interior (DoI). She is Native
American, native to the West, where most DoI lands are
located, and has professional expertise in water policy
and the law. She has a unique skill set and regional
knowledge that will be invaluable in discharging the
tasks that I will call on her to carry to completion.
Many treaties between the United States and Native
American nations have been egregiously violated by the
government of the United States. I would order the
Attorney General, Secretary of State and Secretary of
the Interior to jointly meet, face to face, with legal
delegations from aggrieved nations to address these
issues and ensure that the government of the United
States complies with both the letter and spirit of the
treaty obligations it solemnly agreed to, when it signed
bilateral agreements with Native American nations, even
if the agreements are from centuries ago. Our word must
be our bond, and if we have broken our bond, then we
must right the wrong going forward. We are here together
on this continent and I propose that we live and work
together in a spirit of amity and cooperation. If we do
not comply with our own government's agreements, how can
we expect others to honor theirs?
Federal Election Commission
The present electoral system in the USA is beset by such
an extensive degree of illegality that not even a
multi-volume series of exposés would fully elucidate its
extent. Suffice it to say that the rot is very deep and
penetrates all the way from the Federal level and
reaches into every state in the union, and snakes its
illegal tentacles into thousands of cities, counties,
towns, burgs, townships and hamlets all over the
country.
In many states of the Union millions of ballots are
routinely thrown away and/or not counted at all.
At this point we simply do not have free and fair
elections in the United States of America. I would call
on Bev Harris, of
blackboxvoting.org to head up the Federal Election
Commission. She knows the deep extent of the corruption
in the electoral process in the USA, and she is a
tenacious fighter who won't back down. Bev Harris would
enjoy my full support to implement a constitutionally
sound and transparent electoral system, and to root out
all systemic irregularities that militate against free
and fair elections. My administration would give her the
financial and technical resources to carry out her
charge.
The massive corruption in the national election in the
year 2000 was on embarrassing display for the entire
world to view. Corruption and rigged results were also
rampant in recent elections in 2004 and 2006. How can an
honest individual be elected to any public office, minor
or major, when the ballots are not fairly and
transparently counted? What knowledgeable individual
would even attempt to run for office, knowing the system
is crooked and rigged to ensure the defeat of any and
all who are not supporters of, or members of, the
criminal syndicate that has the country in its crooked
grip?
Therefore my administration will insist, at the bare
minimum, on the exclusive use of paper ballots,
transparency in the tabulation of the vote tallies, and
secure storage of the counted ballots, should recounts
be necessary. Incredibly, these simple measures are
widely ignored and flouted in jurisdictions all across
the country. Digital voting machines can easily be
hacked and their results tampered with, compromised and
changed. I would seek legislation prohibiting digital
voting machines, or any other voting device or method
that yielded anything other than a 100% faithful
representation of the intent of the voter. I would also
call for legislation outlawing the involvement of news
gathering organizations in the counting process, and
mandating open, publicly monitored and transparent
counting of ballots and tabulation of vote totals, from
the precinct level on up. The system we have now is
steeped in secrecy, miscounting, outright vote theft,
and forthright, organized lying. The dishonesty has to
come to an end.
I would insist on legislation to make so-called third
party access to the ballot routine and easy, at all
levels, including local, state and federal, and to open
political debates at all levels, including local, state,
and federal, to all parties/candidates polling 1% and
above. The Democratic and Republican Parties have
strangled all the life out of our political system. We
need new parties, new ideas, and genuine debate of
important issues and policies. The way that public
political debates themselves are structured and
conducted also needs to change. Under current practice,
a handful of candidates who are favored by the power
brokers of the two major parties and the major,
mainstream news outlets, are given the majority of the
questions and the time to answer them, while other
candidates are ignored. I would propose a new, national
standard of allowing individual candidates in a debate
to each have precisely the same amount of time to answer
the same set of questions, and the candidates to be
allowed to speak in a randomized order, so as not to
favor any candidate at the expense of the others. This
simple proposal seeks merely to be fair and polite to
all participants in the process. Astonishingly, simple
fairness and politeness are not part of the electoral
process at present. My administration's philosophy would
be that it is the voters, and not the debate format, who
should determine the favored candidate(s). I would also
lobby in favor of free-wheeling, free form debates,
where candidates have the luxury of exploring their
policy proposals in more depth. The system now is
slanted too much towards producing 5-second, "gotcha!"
sound bites that possess considerable emotional
resonance and zing, but often lack substantive,
meaningful, policy content. Candidates are often reduced
to having to explain or present a complex policy to the
public in 20 seconds, because that fits the network
television news format. The national political discourse
is rendered more superficial and cheapened as a
consequence.
Sadly, in the current system, the Republican and
Democratic parties have effectively conspired to close
off the political process to candidates who are from
other parties. The result is that we essentially have a
two-party dictatorship that excludes views and policies
not approved by the national leadership of the
Democratic and Republican parties. As a consequence, the
nation and the world are suffering from the depressingly
regressive and poverty stricken political vision of the
Democratic and Republican parties.
Agricultural Policy
The old saw goes that, "You are what you eat." And most
of the food we eat is produced by commercial
agriculture. If the nation's population is to enjoy good
health, the food supply must be wholesome and
nutritious. What could be clearer?
For that reason, a Sauder administration would heavily
emphasize natural, organic farming methods. Decades of
industrial, factory farming have depleted the soil of
nutrients, reduced its tilth and vitality, fouled the
nation's soils and waterways with a witch's brew of
chemically toxic run-off from our farmland, and denuded
the countryside of topsoil.
A healthier agricultural model will emphasize natural
mulching, and green and animal fertilizers, to build up
organic matter in the soil. We also desperately need a
continent-wide, non-chemical remineralization of our
cropland, perhaps by widespread application to the
nation's farmlands of rock dust derived from finely
ground glacial till. Glacial till contains virtually
every known mineral and when finely ground and applied
to cropland greatly increases the land's productivity,
and also the health, and therefore the nutrition, of the
crops it produces. Many of the foods we eat are
deficient in essential minerals, including important
trace minerals that are vital to optimal human health,
because the soils on the nation's cropland are so
depleted. Remineralization of farmland is, thus, an
essential component of a thoroughgoing agricultural and
public health policy.
We also need to phase out the widespread, massive use of
antibiotics, and growth hormone in agriculture. These
practices are widely used in industrial or factory
farming, to produce rapid growth of large numbers of
animals, grown in close physical proximity, i.e., to
maximize production on an industrial scale, in as short
a time as possible, while minimizing the incidence of
disease. But the massive use of antibiotics has had a
boomerang effect, in that it has strengthened the very
bacteria it is designed to counteract, thereby leading
to the use of still more antibiotics, and the evolution
of yet more resistant bacteria in response, and so on.
This is a spiral that logically cannot have a pleasant
ending, from an epidemiological standpoint. The use of
growth hormone in the production cycle ineluctably leads
to its presence in the human food supply, and human
consumption. The ingestion of growth hormone in unknown,
ever accumulating quantities equally poses unacceptable
hazards to human health.
The widespread use of genetic engineering of organisms
also poses unacceptable risks to human health and the
long-term viability of the biosphere and the ecological
chain of which humans are an inextricable part. I would
work vigorously and assiduously to bring the agritech
firms to heel and to outlaw the genetic engineering of
crops and livestock, via recombinant DNA technologies,
popularly known as gene splicing.
I would salt the Department of Agriculture from top to
bottom with personnel with a bias towards general
farming, family farming, and organic agricultural
methods oriented towards building and maintaining
healthy soils and producing healthy, vigorous livestock
and crops. My agricultural policy would encourage
general and family farming, local agricultural
cooperatives, back-yard and community gardening, and the
widespread use, cultivation and propagation of heirloom
varieties of fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts and other
crops. Genetic diversity and hardiness is of fundamental
importance to food security and agricultural security in
general, and thus is, in essence, a vital national
security issue. When the base of agricultural production
loses its vitality and genetic sturdiness then the
nation's food supply and crop production are potentially
susceptible to catastrophic failure due to disease,
predation or meteorological extremes. The large
agribusiness corporations have done a grave disservice
to modern agricultural by their mass production of, and
commercial concentration on, comparatively few
productive varieties of crops. They have made billions
of dollars of profits for their officers, scientists and
share holders thereby, but they have put the rest of us
at grave risk.
I would immediately seek emergency legislation to ban
Monsanto's so-called "terminator seeds" outright, which
interfere with the age-old agricultural practice of
saving seed from one crop to produce another crop the
following year. Agricultural production must remain in
the hands of those who directly work the land, and not
be dispensed at the whim of agribusiness technocrats
driven only by proprietary based considerations of
monetary gain. I would also seek legislation to ban the
patenting (and hence the legal ownership) of the genetic
codes of biological life forms including all crops and
all animals, including human beings themselves. The
large agribusiness conglomerates are already well down
this slippery slope and I would put a stop to it,
pronto. I can see where this line of research is tending
and there will not be any armies of cloned, proprietary
slaves on my watch. Since the dawn of time, nature has
provided the means to bring forth new life, and it
suffices to replenish the biosphere in the time honored
manner.
I would call on the expertise of the
Rodale Institute, and
Frances Moore Lappé, and people and organizations
who share their agricultural philosophy. My
administration would make a concentrated move to produce
food locally and regionally, in so far as is possible,
for purchase and consumption in the local and regional
market, which would offer economies in transport and
storage, and also contribute to a fresher, and hence
more nutritious, product for the end consumer. The Amish
have notoriously productive farms and they rely on
animal and human power in their production cycle. By
focusing on general, family farming and intensive
cultivation using largely organic methods they often
equal and even outproduce other farms - without massive
capital outlays for huge machinery and other wasteful
spending. There are centuries of wisdom in their
approach to agricultural production. My administration
would incorporate the best of that type of approach to
farming and seek to replicate it more widely. The focus,
nay, the overweening preoccupation, of corporate
agribusiness has been to mine the land using an
industrial mode of production, and to artificially
manipulate or alter the genome of crops and animals to
extract maximum financial gain; whereas, the focus of
agricultural policy under my administration would be to
nurture and revitalize the land using organic farming
methods, and work with the creative life principle
inherent in nature, to provide a high quality of
nutrition to the nation, while simultaneously providing
just compensation and an equitable living to farmers and
their families, in exchange for the vital service they
render to the rest of society through their food
production.
I have to say something about the enormous importance of
the honey bee. Approximately 30% of the food in our
diets comes from plants that rely on honey bees for
pollination, and that produce the fruit, vegetables and
nuts that we eat. This matters a great deal, because the
honey bee numbers are in sudden, sharp decline.
Honeybee hives have been decimated by a troubling,
mass die-off known as colony collapse disorder.
Billions of honey bees are dead and the problem
seems to be worsening. Can you imagine a diet largely
devoid of squash, watermelons, cantaloupes, pears,
strawberries, almonds, cucumbers, apples, cranberries,
blueberries, cherries and much more? All of these foods
come from trees and plants that rely on honey bee
pollination. If honey bees continue to die off we will
be facing a full-blown agricultural crisis with grave
implications for the national food supply. It is no
exaggeration to say that the health of the honey bee
population is a national security issue of the first
order. And yet, I see no evidence that the so-called
"President" of the United States is even aware of the
honey bees' worsening plight, and of the implications
for the nation, if the honey bee decline causes food
production to plunge.
So my administration would set up a Pollinators Bureau,
within the Department of Agriculture, to ensure the care
and well-being of honey bees and other pollinators,
including other bees and insects, birds and bats.
Pollinators are essential for a productive agricultural
industry. We cannot do without them. We need to
understand and protect them. Organic agriculture, with
no synthetic chemical use, no genetically modified
organisms, and natural habitat protection and
restoration will go a long way toward ensuring the long
term viability of the pollinators that are so crucial to
healthy agriculture, and to the health of the biosphere
in its totality.
Food and Health Policy
The policy here would follow seamlessly from the
agricultural policy. Take a trip down the aisles of any
supermarket, grocery store, convenience store or any
other market or store where food items are sold and pick
up the cartons/bottles/containers/boxes/cans and read
the lists of ingredients. Our foods are laced with
chemicals and artificial additives. It is not unusual to
see fifty or more chemicals and additives listed on a
label. Our bodies are ambulatory chemistry experiments.
What do all these dozens and hundreds of chemicals do
when they go into solution in our blood and bodily
tissues?
Simple: they chemically react with each other and
produce a wide variety of unknown chemical compounds
that then circulate throughout our bodies doing
God-knows-what to us and our health! Is it any wonder
that we have so much cancer, so much mental illness? How
could it be otherwise?
My administration would focus on dechemicalization of
the national food supply, and emphasize the production
and consumption of nutritious, whole, organic, fresh
foods. I would actually use the bully pulpit of the Oval
Office to promote removing the chemicals from the food
supply, and eating natural, unprocessed or minimally
processed, whole foods. The impressive health benefits
of incorporating fresh vegetables and fruits, and whole
seeds and raw nuts into the diet are indisputable. My
administration would place strong emphasis on the value
of dramatically increasing the ingestion of these health
giving foods, while also widely publicizing the grave
damage that overconsumption of sugar and sugary foods
has done and is doing to the health of the people of the
United States.
Some of the most enlightening work that has been done on
the connection between proper nutrition and human health
has been carried out by
Stephen J. Schoenthaler. Simply by eliminating sugar
and refined carbohydrates from the menu in youth
correctional facilities, Dr. Schoenthaler was able to
reduce violent and antisocial behavior by almost 50%.
And Dr. Walsh discovered a strong link between poor
nutrition and mineral deficiencies, and criminal
behavior. Simply put, many criminals tend to have poor
nutrition and suffer from mineral imbalances. Improving
the quality of nutrition in the national diet would reap
huge dividends, not only in terms of public health, but
also in other policy areas such as education, law
enforcement and corrections.
That is why my administration would concentrate much
more heavily on innovative, fundamental, cost effective,
proactive measures than present government policy does.
As
Bill Walsh and Stephen J. Schoenthaler have shown,
poor nutrition is strongly correlated with criminal
activity and antisocial behavior, so improving the
general quality of nutrition for the society as a whole
will yield enormous benefits in the way of a greatly
lowered incidence of crime and antisocial behavior.
Proper nutrition, regular physical exercise, and
sufficient sleep, in and of themselves also greatly
reduce the incidence of disease and the need for
consequent medical intervention. Allopathic medicine has
made many advances, especially in emergency medical
procedures, but where degenerative disease is concerned
it has far fewer answers. Its drug based bias often
introduces a whole suite of harmful symptoms derivative
of introducing the drugs into the body of the patient.
Have you ever watched the drug commercials on
television? First a mellifluous voice over tells you of
the wonderful effect the drug will have on your health
and quality of life - followed by a lengthy list of
sobering qualifications and ominous warnings about
possible or likely side effects should you be so
credulous as to rush down to your doctor's office and
have him/her write you a prescription for the drug.
There is also huge, preventable mortality in the USA
every year - due to the negligence and incompetence of
M.D.s. Astonishingly, 250,000 people die needlessly
every year at the hands of medical doctors, so many that
doctors themselves are the third leading cause of
death in the United States of America.
Widespread implementation of the few, simple, health
policy guidelines above would, in and of themselves,
vastly reduce the level of disease in society, and yield
a huge net gain in overall well being and productivity
of the population at large. This would translate into a
more prosperous economic order, as many millions fewer
work days would be lost due to sickness over the course
of a year, and a larger percentage of the population
would enjoy good health. Moreover, there are
considerable economies that both the public treasury and
personal finances would realize. Some of the largest
expenditures that the Federal government has are moneys
devoted to Medicare and Medicaid. As the health of the
population improves, the cost to government of
subsidizing their medical care declines in direct
proportion, because the healthier people are the less
often they are sick, and when they do fall ill they tend
to recover more quickly and easily. The savings here
could be on the order of hundreds of billions of
dollars, quite possibly trillions of dollars over the
longer term. Improving the level of the public's health
also puts less strain on household budgets, as people
lose less days from gainful employment, and spend
correspondingly less money for medical treatment and
medications. The savings for many households could run
to thousands of dollars per year, freeing up that money
for other needs and expenditures, such as savings,
investments, home repairs, travel, leisure activities,
educational expenses and more. Increasing the general
level of health of the population would have important
economic side effects, with a strongly positive net
valence.
One of the innovative policy initiatives of my
administration would be to develop an extensive system
of hiking and biking trails all over the country, in
order to a) promote a culture of physical fitness and b)
appreciation of the natural beauty of the countryside.
And, yes, outdoor leisure and activity have everything
in the world to do with good health! The well known
Appalachian Trail on the East Coast is but one example
of the sort of trails that I would want to see develop
in a national network from coast to coast, border to
border, and within, and between cities. Some of these
would be for hiking, others for biking. They could be
paved in urban areas, or unpaved in wilderness areas.
There would also be employment opportunities in building
and maintaining the trail system, in providing security
for the trails, as well as in providing for the many
day-to-day needs of the bikers and hikers who used them.
An entire leisure industry could develop around the
trail system to provide clothing, foot wear, bikes, back
packs, saddle packs, food, water, non-food supplies,
rest stations, lodging, entertainment, etc. An inner
city path system could greatly alleviate urban traffic
congestion by making it easy for people to navigate
cities by bicycle. Amsterdam, with its ubiquitous
bicycle lanes, is a prominent European example of what I
envision, and what has been done in Amsterdam is a model
that could be replicated in many cities in the USA,
making it much easier to move around by bicycle. A lot
of European cities are a quantum leap ahead in their
urban planning of what we see in most cities in the USA.
We can learn from their experience.
There are many worthy candidates for Surgeon general,
but someone like
Dr.
Mercola would surely be near the top of the list.
He's an osteopath, not an M.D., and has a much more
holistic view of health than many (most?) M.D.s. The
pharmaceutical companies have an altogether greater
impact on health care policy, and government policy in
general, than is good for either the people's physical
or financial health. The cost of health care is
spiraling out of reach of more and more people. Tens of
millions of people cannot even afford to see a doctor
due to the exorbitant cost of medical care today. A
great deal of this cost increase is driven by
profit-taking by the pharmaceutical companies as they
charge ever more and more for their pills, potions,
tonics and injections-- many of which, moreover, are of
decidedly questionable effectiveness. To wit: a senior
executive for the pharmaceutical giant, Glaxo, admitted
in 2003 that most prescription medicinesdo
not workfor most people who take them.
Dr. Mercola's emphasis on proper nutrition, exercise and
healthful sleep, as the foundation of a healthful life
richly merits a national policy platform. As Surgeon
General he will have wide latitude and access to the
national media spotlight to advance a more healthful
agenda for the nation's population. For too long, the
Surgeon General has labored in obscurity. In my
administration, that would change. Sound health policy
is fundamental to the wellbeing of the entire nation. If
the people are not well, how can the country flourish
and prosper?
I expect that Dr. Mercola would coordinate health policy
to take advantage of other healing modes, such as
naturopathy, chiropractic, meditation, massage and
herbalism. Allopathic medicine has its place, but by
relying so exclusively on the drug and surgery biased
orientation of allopathy, we have arrived at a place
where we have a very high level of disease in the
society, and where tens of millions of people cannot
even avail themselves of the treatments that allopaths
provide, assuming that the allopathic treatments even
address the fundamental, underlying causes of the
medical conditions in the first place. Recent
international surveys have shown that health care is far
more expensive in the USA than elsewhere, yet we lag
behind many other developed nations in a critical health
index:
life expectancy. This indicates fundamental,
underlying problems with our health care system.
Clearly, we need a health policy that will result in a
much lower incidence of disease, and healing modes that
address root causes of disease when it does arise, as
opposed to the drug and surgery oriented approach of the
present medical establishment. There are obviously times
when surgery and efficacious drugs are called for, but
we need a health policy that vastly lowers the incidence
of disease, by hugely improving the level and quality of
health enjoyed by the people at large, such that
recourse to drugs and surgery is much less frequent,
because less necessary.
Heavy metal contamination of the environment is a huge
public health policy issue. I would direct the Surgeon
General and the Director of the Environmental Protection
Agency to coordinate a task force with other agencies
and departments to facilitate the removal or reduction
of toxic chemicals, heavy metals and other harmful
substances in the environment, in foods, in water and
beverages and in people's bodies, using the most cost
effective, environmentally and medically benign methods
possible. Many people have toxic levels of mercury, lead
and uranium in their bodies, and suffer a wide range of
maladies as a result. Simply making low cost mercury,
lead and uranium testing available to the population and
detoxifying those who are suffering from heavy metal
toxicity would yield an immediate, enormous public
health benefit. Many military veterans are coming home
from Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans suffering from
uranium poisoning due to exposure to depleted uranium
munitions. As regards mercury, one of the principle
causes of mercury contamination is mercury amalgam
dental fillings. My administration would advocate
banning mercury amalgam fillings as an environmental and
health hazard, and would work with the dental profession
to facilitate removing as many existing mercury amalgam
fillings as possible, and replacing them with
non-mercury composite fillings. Other sources of mercury
pollution are fish consumption and the burning of coal
in power generation plants. Where lead is concerned,
many inner city neighborhoods continue to be
contaminated with lead, owing to the lead based paints
that were used on the housing stock decades ago.
Chelation works well to remove heavy metals from the
body, and we would work to make it more widely available
and accepted as a treatment modality. Bentonite clay and
spirulina are also potent body cleansers when used
medicinally.
I think any advanced society must have a public safety
net for those who suffer catastrophic injury or illness
and lack the means to pay for their treatment. However,
my health policy would seek to reduce to as close to nil
as possible the number of people who spend fifty years
eating hot dogs, cookies, cake and ice cream, swilling
liquor, smoking cigarettes, who never or rarely
exercise, who are grotesquely obese, and who then suffer
from cancer, diabetes, heart disease, gout and crippling
strokes and become a ward of the state because they are
unable to pay for their own care.
One of the important policy initiatives that the Federal
government has gotten right is the
WIC program. WIC (Women, Infants and Children) is
one of the best programs the U.S. government has ever
developed. It provides food and nutrition counseling to
low-income, pregnant women, and low-income women with
infants and young children. Here's the reality: research
shows that people
who eat a nutritious diet are healthier, better
adjusted psychologically and are less likely to engage
in criminal behavior than those who suffer nutritional
deficiencies. As a society we can invest early on a
small portion of our resources in the welfare of infants
and young children from deprived backgrounds, or we can
neglect the needs they have in the formative years of
their lives, and then devote a great deal more resources
to deal with the havoc a certain percentage of them will
cause when they turn to criminal or other anti-social
behavior when they grow to adolescence and adulthood.
The WIC Program is like a national insurance program, or
investment in the human potential of at-risk-children.
Under my administration the program would be
strengthened, in terms of both the quality of the
nutrition provided and the quality of the nutritional
counseling that is provided, and expanded in scope, as
an integral part of a greater national emphasis on
healthful nutrition for the population of the entire
country.
Last, but not least, I would support innovative,
quasi-shamanic modes of treatment of alcoholics and
others with addictive substance abuse problems. At
present, herbal treatments using entheogenic substances
such as preparations from the African tree,
Ibogaine, are illegal in the USA, because Ibogaine
is a controlled substance under federal law. I would
have this law stricken from the books, because Ibogaine
has been so effective in helping so many drug addicts
and alcoholics to break the cycle of addiction, and
regain some semblance of functionality, even normalcy,
in their lives. Ibogaine does this, because, in some
sense, Ibogaine understands us even better than we
understand ourselves, and it plugs into our mind and
body at a profound, healing level, to help make right
what has gone so badly awry, and thereby, helps to nudge
wounded lives back on track. The truth is that most
individuals in this society, and the society in general,
have made a big disconnect from the natural world of
trees, forests, streams, lakes, verdant meadows and the
broader life process on this planet. We have unplugged
from nature and we're paying a heavy price for that
disconnect. I love the Ibogaine tree for its
hyperconsciousness. I do not know why or how or when it
came to be so highly conscious, I only know that it is
and I am deeply grateful to it for its profound
knowledge and wisdom. There are many conscious plants on
this planet; Ibogaine is only one of them; and it is a
dramatic symptom of our profound disconnect from the
natural order that so few people realize not only that
plants can be conscious, but that some of them are
hyperconscious, i.e., conscious to a high degree that
lies well beyond the capacity of most humans on this
planet to comprehend. My administration would
accordingly continue and greatly expand the pioneering
Ibogaine work of such organizations as the Healing
Transitions Institute for Addiction, which treats
individuals suffering from alcohol and chemical
dependency. There are more
such clinics, most of them outside the United
States. Many millions of people in this country struggle
with addiction problems that cause untold misery for
them and others, resulting in relationship and family
problems, inability to work or be personally productive,
criminal activity, low levels of educational
achievement, injury, sickness and death. I wouldn't
hesitate to legalize Ibogaine and enlist this truly
merciful and hyper-conscious tree as a powerful "ally"
against alcoholism and narcotics abuse.
And, no, I wouldn't overly concern myself with the
inevitable, negative remonstrations and criticisms from
the fundamentalist religionists, and other know
nothings, about coddling drug addicts, because I know
that lots of them also struggle with alcohol and drug
issues. I know with certainty that lots of "religious"
and "respectable" people have to have sedatives to fall
to sleep at night, like the ever popular
Nyquil, or use tranquilizers/pills/booze to make it
through the day and deal with all of the stress and
anxiety of juggling job, kids, (foreclosed, or almost)
mortgage and marital friction (yes, lots of "religious"
and "respectable" people have problem marriages). I know
that many "respectable" people have medicine cabinets
full of all manner of Thorazine, Prozac, Valium, Xanax,
Stadol, Oxycontin and much more. I can say this with
confidence because drugs, both licit and illicit, are so
extremely prevalent in the culture, in all social
strata, in every socio-economic demographic, and in
every racial and ethnic group. So I would legalize
Ibogaine, making it accessible and acceptable to use to
treat addiction issues and gain profounder insight into
the human condition. We would enjoy a healthier, better
balanced society with Ibogaine, than we do without it.
Environmental Policy
My administration would endeavor to literally make the
country to blossom, by encouraging private individuals
and organizations of all kinds, whether public or
private, to plant a profusion of wildflowers, native
trees, hedges and shrubs. I would continue on a national
level and massively extend the wonderful legacy and work
of
Lady Bird Johnson, and the admirable efforts of such
organizations as the
National Arbor Day Foundation, by using the Bully
Pulpit of the Presidency to foment a deeply rooted
national ethic and culture of wildflower and tree
planting. My administration would encourage neighborhood
and community initiatives to beautify and vegetate the
landscape, whether urban, suburban or rural, and
increase natural habitat for songbirds, butterflies,
bees and other wildlife. Some of my fondest childhood
and adolescent memories are of wandering around, in, and
through, the woods, fields, orchards and wetlands of my
native Virginia. I vividly remember the brilliant green
of the new leaves on the trees in the woods in
springtime, the delicate, pink blossoms of the lady
slippers, the dark green leaves and delicate blooms of
the trailing arbutus and the sweetly fragrant perfume of
the honeysuckle, the thick clumps of cattails in the
swamps, the piping of the song birds in the underbrush,
the tadpoles and minnows in the shallows of the
Tidewater creeks and ponds, the earthy, organic smell of
the loam and leaf litter on the forest floor, the
peeping of tree frogs and call of the whippoorwill at
night, the muted hooting of night owls, the box turtles
and snapping turtles, the green snakes, black snakes and
brilliantly colored king snakes, and the brackish, salty
smell of the tidal marshes and oyster shoals with
endless acres of thick, green marsh grass, the
dragonflies, swarms of fire flies at dusk - and so much
more. All of this natural beauty, this profuse diversity
of flora and fauna and sheer upwelling of the universal
life force as expressed in nature's sacred biological
bounty is an inseparable part of the ancient heritage of
the American continent and must be preserved, nurtured
and cherished. Riparian habitats, and wetland
environments in general, such as lakes, ponds, streams,
rivers, swamps, bogs and marshes, tend to have the
highest species diversity among ecological niches,
because they contain water, and all higher, biological
life forms must have water. There are more biological
organisms in a rain forest than in a barren desert for
that reason. My administration would accordingly make
wetland preservation and protection a priority. I would
initiate a national drive to clean up streams, rivers,
lakes and ponds from coast to coast, border to border.
We would have great national drives to collect trash and
spruce up natural areas, but we wouldn't stop there; we
would endeavor to reduce, and even eliminate where
possible, toxic chemical contamination, so as to make
the water more pure, and therefore more healthful for
the native flora and fauna, and for humans too. A
polluted country is not healthy to live in. So we would
try to do some national yard work, so to speak, and have
a real spring cleaning!
A further priority would be to create a crucial coastal
buffer zone, as deep as several miles in width, from
Maine all the way down the Atlantic coast to the Florida
Keys and all along the Gulf of Mexico coast all the way
around to south Texas. A similar coastal, ecological
buffer zone would be established on the Pacific coast.
These zones would include as many barrier islands and
beaches as possible, and adjacent coastal marshes,
swamps and forests. The objective would be to maintain
as much of it as possible in the form of wildlife
refuges, national sea shores, and nature preserves and
national and state parks, with the aim of maintaining as
much of this coastal area in a wild or semi-wild
condition as possible. This coastal region of surf,
sand, dunes, tidal marshes and swamps is tremendously
critical for the health of the oceans and seas that
cover the majority of the planet's surface. All
ecosystems on this planet are inextricably interlinked -
ALL OF THEM. And the coastal regions of the world's
oceans and seas are the great connector. As goes the
health of the marine ecosystems, so goes, ultimately,
the health of most other ecosystems. This matters to me,
and to the human race at large, because we are
biological organisms and we absolutely depend on
healthful ecosystems for our continued survival and
wellbeing on this planet. Myriad marine organisms, as
well as terrestrial organisms, depend for a portion, or
the whole of their life cycle, on the beaches, dunes,
marshes, tidal creeks, estuaries and swamps that border
the world's seas and oceans. They may breed there, spawn
there, feed there, or spend their larval or juvenile
stages or entire life cycle there. These species include
everything from marsh hens to seagulls to horseshoe
crabs to sea turtles to porpoises to shrimp to eels and
oysters and clams and herring and much, much more. If we
continue to kill this ecologically sensitive coastal
zone by building houses, roads, port facilities,
petroleum refineries, commercial strip development, and
the like, the oceans will surely die, and we will suffer
too, as a consequence. We can have industry and housing
and ports and other facilities, but we must do it
sensibly and intelligently, differently than we do now,
with proper protection and safeguards for the highly
sensitive ecological role played by the coastal region
that simply must be protected for the long-term health
of the planet's biosphere, and as insurance for our own
long-term survivability on a vibrant, living planet.
I would want to engage the nation's best Forestry
schools in providing leadership and personnel to assist
me in revitalizing the natural landscapes of the
country. I would call on the professional expertise and
advice of the specialists in native flora and fauna at
universities such as Northern Arizona University, Yale
and Berkeley, and other fine schools all across the
land.
I would want the Secretary of the Interior and the
Secretary of Agriculture to draw deeply on the expertise
of specialists in biological conservation and ecological
remediation, so as to rehabilitate the countryside and
waterways and restore them to natural vitality. The
evidence is conclusive that
honey bees, many species of
song birds,
fresh water fish,
ocean fisheries, bats and
other varieties of wildlife are in sharp decline.
Their decline is both a sober warning to us that we must
change our ways, and also an opportunity to reintegrate
our lives with the rest of the biosphere by cooperating
with Nature in improving natural habitat for native
plants and wildlife.
I would promote national campaigns to plant wildflowers
and woody vegetation along roadways and waterways, on
public lands, on farms, in public parks, in the yards of
private homes, and to bring back in rural areas the
traditional English-style hedge, linear tangled
thickets, as it were, of shrubs, bushes, vines, brambles
and small trees, prime habitat for all manner of
wildlife.
I would want to facilitate and greatly extend the work
of organizations such as the National Arbor Day
Foundation They have labored in relative obscurity for
many years, and it is a completely undeserved obscurity,
since their tree planting mission is so important. Trees
and other woody plants play a crucial role for myriad
other organisms - birds nest and roost in them,
squirrels eat their nuts and buds, bees collect their
nectar and pollen when they bloom in the spring, and we,
of course, breathe the oxygen that their leaves produce.
Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and
their roots anchor the soil on hillsides and mountain
sides and keep the land from eroding when it rains. This
is just a partial listing of the many positive
attributes of trees. A Sauder administration would be
very tree oriented.
We also would continue and greatly expand the work of
organizations such as the
Lady
Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas. It
would be a real priority for my environmental policy to
inculcate an appreciation for the great beauty of
wildflowers and other native vegetation and the
necessity they are for wildlife such as bees,
butterflies, songbirds, hummingbirds and many other
organisms besides. I would order the land management
agencies to coordinate a national effort to flood out
wildflower seeds to individuals, groups and
organizations for planting everywhere and anywhere - in
the yards of private residences, in church yards, in
parks, along highways and alleyways, along fence rows,
in vacant lots, everywhere. This effort would have a
dual purpose: 1) to beautify the land and lift the
people's spirits, and 2) to provide critically needed
wildlife habitat. Bees and butterflies are linchpin
species; they are absolutely non-replaceable links in
the ecological chain, because they pollinate plants
thereby ensuring plant reproduction, and they positively
must have blossoms and blooms to flourish the year
'round. They require nectar and/or pollen or they cannot
survive. The flower-pollinator cycle is vital to the
life process on Earth and must not be broken. Lady Bird
Jonson's instincts were very sound when she first
launched her national wildflower initiative back in the
1960s. The work she set out to do is of the utmost
importance, and always will be, as long as the Earth and
the biosphere endure. We would take the work of the Lady
Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the National Arbor
Day Foundation, and other similar organizations, work
with them all, and help expand their efforts and vision
into a great national undertaking. The idea would be to
develop a kind of national passion for tree, wildflower
and hedgerow planting, and for environmental remediation
across the board. When I say that my administration
would make the continent blossom I mean that literally.
I would also want to promote the preservation of large
tracts of land and habitat, on a sub-continental scale,
in a naturally wild or semi-wild state. There are areas
of the country, such as regions of the Plains states and
the mountain and desert West, several swampy and marshy
regions of the South, southwestern Alabama and many
counties in Arkansas, most of Alaska, Central Appalachia
in western Virginia and northwestern West Virginia, and
most of Maine, that already have a comparatively low
human population density. There are several hundreds of
counties in these areas that have a population density
of 20 persons per square mile or less. More than 250
counties in the lower 48 states have a population
density of about 5 persons or fewer per square mile.
My proposal is not to use the stick of law enforcement
to forcibly move people off the land, rather my policy
would be to use the carrot of the market to buy out
those who would freely sell their land, and many would
take the offer, I am sure. For those who want to remain,
I would propose to offer ecological training and
education to as many as desire it, not to force it on
them mandatorily, and from those who voluntarily
complete the training to hire a select cadre to be
caretakers of the land, as natural land managers. They
would be offered the option of training in ecological
principles, and ecosystem management and begin careers
as nature stewards, as wildlife managers, reforestation
workers, wetland conservationists and restorers,
grassland restorers, and so forth. No one would be
forcibly removed from the land. But those who opted to
sell their land would be fairly compensated. The
approach of my administration would be to set in motion
a land management policy that over the course of a
couple of generations would begin to accomplish some of
the objectives espoused by the North American
rewilding movement. I am not a card-carrying member
of this movement, and have never met and do not know any
of its principals or founders. However, I am sympathetic
to several of their concerns.
It boils down to this: from the standpoint of deep
ecology it is probably better for humans to
substantially withdraw from large, subcontinental areas
of the planet, and let vast tracts of forest, grassland,
marsh, swamp and polar habitat to return to a nearly
wild or semi-wild state, for the good of the long-term
health of the planetary biosphere. Areas of the planet
best suited to this that are still relatively
unpopulated are found in sparsely populated regions of
the Americas such as the North American Mountain West
and parts of the Plains, several marshy, swampy or
mountainous areas in the North American southeast, the
so-called North Woods of Canada, large areas of Alaska,
the Amazon, Patagonia, the Argentine Pampas and the
Andean region in South America, the Kalahari, Namibian
and Sahara deserts and the central rain forests in
Africa, most of Siberia and the mountainous Central
Plateau in Asia, parts of Insular Southeast Asia, the
Outback and Great Coral Reef in Australia, all of
Antarctica and even certain regions of Europe, such as
much of Scandinavia, northwest Scotland, and parts of
Spain. And there will be numerous, smaller tracts of
natural habitat all around the planet that can also be
conserved on a piecemeal basis - if only in units of
several thousands, or even several hundreds, of acres.
However, if large numbers of humans continue to invade
and degrade large areas of formerly natural habitat, as
has happened in the last one hundred years, the
biosphere, and the human race along with it, are liable
to both crash catastrophically, long before this current
century is over. That's our predicament. Either we wise
up as a nation and a species, and real soon, or we go
the way of all flesh, which is to say that we are soon
likely to perish in very large numbers.
Put it this way, we breathe oxygen and both marine and
terrestrial photosynthetic organisms, i.e.,
phytoplankton and green plants, produce oxygen.
Therefore, it is imperative that we safeguard the health
of vast tracts of grassland and forestland, and
safeguard the health of the oceans and seas, and the
coastal swamps and marshes on which virtually the
entirety of the marine ecology depends, directly and
indirectly. It is in our vital, long-term self-interest
as a species to do these things. Imagine that you were
on a space ship on a thirty year, round trip voyage to
Neptune. Imagine further that the space ship's oxygen
supply absolutely depended on the green plants in an
on-board hydroponic garden. Would you be so foolish as
to destroy the plants in the hydroponic garden? Of
course not! Because if you destroyed the plants in the
hydroponic garden you would effectively sentence
yourself to death, for the simple reason that in
destroying the plants you would be destroying your
oxygen supply. Our situation is just as sensitive: we
are on a giant space ship called Earth, orbiting
endlessly in the vastness of creation way out on an arm
of the Milky Way Galaxy, and we have hydroponic
facilities called forests, grasslands, and oceans full
of oxygen-producing phytoplankton. If we foul the
oceans, cut down the forests and plough up all the
grasslands we are jeopardizing our own physical security
and well-being, because we are destroying our oxygen
production units.
So a radical environmental policy that seeks to preserve
natural habitat is actually a national security, even a
species security and planetary security, necessity.
Those who argue otherwise have simply not thought
through all of the long-term ramifications, or, worse,
are sociopaths who endanger global society by their
pathological lies and selfish grasping after corporate
power at the expense of the planet's well-being.
Please note that I am not making a wild-eyed population
reduction proposal. I am not advocating culling the
human herd, or proposing a policy to that end, or any
such thing. NO. What I am saying is that the humans that
are already on this planet in the year 2008 must start
relating to the planet in a different way, starting now,
in the first years of the 21st Century, or really bad
things absolutely will start happening, and pretty soon,
and on a wide scale.
There is still a little time to take remedial action,
and to begin to phase in more intelligent and
environmentally benign policies, but we must begin very
soon, or the biosphere runs the risk of such severe
degradation that the quality of life, and maybe even the
possibility for life at all, will become very
problematic. If we foul our nest too badly, it may be
the Earth itself that will cull our numbers, through
runaway ecological apocalypse, until a new, very
different ecological equilibrium is established.
Energy Policy
My energy policy would put a quick end to energy wars.
The universe is bursting with energy. Why fight over it?
There's plenty for everyone. I would bring a wide range
of technologies employing solar, wind, tidal, water, and
geothermal energies on line. The earth is an energy
dynamo. It's been spinning in space for billions of
years. There are environmentally benign and
energetically efficient ways to break the
oxygen-hydrogen bond and have low cost water engines.
You combine the hydrogen with the oxygen and from the
ensuing combustion derive water vapor as the by product,
which you can recapture and use all over again. The
national labs should have been hard at work on this for
years already. Regrettably, they haven't been, but
others have. There are tinkerers and inventors out there
who can make a better light bulb or mouse trap and I
would unleash them, gladly! It would be a high priority
of my administration to release and harness the power of
American genius for the benefit of society at large.
There are entrepreneurs promoting
actual working devices that run car engines on
water!- and
dramatically increase gas mileage. If the United
States government were not a ruthless, corporate,
criminal syndicate dedicated to the enrichment of the
wealthy few, at the expense of the exploited many,
federal agencies such as the EPA, DOE and DOT would be
out front promoting these technologies. But federal
policy formulation and implementation are closely tied
to corporate profit taking over other consideration, and
so the Fortune 500 and the criminal mafia of Federal
alphabet soup agencies continue to conspire to lock the
planet into a self-destructive mode of imperial warfare
and resource plunder.
A Sauder administration would embark on a radically new
energy policy for a variety of reasons, among which
national security, economic and ecological concerns
would figure prominently.
Al Gore is thinking along some of the same lines,
but he is one of the comparatively few major political
figures who are; moreover he is not President, and
anyway his motives are highly suspect, given his
life-long close ties to the criminal
corporate-government. Parenthetically, I would observe
that Al Gore also has a fatal flaw for a man who would
be a national leader, to wit, he actually won the
national election in the year 2000, but then he made a
crucial, fatal blunder: he failed to ratify his victory
and consolidate his control of the Executive Office of
the President. A national figure who cannot muster the
strength of purpose to claim his own Presidential
victory is not worthy to exercise the power of the
office. Al Gore ran for President, won the election, and
then very meekly stood himself down from office. It was
one of the most astonishing political suicides in
American history. But I digress.
The problems of environmental contamination from
coal-fired power plants and from the coal mining
industry are very serious. Strip mining rips up the
landscape and burning coal produces emissions such as
carbon dioxide, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen and
releases other pollutants like mercury and other heavy
metals that pollute the air, water and soil. Nuclear
power generation is phenomenally capital and technology
intensive, and has the added problem that it produces
nuclear waste that is incredibly toxic and well nigh
impossible to dispose of or store in a safe manner.
Petroleum based energy production also has attendant
contamination and pollution issues, in addition to being
reliant on huge amounts of imported petroleum, which
makes the entire petroleum production and transport
cycle a national security issue of the first order. We
see how this dynamic plays out with the current ruinous
cycle of imperial warfare in the Middle East. As
petroleum reserves are drawing down around the world,
the remaining petroleum has become the object of
increasingly bitter imperial warfare, which is to say,
possession, control and exploitation of the remaining
petroleum reserves has become a national security, or,
more aptly, a national "insecurity", concern.
Do you want to see the nuclear weapons come out and
mushroom clouds billow? I surely don't, and the best way
to avoid that is to begin a major transition right now,
to alternate sources of energy that are cleaner, more
environmentally benign and renewable, or virtually free
for the taking. The obvious prime candidates are 1)
wind, 2) solar and 3) tidal power.
Geothermal energy may also offer promise, if it can
be safely tapped on a long-term basis without
destabilizing underlying geological strata and creating
seismic, volcanic or land subsidence problems.
My administration would vigorously explore all of these
technologies as urgent, national priorities. I would
instruct the Energy Secretary to devote the resources of
the National Laboratories towards devising the most
efficient, cost effective, safe and environmentally
benign methods possible of exploiting these sources of
energy on a large scale and plugging the resultant
production into the national power grid.
I have been favorably impressed with the vision and
initiative of
T.
Boone Pickens, the Texas oil man and
multi-billionaire who has had the foresight to begin
massively promoting and investing in wind generation of
electricity. Of course I realize he has a profit motive
- he's a wealthy businessman, after all. But I applaud
his common sense approach to the conundrum we are in. He
groks the multidimensional problem and he has begun
working on the solution. What's not to like? If only the
alleged "President" of the United States had even one
iota of that sort of horse sense, we might not be facing
Armageddon in the Middle East, but he doesn't, and we
might be facing a real dark period in world history
because he is so unalterably ignorant and churlish.
I would also encourage the R&D and mass production of
efficient devices to dramatically boost gasoline and
diesel engine efficiency using
water. There are some very innovative tinkerers and
inventors who have come up with promising water
technologies that really work, and can be
very easily adaptedto the family car, even by a
weekend tinkerer, using simple hand tools, that
dramatically increase gas mileage and are also
environmentally benign. If there are working models of
low cost systems that are environmentally benign, and
that efficiently break the hydrogen-oxygen bond, using
the ensuing gas as clean, efficient fuel, then why are
these not on the market? Simple. They are! Just click
the links above and you can have these things for
yourself. The inventors and marketers have bypassed the
Fortune 500 and the petroleum monopoly and are taking it
directly to the street. My administration would expedite
the development of these new, environmentally benign
"water engines" and presto! -- bye-bye smog, bye-bye
petroleum wars, bye-bye ugly petroleum refineries and
drilling platforms. The only exhaust from a
well-designed water engine is water and oxygen, which
could be collected if desired, and cycled right back
through the engine.
The boom in new energy technologies would have a number
of major, positive economic spin-offs: 1) we would save
hundreds of billions of dollars on petroleum imports and
radically improve our national trade balance ; 2) the
R&D, installation and maintenance of the new
technologies would spark a boom in the manufacturing and
technology sector of the national economy; thereby
providing 3) more domestic employment, i.e., good paying
jobs; and 4) because the new technologies are cleaner
and more environmentally benign there would be much less
contamination of the environment, and far less of a
public health hazard than is the case with nuclear, coal
and petroleum powered generating plants.
For the life of me, I do not know why this sort of
common sense approach to energy policy is not a national
security priority of the utmost urgency RIGHT NOW. But
it isn't. I can only conclude that the people running
the national government of the United States and making
policy at the level of the Executive Office of the
President are either really ignorant and incompetent, or
deranged psychopaths, or quite possibly all of the
preceding.
Bureau of Higher Consciousness
One of the strongest drives that humans have is to seek
altered states of consciousness. One of the novel policy
initiatives of my administration would be to foster a
national climate of consciousness expansion, an
atmosphere of personal exploration where it was an
accepted life objective to seek out and develop higher
consciousness. Every time I see another vacuous George
Bush or vapid Nancy Pelosi news conference, I realize
anew how desperately much a national, higher conscious
policy is needed. Ideally, this is something that
organized religion could do, and it ought to - but it
doesn't. Instead, we turn on the TV and see entire
channels devoted to the tiresome bloviations of
televangelists who ceaselessly implore their audiences
to send in money for this or that DVD, CD or book. Every
time you turn around you trip over another mega-church
preaching the gospel of material prosperity. However,
the overarching reality is that in the larger scheme of
things people are turning away from organized religion
in droves. In the United States only about
20% of the people attend church services on Sunday.
Congregants are fleeing the pews en masse.
People can't find expanded consciousness via the hollow
route of organized religion, but that hasn't stopped
them from seeking states of altered awareness. The
rampant use and abuse of alcohol, marijuana, legal and
illegal uppers and downers of every description,
cocaine, heroin, glue, spray paint, and more, by many
tens of millions of people in this society, testifies
eloquently to the powerful urge that great masses of
people have for experiencing states of altered
awareness. The shelves of the law libraries are groaning
with laws, statutes and regulations forbidding the use
of this substance and plant, or that herb, seed, or
mushroom on pain of arrest, trial and incarceration. Our
jails and prisons are packed and overflowing with
inmates who have run afoul of such misguided laws,
statutes and regulations.
It hasn't always been this way, and it is not this way
everywhere in the world. But from where I stand it looks
to me that those who administer the oppressive social
control system in the United States greatly fear that if
a dumbed down population wised up, they would lose their
accustomed position of control. The prospect of an
enlightened country full of people who see right through
their devious, exploitive schemes terrifies them. And so
they crack down harshly, criminalizing the mere
possession of entheogens (psychoactive plant species),
what to speak of their actual use, because one of the
things that some entheogens do very well is to open the
human mind and spirit to more expansive realms of
awareness and knowledge, and thus facilitate greater
analytical understanding of all kinds of things,
including the violent, evil machinations of tyrannical
social control freaks who wish to lord it over the rest
of humanity.
Native Americans fought hard in the federal courts for
the right to use
peyote for sacramental purposes in their religious
ceremonies, and there's a reason for that. Peyote is a
traditional
entheogen with a long history of use by seekers
after enlightenment and spiritual insight. Other plant
preparations such as
ayahuasca, in South America,
Ibogaine, in Africa,
salvia divinorum, in Mexico, so-called
Syrian Rue, in the Middle East, and many others have
long been used for achieving expanded states of
awareness, with the practice stretching back into the
mists of time. For whatever reason, there are plants on
this planet which when ingested by humans act as a sort
of hyper-conscious mental modem, and plug into the
central nervous system of Homo sapiens sapiens. These
plants plug into the human mind at a very deep level and
directly connect it to expansive and profound states of
awareness that many people find spiritually
enlightening, and psychologically and emotionally
integrative.
Our culture lacks a spiritual core. The rampant sense of
yawning emptiness is all pervasive. I can feel it. I see
it on every hand. I'm suffering because of it, and so
are you, we all are, it's stifling. Though we have
organized religions, they have miserably failed to
satisfy the deep human yearning for experiencing
expanded states of consciousness, and most all of them
have become little more than glorified social control
mechanisms, officially registered with various and
sundry governmental control structures, wearing their
little IRS-controlled 501(c)(3) dog collars around their
collective necks.
I would want people like
Dr. Rick Strassman, a preeminent medical authority
on entheogens and expanded states of consciousness, and
Mark Plotkin, perhaps the premier ethnobotanist in
the USA, to head up this new Bureau so crucial to
assisting the nation to find its collective sanity.
These men have extensive personal experience with
DMT and ayahuasca, and I would put them in charge of
establishing a national consciousness raising
initiative, for the benefit of as many as possible who
desire to expand their awareness and level of personal
understanding.
My administration would also promote society-wide other
techniques, such as so-called
binaural beat methods, that take advantage of modern
audio and electronic technologies to enable the human
mind to enter higher and expanded states of
consciousness. There is a veritable host of merchants
selling tapes and CDs using the binaural beat
technology. You can find them advertised on the
Internet, in spiritual magazines, and also in some
bookstores.
My administration would also foster research into
extraordinary states of consciousness and enlightenment
engendered by the
kundalini and other exceptional hyper-dimensional
modes of being. A new day is dawning, and a century from
now the psychopaths who fancy that they control this
planet will themselves have long been swept from power,
and from all their petty delusions of power, and
directly summoned before the Lords of Karma for their
end of incarnation exit interviews. Super-conscious
galactic forces beyond their comprehension or ability to
influence are in play, and the more is the pity that
they fail to understand this, because the Universe does
have a deep and abiding well of compassion, and even
now, even after all of their criminal excesses, if they
were to contritely turn their hearts toward love and
humanity, the Universe itself would rally to their
rescue. But we are dealing with the worst sorts of
sociopaths in our day, and as time grows short, it
appears less and less likely that they will have a
change of heart. And so, before they exit this chapter
of history on this planet, they are inflicting some very
heavy, parting blows. From their limited viewpoint, they
falsely imagine that they are maximizing their own
personal gain. In reality, from a long-term karmic point
of view, the greatest and most perfect service that they
could render to themselves, even now, would be to put
themselves at the loving service of humanity. Because
they have willfully failed to do this, the aftermath of
their misguided rule will be a time of intense need for
remediation and healing in every aspect of the human
experience on this planet.
We will need all the help that Ibogaine and the
kundalini can offer us. Some future President of the
USA, if in the future there is even a country named the
United States of America, will have the wisdom to enlist
the guidance of these powerful life allies and write a
new page in history. That day is coming, ineluctably,
inexorably, as surely as the rising sun banishes the
dark of night.
Bureau of UFOlogy and Extraterrestrial Research
I am perfectly serious. I would establish a Bureau of
UFOlogy and Extraterrestrial Research. I would appoint
Richard Dolan as the Director. Questions relating to
UFOs and extraterrestrial life are actually mainstream
cultural issues, right now, and my administration would
make them the object of serious policy and scientific
research. A scientific poll conducted in 2002 for the
SciFi Channel revealed that
the majority of the populationbelieve in UFOs and
extraterrestrials. These are not fringe issues, though
the Fortune 500, corporate controlled mainstream news
media outlets do their lying best to make people think
they are.
The problem for the Powers That Be is that millions of
people regularly see UFOs. The conundrum for the growing
numbers of the public who see UFOs is: who are they
going to believe, the increasingly implausible denials
of officialdom, or their own eyes? The majority of
people are deciding to trust their own eyes more than
the deceptive propaganda of the government and the
mainstream news media. Stories and videos about UFOs are
proliferating on the Internet, and the aliens
themselves, who appear to represent many, diverse,
intelligent species from elsewhere and elsewhen, have
the niggling habit of not following established
diplomatic protocol - they just drop in on anyone they
want to visit, they go wherever they want to, and their
technological prowess makes them and their craft as
slippery as a fistful of Jello. So they are impressively
difficult to apprehend and interrogate.
I have seen many UFOs myself. There is no doubt that the
United States government has engaged in a decades-long
program of systematic lying and cover-up where UFOs and
extraterrestrial life are concerned. I would instruct
Richard Dolan to assemble the best research team he
could find from the academic world, private sphere and
federal government agencies, and research UFOs and
extraterrestrial species using any available ethical,
legal and humane methods, not to exclude such
parapsychological techniques as
remote viewing and shamanic techniques employing
entheogens, the plants whose use facilitates
exploration of expanded states of mental, psychological
and spiritual awareness.
I would issue an order to all executive agencies to
release to the Bureau of UFOs all files in their
possession that pertain in any way to UFOs and/or
extraterrestrials. That means emptying out the CIA's
classified files, the NSA's, the Pentagon's, NASA's, the
FBI's, and so on. The time has come for the cover-up to
end. It is clear that the agenda of the cover-up is no
longer National Security (assuming it ever really was),
but social control of the people, by keeping them in
ignorance about our planet's true place in the galaxy
and the broader universe.
Mass ignorance is not consonant with freedom, so my
administration would open wide the floodgates and make
as much information available as possible. Is it perhaps
true that the Earth is only one of millions of inhabited
or inhabitable planets in the galaxy? Are there human
populations on other planets? So many people have seen
UFOs, and so many people have had reported contactee
experiences in which they saw seeming extraterrestrial
beings who seemed fully human, that it may well be that
the answer to both questions is "yes".
Infrastructure Remediation and Upgrade
The national infrastructure is crumbling and the
national leadership are oblivious. They do not care. As
a class they rival anything that the crumbling Roman
Empire produced 1600 to 1700 years ago. We have a
so-called ruling "elite" who are ignorant, incompetent,
malevolent, intellectually lazy, larcenous and
mendacious. Many of them are outright sociopaths, and of
the rest, many, who are not actual sociopaths
themselves, nevertheless acquiesce in the schemes of the
sociopaths and willingly promote their harmful agendas,
making many of these others sociopaths by default, as it
were.
But that wouldn't stop me. A Sauder administration would
set to work on repairing, maintaining and impressively
upgrading the national infrastructure. The trillions of
dollars that are now lavished on self-destructive
imperial warfare (anyone who cares to see how that
project will end just read Roman history, the blueprint
is being followed by the U.S. government to a "T" --
right down to the present, ongoing military adventure in
the Middle East, the very same region where centuries
ago the Romans spent so much treasure and lost so many
men fighting first the Parthians and later the
Sassanids) will stay at home under my government. We
will take that same money and invest it in this country
and her people, who are the precious lifeblood of the
nation. My plan would put millions of people back to
work, and not at make work tasks either, but doing real
work that is vitally needed to strengthen the country
and shore up the economic health of communities in all
fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico
and the other Territories. You see, spending those same
trillions of dollars at home guarantees that the money
will turn over multiple times in the domestic economy,
and that multiplier effect will actually have a hugely
positive economic impact over time that vastly exceeds
the initial investment. Can you imagine what
transformative effect a multi-trillion dollar investment
in the lives and fortunes of the productive classes of
this country would have on the national economy, as
opposed to throwing away that same vast sum of money in
counterproductive warfare on the other side of the
planet?
Doesn't my plan only make sense?
To begin with, I propose an extensive program of
environmental cleanup, a massive scrubbing of the
nation's air, water and soil to remove chemical toxins,
trash and destructive particulate matter, such as
harmful levels of fine soot in the air and excessive
silt clogging rivers, streams and lakes. We all breathe
air, we all drink and bathe in water, we all eat food
grown in soil, and so we all have a stake in cleaning up
the nation's water, soil and air. We will need a large
cadre of people to head up this effort, trained in the
principles of ecology and environmental science, with
cross-disciplinary expertise in conservation biology,
sustainable ecosystem management, meteorology,
environmental chemistry, environmentally benign
industrial engineering, organic agricultural and soil
science, marine science and hydrology. We will have to
encourage many thousands of our young people to
specialize in this new environmental remediation field,
provide the resources for their professional formation
and develop the organizational structure for them to
apply their expertise for cleaning up the USA and the
world. This is the direction in which we must move
starting now, and my administration would immediately
make bold policy initiatives along these lines.
If we don't, those of us who remain a century from now
will be living on a poisonous, toxic, contaminated
planet, with a severely degraded biosphere possessing a
small fraction of the biological diversity that it has
supported for literally millions of years - right up
until the time that our allegedly "superior" modern way
of life came on the scene, about 100 years ago.
As large numbers of people are mustered out of the
military, and the military-industrial complex makes the
transition to a more peaceful and environmentally
oriented mode of production, millions of people will
need to find alternative employment. I propose to put
hordes of these people to work as engineers,
technicians, equipment operators, clerical workers,
administrative personnel, hard hat workers and service
personnel, and have them build, operate and maintain a
world class, national rail system, new, state of the art
sewage and water systems, clean and efficient mass
transit systems, an efficient, 21st century power grid,
and a superior, high-speed Internet system free of
government censorship and control. Many will also enter
the growing fields of ecological/environmental
remediation, and sustainable ecosystem management.
Water mains are bursting in cities and towns all over
the country. Water treatment plants are outmoded and
dilapidated. The national, electrical transmission grid
is overtaxed and inefficient. Bridges are crumbling,
sewers are in need of repair, gas lines and pipelines
need to be modernized and replaced, thousands of our
roads and highways are full of patches and potholes, and
our airports and train stations (the few that remain)
are showing their age. Toxic waste, trash and degraded
ecosystems are everywhere. We need a massive,
Manhattan-style project to clean up, restore and upgrade
the physical infrastructure, and the landscape itself,
of the entire nation. The economic stimulus that such a
program would give to the whole country would be nothing
short of miraculous, as the life energy and genius of
the people are invested in themselves, in their
communities, and in the long-term well-being of the
nation, as opposed to being siphoned off by predatory,
vulture Capitalism, as the Fortune 500 companies and the
Federal Reserve Banks now do. But you will wait in vain
for any such proclamation from the current occupant of
the Oval Office. George Bush is a one man, national
catastrophe. His unconstitutional, dictatorial reign has
been an absolute disaster for the United States and the
world. The President of the United States has tremendous
executive and administrative power, and a historically
unique, global platform that potentially enables him to
do enormous good in the world. It is to George Bush's
everlasting discredit and shame that he has purposefully
squandered the awesome, terrible privilege that a
President of the USA has, and consciously chose instead
to grind the hopes and dreams of literally billions of
people into the dust, plunging the planet ever deeper
into a worsening cycle of economic exploitation,
environmental degradation, ecological collapse and war.
Other countries are way ahead of us in transportation
technology. The French, Germans and Japanese have trains
that put our rail system to shame. Have you ever had
lunch along the Seine in a Parisian café, then boarded
the TGV to zoom south through the French countryside,
arriving in time to dine in the evening on the
Mediterranean coast? We have nothing to compare with
that in the United States, because we have a damaging
failure of leadership in this country, and our so-called
national "leaders" are myopic, and lack vision and
initiative. The whole country is suffering from the
sheer incompetence of these people. I would make it a
national priority to establish a national, high speed
rail system, along the lines of what the German, French
and Japanese have done. This makes more sense than ever,
in this era of soaring petroleum costs. Airlines are
struggling to remain solvent, and motorists are
suffering from the high cost of gasoline. Rail travel
and transport are efficient solutions to these problems,
or could be, if we had a modern, efficient rail system -
BUT WE DON'T. My administration would set to work on
this problem immediately. In many cases we could make
use of the existing rights of way and medians of
existing railroad and highway easements, thereby holding
the need to acquire additional real estate for public
use to a minimum.
In the cities, we would bring back electric trolleys,
and put in place an extensive network of bicycle lanes
and pedestrian paths. In lieu of spending billions of
dollars on urban expressways we would concentrate urban
transit expenditures on light rail, subways and
monorails. Reliance on the automobile has created
suburban sprawl, which is an unsustainable development
pattern when people cannot afford the gasoline they
require to fuel their cars. We are fast approaching the
breaking point of the suburban lifestyle as a
sustainable mode of living over the long term. As the
suburbs depopulate the people who live there will need
to go somewhere, and they will need transportation. Most
of them will migrate to the cities. The individual car
will not be practicable for the masses in the new
society that is already on its way. From a practical
standpoint, there simply is not enough physical space in
the cities, once the suburban culture declines, for
everyone to have a car, and a parking space or garage,
and to also be out on the road in large numbers.
And anyway, who wants to spend hours stuck in traffic,
when a clean, modern subway, trolley car, or monorail is
waiting to take you across town in greater comfort than
inching through gridlocked traffic at walking speed? Or
to spend hours driving on dangerous highways from New
York to Baltimore, Houston to Dallas, Las Vegas to
Phoenix, Seattle to San Francisco, St. Louis to Chicago,
Boise to Salt Lake City, or Little Rock to Nashville,
when there is a modern, high speed train that can whisk
you from city center to city center, in greater comfort
and ease, and in a fraction of the time, that driving
would require? It sounds enticing doesn't it?
Well, too bad, you won't be having any such experience,
because I am not running for President of the United
States, for reasons I have made abundantly clear, and
none of the establishment, Presidential wannabes who
have thrust themselves front and center in the
mainstream news cycle are even talking about, let alone
emphasizing, the majority of the sorts of policies that
I am advocating. And if you have been voting for
Democrats and Republicans for, lo, these many years,
then congratulations! -- you have gotten precisely the
government you have voted for; we have come to this
wretched fork in the road precisely because of the
policies that the Republicans and Democrats have jointly
put in place over the last 155 years. And if you have
been voting for the politicians that these national
criminal syndicates parade before the public every few
years, and have not had the intestinal fortitude to hold
back from returning them to power again and again, then
you need look no further than your own mirror for one of
the fundamental sources of our political system's
problems: ignorant, fearful, weak minded, uninformed,
timorous, credulous voters, who lack the vision and
strength of will, individually and as a cohort, to just
say "no" and to insist on more, and better options, when
it comes to candidates for elective office, and public
policy formulation.
E Pluribus Unum and the, uh, like, you know,
Education Problem
I would establish fluent mastery of the standard,
English language as a high priority for all citizens and
legal residents. Equally, my administration would want
to ensure that minority languages such as Texas and New
Mexico Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish, all surviving
Native American languages, Pennsylvania German, Cajun
French, New York Italian, Yiddish, Hawai'i Polynesian,
and so forth, are respected as legitimate dialects and
languages, studied, protected from extinction, and
nurtured. These languages are all cultural treasures in
their own right. The common social tapestry is enriched
by preserving and encouraging our shared uniqueness.
Wouldn't it be boring if we were all 100% alike?
That's what makes the USA such a unique social
phenomenon. I very much like the Latin motto: E pluribus
unum. One from many, unity from diversity. That is why a
Sauder administration would emphasize the essential,
overarching importance of achieving mastery of standard,
cultured English for everyone in the society, and, at
one and the same time, also mastering one or more other
languages. There would be a strong emphasis in the
education system, rather along the lines of the Dutch or
Swiss models, of ensuring that as many of our school
children as possible leave school with a fluent
knowledge of at least one other major world language,
besides standard English (in addition to whatever
dialect or language some of them might already know such
as Texas Spanish, Navajo, Pennsylvania German, etc.) I
propose that such major languages as Arabic, Spanish,
French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Hindi and
Chinese be given priority. Like it or not, we now live
in a global society. While on the one hand I am a strong
opponent of oppressive, Big Brother-style world
government, on the other hand I am a vigorous proponent
of an informed, literate, well-educated citizenry with a
solid grasp of world affairs and the ability to interact
knowledgeably in a sophisticated manner in a
challenging, dynamic international environment. To do
that you simply must be able to speak the lingo fluently
and with a high level of literacy, both your own and
others.
It is a sad fact that the education system we now have
in this country is producing a population of genuine
ignoramuses. In 2002 the National Geographic Society
conducted a
geographic survey of 3,000 young adults in several
countries, including the United States. The sobering
results revealed that only 17% of young people in this
country could find Afghanistan on the map - and the
United States is fighting a war there. It gets worse,
much, much worse. Incredibly, 11% of young adults in the
USA (that's 1 in 9) could not find the United States
itself on a map, and 29% could not even locate the
Pacific Ocean on a world map. COULD NOT RECOGNIZE THE
PACIFIC OCEAN!! But they were not finished, far from it.
Sigh. A mind-numbing 58% of 18-24 year olds in the USA
could not find Japan, didn't know where it was, and 65%
couldn't identify France on the map, only 15% could find
Israel or Iraq, and so forth. Dumb + Dumbo = Really
Stupid. Oceans of printer's ink have been spilled on the
subject of the dumbing down of the population of the
United States, but it takes surveys like this one to
bring the harsh reality home. The unfortunate truth is
that a great many of the young people in the up and
coming generation are not very bright - 29% of them
cannot even find the Pacific Ocean on the map!!
We simply must have an emphasis in our schools on a
solid grounding in history, English language skills,
mathematics, logic and philosophy, geography and natural
science. An ignorant populace is weak and vulnerable;
the antidote to weakness is knowledge and awareness. How
hard can it be to recognize the Pacific Ocean on a world
map? And yet, almost 30% of our young people do not have
enough voltage between the ears to do that. Vast
segments of our population are just dumber than a post.
Our schools and academies are producing legions of
borderline mental retards. It's that simple.
The school system in this country is failing. It is
broken, it is falling apart, it is collapsing. One
recent study pegged the 1998 national high school
graduation rate for Whites at 78%, for African-Americans
at 56%, and for Latinos at 54%, with the
African-American high school graduation rate falling to
a mind-numbing low of 29% in Cleveland, Ohio. In many
cities the high school graduation rate for Black and
Latino students hovers below the 50% level. A
recent report revealed that 24% of the high school
students in California drop out and do not graduate. The
Federal government's own polling estimates that
14% of the adult population in the United States
lack basic prose literacy, i.e., one out of seven adults
in this country is semi-literate. But the situation is
actually liable to be far worse than that. A
recent study has shown that an eye-popping 36% of
the adults in Washington, DC and 21% of adults
nationwide are functionally illiterate - that means they
cannot read a map, cannot read and follow simple
directions, cannot do simple arithmetic calculations.
That's more than one out of every five adults you pass
during the course of a day. Think of it. That is how
very bad the educational system is in this country. We
need to do much better. Every individual is part of the
human capital of our society, so what does it mean for
the prospects for success of illiterate/innumerate and
subliterate/subnumerate people individually, and for
society as a whole, when so many tens of millions of
people cannot add 5+17? Or read the directions on a
bottle of medicine? Or cannot even find the Pacific
Ocean on a world map? A huge percentage of the
population, maybe 20%-30% (or more?!), are walking
around with their heads in a fog, not having much better
sense of the world and their place in it than the
average medieval peasant a thousand years ago.
What to do? At the very least we must begin by having a
national debate about our stunning level of ignorance as
a people. And we need an emergency, all out, national
literacy and numeracy drive that has one single
objective: to ensure that as many people as possible
achieve basic prose literacy and basic numeracy, i.e.,
the ability to read and write at a basic level, and to
count and do simple arithmetic, at a bare minimum.
Can we muster the smarts to do even that? Or is the
situation so far gone that we cannot pull out of our
downward educational spiral in time to avert absolute
societal calamity?
I confess that I am at my wit's end contemplating the
sheer scale of what has gone so very wrong and thinking
of how best to remedy this deepening national
catastrophe. I wonder if the
hemi-sync system pioneered by Robert Monroe could
help some of these people who have trouble learning?
Would the educational system even be willing to try new
approaches? We need to find out. We need to explore
other ways of teaching, learning and mastering the basic
core of knowledge necessary to survive, navigate and
flourish in the modern world. So very many people are
falling by the wayside and we need to have a crash,
intervention program to address this alarming state of
affairs. I am afraid that if we do not reverse the
present course we are on that the current trajectory
will lead us ineluctably to a sort of dystopian, Mad Max
world where there are hordes of ignorant, illiterate,
subliterate, uneducated, borderline mental retards who
are lorded over and dominated by an educated, moneyed,
sociopathic class that run the the nation and the planet
for their own, personal benefit and to the simultaneous
detriment of the rest of the human race, who are
destined to generations of grinding, ignorant poverty
and cruel exploitation.
I must say that I am intrigued and encouraged by the
work done by
Kanya Vashon McGhee at his bookstore and learning
centers in Harlem, New York and Atlanta, Georgia. His
Tree of Life Bookstore & Educational Center of Harlem
was a rare gem burning brightly in the heart of New York
City, like a beacon of hope, drawing in people like a
magnet with Kanya's unique educational approach based on
practical application of the universal laws of the
ancient Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. Large numbers
of people whom society had relegated to cast-off status,
junkies, drop-outs, convicts, were pulled into the orbit
of the Tree of Life Bookstore & Educational Center in
Harlem and began to read, to learn and to flourish, many
of them for the first time in their life. Now that's an
impressive accomplishment, both on Kanya's part and
theirs. I would certainly want to have Kanya Vashon
McGhee in my administration. He is a national asset of
the first caliber, like a sparkling Hope Diamond, and I
would turn him loose to establish a national network of
Tree of Life Bookstores and Educational Centers from
border to border and coast to coast, to replicate what
he accomplished in Harlem in cities and towns all over
the country. His emphasis has been primarily on the
upliftment of downtrodden African-American people, but I
am sure that his approach would benefit many other
people, too. My administration would encourage new
approaches like this, based on ancient wisdom retooled
for changed, contemporary circumstances. Kanya has a
demonstrated track record of success in Harlem, and in a
saner world the so-called Department of Education would
latch onto a program like his and take it national - for
the betterment of society at large. Sadly, the
Department of Education is currently presided over by an
elite educational, technocratic clique who care more for
institutional clout and bureaucratic power plays than
they do about the life prospects and career formation of
the nation's young people. The end product of our
educational system is in sharp decline, with the result
that tens of millions of people are ill prepared to meet
the challenges of the dynamic, rapidly changing global
society we are plunging and morphing into.
Finally, I cannot help but notice that in recent years
many of the best performers in national spelling bees
have been home schooled children. The home schooled kids
often have a higher literacy level and have spelled
circles around the kids coming out of the public
schools. More and more families are
home schooling as a means to avoid sending their
children into a frankly inferior, public educational
system that is in rapid, self-evident decline. We need
to find out what is working in the home schooling
environment, and apply that all across the country; at
the same time, we need to find out what methods are not
working in the public schools, and stop using them. So
many public school systems have become nothing more than
minimum security day-prisons where small children and
adolescents are warehoused and institutionally
socialized to be meek, compliant, dependably dumb,
digitally tracked, surveilled and monitored wards and
subjects of the corporate state. In many schools there
are metal detectors at the entrances, regular locker
searches, uniformed police on duty and roaming the
hallways and play grounds, and more than a few students
are carrying guns, knives and other weapons, whether for
self-defense or to prey on others. Is it any wonder that
in such a fearful, repressive, violent environment so
little learning takes place? Is it any wonder that so
many young people come out of our harsh, prison-like
public schools deeply emotionally scarred and
academically deficient?
In the old Soviet Union, political dissidents were
singled out for coerced, involuntary psychiatric
treatment by the state, because they were considered
aberrant individuals. But the modern public school
system in this country has gone one up on the Soviets -
yep, school officials don't even let matters rise to the
level those inept, 20th Century Commies did. You see,
here in this country they spot the future difficult
cases early on, while they are still young children or
adolescents, and send them around to see the school
psychiatrist or psychologist, who can then begin the
process right away of drugging the young rebels before
they even reach the adult, political stage. Maybe you've
noticed that we've had a bunch of school shootings in
recent years, and in almost every case, the
troubled young killer was hopped up on pharmaceuticals
dispensed by the school shrinks. Oh, it's a brave new
world, yes it is, and we're raising up the new
generation the chemical medical way, the
school prison farm way, and large numbers of them
are increasingly dumb and dumber, and emotionally
wounded and they are not happy, no they're not. Can you
see the future yet? Because it's coming into focus real
fast.
To use a football metaphor, I'm strongly inclined to
call an educational huddle, as it were, with the Kanya
Vashon McGhees, Robert Monroes and Home Schoolers of
this country, tell them all to sprint for the goal line
when the ball is snapped, and then fling the ball down
field, as far as I can heave it, and let them go up and
gather it in for a winning touchdown, as time on the
game clock ticks down. That's it, that's the way I see
it, because the educational system of this country is in
a serious mess right now, and fixing it will require a
new mentality and a new approach. The old, industrial
model, of herding children and adolescents robot-like,
machine-like, into rectilinear ranks and files in
classrooms, and then funneling them down the hallways
and through the corridors from pen (classroom) to pen
(classroom) at mechanically predetermined intervals
regulated by the ear-jarring clanging of Pavlovian
bells, is not working well. It has produced a veritable
army of poorly adjusted, ill-educated individuals who
have just enough training to ask: "Want fries with
that?" and who frankly lack the preparation to do much
more.
That's the hard reality. We must do better. I hope we
can.
Family and Sexuality Policy
A Sauder administration would have decidedly different
policies on family life and sexuality than is the case
in the current political climate. To begin with, I do
not understand why a secular state fears gay marriage.
The marriage contract itself is just that - it is
fundamentally a legal contract. And the contract is
between the parties to the marriage and the state. Why
the state cares whether the parties are heterosexual or
gay or bisexual or transsexual or
intersexual (some medical authorities estimate that
perhaps one to two percent of humans are an admixture of
both male and female to some degree) or eunuchs, or even
completely genderless altogether, is beyond me.
Personally, I don't greatly care one way or the other. I
assume that most people, in the course of their life,
engage in some degree of sexual activity with others.
What exactly it is that they do, as long as all the
parties are of age and voluntarily consent, and there is
no criminal assault or coercion involved, does not
matter to me.
So I say, if gays want to marry: fine, let them. Why
should heterosexuals have all the joy of changing soiled
diapers at 3 o'clock in the morning? Why shouldn't
homosexuals and lesbians also be able to experience such
precious parental rites of passage as toilet training,
the terrible twos, or hysterical, four-year-old
screaming tantrums for a bag of lollipops in the candy
aisle of the local supermarket? Now that procreative
science has evolved and we have surrogate motherhood,
sperm donors, turkey basters and artificial
insemination, not to forget good old-fashioned adoption
of orphans - you don't have to be a fertile hetero to
have kids. In fact, if you're honest you just may have
seen, or know of, a fertile hetero or two or three who
have children, and shouldn't, because they're lousy
parents and their kids will suffer as a result. On the
other hand, if there are gay people who want to have
kids and are financially secure and stable individuals,
why shouldn't they be able to marry and raise a family?
So a Sauder administration would not stand in the way of
gay marriage. Besides, and here's the clincher, is it
not fundamentally discriminatory to exclusively restrict
the right to divorce, alimony payments and child support
to heterosexuals? Well?
Polygamy would not be a concern either, whether speaking
of polyandry or polygyny. Or a combination thereof. As I
see it, from the point of view of the secular state,
marriage is a legal contract. It's that simple. I should
think that, from the standpoint of potential billable
hours alone, divorce lawyers would have a field day with
a broken marriage involving seven or eight aggrieved
parties. As long as government is in the business of
legally licensing sexual relationships, why should the
number or gender of the parties to the marriage contract
be a particular concern?
As I understand it, one of the reasons for licensing of
marriages is for the government to have legal control of
any progeny that issue from the marriage union. By dint
of entering into a contractual relationship with the
state, i.e., the granting of the marriage license, the
government gains a legal, contractual interest in any
and all aspects of the marital relationship, which would
most especially include any children the parents produce
or legally adopt. Which is to say, the state regards
children as its property, because they are the product
of a state issued breeding/family license. Seen in this
way, it is easy to understand why for so long
fornication was a crime in so many jurisdictions (and
may still be in some places) - it was tantamount to
unlicensed breeding activity.
The state of Texas recently went into a Fundamentalist
Mormon community in west Texas and kidnapped hundreds of
children from their parents at gun point. The immediate
legal pretext on which the mass seizure of children was
done ultimately proved to be a criminal hoax, and the
informant was
apprehended in Coloradofor making a false report.
But the
entire exerciseshould be very instructive for anyone
who loves their own family, and cherishes their own
freedom, because from a policy standpoint what the State
of Texas was doing was establishing a legal precedent
for the mass round-up of a civilian population at
gunpoint. So before anyone gets too worked up, perhaps
thinking that those weirdo, fundamentalist Mormons got
exactly what they had coming to them, consider the
future policy implications of what the State social
control apparatus did. The bottom line is that the
government regards children, any children, that includes
YOUR CHILDREN, as the property of the state, and it will
seize large numbers of them en masse, at gun point,
under any (il)legal pretext, if it wants to -- because
it can! So understand that if you approve of the huge,
so-called "law enforcement" operation that went down in
West Texas earlier this year, that you will have no
grounds to complain when the cops show up in your
neighborhood, and cordon off entire blocks, and start
hauling children and parents away by the hundreds at
gunpoint, because someone called in a hoaxed, criminal
complaint. That's what's at stake here - first they come
for the so-called misfits and weirdos. Then they come
for YOU and YOUR CHILDREN, once they have established
the legal precedent. Capisce?
A Sauder administration would let the Mormons practice
polygamy, and, well, most anyone at all, if that's what
they really want to do, so long as all parties involved
were of majority age and gave their voluntary consent.
The simple fact is, with a national divorce rate
hovering in the vicinity of 50%, our conventional
marriage tradition - one man and one woman marry each
other and live happily ever after in conjugal bliss -
just isn't working out that way for an awful lot of
people. The reality is that in this society a great many
people, perhaps most people, have multiple sexual
partners over the course of their life, some of whom
they marry or are married to, and some with whom they
are not married. People may have multiple, sequential,
sexual partners, or multiple partners simultaneously,
and they and their partners may, or may not be married
to one another or to others.
Millions of couples are cohabiting; they're not
married, but they establish a household and live
together. Whether you think that that state of affairs
is right or wrong, or moral, immoral, amoral, or doesn't
matter at all one way or the other, doesn't alter the
fact that that's the way it is in this society. Sexual
activity begins for many (most?) people in their teenage
years and continues thereafter well into adulthood.
In fact, my administration would want to have a
thorough, very public national debate about what
constitutes marriage
(hetero/gay/intersex/bi/poly/whatever), and the
licensing thereof, and the implications of state
ownership of children. That's the plain fact of the
matter, isn't it? Isn't that the ultimate implication of
the current practice of tagging infants at birth with
social security numbers, like cattle getting tagged in
the ear by feedlot operators? I mean, does anyone
seriously expect that social security will still be a
viable, financially solvent government program
sixty-five, or even twenty years from now? So isn't this
business of tagging children in infancy really all about
lifelong, cradle to grave, monitoring, surveillance and
social control? In other words, isn't the social
security number really a sort of slave number, a
tracking number by which the elite controllers can
manage and manipulate the human herd? A means by which
the corporate government tags you in infancy, so they
can easily find you and single you out for special
attention, if the societal controllers feel at any time
that you are escaping their control?
And what about single people? Many millions of adults
are single. Marriage is not as common today as in the
past. Being single, and remaining single, is seen by
more and more people as a legitimate life choice. Also,
what about the many millions of single parent
households? The Ward and June Cleaver model of a nuclear
family that we know from mid-20th Century popular
culture is not nearly as accurate a reflection of
families and households as it once was. Our whole
society is in ferment and transformation, at a very
fundamental level, socially, sexually and
psychologically. The public policy implications are many
and pressing. My administration would initiate a
thoroughgoing public policy debate on these issues.
Society changes, and government must adapt to remain
relevant.
Prostitution should be decriminalized. Then we wouldn't
be subjected to sad spectacles like the one the
ex-governor of New York, Elliot Spitzer, recently
subjected himself to, in a kind of ritual, über-public,
political harikari, wherein he was forced to resign from
office in disgrace when it became public knowledge that
he had been regularly patronizing expensive prostitutes,
at one and the same time that he had been criminally
prosecuting prostitution rings with fanatical vengeance
and righteous zeal. You can't make this stuff up.
So I would take a hands off approach. If people want to
do it, as long as everyone involved is of legal age and
freely consents, and no one is criminally assaulted or
coerced, then the state has no interest in the matter.
The policy would be similar to what you see in Nevada or
Amsterdam or Germany. If you don't want to do it, then
fine, you don't have to, and no doubt, probably most
people will not want to. But if others do, equally fine,
they can. It goes without saying that where human
trafficking is concerned, or where people are forced
into prostitution against their will, then the state has
a legitimate obligation to act in favor of the victims.
I realize that many prostitutes are exploited -
unfortunately, so are many coal miners, sweat shop
workers, migrant agricultural laborers, and untold
millions of others all over the world who labor under
health and life endangering conditions. The state has a
legitimate interest in the welfare of anyone who is
laboring under exploitive conditions. The mere fact of
decriminalizing prostitution would immediately free many
prostitutes, both male and female, from jails and
prisons all over the country. It would also bring more
pimps out of the shadows and expose them to labor laws
and state regulation. Under a more equitable economic
order the only people engaging in prostitution would be
those individuals who desired to do so. Under the
current arrangement prostitutes are doubly jeopardized
by having to work in the shadows of society, which makes
them more vulnerable and more easily exploited, and also
being subject to arrest and imprisonment, adding the
burden of jail time and a rap sheet to whatever other
problems they may experience. Sexuality is one of the
most pleasurable and intimate activities that humans
engage in. Those who provide sexual pleasure to others
should not need to fear arrest and imprisonment.
The policy on pornography would be similar. It's O.K. to
graphically depict the nude human body or human sexual
activity. Or to observe the naked human body or sexual
activity. You can't go through the supermarket checkout
line without passing racks of magazines and tabloid
newspapers full of tits, ass and chiseled abs -
emblazoned with headlines about how a girl can please
her man, or how a guy can get a girl. Or which celebrity
is screwing which other(s). And so forth. We're not
living in the 1920s anymore and that's probably a good
thing.
The information at
wordcount.org is instructive. From the website:
"WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage."In other words, the website simply has done a word usage frequency count from myriad English language sources to find the most used words in the language. Of course, the small words that are the glue that hold the language together predominate, words such as: the, of, and, to, a, in, it, is, was. But having collected and listed the 86,800 most used words, the project then went a step further and provided a search feature for the most used words, called QueryCount:
"Each time someone searches a word on WordCount, QueryCount
takes note. Every few hours, QueryCount refreshes itself, rearranging
its word rankings based on the number of times each word has been
queried by WordCount."
Go ahead, take a look:
The top 25 most searched words when I looked, starting with #1, were:
sex
the
libertarian
love
shit
fuck
god
i
cunt
a
ass
penis
pussy
dog
vagina
jesus
hello
hate
john
bitch
dick
me
bush
and
you
Well. To my knowledge, Google and Yahoo have not yet divulged what words people search most often in their search engines, so this project represents the best approximation that I have seen to date of what is really going on in people's minds, when they search information on the Internet. It turns out that the inner landscape of our group (or should it be grope?) mind is preoccupied with I, me, you, love, hate, God, dog, Jesus, shit and, most of all, sex. In fact, it looks like three of George Carlin's seven words that you absolutely cannot say on television are in the top ten on the list of most searched words. To cut to the chase, my administration would have the attitude that most everyone has hormones and genitals, that sexuality is a normal, vital part of the human condition, and what goes on in the people's pants is their own business. Unless criminal assault, coercion or other criminal activity is involved, personal human sexuality per se should not be the government's business.
Maybe Dr. Susan Block should be brought in to do a whole series of HBO specials or public service announcements on the state of contemporary sexuality in the United States. And no, as with Ibogaine (see previous sections above), I really don't care much what the prim and proper religious fundamentalists and the PC thought police have to say about all of this. Chances are good anyway that a lot of them are also typing words like "sex, cunt, penis, pussy and dick" into Internet search engines, right along with "you, fuck, me, vagina, Jesus and God." Wasn't it only last year that the very married, super-Christian, Colorado mega-church Pastor, Ted Haggard, was caught out as a regular patron of a homosexual prostitute -- the same Pastor Ted who just as regularly thundered from the pulpit on Sunday morning about how homosexuals would burn in hell for their sick lifestyle? Do you really think Pastor Ted is the only one?
So, as regards homosexuality, and poor Pastor Ted, my administration would take the common sense position that a certain percentage of the population are gay. That's just the way it is. We can probably hold a nature vs. nurture debate until the end of time about the causes of homosexuality, but at the end of the day, they're queer and they're here. So I say, live and let live. I would support decriminalization of homosexuality, with the proviso that public sexual activity be proscribed for gays, just as it is for everyone else. That means that gays like Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who frequent or cruise public restrooms seeking to get or give a little manly love, must either: a) rent a room, like other normal people, or b) take the object of his man-love-desire home to his bedroom, subject to his wife's approval, presumably. Which reminds me, why does a flagrantly gay, United States Senator have a wife, anyway? Only in America, I suppose.
And finally, the abortion issue is deeply divisive and troubling. I am opposed in principle to the taking of innocent life. I am mindful that all human beings go through a fetal, developmental stage in the womb. I was once a fetus myself, and if I had have been aborted, I wouldn't be here today and you wouldn't be reading this lengthy declaration of emphatic, non-candidacy for the Presidency of the United States of America. Having said that, especially in cases of rape and incest, where criminal assault is involved, and the sexual activity was not consensual, how can a reasonable person deny the victim the right to abortion, if she desires it?
I must say that I am appalled by so called partial birth abortion, where a fetus is brought partially out of the birth canal and then its brains are sucked out, killing it. If the birth process were extended another minute or two, that same process would be premeditated murder. The whole procedure is ghastly and ghoulish. If the birth truly places the mother's life in jeopardy, and if the procedure is an urgent medical necessity, I can see the reason for the practice in those circumstances; otherwise it seems to me that it is just a sanitized method of infanticide.
Conclusion
So there you have it. Those are just some of the sorts of policies and policy proposals that will go largely, and probably almost completely undiscussed, by the candidates that the Democratic and Republican criminal political syndicates put up before the public for predetermined, rigged selection as National Dictator. You see, the present agenda of the United States government is so tangled up in social control, mind control, economic control, and incessant imperial warfare that there is just not much time, money or thought for anything or anyone else. That's the way it is. That's the American Way.
When (if?) you enter the phony-baloney, rigged, so-called voting booth (do you really think that your vote is going to be counted by that electronic voting machine?) pause a moment and remember: I am most definitely *not running* for President, and if *not elected* I will *not serve*.
So don't vote for me. So many of the voting machines are rigged that the status of the electoral process in the USA these days is a massive, criminal sham and I have absolutely no desire to preside over a massive, criminal sham.
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Contact the author at dr_samizdat@yahoo.com. If you would like to support Richard Sauder's writing and simultaneously save some money, pollute less and decrease the power of the petroleum cartel, click here and here, for innovative ways to use water for fuel in your personal car or truck.