Born in San Francisco and now
living in Ukiah, Mendocino county. B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E.
degrees from San Jose State. I believe in the scientific
method (Wiki)
and score at the bottom of the Authoritarian scale (on line book:
The Authoritarians by Bob Alteyemer). The idea of an
authoritarian follower is closely related to the Milgram
Experiment (Wiki)
which demonstrates that some people will follow a leader that
they view as an authority to the point of commiting
murder. Also Erich Fromm books: Escape From Freedom
(US), or The Fear of
Freedom (UK) (Wiki),
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness(1973) ISBN 978-0805016048.
Books on U.S. politics and authoritarian behaviour are: Conservatives
Without Conscience, ISBN-13:
978-0670037742, 2006, by John Dean Republican Gomorrah: Inside
the Movement that Shattered the Party, ISBN-10:
1568584172, 2010, by Max Blumenthal
Personal Freedoms
The Bill of Rights needs to be restored (Bill of Rights Defense Committee).
In addition to ending the “War on Drugs” (Wiki) , the
“Tough on Crime” (Google)
laws need to be repealed. There are a lot of people in
prision that do not belong there (Wiki).
These laws were enacted in the 1980s to curb the crime wave, but
did not work (Wiki: Freakonomics).
The justice system needs to be restored so that everyone is equal
under the law. The book
With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to
Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald (MacMillian)
makes the case that not only are the elite immune from
prosecution, but the rest of society is over prosecuted, hence the
high prison population (Wiki).
Equality under the law is the foundation of the U.S. Constitution
and without it the whole legal system is defective.
Corporations, churches and governments are not people (MoveToAmend). This goes
way beyond the Citizens United (Wiki)
Supreme Court case, for example corporations have the right to lie
if they are people (Wiki: Nike
v. Kasky).
The current federal government policy encourages whistle blowers (Wiki)
yet they are treated as criminals.
Checks and Balances
The checks and balances that used to regulate government
and business need to be restored. For example there was a
financial crises surrounding The Great Depression (Wiki).
At that time a lot of effort was put into trying to prevent it
from happening again. As a result The Banking Act of 1933
(Wiki: Glass–Steagall
Act) was passed. But it was dismantled by the
Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of
1980 (Wiki)
and The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (Wiki).
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of
2010 (Wiki)
not only does not restore the checks and balances it goes more
toward making the problem worse by allowing the Security Exchange
Commission (Wiki: failures)
to avoid Freedom Of Information Act (Wiki)
requests for documents (Wiki: Title
IX, Subtitle B, Section 929).
The regulatory commissions need to stop protecting and get back to
regulating (Wiki: Regulatory
capture). The root of the problem is the Revolving
Door between government and industry and the military (Wiki).
Note the Revolving Door operates in all branches of the government
and at all levels. Openness (Wiki)
and transparency needs to be brought back.
Money
The U.S. spends more than twice as
much for war each year as (China + UK + France + Russia + Japan +
Germany) combined (Wiki: defense
spending). Maintaining foreign bases is very expensive
both in terms of money and good will (Wiki)
and most of them should be closed. This is a huge waste of
our money that could be spent improving the lives of
citizens.
The tax rate for the wealthiest needs to be raised to 50%.
Adam Smith (Wiki)
was wrong about free market economics (Wiki) as
demonstrated by John Nash (Wiki).
The movie A Beautiful Mind
(Internet Movie
Data Base) describes his idea in the bar scene.
Government control of things like single-payer health care (Wiki)
and the Post Office is more cost effective than privatization
(Wiki: Privatizing
profits and socializing losses). Capitalism works when
there’s a true competitive market and the checks and balances are
in place, it's not good when applied to a monopoly.
The monetary system (Wiki: Fractional
Reserve Banking) requires an ever growing economy to
work. That's not a sustainable idea so we need a new
monetary system that is sustainable.
Sustainability
Policies based on the idea of perpetual growth need to be
changed. Some products should be labeled with their mean
time between failures (Wiki: MTBF) to encourage
longevity. For example when shopping for a car you could
choose between a one that will last for 7 years or one that only
will last for 3 years. A related idea is mean time to repair
(Wiki).
Many products are designed to be thrown away rather than be
repaired. Labeling with MTTF and MTTR would allow consumers
to better understand what they are getting.
The Press and Issues
In the video Constructing Public Opinion: How
Politicians & the Media Misrepresent the Public (free
on line version) or the book Constructing Public Opinion by
Justin Lewis (ISBN-13: 978-0231117678) the case is made
that political polls more shape than report on public opinion and
that the media compound the problem by reporting only on the
differences between political parties rather than also reporting
on how they agree.