politics

Calling All Hands! Policy change can make life better.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Ever since the Great Recession, there has been struggle in America.

The Federal Reserve instituted policies that made life harder for most of us.

Many people have struggled even to maintain some sort of sanity in their life because of successive job losses during hostile takeovers. Others have struggled on the job front as some businesses closed their doors. Some have struggled to survive and thrive after the Covid Caper, facing challenges from an experimental vaccine requirement either as a recipient with side effects, a griever at the loss of a friend or a family member or a person fired for refusing the covid shot.

As real estate prices have soared, often up 33% from one year to the next, many have struggled to pay their property taxes or have lost their home. Grocery prices have inflated to the point that people have had to resort to skipped meals or the use of money-saver recipes, a strategy that will only temporarily lower the cost of food preparation in inflationary times.

Why call on All Hands to struggle more? Why? Because that’s how life will get better.

Return to sanity…Things to avoid doing: I hope for these things…

No more woke strategies in public schools. No more transgender education in schools. Reduced administrator salaries in schools to bring them in line with teacher salaries. Fewer administrators.

No more deregulated banking without Glass Steagall and with Holding Companies as a trap door to escape fiduciary duty. No more Too Big to Fail Banking (reduce the size of large banks). No more derivatives trading.

No more deregulated communications where Fake News is normal. If a falsehood is published, a retraction and a potential fine. No more censorship or propaganda.

No more regulatory mayhem in transportation with regulations requiring a new kind of car that costs more than people can afford. No more inflating car insurance costs.

No more regulatory quibbling about using natural gas energy to heat homes or cook with.

No more monopoly influence in the U.S. medical, pharmacy, education, banking.

No more woke military.

No more climate change dogma.

No more bribes in Congress to help foreign nations to get the deals that undermine American interests.

No more digital currencies that threaten cash as legal tender.

End unfunded mandates of all kinds. That would get rid of a lot of legislation that requires people to do things that they can’t really afford to do.

No more interventionist Congressional policies to pick economic winners and losers.

End and repeal all previous legislation that exceeds 100 pages. Future legislation will never exceed 20 pages. No more Think Tank legislation. Congress has to write the legislation and each Congress person who sponsors legislation has to justify it based on their constituency.

No more off-shoring tax advantages that lead corporations to invest in foreign rather than domestic labor, causing unemployment at home.

No more federal subsidy for Universities. Allow students to use a new low cost online training system that allows a person to prove competency by passing a basic test that proves mastery. No more tuition. Universities have failed America.

Instead we need so many things that require an All Hands effort:

We need new businesses. There should be a tax moratorium on new businesses with stepped gradual taxation of new businesses after 5 years. This allows new business to form because of new tax free advantages for small business.

Also, new businesses need an end to all regulatory renovation requirements for newly purchased or leased business buildings for the first 5 years of operation. Leaving in place only basic safety requirements, new businesses should not be required to meet a city’s latest huge expense requirement for new plumbing and wiring and many other details that really is all about graft.

Homes should cost what people can afford and therefore, there should be an end of monopoly price interference in real estate; investor ownership of American homes should end.

The wheels of government can do more good if We the People can draft and pass a a new Constitutional Amendment to further limit Congressional power with term limits.

We need less warfare and in that interest I suggest that we should reduce the budget of the Pentagon and DOD and require a yearly audit with no new funds until the audit is completed. We should close foreign military bases. We should bring our soldiers, sailors and airmen home.

We the People need to draft and institute a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Congress should forego any salary payment until a balanced budget is submitted for the coming year.

We the People should put an end to all previous emergency powers. Emergency powers just call for disaster capitalism. Future emergencies without special powers will never last more than one year: no matter what the circumstances, emergencies must end.

People who commit crimes against government while holding government office must be kicked out of office and brought to justice. Their monies if obtained through crime should be seized and doled out to their victims.

We should end vaccine requirements. Vaccines have proven harmful. A new study of vaccines may be in order since the CDC just admitted that vaccines haven’t been properly studied but the CDC shouldn’t do it. Instead of mandating vaccines, we should make sure that they are available if they are safe but there should be no more vaccine requirements.

We the People should end electronic voting. We should also end mail-in voting since it has led to voting fraud. We should make sure voting reflects the public’s votes.

Americans need better than what we have. Neoliberalism has led to an overgrowth of malignant organizational politics and that has harmed individuals. We the people are not grist for the neoliberal mill. We have a dysfunctional unaccountable government. We have banking that’s been subsidized for failures. We have untrustworthy media and censorship. We have overregulation and a broken justice system.

We would all like to see a healthier America that’s prosperous and sensible. Reining in the worst abuses caused by deregulation in the areas of finance, energy, communications and transportation would be a start. That deregulation happened in the 1980’s and 1990’s and it was followed by reregulation in favor of corporate interests. Changing that set of policies would go a long way to improve American prosperity. Stop hurting the little guy and allow willing hands to improve our nation’s economic performance by reregulating towards balanced economic protections that also prevent largescale malinvestments.

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Reaching for limitless power leads to having less.

~ fastcaranalysis ~ Leave a comment

Julian Assange has been persecuted by people who imagine that they have infinite power because of the “War on Terror.” Remember the War on Terror. Remember rendition and torture. People prosecuting the War on Terror wanted no limits to what they could do. And still the pursuit of limitless power under the terror watchword continues.

No one seems to be making these power players stay within the bounds of their alotted power as set out by law and no one seems to be making them do their job the way it’s supposed to be done. “Make me.” “Stop me.” And if you can’t make the government do or not do and you can’t stop the government from doing something that is diplomatically and legally wrong then some would think that means the power players have infinite power. That isn’t what it means. Check it out. The United States power gang running the government in Washington has less power now than ever. Less power? How?

When the U.S. federal government decided to use drones to assassinate perceived political threats, that decision undermined the Rules of Diplomacy. The Rules of Diplomacy were developed and modeled on Italian City State policies that enhanced trade. One significant outcome of the application of the Rules of Diplomacy is that during the American Civil War, European powers refused a request by the South to assassinate Northern diplomats visiting Europe. Europe refused to kill those men visiting Europe because of the Rules of Diplomacy. And the Civil War happened which killed a lot of Americans and not any Europeans.

The Rules of Diplomacy evolved after The Peace Treaty of Westphalia that happened in 1648 to stop the Thirty Years War that killed 8 million Europeans. The astonishing amount of death that occurred during the Thirty Years War happened because people fought against a ruling class that wanted to have uniform religious beliefs among its population. If your King adopted a new or old religion, you were supposed to conform to it. Conquered people likewise should adopt the conquerer’s religion. Europeans fought against this notion and after a lot of death and a lot of missed opportunity for better life outcomes, the Peace of Westphalia stopped the fighting and accepted the idea that people can choose for themselves what they want to believe in.

As I watch politicians throwing away the Rules of Diplomacy by shooting down perceived political opponents in far away places with drones, I begin to understand the necessity of those rules. I predict that eventually, if assassination by drone continues, a new technology will come along that will be more portable, accessible and deadly. And without the Rules of Diplomacy, this technology will be used to assassinate many in the political arena. Bang, no more diplomacy. It is a bad and foolish move to throw away the Rules of Diplomacy. How will you conduct peace when all your diplomats are dead or becoming a diplomat is just a death sentence?

Likewise, the use of Social Media to influence and even brain-wash people under the mistaken belief that censorship is a social good and it would be better if people believed the same narratives, however false they may be or become is foolish. Eight million Europeans died to end that the last time it was tried. I am amazed to see anyone try to make everyone think alike now in the twenty first century. If the twentieth century was the Century of War Hubris, the twenty first century may be the Century of the Fool.

As we measure the strength of the United States, I am sorry to say that we have weakened under the War on Terror. We have lost resolve. We aren’t resolved to do anything prosperous. American cities are deteriorating. We aren’t resolved to be a force of good in world affairs. No one trusts the Dog King in Washington. We aren’t resolved to protect children or help them to meet their potential as human beings. And in this way we abandon a brighter future. We aren’t following or listening for what is Sacred in this life. Global Warming fears and protecting Gaia aren’t the Sacred. Fear of death by disease or starvation isn’t the Sacred. There isn’t a single social good that is being protected. Wanton greed has replaced those things that were more powerful and more important. Ego based power and ego based greed can’t help a nation to prosper. It just has no power to do so.

Narratives explaining our Fall from Grace imply that Communists are trying to take over the country. Limitless power is what Communists seek, therefore it must be Communists changing the country in order to take whatever they can and destroy whatever was best. Weaponizing the law in lawfare contests is part of centralization, communism, fascism, totalitarianism and it doesn’t grow power. It just destroys. That’s all it can do.

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So welcome to the Century of the Fool. We can change back to wiser ways and now it’s clear that we should do so. Why wait? Free Julian Assange. Stop the War on Terror.