BRATTLEBORO — While grateful that the rancorous presidential and vice-presidential debates are finally over and an election has been held, I find myself profoundly frightened and frustrated. Eight years of the Bush Administration have done catastrophic damage to our Constitution, economy, environment, health care, education, and our standing with the rest of the world.
As a matter of fact, it would appear that we in the United States no longer have a democracy - a government of, by, and for the people, as President Lincoln put it at Gettysburg. Instead, we have a plutocracy, a corporatocracy, a government by corporate rule.
The wealth of the richest Americans has been growing dramatically, while the poor and middle classes have been losing ground. Not coincidentally, in Washington, D.C., 65 corporate lobbyists dog the heels of every legislator, drowning out the calls and emails from individual constituents. In some cases, lobbyists actually write legislation. That is decidedly not democracy.
One would think that the presidential debates would have addressed these and other critical issues. But they didn't. The Democratic National Convention Commission drafted a 51-page platform called “Renewing America's Promise.” The Republicans had a similar document. They were never mentioned in the debates, as far as I can recall.
It turns out that the debates are controlled by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which decrees who will participate, who will ask questions, what questions will be asked, and what issues will be addressed.
Third-party candidates like Cynthia McKinney (on the ballot in 30 states) and Ralph Nader (on the ballot in about 45 states) were banned from the debates. Too bad, because I'm sure they have important things to say - maybe things that can help us out of the mess we're in. Why sabotage the electoral process by excluding them? Why are the presidential debates little more than the exchange of memorized soundbites?
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Please allow me, Mr. President-Elect, to raise some issues that the debates didn't deal with, and make some recommendations for your time in office:
• First and foremost, reinstate the Constitution. Your oath of office requires you to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution of the United States. By one account, your predecessor once referred to it as nothing but a “goddamned piece of paper.”
• Restore the proper functions and autonomy of the three branches of government.
• Do away with Presidential signing statements. When Congress passes a bill, honor it. The people (and hopefully not the corporations) have spoken.
• Banish the hideously flawed notion of the “unitary President” who is above the law. No one is above the law. Review all the G. W. Bush executive orders and, as soon as you can, eliminate all that trample on the rights of a “free” people, especially any that facilitate the preemptive declaration of martial law or the assassination of anyone, anywhere, on the President's orders.
• Clean up the voting process. Make sure that everyone gets the chance to vote. Eliminate all the schemes currently in use to disenfranchise voters. Ban electronic voting machines that can be programmed to favor one candidate over another without a paper trail.
• Limit corporate influence on the election process or forbid it altogether. Whatever became of the idea to ban corporate money from politics?
• Shorten the length of political campaigns. Stop the attack ads and the lies. They are truly a malignancy on the national psyche.
• Re-regulate the banking industry. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco (after the savings and loan fiasco and the Enron fiasco) never should have happened. The self-serving theory of “trickle-down” economics, the underlying distain for government, the greed and corruption have served to threaten not only the U.S. economy, but all the world's economies.
• Stop the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. They have cost too much in lost and broken lives and in money. They have not made us safer. Only the private military contractors like Halliburton have benefitted. If you haven't seen the Winter Soldier testimony, you owe it to yourself and the country to do so.
• Renounce the “War on Terror.” There are many more terrorists now than there were before this “war” started. Indeed, the illegal invasion of Iraq has made the whole world far more dangerous. It has given license to any number of ruthless leaders to launch similar debacles.
• Stop warrantless spying on Americans. Stop being the world's #1 arms exporter. How can we proclaim Peace! Justice! Democracy! while arming the world to the teeth thus enabling the warlike, the unjust, and the tyrants to prevail?
• Instead of bombing wedding parties, build schools, dig wells, provide health care, micro-lend on a global scale, and cooperate with the hundreds of thousands of nongovernmental organizations working around the world to foster peace, safe energy, health, and education.
• Stop torturing people. Shut down Guantanamo. (Other bad examples for the rest of the world.)
• Make it a top priority to stop the violence that is so pervasive on all levels of our society. Violent television, movies, and video games condition us to engage in violent acts. Consider our general lack of civility, our negative campaigning, our road rage, our willingness to blindly join the armed forces and kill those who we're told want to do us harm and video-tape our exploits for the consumption of patriots back home.
• Insist that the teaching of U.S. history include a true accounting of our country's perverse doctrine of “manifest destiny,” the genocide of native Americans, the slave trade and race discrimination, the denial of voting rights to women for such a long time, the interference with duly elected leaders around the world, the slaughtering of innocent people, and all the wars of conquest we've waged to secure the resources of other countries for our own selfish wants. (It turns out that Iraq was about the oil.) And we are told that our way of life “is not negotiable.”
• Curb the Pentagon. Renounce the U.S. Empire. For what good reason do we have 2.5 million military personnel staffing 737 U.S. military bases around the world? At the height of the Roman Empire in 117 A.D., just 37 major bases were required to police the realm.
The $488 billion going to the Pentagon, plus many more billions in supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be better spent meeting urgent needs such as hurricane relief; highway and bridge repair; developing clean, safe, renewable energy; salvaging the disintegrating economy; and providing humanitarian aid worldwide.
• And report back to us about why we still have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at Russia. This is insane and clearly puts all of humanity at risk. And lest we forget, the only country to drop nuclear bombs on a civilian population was the United States, the champion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• Stop the use of depleted uranium (DU), a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process. Weaponized DU is a WMD that is illegal and genocidal. It has a half life of 4.5 billion years. We have exploded thousands of tons of it in the Gulf war, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and again in Iraq.
The dust that results is chemically toxic and radioactive. It cannot be cleaned up. Circulated by the winds, it is slowly contaminating the planet. Any living thing is vulnerable to harm. Some U.S. veterans of the above conflicts are now having deformed children. And the suffering of people in these war zones from deformities and cancer and mental anguish is horrific.
• Establish a Department of Peace as Congressman Dennis Kucinich has long advocated. Cooperate with, and stop thwarting, the United Nations. The foremost longing in every human heart is to live in peace.
• Understand that we do not own the world. We are brothers and sisters to all the world's peoples. “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves,” according to a quote long attributed to Chief Seattle. It is unconscionable for the U.S., with 5 percent of the planet's population, to use 25 percent of its resources and produce 25 percent of its pollution. We must respect all other parts of the web.
• Establish a program of quality health care for all. Make it a right for everyone, not a privilege available only to the wealthy. And why not work to make it truly universal? Billions of humans around the world deserve to live healthy and productive lives. If you haven't seen Michael Moore's film Sicko about the U.S. health-care nightmare, I urge you to.
• Do everything in your power to get this country mobilized to combat global warming. Even the Pentagon has called global warming a greater threat to the world than terrorism. Join the rest of the world in bringing atmospheric carbon dioxide back under 350 ppm, the level necessary to avoid a catastrophic tipping point. The level now is 387 ppm, the highest it's been for at least 650,000 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. There isn't much time left to do this.
• Remove corporate control of the news media so that people can truly know what's going on in their world without the filter of corporate self-interest.
• Increase the minimum wage to make it a liveable wage. And mandate equal pay for equal work.
• Legislate a cap on CEO salaries. What CEO is worth 411 times the amount paid to his or her lowest-paid employee?
• Curb the salaries of hedge-fund managers. It is obscene that the top 50 “earned” an average $558 million in 2007, yet paid a lower tax rate than the middle class.
• Lobby for additional vacation time and a shorter work week so that people can spend more time with their families and communities. Make Election Day a national holiday so that more people can more readily vote.
• Reinstate the League of Women Voters as the official overseers of national elections.
• Insist that corporations pay their taxes. More than half do not. Stop them from setting up post-office-box headquarters in places like the Cayman Islands.
• Stop the hemorrhaging of jobs to overseas countries with cheap labor that leaves mostly service jobs for us folks back home.
• Limit the number of lobbyists stalking the halls of Congress. They pose a threat to democracy.
• Make the chemical industry responsible to pay for the environmental and human health devastation it is causing. The use of 80,000 different chemicals, most of them untested for safety and health, is intolerable. Effects on infants and young children are largely ignored, yet they are the most vulnerable. No parent should tolerate this.
• Employ the Precautionary Principle to halt further development of transgenetically modified organisms. Lesson from nature: the tomato evolved over thousands of years, and nature never found it necessary to include flounder genes in the equation. Insist upon labeling foods containing GMOs that are already on the shelves so that citizens have a choice between purchasing them or not.
• Don't imprison people convicted of minor drug offenses. We incarcerate a higher percentage of our citizens than any “civilized” country in the world, probably as an accommodation to the privatized prison industry. A high percentage of these inmates are minor drug offenders.
• Stop regarding corporations as “people.” Bring us back to the time when corporations were licensed to perform particular functions for society and had their licenses revoked as soon as they didn't do that. When the bottom line is strictly profit, our safety and health and well-being are sacrificed to greed.
• Declare forthwith an end to nuclear energy. Exercise the Precautionary Principle again. Regardless of how safely nuclear plants are operated, there remains the matter of the highly radioactive waste that will be with us for 250,000 years, and future generations (40,000 of them) will have to pay the price.
By the way, Greenpeace has a calendar showing some nuclear mishap at some nuclear plant somewhere in the world for every single day of the year. Nukes are not as safe as the industry would like you to believe. There are lots of safe, renewable, sustainable forms of energy that we can employ right now that don't require evacuation plans or run the risk of incurring many billions of dollars in damage to people and the environment.
• Revitalize our educational system. We should not be training human beings to be good consumers but enabling them to reach their full potential as unique individuals
• Re-do the 9/11 investigation, and this time include the collapse of World Trade Center Tower #7. Respect the millions of Americans who are not satisfied with the original report. Recall that the neoconservative Project for the New American Century stated that what would be needed to launch its program was something like a “new Pearl Harbor.” Voila!
• And stifle the rhetoric about the United States being the greatest country the planet has ever known and God's gift to the human race, with the greatest educational system, the greatest health-care system, the most productive workers, the most innovative scientists. All this rhetoric is simply a myth.
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Maybe, Mr. President-Elect, if you pay attention to the people and get corporate America to back off, you can be instrumental in steering our ship of state back on course, and this nation can truly exemplify the change that the people of all nations, and all cultures, and all races want for their world.