I've been mulling over several ideas for awhile and finally decided to put them through the sausage grinder and see what comes out. First let me tell you about me. I'm a minority: a White, Male, Balding, Athiest, American, Liberal, Monogamist. Hey, given enough adjectives we're all minorities. But I assume the most important are my Athiest and Liberal lables. There's definitely not enough of our voices. There are plenty of people who want to refer to guys like me. Hannity, Limbaugh, Savage, Hume, all rail about guys like me. Guys who control the media, set the political agenda, activate the courts and sap our corporations of profits.
They've been fighting guys like me for years now. I guess it's time we started to fight back. I would say that we are fighting back, but again this minority thing rears it's head. I can't get my agenda through. Franken, Moore, Dean and Kerry are all liberals, but they shy away from the Athiest thing and they don't want to really tackle the important contrasts to the Republicans.
Here are the top three things on my agenda. I think these things would improve America
- Convert to the Metric System
- Free Electorial Television Commericals
- Corporations may not lobby Congress
The first is the most obvious and would get the ball rolling. The
ENTIRE world is on the Metric system! Only one nation is not on the Metric system other than the United States: Myanmar! That's right Burma, the tiniest tip of the Asian continent. How fundamental is weights and measures to commerce? How important is it for scientific exchange? How fundamental is it to the rest of the world? American weights and measures are archaic, hard to use and scientifically unsound. Take Fahrenheit. A scale that was designed to measure the "average" human body temperature. A pretty inconsistent constant to measure on. People are all different temperatures, blacks, whites, asians, women, men, all have differing "normal" body temperatures. Now Celsius? It's based on the freezing and boiling of water! How solid is that? Pretty standard stuff! It's not too hard to figure out what zero degrees celsius is?
The second is free electoral commericals on television. Only the public airwaves, NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX would have to give free airtime to political commericals. Only during the month of October. Full blocks given over to each party and to local candidates. These are publicly owned airwaves! We lease them to the corporations who make money off them. The least they could do is to improve our democracy. Full 3 minute commericals about the issues! Attack if you want, but don't forget that your opponent has 3 minutes to respond. All free, the money issues would be lessened considerably.
The third is one dear to my heart. America is a country by the people, for the corporations. Corporations have the time, money and interest to lobby congress. Congress responds by giving away our money, land, and lives to them. Corporations are, by definiton, not a person. They exist outside the "people" of "We the people!" And yet, they get all the favors, all the perks, and get away with the most obscene miscarriages of the people's trust. Use only the example of Haliburton, the corporation once headed by the Vice-President. Here is a corporation that gets a no-bid contract to support our troops in Iraq and yet sets up offshore corporations to avoid paying American taxes on the money we pay them. Here is a corporation who cannot account for 1 billion dollars of Iraq war money. They actively frauded the American people out of 500 million in overcharges. It flouts American "no business with rogue nations" clauses by setting up offshore corporations to do business with terrorist supporting countries. I think that corporations guilty of these charges should have their boards of directors brought up on treason charges. I think their citizenship should be revoked. Just the citizenship. That's all. They no longer carry an American passport, they no longer get the protections. They can keep their money, their perks, their golden parachute. But they cannot vote, lobby congress or be protected by our laws.
That's the first three sausages. Not too bad! Pretty spicy! I'll have more, when the grinder spins up again. I'll be sure to hook it up here again. Please read and comment. Tell me why I'm wrong, why these ideas wouldn't work.
