American Sustainability Party
So, right, this is what happens when I start thinking too hard. Bear with me though, because good ideas take some time and a lot of feedback to emerge. I’ve been thinking about an ideal political party. I love the liberty part of Libertarian thinking, i.e., if it doesn’t impose on anyone else’s rights, then it doesn’t need to be illegal. We just went down the wrong path when restricitive laws were passed to “save society money.” This fed into the whole liability as the basis for all social relations. If you aren’t just by me, I’ll sue you and cause you money pain. Hate it! But that’s a bit of a tangent. Liberty and freedom, core values.
I am also deeply committed to the entire concept of sustainability. In fact, we’d do much better to base all of our societal relations on sustainable living. As discussed in past duh pookie posts, traditional economics don’t serve the good of the whole since mainstream economic theory fails to account for externalities, especially unforeseen costs of bad production methods, or just plain insanity like anyone anywhere producing plastic that does not decompose. Permanent garbage, yay! For a real example, antifreeze sells at the gas station for $5.99 a gallon. The price reflects the cost of production and distribution. But, the cost of toxicity to the environment after its use is not accounted for in the original price. This is deeply flawed economics and justifies all kinds of nasty business practices. So, environmentalism would be a core value.
Next, I’m a progressive, so I support the idea of government helping people out. This, to me, is another cost we bear for the good of the whole. Miserable, discontented people lead to instability and disorder. Here’s where my dream party would part with Ayn Rand and the Libertarians. We’d need to provide social services to those unable to help themselves. A critical component would be reasonable, limited social services, not something for nothing, not a free-for-all party. Everyone is capable of performing some kind of community service. Except maybe babies. Okay, no work required from babies!! But some kind of useful participation required from everyone else in order to receive benefits. So, civil service and social service, two more core values.
And the last core value is a little hard to articulate. Community not commercialism might come close. Back to basics. An emphasis on learning, collaborative technologies, humanism. Product obsession replaced with some kind of acknowledgment that we should be humble. A desire to evolve into peaceful, creative, humorous people who live without taking more from the environment that it can give.
Look for the American Sustainability Party on your 2012 ballot. I’m sure it will be just that easy. Anyone wanna join?
Babies, Boyscouts, and Drought: Ethical Dilemmas Abound
Today’s headlines threw me into a quagmire of philosophical indecisiveness: Octuplets were born to a woman who lives with her parents and already has six children, the Boy Scouts have engaged in massive clear-cutting of their lands, and the California drought continues to pit the livelihoods of farmers against conservationists. How do we decide right from wrong when no laws have been broken? Do we have any context to judge right from wrong if we remove the dictates of religion?
In the case of the unnamed mother from Whittier, CA… we have a woman who already has six children who receives fertilization treatments from a doctor who supported her decision to produce EIGHT more babies in one pregnancy. She will undoubtedly receive gobs of free crap from private and corporate donors who say the children are a miracle! and seek to capitalize on all the free publicity. Religious people will claim God gave her those babies, despite the drugs and who knows what unnatural methods used to produce babies in a woman who did not conceive under God’s normal rules. (I am not at all opposed to IVF or other methods, but she already has SIX children?!) Did the doctors ask how a woman with six babies could claim to have fertility problems? Nope. They collected the cash. Here’s another headline for today, Medical Needs of 6.2 Million U.S. Kids Go Unmet.
About the Boy Scouts… this organization has always claimed to be stewards of the land, but according to the SF
Chronicle:
the investigation – a nationwide review by five newspapers of more than 400 timber harvests, court papers, property records, tax filings and other documents since 1990 – also found that:
– Scout councils have ordered the logging of more than 34,000 acres of forests – perhaps far more, as forestry records nationwide are incomplete.
– More than 100 scout groups – one-third of all Boy Scouts councils nationwide – have conducted timber harvests.
– Councils logged in or near protected wildlife habitat at least 53 times.
– Councils have authorized at least 60 clear-cutting operations and 35 salvage harvests, logging practices that some experts say harm the environment but maximize profits.
According to the article, Boy Scout Councils lost money when they disallowed gays and atheists from joining the organization. Logging helps to replenish those funds. Ka-ching!!
On the California drought… Well, newsflash: California is semi-arid and wouldn’t exist in its current form without water being moved about and injected into the places where the loudest lobbyists live. Agriculture is hugely important here, for the state and for the country, but when does agribusiness stop getting its way? When smelt are endangered. This drives a lot of people crazy, that human enterprise suffer at the hands of a rotten little stupid fish that no one cares about. But we live in an ecosystem, and to claim that we understand the intricacies of interdependence in this system has been a human downfall for too long. Let the smelt die, and then what goes next? It comes down, yet again, to money. I can live without strawberries or pay more for bell peppers to save the fish. Because sustainability is important to me. But what if sustainability has cost jobs for farmers? Some of those same farmers probably objected to auto industry bailouts. At what point do we bite the bullet and let people suffer job losses? California’s water politics run far too deep for one little duhpookie post, but I do expect to hear more and more as state populations continue to increase and climate change continues to lead us into drought. Somehow, while all the farmers complain, I can’t help thinking about Mexican farmers and the Rio Grande that no longer reaches their land.
Self-interest, or the good of the few, versus grander interests like balancing the needs of the planet. This question seems to be coming up more and more often as our collective unconscious grapples with our new responsibilities as global citizens.
Why I am Slowly Becoming a Progressive Libertarian
I strolled over to Cato Unbound yesterday for some fascinating reading. I found this month’s Lead Essay entitled Corporations Versus the Market. These guys are Libertarians, and I thought I was reading just to get a different perspective on things. On Facebook, some friends and I have been having a discussion about Red States versus Blue States, which led into a discussion about illegal immigration, and finally to corporate profits. With a newly elected Obama, I think we all need to reassess. The Bush years exposed the so-called conservative Republicans as none-of -the-above. The spending and federal bloating were out of control.
The fascinating thing about the Cato essay is that I found that I agreed with all of it. The essay argues (I hope I am paraphrasing accurately) that our current system is actually a huge promotion of corporate welfare via bailouts, subsidies, protectionist tariffs, and even the use of eminent domain for corporations. We don’t have a “free market.” If we did, we’d see lots more small and local businesses and fewer big-box and national chains. Government policy protects these businesses. They don’t really occur naturally. (I suppose by “naturally” I mean in a truly free market economy.)
This environment of the federal government favoring large corporations, combined with the federal government taxing us hugely, has led to a worldview that expects the government to redistribute wealth because we have neither control of any spare income (which instead goes to federal taxes) nor control over huge bureaucracies like in the case of the healthcare industry.
Here’s a real world example. I have been working for the past year to establish safe routes to school for our local elementary and junior high. I petitioned the city to improve signage and reclaim roadway on a very narrow and very high-traffic stretch of road. This is (IMHO) a traditional obligation on the part of local government: ensure safety for local residents on local roads.
But the city won’t help. Why? They told us to go get a federal grant to pay for it. The federal government’s reach into all areas of civil life has undermined our power as local citizens to have an impact. Not good!
So there it is. Duh pookie is now a Progressive Libertarian blog! I keep laughing to myself about how I just became a “compassionate conservative”!! I’d love it if there truly was such a thing.
The Answer is 42
We love our humanness but we need to contain it. Our beautiful structures, shiny and grand, our desire to manicure everything, the need to build, and build, and build. Our ant nature. We are related to chimpanzees and bonobos. Closely related. This is contrary to our habit of seeing ourselves removed from the natural order. We’ve engineered our surroundings on a scale so grand we’ve impacted other species and the climate.
Is it possible to be different? I can’t see it. I can’t see us, all 6 billion of us, renouncing materialism and consumer culture and living humbly. We pity the people who now live as humbly as we maybe should. Third world people living subsistence lives.The wealthy around the globe who’ve accumulated the most don’t want to give an inch. Our chimp nature. Monkey hoarders. No one wants miss out, to be left behind.
Truth is, no one is really sure where we’re going. Why do we accumulate? Scarce resources? That thinking leads to wars and shortages and survival of the fittest. Or the smartest. Or just the most brutal. It’s exclusivity as its best. It’s “better me than you.” But that mentality is bringing us all down.
Here in the “western hemisphere” (a complete construct) we have traditionally frowned on proscriptive politics where someone or some group seeks to steer the masses in a concerted effort toward some heroic goal. We call that communism or tyranny. We think it’s bad, unnatural, and leading to no good. At what point do we reconsider that idea? What if the plan of action is solid and improves the quality of life for everyone? Self-serving all-natural competitiveness is ruining the world as we know it. We need leaders who are anti-Cheney with his hunting, discompassionate, hatred of things that should be sacred like human rights, environmental stewardship, and peaceful coexistence. We need to become fundamentally different. We’ve got good people: Christians who can love more and protect less, business people who can first do the right thing, parents who accept that two children is enough, farmers who refuse to poison the soil they know gives us almost everything we need.
Who are we today? How can we be different? We can start by getting off the hate bus. We are all one together, not a threat to each other. If we want to make it so, we can have paradise on earth. Less people, plenty of food, plenty of space. Less people is key. More trust is essential.
The Failure of Our Democracy
Whee! A little lite reading for today!
With the elections approaching and the pressure mounting to select a Democratic nominee to stand against McCain, I’ve been considering our democracy, it’s processes, and it’s flaws. I won’t even start with the whole Electoral College bit, but will instead move straight into a little discussed aspect of our system: proportional representation. If you ask the average Joe on the street, they think we have it. We don’t.
I was all set to do the math and build a chart based on the number of seats each state currently holds in the House of Representatives proportionally compared to each state’s population when I stumbled on this gloriously complete version in Wikipedia.
If you live in Wyoming, you share one representative with 522,000 of your friendliest neighbors. If you live in Arizona, you share with 792,000 others. That’s just for the reps. Senate-wise, if you live in Wyoming you share one senator with roughly 250,000 cowboys. If you live in California, you share Feinstein with 18,276,000 people. That’s EIGHTEEN MILLION two hundred seventy six thousand people. Hmmm. I bet that’s not quite what the framers had in mind.
But we haven’t even gotten to the actual discussion of proportional representation. We live in a winner-take-all democracy. In other countries, they enjoy the penultimate form of democracy: proportional representation, aka coalition government. In the US, we sell to the highest bidder. The loser is not represented at all. Here’s a quote from an article in the Boston Review:
Polls show most Americans would like to see a third party electing candidates at every level of government, but only three of our nearly eight thousand state and congressional legislators were elected on a minor party ticket–all of them in Burlington, Vermont.
Buncha hippies! Those Vermont people are crazy! Yeah, crazy cool. I want to see a share of Green Party seats. And Libertarians. Yeah! More Libertarians!
Chaser:
courtesy of http://commonsenselogic.blogspot.com/
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