Issue #43
Last Update December 24, 2005
National No Beauty Contest by Gerry Krownstein The media, especially the network media, have been treating this presidential campaign as a combination beauty contest and sporting event. As a result, election coverage has been trivialized. There are major problems facing our country that the next president must address. Some of them are problems that current president should have addressed and didn't, or addressed incorrectly and made things worse. Ignoring these problems, or solving them badly, will damage the country, and the next Administration. Here are the problems:
1.Terrorism. Most terrorism is not state-created, and only marginally state-supported. The war metaphor does more harm than good. A broad-based protocol must be developed to define the crime of terrorism, and provide international mechanisms for locating terrorists, preventing their acts, trying them (in civil courts), eliminating their funding and, if necessary, destroying their protected bases. The hard parts will be getting agreement on the definition of terrorism (suggestion: acts targeted at the death of civilians without military objectives); creating a mechanism with safeguards for sequestering their funds wherever they may be; and providing a powerful international force under international command for destroying protected bases. US policy to date has been the biggest obstacle to these goals, since we always look to reserve the right to do whatever we please in our own interest and do not want our government officials or military subject to international sanction in any way.
2.Iraq and Afghanistan. Our ventures into these countries had two different origins. Afghanistan was seen as an appropriate response to 9/11, and our actions there has international support, Iraq was seen as an arrogant, unnecessary exercise of unbridled American power, and had only the support we could wring from small client states, plus Tony Blair's collaboration in the making the preinvasion case and in the invasion itself. Nevertheless, the outcome has been the same in both countries: thinly veiled anarchy, devolution into regionalism, a central government that controls almost nothing, an economy in shambles, and damaged infrastructure, and a dependence on US and British troops to maintain what order there is. The task in both places is to stabilize the economy and civil order, prevent the reestablishment of terrorist havens, and get out.
3.The economy – jobs. The tight job situation is the US is only partly due to our international trade agreements that foster the export of jobs. It is also due to improvements in productivity that make labor a less important and valuable part of the production process, which produces the anomaly of growing corporate profits with shrinking job opportunities and reduced pay and benefits for those employed. The jobs issue is intertwined with social benefits issues such as health care and education. Solving the systemic problems will be much harder than those of job export; a restructuring of our whole system of work for reward may have to be rethought.
4.The economy – balance of payments. The US imports far more (in dollar value) than it exports, leaving us a debtor nation in world trade. We have survived thus far because the dollar has been the world's currency. If other nations get sufficiently mad at us because of our blundering and ham-handed international policies, or lender nations get tired of keeping all their eggs in the dollar basket, lending may switch to the Euro. Europe is now a larger market than the US, both in terms of population and GDP, and the Euro is now stronger than the dollar. Unless we can correct the balance of payments, the results of a currency switch on the part of even a small percentage of lenders will have a major impact on our economy, pushing up interest rates, cutting US imports, and creating a major depression if the currency change is more than moderate.
5.Energy. A petroleum-based economy leaves us vulnerable to political pressure from the Middle East, monopolistic pricing practices from the international oil companies, and the detrimental impact on the economy of declining petroleum and natural gas stocks, not to mention the environmental impact of burning petroleum. This is one of the few problems on the list that may be resolved by improvements in technology. So far, little has been done (by either party) to make these technological advances arrive at an early date.
6.Health care. The HMO system has pr oven to be a financial and health care disaster for the country. Governmental health care works somewhat better, but is crippled by Congressional restrictions and is available only to the elderly, the military and Congressmen, and to some extent to the indigent. Fee-based medicine not connected to either of these alternatives is practical only for the very wealthy. Solving the health care conundrum without creating a stultifying bureaucracy from which there is not recourse (a situation we face today with HMOs) will be difficult, with believers in an activist government clashing with believers in the magical power of the free market. Perhaps the solution will involve the recognition on the part of free-martketeers that the free market only works efficiently when choice is easy to come by, a situation that does not exist under monopolies, near monopolies and cartels; and the recognition on the part of government-action types that where true competition exists, it should be allowed to flourish. This implies an eventual solution putting control of health care administration in a governmental single-payer system (already operating with far lower overhead than the HMOs and not requiring the subtraction of administrative profits from the health care dollar), altering the patent monopolies on drugs (the development of much of which is government funded anyway, regardless of what the pharmaceutical companies would have you believe), and leaving doctors and hospitals free to compete on the basis of quality and price for the health care dollar.
7.The environment. Failing to deal with environmental problems is like looking away from an oncoming train: it seems to have gone away but the impact is devastating. Ideology is no defense, and bargaining with the planet doesn't work. International solutions to recognized problems have been too little, too late, and deeply flawed, but some movement has been better than none. Ozone problems have been successfully dealt with by international action. Other major environmental problems (air pollution, greenhouse gases, water availability and purity, erosion of arable lands) must be dealt with internationally. This will only work if we listen. Burdens must be equitably shared. Those causing the bulk of the problem (developed nations) must bear the bulk of the burden of correction, and solutions must be found to satisfy the legitimate needs of developing nations without increasing environmental decay. The current first-world policy of exempting itself from hard actions, while requiring it of nations under our economic domination, will not work.
8.Nuclear proliferation. Bad as the Bush administration's record has been in this area, by weakening treaties and diverting our attention from India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea with the Iraq adventure, other nuclear powers have not been helpful either, not least by refusing to abide by treaties already in place to significantly reduce our nuclear arsenal. Iran and North Korea have learned two lessons from President Bush: treaties need not be obeyed, and America will not attack a nuclear nation. If anything, Iranian and North Korean desires to become members of the nuclear club have been inflamed by US policies and actions of the last three years and have a real payoff for them that was not apparent prior to this Administration taking office.
9.Domestic needs. Affordable housing, quality education, efficient transportation are all major needs largely ignored by our government. The price tag decried by conservatives as too expensive is a mere fraction of what Iraq has cost us, not to mention that unwise tax cuts. The failure is in domestic and political will. If we wanted to pay for these, we could; we just don't want these, apparently, as badly as we want weapons, tax cuts and industry giveaways. This is a problem that is more in the lap of the public than the President, but the president must lead.
10.Pensions. The Social Security system is fundamentally sound and would weather the aging of the baby boomers just nicely, thank you, if the government had in fact treated it as a trust fund instead of merging it with the general revenues. Proposals for privatizing social security are just plain silly: they interpose a profit layer that depletes the funds available for pensioners without providing any additional benefits for what should be a basic safety net, and they ignore they recent history of corporate pension fund looting (see Enron, and now United Airlines; in fact, the government fund that guarantees private pensions is broke because of corporate defaults) that impoverishes retirees that thought they were prudently paying in their company's private pension funds to create a more affluent old age then under social security alone. Small changes to Social Security now will forestall major changes or funding impacts later; better laws safeguarding private pension funds will do more for retirees than privatizing Social Security.
If the media felt any real responsibility to their public, they would insist that each candidate develop a cohesive and detailed plan covering all of these problem areas, and would publicize the plan details. The public would then be able to evaluate what the candidates are offering and make an informed choice. The candidates would be freed from doing some of the silly things they now do to win, and from saying some of the silly things they say to win the attention of the media.
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