Nr. 50

As a writer of this blog who is guided by an independent a non-politicized view of the universe and who embraces progressive  thinking with a healthy dose of intellectual curiosity and of so-called “conservative” as well as “liberal” values, in addition to valuing the secular-rational-humanistic philosophy perspective, I feel strongly that the Republican shutdown of the US government crisis may eventually be viewed by historians as a blessing in disguise.

For that to happen, we the people, need to de-fund the Republican party, and to zero out its political capital generation capacity via our democratic and constitutional prerogative of voting this party out of the political realm, period.

Our nation needs to heal and that means it needs a new second party of to substitute the one that has now demonstrated that it is recklessly intellectually and morally bankrupt.

The Democratic party in turn needs to usher in an era of reforms.  Congressional reforms, electoral reforms which may require the elimination of the Electoral College, election campaign finance reforms, foreign policy reforms, and host of other reforms which will reflect that “we the people”  will and can regain genuine participatory democracy  and enjoy a two-party system with both engaging cooperatively, respectfully, and constructively.  Of course the option of a three party system provided with an instant runoff voting would also be desirable

As regards to foreign policy reform one can be inspired in this quest by former President Eisenhower whose salient farewell message was, beware of the industrial-military complex and beware of foreign entanglements.

President Eisenhower believed in America the republic, and not America the empire builder.

Today we spent 60% of our budget on the military and that budget is higher than the military spending of the world combined.  The military budget is now $ 2.2 million per minute.   This is obscene and counter productive.   The statistics just noted are based on President’s Obama 2013 federal discretionary budget sent to Congress in 2012.   The EPA receives 1%,  Health and Human Services 6%, to name a few intolerable contrasts.

President Eisenhower also criticized the fact that the US became the first and only nation on earth in history to use nuclear weapons on innocent civilians, and did so after Japan had agreed to surrender.

President Eisenhower also did not buy into the irrational notion that Israel, which clandestinely became the only nation to get to develop a nuclear weapons arsenal,  can do no wrong, and must be unconditionally supported at a level which now amounts to more than  US $20 million per day, and furthermore he was ready to take military action against Israel when it bombed America’s most advanced spy ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, killing 34 of its crew and wounding 174, a fact Israel first denied suggesting the crime was committed by the Soviet Union.   For forty-five years on, thanks to the complicity of the mainstream media, the cover up ordered by President  Johnson is still in place.  Now Israel is ready threatening daily to attack Iran of false allegations and expecting the US to protect it .   The publication Veterans Today, inter alia, documents these facts as verifiable via the following URL,   https://www.google.com/#q=israel+bombed+uss+liberty+Veterans+Today,

So to sum up, the time has come for a new paradigm in foreign and national affairs.

We must and still can become a beacon of participatory democracy by ending our foreign interventionism, and by beginning to rebuild our infrastructure,  public health services system (the start of which drove Republicans to the point of generating the present crisis),  and educational system, and by first and foremost, working towards a redistribution of rights and obligations in an equitable approach which will downsize our degree of social stratification, and will  also result in respectable deburocratized, accountable and transparent governance where “we the people” are the only people and, contrary to some misjudgments by the judiciary branch,   corporations are not deemed “people” as well so as to facilitate their bribery  of corrupt politicians such as the ones orchestrating our tremendously damaging shutdown which as of today has cost the taxpayers about $ US 8 billion dollars ( i.e. $ US 8 thousand million dollars ).

Our US Government is not for sale by the top 1% and their corporate agents and their corrupt extremist right – wing representatives in Congress.

The historically unprecedented damage to the US caused by the reckless and vandalistic paralysis will end soon and from these ashes there will rise a new era of potential peace and prosperity dividends achievable by us uniting as never before and engaging in the monumental homework reform, something which will give us more “homeland security” than the maintaining some 300 military bases abroad, a concentration camp in occupied Cuban territory where inmates have been tortured and some kept for a decade without any charges and the due process, and by  the use of extra judicial drone assassinations and abductions abroad, or by spying non-judiciously on computer systems of such state enterprises such as  Petrobras , an oil refinery in Brazil, our ally,  which is now the 6th largest economy in the world.

I end this article with the sentence used by former President Clinton,  which paraphrased says,  we must inspire persuasively by the power of example and not by the example of power.