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Twelve Compelling Reasons to Have Chosen
to Elect
Barack Obama and not John McCain
www.EarthManifesto.com Dr.
Tiffany B. Twain
November
7, 2008
In
the hopes that the Earth Manifesto would be discovered by millions of people
before the November 2008 election, I had modified One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies to
be an advocacy piece for Barack Obama and the positive change that he
potentially represents. Here it is, for
the historical record.
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The Presidential election that will take place on
November 4, 2008 is critically important to our future. Twelve principal categories of public policy
are discussed in detail below. It is vitally
important for us to courageously and honestly address these issues. We must deal with these challenges in a
bipartisan way, and emphasize fair and sound economic policies. And we must remember to take into account the
social and environmental aspects of all public policies so that they are sane
and long-term-oriented.
The backdrop of this election is startling. The most serious economic crisis since the
Great Depression confronts us. Banks and
insurance companies on Wall Street and in Europe are failing. Credit, which is critical to business and
trade, is paralyzed, causing normal business activities to be disrupted. These circumstances are creating dangerous
financial instability, and they are forcing our federal government (and thus taxpayers)
to make desperate and extremely costly bailouts of giant corporations that are
“too big to fail”.
We must now change our priorities and alter the
status quo. We need to elect a smart,
flexible and fair-minded leader who understands the numerous ways in which our current
policies are undermining the greater good by squandering resources, creating
undue risk, piling up debt, obstructing progressive change, eroding hopes of
actualizing good-citizen goals, unfairly exploiting workers, damaging
ecosystems, and putting the prosperity of people today and future generations
at risk.
Consider the following twelve comprehensive plans
that would help achieve the common good goal of making the world a better,
fairer and safer place:
1. A SOUND
ECONOMY. We need to protect our economy
by reestablishing sensible banking and financial industry regulations to
prevent the harm done by greed, speculation, overly-risky debt leveraging, corporate
conglomeration, imbalanced conflicts of interest and the unaccountable power of
big corporations. We must promote
broadly-distributed prosperity in our nation, and prevent abuses of power and
unfair privileges for insiders. Instead
of pandering to wealthy people, CEO’s, speculators, war profiteers, polluters,
the radical religious right, and economic fundamentalists who oppose sensible
regulations and oversight, we must embrace economically sound policies and
innovative ideas, prudent risk-taking, greater transparency, economic justice,
farsighted environmental policies and sustainable activities. We must reverse the trends in our government
and society toward fiscal irresponsibility, misallocations of resources, dishonesty,
deception, discriminatory practices highly-leveraged speculation, and
hyper-partisanship that have created such serious systemic risks. Desperate government bailouts must safeguard
the greater interests of the mainstream public, and not just those of investors
and Wall Street banks. All economic
stimulus and recovery efforts should contain socially-just provisions and ecologically-sound
plans.
2. ENERGY
POLICIES. The United States needs to
achieve independence from its addiction to fossil fuels. The best way to do this is to boldly change
course on national energy policies.
Instead of shortsightedly continuing to subsidize oil companies and
stimulate efforts to “Drill, Baby, Drill”, we must invest in a world
energy-modernization program along the lines of the “Ten-Point Plan for Good
Jobs and Energy Independence” that is advocated by a coalition of business,
labor, environmental, and community leaders called the Apollo Alliance. This
revolutionary change will shift the emphasis of our national energy policies to
greater efficiency of energy use, and toward conservation of energy resources,
and to the development of alternatives to fossil fuels. It will also help us to make significant
reductions in climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions. These are extremely important steps for us
to take in order to create a healthy economy and improve our national
security. John McCain is the wrong
candidate to lead on this issue because is nearly as deeply in the pockets of
Big Oil as the Bush/Cheney crowd, and he has supported shortsighted
expediencies like a wrong-headed “gas tax holiday” and he has opposed bold
approaches to the adoption of renewable alternatives.
3. MIDDLE
CLASS FAIRNESS. We need to strengthen
and expand the middle class and improve opportunities for social mobility. To do this, we must renew commitments to
policies that benefit the majority, rather than merely pandering to the
rich. The middle class has been
significantly harmed by unfair and regressive Republican tax and social policies. To restore this vital segment of American
society, we must once again implement strategies that helped build the middle
class in the first place: (a) regulate
Big Business so that it primarily benefits “We the People”, and not just investors
and wealthy people; (b) make higher
education more affordable for everyone by providing inexpensive financing and a
program similar to the post-World War II “G.I. Bill”; (c) invest in our nation’s crumbling physical infrastructure
rather than in wars abroad; (d) restore
taxation that is fairer and more progressive; (e) create balanced incentives for home ownership that are fair to
a maximum number of people; (f) enact and enforce laws that give workers more
power in their struggle against the abuses of capital; (g) create a social safety net of universal
healthcare and reduce the severe inequities that currently exist in medical
care; and (h) provide for a true Social
Security retirement benefits program that protects retirees from having their payroll
taxes squandered by the government.
These are progressive ideas much more likely to be implemented by Barack
Obama and a Democratic Administration than the economic fundamentalists of the radical
right who currently control our country.
4. WAR AND PEACE. We need to find a way to courageously commit our nation to the diplomatic
and peaceful resolution of conflicts between nations of the world. We must pursue foreign policies that respect
the sovereignty of other nations and enhance the mutual security of all. We must reject wars for resources and military
aggression and preemptive warfare. Policy
deciders must be prevented from waging wars to divert attention and money from
domestic problems, OR to abuse power in the name of national security. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the enormously
successful war hero of World War II and U.S. President from 1956 to 1961,
warned Americans about the “military-industrial complex” and a "disastrous
rise of misplaced power". He
emphatically counseled: "Only an
alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge
industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and
goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” A Cabinet-level Department of Peace should
be created to advance the causes of international cooperation and responsible
statesmanship in the resolution of conflicts.
Stronger international agreements, laws and institutions should be
supported to prevent wars and torture and genocide. A summit of Middle Eastern countries should be convened to
develop strategies to solve conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in ways that are
most likely to ensure that these nations do not become failed states. A bold new plan must be developed to
guarantee a safe homeland for Palestinians and to make sure that they peacefully
coexist with Israel. A revolutionary
new initiative should be launched to reduce the influence of radical extremism
and religious fundamentalism worldwide.
International social justice, human rights and sustainable development
should be actively promoted as top priorities along with these proposed robust
peace-building initiatives. Significant
taxes should be levied on all sales of guns, ammunition and military weapons,
and the funds generated should be used to create more just societies and to engage
in proactive peace-building programs. We
need to elect a truly honorable leader, and NOT another representative of
hawkish war enthusiasts and domineering supremacist Stern Father ideologies. John McCain embodies the mentality of aggression
and overweening influence by the defense and armaments industries. He supports surges of military escalation
and harbors a belligerent attitude toward Iran. We must reject such Neoconservative ideas and the misallocations
of resources that accompany them.
5. CONSTITUTIONAL
PROTECTIONS. We need to defend our
Constitution and its checks and balances from Executive infringements. George Bush and Dick Cheney have betrayed
Americans by aggressively expanding the power of the Presidency. In doing so, they have undermined the responsibilities
of Congress and diminished the civil liberties of citizens. Bush and Cheney have done this by using legal
maneuvers and signing statements to evade rules of law, and by controlling
information, acting with secrecy, exploiting fears to divide people, using propaganda
and deceit, suppressing dissent, spying on American people with warrantless
monitoring of communications, violating international treaties on torture,
using “extraordinary renditions” of prisoners to offshore prisons, creating secret
military tribunals, abridging habeas corpus rights, obstructing oversight and investigations,
disdaining human rights, reducing workers’ rights and collective bargaining
powers, cherry-picking science, intertwining government and religion, diminishing
the prerogatives and reproductive rights of women, figuratively pillorying gays
and lesbians, and manipulating the judicial system by consistently appointing
right-wing judges. John McCain is the
representative of the radical right in this election, and to trust him to be
more honest and responsible with these expanded presidential powers would be a
risky gamble. Eight years is far too
much of these authoritarian gambits!
And we cannot afford to have another right-wing corporatist judge
appointed to the Supreme Court to join John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Clarence
Thomas and Antonin Scalia. Give us a
break!
6. ETHICAL
POLITICS. We need to make politicians
and our government more responsive to the needs of the people. To do this, we should enact publicly-financed
“Clean Money, Clean Election” legislation to institute far-reaching campaign
finance reform. We should also enact a more far-reaching
Congressional Ethics Act to prevent politicians from giving in to the
corrupting influence of corporate lobbyists and Big Money in our government. We simply must reduce the overarching power
that big corporations have in influencing Congress. Bipartisan initiatives like this must be implemented to limit institutionalized bribery. Misguided perks and wrongheaded subsidies
and programs that facilitate the externalizing of costs upon society must be
eliminated. We must vigorously advance and protect the interests
of small businesses, entrepreneurs, workers, women, children, minorities, and
future generations. We cannot continue
to let our American democracy be damaged by the proliferation of ethical
conflicts, influence peddling, deceptive practices, rash risk-taking, favoritism
for the rich, cronyism, shortsighted profiteering, media manipulation, and
outright fraud.
7. FAIR
TAXATION. We need to make taxation more
progressive. This means lower taxes for
90% of Americans and higher marginal tax rates and higher taxes on capital
gains and a reinstatement of the pre-2001 status of the Estate Tax on the
inheritances of rich kids. To
accomplish this egalitarian goal, we should enact a Social Justice Taxation Act
that will make Tax Code revisions to ensure fairness. This Act should be made consistent with the criteria of the wise
lawgiver Solon, who created taxes that were graduated in such a way that the
rich paid a rate 12 times that of the poor.
The most practical way to do this is to revise the federal Tax Tables so
that every taxpayer will pay 4% (vs. the current 10%) on the first $15,000 of
Taxable Income (for status of “Married, filing jointly”), and all taxpayers will
pay 48% (vs. 35% currently) on any earnings they make in excess of $250,000. A progressive sliding scale would determine
tax rates for all earning brackets in between $15,000 and $250,000. The tax changes should be made so that they
are revenue neutral, i.e. they involve no new taxes in total. In addition, tax loopholes and offshore
incorporation that allow giant corporations to evade tens of billions in U.S.
federal income taxes should be eliminated.
Hedge fund managers should be required to pay taxes on their income at
regular rates, not low capital gains rates.
8. BALANCED
BUDGETS. We need to stop our federal
government from recklessly indulging in the short-term-oriented expediency of borrowing
enormous amounts of money to squander it on tax breaks for rich people and fighting
wars. We should make a binding
commitment to reduce the spiraling use of debt, and to stop the lavish waste of
taxpayer funds and borrowed money. To
achieve this, we must reinstate Pay-As-You-Go spending rules for the federal
budget. We should also establish a new
mechanism that will be effective in discouraging our expedient inclination to live
beyond our means. We should create a
Fiscal Responsibility Act that will force lawmakers and the White House to set
honest priorities and end government spending on wasteful bureaucracy, pork
barrel projects, corporate welfare, corrupt profiteering and wars of aggression. The following 3-year plan is guaranteed to
be effective, because it will give a powerful motivation to the primary
deciders in our system (wealthy people and big corporations) to support
balanced budgets. Here’s how it will
work: Pass a law requiring Big
Businesses and the Wealthy to be assessed for federal deficits at the end of
every fiscal year. For instance, for
the fiscal year running from October 1st, 2009 to September 30, 2010,
assess 25% of any federal budget deficit as follows: half of this obligation will be assessed to businesses that earn net
incomes of more than $2 million, and the other half will be assessed to
individuals with taxable incomes above $250,000. Allocate these assessments on a progressive scale with higher
percentages for higher incomes. Then,
in the following fiscal year, assess 50% of any deficits using the same
methodology; and in the year after
that, assess 100% of any such deficits.
In recognition of the fact that the use of borrowed money can be
sensible if it is used for such purposes as improving our nation’s schools and
physical infrastructure, we should establish an effective system for issuing
bonds with preferred low interest rates for citizen-approved investments.
9. ECOLOGICAL
SANITY. We need to make revolutionary
commitments to sustainable existence and a better quality of life. To accomplish this, we should give higher
priority to the following initiatives:
require all coal-burning power plants to be modernized with
pollution-control equipment; defend and
enforce the Clean Air Act and its New Source Review provisions; limit suburban sprawl; establish more ocean Marine Reserves; ensure that environmental laws are upheld,
including the Clean Water Act, the Wilderness Act, the National Environmental
Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act;
and increase protections of National Parks, Bureau of Land Management
lands, National Wild and Scenic Rivers, and roadless areas of National Forests.
10. HONEST
ACCOUNTING. Require the General
Accounting Office (GAO) to improve internal controls and accounting and
reporting practices, with the goal of having an unqualified audit
opinion rendered to Congress and the American people that certifies the financial
statements of the federal government are fairly stated in accordance with
generally accepted accounting principles.
In connection with this audit, empower the GAO (or newly-created civil Grand
Juries of distinguished and responsible citizens) to make recommendations designed
to make the government, and the Defense Department in particular, better
controlled and more effective, frugal, honest, and accountable.
11. FAIR AND
EQUAL HUMAN RIGHTS. Ratify the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA) to give equal rights to women and men. The ERA was first proposed in 1923, and was
once ratified by 35 of a necessary 38 states.
It would be a cornerstone of fairness that should be incorporated into
our great Bill of Rights. Likewise, a
new Constitutional Amendment should be created to give gays and lesbians fair
treatment and reasonable protections under the law. And while we are at it, let’s strengthen the Constitution to make
clear our common agreement that no Church should be able to impose its dogmas
on society, and that pursuant to the guarantees in the First Amendment,
reasonable separations between Church and State must be established and
protected.
12. POPULATION
GROWTH. One of the fundamental
contributing factors to all of our social and environmental problems and
conflicts in the world is the surging number of human beings on Earth. We need to reduce global human population
growth from its current net increase of about 75 million people per year. To do this, we must provide better education
and opportunities to girls and women worldwide. We should help finance women’s reproductive healthcare clinics
and provide free contraceptives to women everywhere. This will have a great humanitarian collateral benefit of
simultaneously reducing the transmission of sexually-transmitted diseases like
AIDS. The Republican Global Gag Rule
that restricts U.S. support for family planning programs abroad should be
revoked and we should immediately pay our Congressionally-approved annual
contributions to the United Nations Population Fund that have been held up for
years by the Bush Administration. We
should also guarantee women the right to make their own personal reproductive
choices. We must stop forcing women to
have children who do not want them. To
do this, we should enact an Amendment to the Constitution that establishes
reproductive rights for women as defined by the practical Roe vs. Wade decision of the Supreme Court. The official Republican platform calls for
exactly the opposite, a constitutional amendment banning abortion even in the case of rape or incest or danger
to the life of the woman. This is
obscene!
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These
are the 12 top reasons that it would be best to elect Barack Obama as our next
President. He is a very intelligent man
who seems committed to the betterment of our society. He is calm, cool, collected and rational --- a distinct contrast
to the erratic and temperamental John McCain, who styles himself as a
“maverick” despite having voted with the orthodox Bush/Cheney Republican line more
than 90% of the time in the Senate.
When
Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama on Meet the Press on October 19, 2008, he
said: “I think he is a transformational figure … a new generation coming onto
the world stage.” He noted that we need
a leader who reaches out to younger people for greater inclusiveness and
diversity in our societies. I strongly
agree that we must let a new generation
of people lead our nation. We need an
open-minded leader who has both the ‘social intelligence’ to be able to
articulate the true nature of problems and the ‘emotional intelligence’ to be
able to communicate effectively with Americans about what needs to be done to
assure the greater good in the short term as well as in the long run. We need leaders with want to unite people
and who demonstrate honesty and integrity.
The “Make-Believe Maverick” article about
John McCain in the October 16, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone magazine makes it startlingly apparent that John
McCain, despite the image that his campaign has tried to craft, is poorly
suited to be our nation’s president.
Think about the election from
another point of view. We are voting to
elect not just a President and Vice President, but an entire phalanx of
thousands of civil servants who will be chosen by the president we elect in
November to be appointed to his cabinet and the many agencies of the federal
government. Republicans have
hyper-politicized these positions, giving control of agencies to partisan
political operatives who advance narrow ideological initiatives instead of the
common good. We must reject this
Machiavellian philosophy and turn government once again into a force for the
advancement of the greater good.
A
lifelong Republican recently said to me, “I did not leave the Republican
Party; it left me.” Think about this! The Republican Party deserves to be renounced for its unfair
policies, its fiscal irresponsibility, its ideological stubbornness, its
aggression in warfare, its shortsightedness, its anti-environmentalism, its
socially regressive actions, its abuses of power, and its failure to honestly
address such problems as our addiction to oil and the inequities in
opportunity, legal justice and healthcare.
As John McCain gets more desperate because he is trailing in the
election polls, he has indulged in campaign tactics that are reprehensible and
deserve repudiation, especially those tactics that manipulate people’s fears
and insecurities, divide people, make terrorist insinuations, and try to
suppress voter turnout. “Too
radical. Too Risky.” We’ll see!
The issue of trust is paramount in
this election. Conservatives are
fearful that they cannot trust a progressive black man; liberals are even more concerned that they
cannot trust John McCain and the Republican Party which has so seriously betrayed
the public good in the last 8 years. As
a candidate, George Bush rhetorically reassured us that he would “be a uniter,
not a divider”. He said he would bring
honor and integrity to the government, but once he got into office he pushed
through policies that pandered to the narrow agenda of right-wing
Neoconservatives, the base of the Republican Party to which John McCain has
been pandering for support to get elected.
The litany of evidence concerning
the Bush/Cheney failings is long: the
Administration gave expanded special privileges to vested interests, and pushed
through distinctly unfair legislation, and acted in ways that are fiscally
irresponsible and patently wrongheaded.
The Bush/Cheney regime vastly expanded the national debt by spending profligately
and cutting taxes in ways that that primarily benefited the already rich. They opposed safeguards of oversight and
regulation. They committed one of the worst
foreign policy blunders in history by using flawed intelligence, public
deception and preemptive war policies to recklessly attack and occupy Iraq and pursue
a prohibitively costly and misguided security racket (“the war on terror”). They have aggressively infringed upon citizen
liberties and Constitutional rights. And
they have helped create an unfair and unstable and unsustainable economy.
It would be folly to trust that John
McCain will now deliver something completely different. He is the representative of the party that
has championed this retrogressive state of affairs, and he advocates MORE tax
breaks for the rich and giant corporations. We
are at a moment of great potential for positive change. Today’s housing crisis, high inflation in
the cost of necessities, healthcare inequities, fragile economy, volatile
markets, huge investor losses, and widespread insecurity make it necessary for
us to enact far-sighted reforms, not just quick fixes and disingenuous reforms. Instead of stimulating booms that will once
again go bust, we must wisely institute fairer and more sound economic policies. We must act to make sure that banks use less
borrowing leverage and honor better credit principles. Banks must be subject to greater oversight
and supervision to prevent speculation and fraud and usury and insolvency.
Visionary understandings must be cultivated so that we can
identify the best courses of action. See the Progressive Agenda
for a More Sane Humanity for an extensive and detailed list of such suggestions
and ideas (it can be found linked to the Earth Manifesto home page).
We must essentially transcend the
short-term expediencies of politics and recognize the ways that we are
“fleecing the future”. How are we doing
this? Think about it! We are squandering resources, dumping wastes
and toxins into the environment, degrading fresh water resources, spewing
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are changing the Earth’s climate and causing
extensive damage to ecosystems worldwide.
We are also piling vast amounts of debt onto those in the future and
allowing Golden Rule principles to be ignored, and letting our leaders infringe
upon the civil liberties of citizens, and making old people and workers and
young people more insecure, and failing to respect other nations’ sovereignty, and
indulging in extremely costly military occupations. And now, in a big way, we are shortsightedly allowing profits to
be privatized while enormous risks are socialized. This is essentially establishing a welfare system for the rich
and the well-connected and Wall Street.
We simply must refocus our national policies so that we leave a less
disastrous legacy to our descendents!
Privatizing profits and socializing risks? How are we doing this? We have allowed risks to be socialized in
two ways: (1) we let corporations
externalize onto society the costs of pollution, toxic wastes, worker
healthcare and a fair share of taxes, instead of requiring these costs to be
included in the prices of product and services; and (2) we let our economic system be ‘gamed’ by speculators so
that they can make outsized gains and create economic bubbles, and then when
this risky behavior threatens to destroy the entire financial system, we bail
them out and have the government/taxpayers assume the ‘toxic assets’.
Underlying this shortsighted and unfair perversion
of capitalism, there are a number of overarching challenges that we must
squarely face: the foolishly short-term
orientation of our activities, the unsustainable depletion of resources, the failure
of democratic system to thwart domineering ideologies, and the harm we are
inflicting on Earth’s ecosystems and other species of life.
I strongly believe that Barack Obama is better qualified by
intelligence and temperament and honesty and progressive principles to lead us to
a better future. I encourage voters to
elect him!
Truly,
Dr. Tiffany B. Twain
savetruffulatrees@hotmail.com
p.s. John McCain initially tried to reassure Americans
in the face of the collapse of Wall Street banks, mortgage institutions and
insurance companies that the fundamentals of our economy are strong. Yet fear and insecurity grip the nation, and
near panic seems to have overtaken Washington D.C.
It
is valuable to ask if our resilient economy really does have strong
fundamentals. The basic foundations of economic prosperity are these:
(1) The health of natural ecosystems, upon which
we completely depend, including the land, topsoil, fresh water resources, forests,
fisheries, wetlands, rivers, oceans, clean water and air, and biological
diversity. STATUS: Poor, and declining.
(2) The health and well-being of American
workers, including their education, physical fitness, nutritional security, reasonable
healthcare, affordable necessities, psychological well-being, and the fairness
of shared benefits of their productivity. STATUS: Poor, and declining.
(3) The good management of the economy and its
financial soundness, as measured by balanced priorities, wisely-targeted
investments in research and development and national infrastructure, social
well-being, prudent risk-taking, sensible debt levels, reasonable credit
availability, and sustainable long-term orientation. STATUS: Poor, and rapidly and frighteningly
deteriorating.
(4) The vibrancy of our democratic institutions,
as reflected in their fairness, equality of opportunity and justice, the awareness
of the electorate, the fair balance of power between capital and labor, the
civil liberties of citizens, governmental adherence to rules of law, the
independence of the media, and the protections of privacy and individual
rights. STATUS: Fair, but under
concerted assault.
(5) A stable and peaceful government with
fairly-realized national security and good relationships with neighboring
countries and our allies, and a stance toward our ‘enemies’ that is not overly
arrogant and antagonizing and humiliating and merciless. STATUS:
Poor, and declining due to policies of preemption and unilateral action.
Let’s restore these foundations! Let’s reject the status quo, and embrace new ideas
and new leadership. Let’s embrace
positive change that we can believe in!
We cannot afford to have right-wing radicals prop up another B-grade
leader to implement inequity-filled ideologies and to manipulate people with
deceptive moralizing worldviews and aggressive militarism. These are the overriding reasons that we would
be wisest to elect Barack Obama!
During
the first Presidential debate on September 26, 2008, John McCain repeatedly
asserted that Barack Obama “does not understand”. McCain’s military mind does not seem to be capable of
understanding that opposing points of view may have equal or greater validity
than one’s own cherished beliefs.
McCain claims to see stark clarity in military matters and he has
certitude in the value of strength and domineering power, but he seems to be
unclear on the pragmatic reality behind the effectiveness of “soft power” and
the seriously counterproductive limitations of ruthless “hard power”
options. The fact of the matter is that
there is a “fog of war” that obscures a good many truths, and it can mislead
people into supporting strategies that can be prove to be very detrimental and collectively
insane.
John
Steinbeck, on a naturalist expedition with Doc Ricketts to the Sea of Cortez
during World War II, observed that if we were to regard the behaviors of the
human species with the same objective scrutiny that we give other creatures, we
would see that humans have a decidedly distinct propensity to occasionally use
violent aggression against others of our own species, especially during times
of collective insanity that characterize long-lasting wars. This is essentially why General Douglas
MacArthur said “I believe that the entire
effort of modern society should be concentrated on the endeavor to outlaw war
as a method of the solution of problems between nations.”
War is not the answer, Senator McCain. As conflicts over resources and markets and
ideologies and control and religions heat up in the world under the stress of
increasing human numbers and intensifying global competition, we need calmer
civilian heads to prevail. We need to
have a leader who is NOT hot-tempered, grandstanding, military-honor driven,
superiority asserting, privilege pandering, right-wing coddling,
judgment-impaired, deceitfully dissembling, closet authoritarian, indignant or evangelically
stubborn.
The McCain campaign has become very ugly with its
distortions and desperate attempts to link Barack Obama to terrorists,
socialism, anti-Americanism, and Muslims.
It brings to mind the quote by the venerable Adlai Stevenson in the
1950’s:
"I'm
not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing
about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are
unworthy of winning."
John McCain and Sarah Palin are proving to many
voters that they are not worthy of winning.
We cannot have another Administration that embraces self-righteous
certitude and asserts that any means is justified to accomplish the narrow ends
of getting elected and then misusing power, especially to start wars and
forcefully occupy other countries.
“War is never a solution; it is
an aggravation.”
--- Benjamin Disraeli
Sure
there are people who “do evil” in the world.
But we must see deeper truths about the nature of “evil”. I personally think that the Taliban in
Afghanistan are horrible men for the oppressive way they treat women and for
their religious fundamentalism and their tribal violence against the
long-suffering poor people of Afghanistan.
But trying to impose our values on Afghanistan is proving to be quite
costly. And it has been an epic blunder
for the U.S. to have taken its eye off the ball in Afghanistan to attack and
occupy more “target rich” Iraq. There
is a profound extent to which war is a distraction that is used by aggressor
leaders to gain strength for domestic exploitation and profiteering and power
and control and repression.
We must understand Sir Peter Ustinov’s words:
“Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war
is the terrorism of the rich.”
It
is folly to attack, oppress, humiliate and wreak injustice on those who oppose
economic imperialism and aggressive militarism. Terrorism should be combated the way that the 9/11 Commission Report indicates in its
chapter “More Than a War on Terrorism”:
"long-term success demands the
uses of all elements of national power:
diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, economic
policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defense." We must act to prevent unnecessary wars!
The declaration of a broad “war on terrorism” against entire
nations and entire religions actually gives counter-support to terrorism. Such tactics strengthen terrorist impulses
and give them more recruits, and relatively more power as we recklessly harm
our own nation in our obsessive bullying, superiority-presuming, self-righteous,
angry, vindictive, endless and extremely costly efforts to win a “victory” over
a tactic. We are acting like the
British Redcoats during the Revolutionary War, marching in superior force
formation while being picked off by colonist rebels hiding in the woods and
defending their homes and farms and country and religious freedoms against the
oppressive forces of King George. See Reflections on War in PART TWO of the
Earth Manifesto for fuller understandings concerning war and peace.
Anyway,
make no mistake about it: John McCain
and Sarah Palin represent the right wing in this election. They stand for dominion-oriented hubris and
the escalation of wars and the forces of control and exploitation and
repression and power abuse and secrecy and stonewalling and retribution. To elect them would be folly, for they
stubbornly vow to ramp up this suicidal struggle against fairness,
international justice, diplomatic pragmatism, sovereign integrity, peaceful
coexistence, religious tolerance, progressive taxation and ecological
sanity. Elect Barack Obama!
Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin recently said, "I'm not going to solely blame all of
man's activities on changes in climate."
Ha! – Women everywhere may feel exactly the same way! The motives behind man’s activities are
indeed sometimes inscrutable. Sarah’s
arrival on the national stage promises to give us a whole new genre of
“Bushisms”. But maybe Sarah Palin is
onto something, inadvertently. The most powerful of all influences in determining
man’s activities is human nature.
Whether or not the weather affects us all, or arctic extremes, or stresses,
or hormones, or even Mercury in retrograde, it’s simple, really. This is not rocket science. Once we understand and accept what we know
from personal experience about natural human behaviors and propensities, it
becomes clearer that we need strong safeguards and better design of our
economic and political systems in order to establish fair and sustainable societies
that are not vulnerable to shrewd manipulators and greedy opportunists and
power-obsessed madmen --- or false mavericks and deceptive barracuda!
Thanks,
John McCain, for trying to put a woman in such a high position in national
politics. It is highly regretful that
the particular woman you chose is one who insidiously stands against the
majority of things that would benefit women the most.
McCain
and Palin remind me of the Bush/Cheney crowd.
Think about it: circuitous argumentation, deceptively-scripted speeches,
devious secrecy, the obstruction of investigations, the cheerleading for
right-wing causes, the attack-dog political ads, the disingenuous populism, the
deregulators giving lip service to the need for government oversight and
supervision of corporate and banking activities, and the agitators for creating
divisive culture-war conflicts over hot-button social issues.
A
last word on Sarah Palin, bless her clever barracuda-alluring soul. Alaska is the last of our frontiers, and
like the frontier Old West, it hews towards guns, hunting, vigilante justice,
shooting varmints, romanticizing outlaws, patriarchal strength, States’ rights,
and even the cultivation of ideas about independence and secession. Think about the homemade signs that people created
for a heavily-attended ‘Alaska Women Reject Palin Rally’ that was held in
Anchorage on September 14th.
They are quite revealing:
Pro-woman Anti-Palin: Beware of Tricksters
Voted for Her Once: Never Again
“God’s Will” is NOT a Foreign Policy
Great Performance Sarah But We’re
Not That Stupid
Palin is George Bush with
Lipstick
Mc Same!
Reckless. Inexperienced.
Choose
Obama and Biden!
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