Shaking the muck out of DC

In light of all the madness in DC today, I’d like to make a counter offer:

1)      Rule of Law Reboot: A resolution reaffirming that the US Constitution is a civil law contract, to be obeyed as written.  What’s not clear must be clarified by written amendment.  What needs to change needs to be changed by written amendment.  Details are here: https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/rule-of-law-reboot/, and here: https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/annotated-usa-constitution.pdf.  And, remember, the constitution is the authority; it’s not just a “serving suggestion,” or starting point for an endless stream of prohibitions, mandates, handouts and theft.

2)     Monetary/Banking reform: Our petrodollar scheme was a dangerous gambit, and it has led to needless (and undeclared/unconstitutional) war, massive debt, and impending monetary system collapse.  We must fix this.  We must audit “The Fed” (counterfeiting crime ring), if for no other reason than to restructure and repudiate debts, and create an entirely new, genuinely private central bank, and insist upon constitutional money, under the direct control of Congress and the Treasury.   I’d strongly support something similar to the “Free Competition in Currency Act,” which was reintroduced in this Congress by Rep. Paul Broun (H.R. 77)

3)     Stand down our global military-industrial empire.  I want a very strong military…but one dedicated and focused on only defense of our actual nation as delimited by our federal and state constitutions.   No nation building.  No nannying or bullying.  No global policing.  And it’s time we overhaul our military development and acquisition processes.  They’re embarrassing.  I propose we cut as many nations as possible loose from both our purse strings and browbeating.  Re-institute the constitutional design (quite like the military systems of Switzerland and Israel) Peace, commerce and friendly skepticism with all nations, entangling alliances with none.  In other words, stand down our global military-industrial empire.

4)      Of course nullify PPACA/ “Obamacare.”  But I want politicians out of our healthcare system entirely.  More details here: https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2013/10/15/can-politicians-even-define-health-care/.

5)      A resolution reinforcing that, in the constitution as actually written and amended, there are only seven federal crimes that apply to citizens outside of Washington, DC (1. counterfeiting, 2. piracy, 3. high seas felony, 4. offense against the Law of Nations, and, 5. treason.  Tax and postal crimes are implied, but unfortunately, unspecified).  Other federal crimes must either be the result of a trans-state-border dispute (murders, other State crimes crossing state lines, for example), or are not federal crimes at all, and the wrongly convicted would be freed.

6)     Pork (“earmark” or localized spending added to bills) is unconstitutional, and it’s time we call it the crime it is.  Farm subsidies, corporate welfare, federal block grants that should originate and end within the states…they all must stop.  I will squeal whenever I see pork.  That alone will keep me busy.

7)     TERM LIMITS!!!  I used to think that this is voters’ job.  And of course it is.  But voters aren’t doing it, and there are too many reasons why it’s easy for voters to screw this up.  First of all, there are $everal tremendou$ advantage$ to incumbency in money, power and time that make it difficult for anybody to compete fairly.  Second, the media is all about the status quo – it’s their major source of income.  Third, there’s a cultural expectation that the job “belongs” to the incumbent, and everybody else is a “challenger.”  Sigh…  So, we need term limits on everybody – including Supreme Court Justices.  They’ve granted themselves faaar too much power and sanctity.

8)      I know that the federal constitution isn’t perfect.  But I really hesitate to even mention amending the constitution, given who’d be sitting next to me in congress.  But since I’ve been asked about this, here’re some amendments I’d propose if I thought they could be ratified intact:

a)      Sunset Amendment: a 10-year expiration date for all non-constitutionally specified agencies, laws, powers and programs to gracefully remove, or at least review for reinstatement, everything that’s not specifically written into the constitution.  Our laws must be simple enough to understand, few enough to know, and important enough to enforce without classes or exceptions.  So a regular “spring cleaning” is required.

b)      To more specifically forbid central banking and “monopoly money” in both senses of the term (money backed by nothing, enforced by government monopoly on currency).

c)      To nullify the 16^th Amendment, which essentially pays for only central banking anyway.

d)      To very specifically limit the authority grant of Article I, Section 8:3 (the “Commerce Clause”) to only disputes/issues between states, and not within states.

e)      To clarify or even nullify the misinterpreted and increasingly dangerous “Law of Nations”, or jus gentium (Article I, Section 10).

f)       To modernize references to the Navy (Article I, Section 8:13-14; Article II, Section 2:1, the 5^th Amendment) and “high Seas” (Article I, Section 8:10) to delimit authority and armament in the air and space as well.

Can politicians even define “health care?”

I’ve worked in healthcare since 1978 in public health, research, clinical, education and industry roles.  And I can’t tell you what healthcare is.

To my wife, it’s massage and things that smell nice.  To others, it’s Reiki, or heterodox nutrition.  Some debate that vaccines are bad medicine, but marijuana is great healthcare.  And they have convincing arguments.

Is gender-reassignment, or voodoo healthcare too?  Who decides?

I think cardiovascular science and technology is genuinely wonderful.  It’s my professional specialty, and I think it should qualify as healthcare, notwithstanding strong disagreements in the field (Are stents good, or bad?  Should we try to lower blood cholesterol, when we know high cholesterol correlates to longer life expectancy?).
But as for everything else?  I can’t even give you a clean definition of “health.”  And I’ve been in the business my whole life.

Politicians sure think they know all about it.  And by the Election Day polling numbers, well-over 90% of us believe and trust that politicians should control …everything.

But after the more than 100 years the unionized AMA has wielded political monopoly power, the 80 years of taxpayer subsidized health insurance, 60 years of socialized health, education and welfare, and the almost 50 years of even more directly socialized healthcare in the form of our rapidly swelling Medicare system, I’m appalled that we think we want more politics in healthcare.  I’m disgusted that we’ve been lead to believe that health insurance is what we want when that is often antithetical to healthcare.  And I’m embarrassed that We The People haven’t seen a better way to live that’s always been right before us.

In every field of science, technology and plain old merchandise that isn’t so political, costs decrease while quality, efficacy and availability increases with every new advance.  Luxuries of yesterday like cellphones and personal computers are now ubiquitous and powerful necessities.

The in-your-face availability and range of price/quality in shoes, coffee, kitchen gadgets and even things like used magazines and historical wristwatch reproductions has become amazing in a relative freedom from political control.

There’ve been innumerable healthcare advances in the last century that would’ve made healthcare cheap, effective, and easily available to all…if not for all the politics that’s been creeping in since Teddy Roosevelt’s time.
Politicians have already made everything related to medicine unfair, complicated, ever-changing, severely limited, and ghastly expensive.

And they’re not done yet.

However, none of the preceding is any part of my main objection to more politics in healthcare.
I’ll let others quibble over whether politicians will finally be able to keep a promise, or make something work at all as advertised.  The real problem, whenever we rub that genie’s lamp of politics, is corruption, and calamity.

Everything government does, it does by force.  Politics can’t do anything without at least the threat of fines, taxes, courts, guns and prisons.

It’s easy to dream that this kind of force can be used for good.  But the usual reality, as evidenced by all of human history, is a scale and degree of injustice and death that only politics can achieve.  Power is of course a seduction for those who’d wield it.  But it’s just as attractive to those who can simply buy the portion of such power as suits their purposes.

And make no mistake.  All power is for sale.

Whenever politicians are allowed to steal a new power, there’s a new industry in lobbying for the use of that power.  We can see how that lobby has worked for the military industrialists and bankers, and we should see what it has done to our health, education and welfare as well.

Adding more power to government, with more snooping into things that are more personal than ever before possible, only makes the resulting corruption more dangerous.

Hitler’s infamous “T4” eugenics/euthanasia program under Germany’s socialized healthcare system certainly demonstrated one hazard in giving politicians so much power over life.  But think about what we already know of our own government; what they’ve admitted to from the past (testing plutonium on school kids, syphilis experiments on black men, experiments on soldiers), and what they’ve been forced to admit recently about their spying, militarization and deceit.   Think hard about how much more secretive, powerful and deceitful we know our government to be now than ever before; and just what such a government is capable of doing with the actual coding in our cells.

And changing the role of healthcare workers from healers to government agents who’ll give to politicians everything from your DNA to your intimate personal and family details, will, over time, change the sort of people who’d seek out such a career.
You really shouldn’t want that to happen.

I fear what will happen when healthcare becomes a tool of global domination.  Our fear of sickness, combined with too much trust in politicians, could prove deadly when another health crisis, real or manufactured, like AIDS or mad cow disease, entices politicians into massive power grabs at our expense.

We The People have exactly and only what we have freely and repetitiously chosen not just every every day we sigh, and yield to what we know is wrong and isn’t working; but also every Election Day.

Elections were meant to be a means of peaceful revolution.  We’d better finally use them for that purpose, because the power over our bodies we’re granting to politicians now will have no good end, unless that end is determined by our change of heart and mind.

RELATED POSTS:
https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/a-short-history-of-health-care-let-doctors-be-doctors/
https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2009/07/28/health-insurance%E2%80%A6or-healthcare%E2%80%A6choose-one/

Rule of Law Reboot

What follows is a resolution that’d be a good first step to a better course for our nation.
If elected to congress, I’d introduce it immediately.
But don’t wait for me…please feel free to send this to your representatives in local, state or federal office.
PLEASE do this or something like it!
I’d of course prefer that this be passed as a Bill or Joint Resolution.  But even as a Concurrent or Simple Resolution, it’d open a discussion on what sort of nation we’re to be; a nation with governed government, or a great big crime syndicate:

Whereas the plain wording of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution for the United States of America is binding law;

Be it resolved that;

No federal law, agency, program or international treaty that depends upon authority not specifically granted by the Constitution for the United States of America shall be valid;

Any federal agency, law,  program or international treaty transcending authority specifically granted by the Constitution for the United States of America is null and void;

Unconstitutional laws, agencies, programs and treaties have created both problems and dependencies that will take time to rectify;

All unconstitutional federal powers, delegations, laws, programs, treaties and entities that cannot be immediately nullified must be phased out within no more than ten years.

 

An Indiana/local version of this could be (SOMEBODY PLEASE INTRODUCE THIS HERE IN INDIANA!):

Whereas the plain wording of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution for the United States of America, and Article I Section 25 of the Indiana Constitution is binding law;

Be it resolved that;

No federal or state law, agency, program or international treaty that depends upon authority not specifically granted by the Constitution for the United States of America  or the Constitution of the State of Indiana shall be valid;

Any federal or state agency, law,  program or international treaty transcending authority specifically granted by the Constitution for the United States of America is null and void;

Unconstitutional laws, agencies, programs and treaties have created both problems and dependencies that will take time to rectify;

All unconstitutional governing powers, delegations, laws, programs, treaties and entities that cannot be immediately nullified must be phased out within no more than ten years.

Your vote’s not a poker chip; it’s weapon.