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Edited on Thu Feb-19-09 01:18 AM by ddeclue
Article I Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; - The United States Constitution
President Obama is about to give his very first State of the Union Address in just a few days.
These are perhaps dark days yet they are not the darkest in the history of our Union.
We should remember that there have certainly been darker more dangerous times than today - the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950's and 1960's, and the Vietnam War.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's advice to the nation upon taking office in March of 1933, "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" is prescient advice for today also - his list of problems faced in 1933 sound very familiar to our ears today as well.
Yet this crisis has offered us a once in a generation opportunity as well.
We as a nation often fail to see our errors and fail to correct them until we have been forced to do so.
This economic crisis has forced a day of reckoning upon us not seen for many years and forced us to confront our failures.
We for many years have failed to recognize that we are ALL Americans together and that we should all have a decent opportunity at the American Dream. It is not a privilege that should be reserved to the wealthy, the powerful, and the elite.
Much of the policy of the last 28 years has been wrong headed in our cuts to the social safety net and helping the rich to get richer by helping the poor to get poorer. Instead of offering people a ladder and a helping hand up those in charge have more often than not stood at the top of the wall pushing ladders away and dropping boiling oil on those who would dare try to climb to the top.
If I were writing President Obama's State of the Union Address, I would ask him to recommend to the Congress' consideration the following necessary and expedient measures:
1) Immediate or near immediate withdrawal from Iraq. We can no longer afford to borrow and spend 12 billion dollars a month on an optional war and a non-optional war. We can't afford this luxury and should confine our efforts to finding and destroying al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
2) Ending the Bush tax cut on the wealthy immediately. We must spend our way out of this recession but we shouldn't borrow ourselves into eternal poverty just to keep the ultra wealthy from paying a few percent more in taxes. They've benefited far more than the rest of society in the last 28 years - they should shoulder a higher percentage of the burden.
3) Investment in national infrastructure. We need to spend more on roads, bridges, highways, schools and other public works. We've seen the failure of the levies in New Orleans and the failure of the bridge in Minneapolis. These failures are what happens when we try to save a few pennies and we end up spending much more to fix it after the fact.
4) Investment in national emergency preparedness.
We need to spend more to train ordinary people on how to be ready and what to do in the event of a national emergency or a local one or even a personal one. We need to be training our citizens in CPR, using AED's, basic first aid and how to survive events like a hurricane or an earthquake. Instead of scaring people with latest color coded fear alert, we need to be empowering them to act by teaching the necessary skills.
We need to make sure we are truly ready to handle multiple simultaneous events like an earthquake and a hurricane or midwest tornado outbreak or two simultaneous hurricanes or a volcanic eruption and a 9/11 like scenario.
Empowering people to take care of themselves and their neighbors by teaching them the necessary skills is grassroots democratic (small d) government at its finest and it is in the national interest to emphasize this idea and work towards everyone being empowered, educated and involved to handle emergency situations.
5) Investment in free lifetime education for all Americans.
Money should not be a barrier to anyone obtaining additional education at any point in their lives.
Education needs to stop being viewed as a commodity which an individual citizen must purchase at great expense and instead needs to start being treated as a national investment in a national asset.
We the People are our nation's greatest asset and the government should invest in us not merely for our own benefit but rather for the national benefit. People should be able to learn at any age and receive college credit for that learning that will translate into better jobs and a better equipped more flexible workforce.
The government can help do its part by helping to bring high speed fiber optic class internet to every household and business in America to allow for better distance learning / internet based learning programs. It can also help by subsidizing distance learning and internet based learning programs and/or conducting them directly as a way of driving down education prices.
It's a shame that I have to have satellite TV with several hundred channels just to get a few pseudo educational ones while our airwaves are filled with such junk as "American Idol" and "the View". Why not really fund PBS to have numerous channels intended for a large number of actual college level educational courses that can be applied to a degree program?
The government ought to also offer grants to pay for the college education or vocational training for any person who wants to further that education regardless of what education they might already possess and regardless of their age.
The government ought to also help out with grants for those interested in learning skills that are particularly useful to it like training aviators, amateur radio operators, high demand foreign languages (Arabic, Farsi, Pashtu. Russian, Chinese, Korean), etc.
6) Changes to credit card loans to limit interest rates to prime plus 5% and penalties and changes to make bankruptcy conditions more fair to the borrower especially during times of unemployment.
7) Changes to protect homeowners from unscrupulous banks to end the practice of adjustable rate mortgages and balloon payments and to give homeowners a breathing period of three months out of every five years for periods of unemployment, illness or other crisis where they could skip payments if necessary without foreclosure or penalty.
8) Changes to break up large corporations and banks which present a dramatic risk to the national economy if they fail. Too large to fail equals too large to exist.
9) Changes to insure transparency of investments and accountability to investors. There should be limitations on how complicated an investment vehicle should be allowed to be. It should be comprehensible without a Ph.D. in statistical analysis and all the information should be available to the investor and should be audited by the government, not an accounting firm that has been co-opted by the investment house. There should NOT be two classes of investor in this country, the elite with the inside knowledge and then the rest of us.
10) Changes towards greater regulation of business and banks to curb their power over citizens, taxpayers, labor, consumers and the government. It's time to put an end to the Gordon Gecko mentality in those at the top in this country.
11) A renewed emphasis on national service and international service through a dramatically expanded Peace Corps and Americorps. Americans need to get a broader perspective of the world outside of their own family, friends and neighbors. The world needs to see America as a friend in need, not a bully or a renegade.
Kennedy's Peace Corps did much to promote goodwill towards Americans around the world and has paid dividends in what it taught those Americans that dared to venture out as America's ambassadors for peace around the planet. We spend nearly $150 BILLION a year on the Navy and Marine Corps. We don't even spend 1 BILLION a year on the Peace Corps. We could increase the Peace Corps budget by 1000% and it would barely even be noticed in the defense budget but it would more than pay for itself in terms of the international good will it would buy.
12) An immediate end to torture, warrantless wiretaps, and indefinite detentions. An apology to the world. An immediate recessitation of the Writ of Habeas Corpus. An immediate end to the unconstitutional "PATRIOT" Act.
A Federal investigation and prosecution of anyone who has violated the law or the Constitution in the last 8 years. It is time to return our Constitution and hold those who abused it accountable for their actions.
13) An immediate return of transparency and accountability to government. Freedom of Information Act requests should be honored. Everything in the universe needs to stop being "classified' to keep it out of the hands of the press and to keep the public from holding the government accountable. A concerted honest effort needs to be made to declassify as much as possible that has been inappropriately "classified" during the last eight years.
14) An immediate end to the use of "no bid" and "cost plus" contracting must be made. This has caused the Federal spending to balloon in the last eight years. Government contractors must bid competitively in fixed cost contracts without favoritism. The Government must once again become careful stewards of the taxpayer's dollar.
15) An immediate establishment of a consistent foreign policy based on universal human rights, democracy, freedom of speech and religion, and non-discrimination based on sex, religion, race, and nationality. We need to stop coddling dictators because they are the "enemy of our enemy".
We need to stop having a schizophrenic policy when it comes to China and Vietnam vs. Cuba and North Korea. If Cuba and North Korea are "dangerous" communist dictatorships then why do we trade with China and Vietnam? We need to hold China and Vietnam far more accountable for human rights, worker's rights, safety laws, environmental laws, democracy, and freedom of speech and religion. We should not be arming them with manufacturing capacity and technology which will some day be used against us if they in turn are not actually going to change their systems and join the West in the one way that really matters - democracy.
16) Investment in a single payer universal health care system.
The government needs to take this albatross off the necks of employers - no other Western industrialized nation makes employers or employees pay for health care - why does the United States?
Do we not proclaim the "right to life" in the Declaration of Independence as a natural right of all men?
Is it not wrong then to translate it into a commodity to be sold only to those who can afford it?
Health care costs are breaking this nation's finances and need to be brought into line. Universal health care through single payer is the best way to insure that we gain some control over the problem.
17) Investment in healthy lifestyle, not merely health care.
The President needs to champion living a healthy lifestyle not merely universal health care.
This means making exercise and diet high priority messages from the Presidential pulpit - not just for kids but for all Americans.
It means speaking out on the health benefits of quitting smoking, quitting drugs (both prescription and illegal), and drinking only in moderation.
18) Investment in training a large number of additional doctors, nurses, physician's assistants, EMT's and other medical personnel and investment in furthering the training and advancement of medical personnel in particular. If there were more doctors and more P.A's that were available then it would stand to reason that a doctor's visit would cost less through simple supply and demand economics.
19) Investment in alternative energy development - not just research. Wind and solar power ought to be either built by the government or highly subsidized to encourage it. Every roof in America ought to have several kilowatts of solar cell capacity on it at a minimum.
Not only would this lessen our dependence on foreign oil and natural gas and reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, it would also distribute our power generation across a very large number of generating nodes dramatically reducing the risk in the event of a natural disaster or a terrorist action or a man-made failure taking out a major power plant or distribution grid.
20) Investment in electric rechargeable car production - not just research. The government should pay to replace its fleet of internal combustion vehicles with purely electric rechargeable vehicles as well as methanol fuel cell/rechargeable vehicles. If the government makes a large purchase then the manufacturers will have more incentive and feel less risk in making the switchover.
21) Investment in additional nuclear power. I'm sure that I'm off the "Democratic Reservation" with this one but face it folks - nuclear power puts off zero CO2 and far less radiation than existing coal plants do every day in normal operation.
There is no such thing as "clean coal" and we just need to move past that marketing campaign nonsense. Some day we may be able to generate all we need from solar and wind but if we really intend to go "100% electric" for houses, cars and trains, then we will require a great deal more generating capacity than we have now and if we really want to retire all the coal and natural gas fired generating plants that creates an even larger gap to fill.
We will need to invest in parallel in alternative energy AND at least in the short to mid term in nuclear power if we really want to end global warming and end our dependence on fossil fuels.
We should look forward to the day when only aircraft need to burn fossil fuels.
22) Investment in basic scientific research in all disciplines. Let's face it, corporate America will NOT invest in any innovation it isn't forced to invest in. It would rather market its way out of a box than invent its way out of that box. The greatest advancements in technology in the last 100 years have all been as the result of government subsidized research during war time, during the Cold War, or in the Space Race.
We have not really invested in technology in a major way since the Apollo program of the 1960's. That program did more to advance our quality of life in ten years than would have happened in thirty otherwise.
23) Investment in a much larger space program - This is one way to really push the limits of technology that has been proven to work. NASA's budget has been stuck around $15 BILLION annually for quite a long time - this is about one third of what it was in the heyday of Apollo, yet we've got 700 billion to bail out corrupt bankers on Wall Street whose greatest innovation is slicing and dicing processing loans into investment instruments that have more in common with a hot dog (processed meat product) than a solid investment in America.
Instead of $15 billion a year, let's spend $30 billion - if we got out of the war in Iraq, we could more than justify this.
Instead of canning the Shuttle to build the Ares we should keep the Shuttle, build the Ares and then build Shuttle 2.0 to replace Shuttle 1.0
Shuttle 2.0 should be a single stage to orbit fully reusable launch system that can be flown back to a runway landing with a much more robust structure built of titanium and inconel instead of aluminum as in Shuttle 1.0 - and THEN surround THAT with thermal tiles and RCC.
And yes let's finish the ISS and man it with a full staff and do some interesting research.
While we are at it, let's work on a joint mission with China to the international space station. They want to become a space power and we ought to show magnanimity towards them along with the Russians in helping them along the path that we pioneered in the 1960's. Part of our price in this should be an opening of China to Western ideals of democracy and free speech however.
We should also work on sending more visitors to the ISS from around the world and particularly from the developing world - our space program is our single most under-utilized tool of diplomacy in teaching the world that Americans are not bad people and that America doesn't have bad intentions.
Let's go back to the moon too and build a permanent base there. If we can start using the moon as a source of materials for space missions, we can put a lot more up into space from there than we can from Earth.
And finally let's go to Mars as well. This will really serve to push the limits of our technology and more importantly will give us an even greater perspective on just how small and isolated our world really is and how important it is to take care of it.
Doug D.
Orlando, FL
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