We don't have to live like this. Prohibition doesn't work.
Issues 2
Education –
College Affordability Enlightened countries look upon a college education as an investment in their economy. Not as an opportunity to squeeze money out of students. Getting a good college education is hard work and requires sacrifice. We should be proud of the Americans who are willing to take on this challenge. College should be free for students carrying at least a 3.0 Grade Point Average (GPA). Students who fall below this average should be given a probationary semester to bring their grades back up and will not be allowed to continue if they don’t. For profit private schools would be required to submit their student body to testing by an independent testing organization twice every year. If their student body, as a whole, can’t demonstrate acceptable progress the school would be given a probationary semester to bring their average up. If the school cannot provide an acceptable level of progress, the school will be closed. The days when fly-by-night “colleges” would pop up and make unrealistic promises just to get students to take out massive loans to hand over to the “college” are over. Egregious cases would result in prosecution and forfeiture of tuition already paid by the students.
Private Sector Schools (Charter Schools) -The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) scandal in Ohio. ECOT shut it’s doors on January 19th but six days later it’s website is still up as if nothing happened and inviting students to enroll. ECOT had 12,000 students enrolled. Each of those students represents $6,000 taken from the local public schools and given to this privately owned charter school. The loss of 10 students from the local public school means the loss of a $60,000 math teacher. 20 students would mean the loss of a $120,000 science lab. America has a tradition of providing a free, public education to all of it’s children. These schools are provided in the local community. If you prefer to educate your children in private schools, that is your right but you pay the tuition at the private school. The taxpayers are paying to provide a public school that your child can attend tuition free. The taxpayers should not be called on to subsidize your decision to not take advantage of the free public school that we built for your kids. How can anyone believe that a private school will provide the same of better education than the local school at a lower claimed cost but with the extra burden of slicing off a piece of the pie for the proprietors of a for-profit, private school. The numbers don’t make sense even if you include the $6,000 per student taken from the local budget to subsidize the for-profit private school. In many states, these for-profit schools are exempted from the testing required in the public school to assess whether the children are making adequate progress.
Campaign Finance Our elections should be about who has the best ideas to improve America for all Americans and not about who has the deepest pockets. Political Action Committees must reveal the names and amounts of their donors. What are they hiding?
Sorry Mr. Romney, corporations are not citizens! Every first year law student learns that corporations are a “legal fiction”. A corporation is a fiction that makes it more convenient to deal with a company that has a great number of stockholders. It’s just a name for the whole group. I’ll believe a corporation is a citizen when Texas puts a corporation to death with a lethal injection. The over-used phrase “corporate citizen” is just wrong. Corporations are not mentioned as citizens anywhere in the Constitution.
Criminal Justice Reform
Private Prisons – We need to close all private prisons. There have been more than enough cases to prove that the profit motive corrupts a prison system. Corporations who exist, only to profit from the suffering of others, are an abomination. There are quite a number of functions that should never be turned over to the private sector and prisons are clearly one of them.
Death Penalty I used to support the death even though it violated my Catholic upbringing. I thought it was more merciful to execute someone than to keep them in a cage for the fest of their natural life. Prisoners serving life sentences are often the most difficult for the prison personnel to deal with because they have nothing to lose. And I believed that almost everyone on death row was guilty. I thought it was unlikely that an innocent person would go though the entire conviction process without it coming to light that they shouldn’t be convicted. In my last year of law school, 1992, a couple of public defenders started the Innocence Project to use DNA technology to prove that people who wrongfully convicted were innocent. I thought they might find two or three. So far, they have exonerated 350 using DNA and that’s only the exonerations. Because of the work of the Innocence Project, many thousands of innocent people have been spared the trauma of being charged. Knowing that their work will be scrutinized with DNA technology, the procedures of police, evidence techs, laboratories and judges have been improved and are constantly getting better. I no longer support the death penalty and I was wrong to assume the system was nearly infallible.
Economy The American economy belongs to all Americans not just those at the top of the income spectrum. We claim to have a capitalist system. It should have been called the “Labor and Capital System” because this system will not work without both labor and capital. They are equally important. Neither can get along without the other. In my life, I have belonged to at least three unions. Unions created the middle class. Even if you have never worked in a union, your standard of living is the result of union activities over the last 130 years including a fair number of union members who were killed for their efforts. Many scholars attribute the current trend of income inequality to the falling membership in unions.
Healthcare We already are a single payer system. Most of us pay our health Insurance premiums and co-pays and anything else the insurance company doesn’t want to cover. Most of the time the government doesn’t pay part of it. The hospital doesn’t take up a collection from their shareholders to cover the cost of treating the poor and indigent. The insurance companies don’t pay any more than they have to under their contract. In the end, there is only one payer. That single payer is us. Since we are the only one paying, we need to recognize the health insurance companies as parasites on the system. Every dollar of your premium that goes into the pocket of some vastly overpaid CEO or to the shareholders, doesn’t buy any healthcare at all. Health insurance is a scam. In the early days of health insurance the job of collecting premiums from the risk pool (us) was done by non-profit mutual insurance companies. They were sometimes organized by a large employer to help their employees reduce the risk of health problems by having them all contribute to a fund and paying for healthcare from that fund. By everyone contributing an affordable amount the fund would be enough to cover any personal catastrophes and pay the administrators to keep track of the money. The basic concept that underlies all insurance is that the larger the group, the more stable the fund and each person’s share of the burden gets smaller. By that simple logic, if a larger group is better for the members of the group, you would want to make the group as large as possible. Therefore, putting every man, woman and child into the same risk pool will be the optimal situation for everyone. The only downside of a single payer system for everyone is that we will have no need for health insurance companies. Those people will have to find new employment. The good news is that we won’t have a huge chunk of our premiums siphoned off to overpay a CEO and an army of lawyers who work at these insurance companies whose whole job is to find ways to deny claims and wipe out members of the pool. Since, we are already the only ones paying for healthcare, we should adopt a single payer system as soon as possible.
Infrastructure – It’s no secret that we need to fix our infrastructure all over this country. That will mean jobs, jobs and more jobs. The Republicans are talking about infrastructure all the time but we need to upgrade the Brent Spence bridge. It was a “shovel ready” project which should have been started early in President Obama’s first term when there was money available as part of the stimulus. The Republicans had Mitch McConnell from Kentucky running the senate and John Boehner of the Ohio 8th as Speaker of the House. That sounds like a slam dunk. It’s not a bridge to nowhere. Everyone agrees it’s badly needed and the two most powerful legislators in Congress each live on one side of this project. The only reason it didn’t get done is that Republicans were afraid that Obama would get the credit for building it!
Jobs
National Debt –
How Voodoo – Tricle Down Economics Caused most of the National Debt zFact 12/19/2017
Abortion – I think abortion is wrong but that is a religious consideration which the Constitution prohibits the use of our government to enforce. I will not stop you from getting an abortion because the Supreme Court has said is your right under the privacy guaranteed to you by the Constitution. If you oppose abortion and want to do something about it, you should not be encouraging your elected officials to pass laws that are prohibited by the Constitution. We need an Amendment to the Constitution to prohibit abortion. However, you need to convince your friends and neighbors that they should support such an Amendment because I’ve heard figures that as high as 65% of Americans want abortion to be available on demand. If that’s true, an amendment would never pass. It’s also concerning that prohibiting abortion will felt more by the poor than any other Americans. Even if we had an amendment for a total end to abortion, the wealthy will always be able to hop on a plane and fly to some other country where they can get a safe abortion. I can’t put it into words but that bothers me.
The opioid scourge, here and elsewhere, has overwhelmed police and fire departments, hospitals, prosecutors, public defenders, courts, jails and the foster care system.
Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst kind of violence”. Bill Ebben: Whenever our policies lead to violence, we should step back to see if there might be another path. Violence should be a wake up call. Violence is not the path of God. We should always take violence as a signal that we are on the wrong path.
