Tuesday, August 5, 2008

A pre road downs lull...

... which is to be expected with the road, AC, The Shore, The Hollow Deck, and getting back to "the life" looming. I will try to get "work" done as I can. For today I will only say that the path forward has to entail narrowing the scope or at least articulating some specifics about the major issues that a fairly radical progressive grassroots solidarity movement would have to embrace in an ongoing activist manner in order for any progress toward the substantive core sea changes that are needed and being called for in our business and politics to be even remotely approachable.

Here are the ones that always seem to come to mind off the top of my head whenever I start thinking about what has to be considered in this regard. The major issues and or slash proposals that I will focus on are:

  • Constitutional Ammendment Level reform of the money in politics cancer that is an ongoing worsening problem and deterrent to "our Democracy."
  • The "Bipartisan" problem of "our" gridlock and incumbancy corrupted two party system. Among the first reforms related to this quagmire is to eliminate the Electoreal College altogether or- if people want to keep it for nostalgia's sake just make it be a figurehead entity by having the Electoral Votes for each state be divided proportionately and have the number for each state be exactly a function of said state's population. I am sick of my vote counting less than any other American's based on the density of the population of our respective environs. And I also think that no President should ever again be sworn in who didn't get the most votes by the people of this country. Much much more on this "Electioneering Reform" part of "the movemnt"
  • Single payer national health care- a no brainer to everyone but the Insurance company and big pharma PR legions and and all the politicians in their respective but none too respectable hip pockets.
  • A complete overhaul of our public education and social welfare priorities and approaches- most especially as these institutions fail in our major urban centers and fail the people and children most at risk because of the social problems and economic and opportunity inequities exacerbated critically by the dysfunctional operations of current status quo "business and politics as usual."
  • The need to develop a major new Federal Project called, for lack of a better term, the "Department of Peace." Eventually this department would become equal to on funding and scope levels as the current "Department of Defense", or the "Pentagon System for a planned economy," or the "Military Industrial (and Congressional Incumbency) Complex.
  • Calling for a "Brand New and Green This Time New Deal for the American People. It's possible that this "new green deal" could be part of the above "Department of Peace" and could also be closely aligned with the new kinds of "Fair Trade" and "Fair Exchange" trade and treaty agreements we need to enact in the face of climate change and "Peak Oil and Everything Else, Too" that we will all be dealing with as we move forward into our collective, local, and global futures.
  • And finally, an overhail of our archaic, draconian, and failing "War on Drugs" system of drug laws, incarceration policies, and arbitrarily unjust and unequal enforcement policies.

Addressing these at length and coming up with proposals and very specific calls to organized activism around those proposals will be where this blog and www.dialogdem0cracy.org focus for the most part for the next couple weeks. On that and on occasionally lamenting the sad state of our Democracy as the Presidential Election Seasons Prime False Advertising Campaigns heat up.