Monday, December 19, 2011

Rethinking America

Listening to the debates among the candidates contending for the nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, I have been struck by how many references there have been to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. There seems to be a feeling, among some candidates at least, that these documents are unambiguous and that one can simply read them and understand immediately what the law is without any further interpretation. One gets the feeling that some candidates feel that much of the history of the Supreme Court has involved replacing the constitution with new laws rather than arriving at legitimate interpretations of the guidelines provided in the document. One candidate, Newton Leroy Gingrich, has even suggested he would, as president, feel free to ignore court decisions he disagreed with and perhaps even impeach judges whose decisions he found objectionable.

All this talk of the constitution has made me wonder whether the problem of current American politics has been properly identified. It could well be that the source of the deep divisions that have paralyzed America's legislators is the Constitution itself, since that document was the product of legislators who were incapable of seeing eye to eye on how the nation could be governed. Although it would admittedly be a big task, it might be time to put the Constitution of September 17, 1787 into the nearest shredder and start all over again trying to provide a more workable set of guidelines in order “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” If a new American constitution is written, I would recommend making a few minor changes in the structure of the country. A few of the suggestions I would make are the following:

  • Abolish the states. The very idea of trying to unite states was wrong-headed in 1787, when the only states were Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, all of which are clustered together on or near the Atlantic coast. Now that the nation that grew out of those twelve states whose representatives signed the constitution in 1787 has fifty states that cover many times as much territory and have over one hundred times as many people as in 1787, the prospect of uniting them all is incalculably more difficult than it was as the nation was just getting started. The task of running the country as a country is hampered at every step by the existence of states with artificial boundaries, many of them so large that there is very little common ground within those boundaries. If one looks at a state such as Colorado, just to give one example, it is obvious all four of its borders were drawn on a map with a straight-edge rather than following natural geographical features. The eastern third of the state is prairie, the middle third is mountainous terrain, and the western third is a mostly arid terrain of mesas, canyons and hills. All three of these regions have different ecosystems, different economies and different demographics. What is now called the State of Colorado is an absurd monstrosity, an outrage to both reason and emotion. And Colorado is but an example of a kind of absurdity that is multiplied across the expanse of land between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.

    Once the monstrous fiction of a state is removed, dozens of now-untractable problems will immediately disappear. Gone will be the conflict that now exists between federal laws and state laws. In the absence of state laws, there could be (as in Canada) a single set of federal criminal and civic laws. People who favor reducing the size of government should welcome the total elimination of fifty state legislative bodies, and people who favor the reduction of the tax burden should welcome the complete elimination of all state taxes. Much of the waste and redundancy that cripples the United States of America would be eliminated immediately by the elimination of states. (Of course, if there were no states to unite, the name of the country would no longer make sense, but it should not be difficult to find a new name for the more streamlined and much-improved country. It could be called Atlanto-Pacifica.)
  • Abolish the Senate.The Senate exists only because the founding parents could not agree on whether each state would be represented in the federal government by a number of representative proportionate to its population or each state would have equal weight just by virtue of being a state. (This whole issue was made even more complicated by the fact that some states that had a large number of human beings living in them, most of whom were slaves, wanted slaves to count as represented population, even though they could not vote to choose their representatives.) If there were no longer any states, there would be no need for equal representation among them, and hence no need for a Senate. Again, people who feel that government has grown much too large should be overjoyed at the prospects of eliminating one of the two bodies that make up the current Congress.
  • Abolish the office of President. The office of President of the United States (POTUS) is surely the second most ridiculous political idea in the history of governance, the first prize going to the office of Vice President of the United States. No country needs a president elected separately by the people, let alone a president elected by an electoral college. A country does need some kind of leadership (unless it is a country run on Quaker principles), but a prime minister will suffice. If the House of Representatives were structured more like a House of Parliament, then the leader of the party with the most elected representatives would automatically be the Prime Minister. A Prime Minister appoints a cabinet of elected members of parliament, who may be, but are not required to be, of the same political party as the Prime Minister. The cabinet is both an executive branch and a legislative branch.
  • Abolish an electoral cycle with fixed periodicity. Rather than having elections every fourth year, elections should be called as they are in all countries that have a parliamentary system. It should be the law that a government in power must dissolve parliament after five years of rule, but there would be provisions for the ruling party to call elections more frequently than that, and there should be mechanisms in place for the opposition parties to have motions of non-confidence that would force an election if governance is going badly. In order to reduce the amount of time and money wasted on political campaigns. elections should be held no more than thirty days after parliament is dissolved. In an age of rapid communications, thirty days is ample time for a political party to inform the voters of its platform and for the voters to evaluate the platforms they are asked to consider.
  • Reconstitute the Supreme Court. If judges continue to be appointed by the party in power, they should be appointed for a limited amount of time, say, a non-extendable term of eight years. If judges are elected by the people, as perhaps they should be, then they should have to stand for election every time there is a parliamentary election.

These are a few of the structural changes that could be made to enable a more efficient and streamlined and much less costly form of government to emerge in the country now called the United States of America. If the Constitution of 1787 is retired and replaced with an improved document, many of the amendments to the current constitution, including the Bill of Rights, would also be retired. Many of the ideas now rather poorly and ambiguously expressed in the Bill of Rights that came to be attached to the original constitution of 1787 could be expressed more clearly. The ambiguous amendment calling for the separation of church and state, for example, could be replaced by a provision declaring that there be absolutely no reference to any sectarian religious dogmas within the Parliament or Supreme Court or in federally funded educational facilities or health care providers, but guaranteeing that no individual ever be limited in his or her choice of religious views and practices, so long as those practices do not violate the criminal laws of the nation.

There are other reforms that I personally would recommend, but some of them are controversial, and I do not wish to enter into controversial issues here. They can wait for another communication. Suffice it to say for now that it seems perfectly obvious that the Constitution that has been in place since 1787 is no longer a fit instrument for effective government. It was never particularly good, but as times have evolved its few good points have ceased to be as good as they once were. It's time to bring an end to the United States and to replace it with a constitutional democracy more like those in most European countries and in such countries as India, Korea and Japan—or our next-door neighbor, Canada.

Saturday, October 22, 2011









Monday, July 04, 2011

Green Tea Party policy on national holidays
















Friday, June 03, 2011

Green Tea Party educational policy

Public education in the United States has always been fraught with political complexity. Consider the following facts about the history of public education in the United States.
  • There was no system of public education until the late 1820s.
  • The decision to provide public education was motivated by the thought that citizens in a democracy should be sufficiently literate to become informed about political and social issues so that they could make informed choices when voting. Since women did not have the right to vote in many states until the 19th amendment was added (passed by Congress June 4, 1919 and ratified August 18, 1920), public education was offered only to males at first.
  • Because it was widely believed that without a solid moral education, a person would not be capable of making good decisions in voting, moral education was seen as of the greatest importance in public education.
  • Because it was widely believed that there can be no morality in the absence of religion, it was decided that the Bible should be at the center of a boy's public education. But since the first amendment prohibits the establishment of a religion by Congress, it was decided that children would be taught no particular religious doctrines; each child would be allowed to interpret the Bible in his own way and to arrive at his own understanding of its moral teachings.
  • Almost immediately, there were major protests against the newly formed system of public education based on what was called non-sectarianism.
    • Conservative Christians claimed that the educational system showed a strong liberal permissive bias (because it gave freedom to students to interpret the Bible in their own way) and a Unitarian bias (since the doctrine of the Trinity was not allowed to be taught). Many leading evangelical Christians therefore threatened to refuse to pay taxes that would support schools that they could not in good conscience send their own children to.
    • Catholics claimed that the educational system showed a strong Protestant bias, since all students would be taught from an English translation of the Bible that was not approved by the Vatican. Moreover, a document from the Vatican declared that allowing people to read the Bible without the guidance of properly trained priests is deliramentum (folly, nonsense, madness). Many leading Catholics therefore refused to pay taxes that would support schools that they could not in good conscience send their own children to. (This issue became so heated at times that riots broke out. In the worst of the so-called Bible Riots, nineteen Roman Catholics were killed, and several Catholic churches were burned to the ground.)
The issue of public education has become even more complex now than it was in the nineteenth century. The demographics of the country have changed significantly with the result that a religious text associated with Christianity is no longer suitable as a basis for public education. Although 76% of the US population are people who identify themselves as Christian (51% Protestant and 25% Roman Catholic), 15% consider themselves as having no religious beliefs and another 5% say they do not know what their religious beliefs are. 4–5% of the US population identify themselves as following a religion other than Christianity. (See source of these data.) Taking societal and demographic factors into consideration, the Green Tea Party recommends the following policies for public education.

  1. Given the importance of moral education, but taking into consideration the need to maintain a non-sectarian (and preferably non-religious) basis for morality, all students in public school should be exposed to a broad spectrum of the moral thinkers who have influenced human beings throughout recorded history. At the minimum these thinkers should include Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Mengzi (Mencius), Zhuangzi, Zhuxi and Wang Yangming.
  2. Given the importance of historical context for any public policies, all students in public school should have a thorough grounding in the histories of ancient Mesopotamia and of all the continents on the earth.
  3. Given the importance of religion in human history, every public school student should receive an education in the histories, beliefs and practices of all the major religions of the world. Given the breadth and depth of this topic, comparative religions should be taught every year of a student's educational career.
  4. Given the importance of reasoning and critical thinking, every student should receive training every year in informal logic, formal logic and mathematics. This should be supplemented with a grounding in the theory and practice of scientific method.
  5. Given the importance of knowing a human being's place in the natural world, every public school student should have a grounding in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and geology, with an emphasis on the canons of reasoning and assessment of evidence practiced in each of these scientific disciplines.
  6. Given the importance of understanding how laws are made and interpreted, every student in a public school should study some aspect of constitutional law, how bills are formulated and approved by the Congress, the functions of the executive branch and a history of Supreme Court decisions. Such education should be a part of every year of his or her educational career. Every student should also receive an education in state and municipal government.
  7. Given the importance of languages as an access to cultures, and given the fundamental importance of multiculturalism in today's world, and given the ease with with young children learn languages, every student in an American public school should be taught, from the Kindergarten level to the completion of secondary education, at least the following languages: English, Spanish, and French, plus one Asian language, one African language and one native American language. (Given that Kindergarten is a German word, and given the importance of both the Germans and the Dutch in early America, every child should also learn German or Dutch, or at least Norwegian.)
  8. Every child who is a resident of the United States should receive the basic education described above, and this education, and all educational materials necessary to carry it out, should be completely funded by federal monies. All students should receive allowances for transportation to and from school and for healthy food consumed during school hours. (Students caught eating Oreo cookies provided by Red Tea Party mavericks during school hours should lose their food allowance privileges for a week.)
  9. The core curriculum should be determined by the federal government; no state or municipality should have the right to determine its own curriculum for any subject other than state and municipal history or civics.
  10. No educational institution funded by public monies should have a sports team that competes with other institutions of learning. Monies now wasted on inter varsity sports should be diverted to exercise and fitness programs and courses in basic nutrition, which should be available to all students but required of all students whose BMI index places them in the overweight or obese range.
  11. No person who has not successfully gone through the curriculum designed by the federal ministry of education should have the right to vote in any elections at any level of government unless he or she has passed an examination equivalent to that required of all naturalized citizens. (This is in keeping with one of the Green Tea Party's principles, namely, that unearned citizenship is a contradiction in terms.
Some Americans, especially those given to extraordinary levels of ignorance, may object to what they see as too large a role played by the federal government under a Green Tea regime. The official Green Tea Party response to such people is “Tough carrots!” Let people who have no interest in responsible democracy move to a plutocracy, where all their thinking is manipulated by greedy capitalists and where hardly anything is available but misinformation carefully doled out by people with vested commercial interests. As for America, may it become a democracy in which political decisions are made by representatives chosen by informed voters who have demonstrated their abilities to think critically and for themselves. That is, after all, what the Founding Fathers and Mothers had in mind.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Green Tea Economics






Increasing legal immigration



Decreasing the prison population







Friday, May 27, 2011

Green Tea Party





The Platform


Balancing the budget




Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Taking stock of American progress


— Henry David Thoreau













Sunday, March 13, 2011

Speaking as a foreigner

(L.P. Hartley, The Go-between)










Monday, January 10, 2011

Gluttony for Punishment

On the last day of 2010, I finally finished a task I had set out many times to do before: I finished reading the Christian Bible (the Protestant version) straight through. As I read it, I kept some notes and marked some cross-references and grouped passages together according to themes. On the first day of 2011 I decided to repeat the task, this time reading the King James version to savor the poetry of 17th century English, and this time following a traditional lectionary that selects for each day a mixture of Old Testament and New Testament passages. Yesterday, January 9, one of the selected readings was Psalm 21, and I was reminded by that text of a disturbing theme than runs throughout the Hebrew and the Greek texts of the Bible—a theme that I always try to ignore, and one that I certainly never try to incorporate into my approach to life. The theme I find so distasteful is the identification of others as enemies and the prayers that one's enemies will be destroyed, and that all who are unrighteous will be punished. The lines of the twenty-first Psalm that brought a sickening taste to my mouth were these:

Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies: thy right hand shall find out those that hate thee.Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them. Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men. (Ps. 21:8–10)
Now I may very well find such words as the very opposite of anything I would regard as inspirational or spiritual, but it is educational to encounter such passages (again and again) in the Bible, because they help me understand a great deal about both the European and Semitic traditions, and of the Judeo-Christian threads that are woven into the fabric of American culture. So much of what has always distressed me about America's European heritage has been the role that American  men (and sometimes, but more rarely, women) of European extraction have taken as those who must be obeyed, and those who must mete out punishment to those who fail to obey. There is a significant sector of the American population who can be described as gluttons for punishment, for they seem to have an insatiable appetite for punishment—so long as they are not on the receiving end of it.

And a great deal of this gluttony for seeing the unrighteous suffer and be exterminated comes directly from the culture of the Bible. Whether it is Joshua marching into the land of Canaan and killing all the men, women, children and even animals on the grounds that the ways of the Canaanites were offensive to the sight of God, or the Christians longing for the downfall and humiliation and devastation of the Roman empire, there are few books of either the Jewish or the Christian scriptures that do not celebrate the suffering and death of those who think and act differently and whose difference is deemed offensive in the eyes of God.

This week I received a letter from someone serving a very long sentence in a California prison. He told me of a conversation he had recently had with a fellow inmate. My correspondent told how he had begun the discussion by saying that he was disturbed by American foreign policy, which is so often a policy of forcing others to accept mainstream American values and economic policies and regarding those who do not readily comply as savages and evil-doers who deserve no better than to be dominated and, if necessary, destroyed. This opening led to a spirited discussion. The other inmate reportedly made no attempt to deny that America's behavior in the world has been aggressive and domineering. Rather, he defended America's culture of bullying as being essentially human. This is a dog-eat-dog world, he said, and those who do not bully get bullied. If America were not dominating others, others would be quick to dominate America. The only way for a country to survive is to look around and see who is poised to try to be aggressively dominant and to beat them to the punch.

It does not surprising that an inmate in an American prison would think that striving for dominance is the very essence of being human. From everything I have heard about American prisons, they are, as a friend of mine—a former prison guard—recently put it, “just like everything you have ever heard about hell, but in many ways worse.” It is not easy for those who live in hellish realms to see that there might be some alternative to being dominated by both the legal system and other prisoners and gaining respite from being bullied only by finding a few weaker people and dominating them.

The culture of domination thrives outside the walls of our prisons almost as much as it thrives on the inside. The very fact that there is such a thing as prison walls betokens a culture of domination, and of justifying domination on the grounds that those being dominated are evil-doers or reprobates whose behavior has alienated them from the allegedly inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That Americans are so fond of punishment—or at least so convinced that there is no alternative to it—is distressing enough. The distress is compounded when one thinks of the people who are deemed worthy of punishment: drug addicts, the poor, the disadvantaged, the mentally ill. With the exception of a few so-called white-collar criminals such as Bernie Madoff, who seem to be driven mostly by greed, most of the people in American prisons are there because of drug-related behavior or from actions arising from the desperation of poverty.

I have some study questions for America. Why is drug addiction seen as a crime to be punished rather than as a disease to be cured? Why is vagrancy and homelessness seen as a miscreance rather than as a condition that no one chooses? Why is begging seen as a manifestation of laziness rather than as the consequence of desperation? Why are those who cannot afford health care because their skills do not enable them to earn high wages perceived as a drain on the economy and a factor in a nation's national debt? Why are those who need help regarded as parasites? And to what extent do these attitudes reflect religious teachings stemming from three thousand years ago and elevated to the status of divinely inspired wisdom? And here is a question for extra credit: how many people like John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords have to be shot by people who feel a need to punish them for offering help to those who need it before America dares to meditate on its addiction to punishment?