We The People...

Last debate of Obama’s political career was tonight and the resonating point of the night was the last thing said by Bob Schieffer before his sign off. He said, “We all love teachers.” This just felt like a huge slap to the American people. Yes, the phrase “we all love teachers” is mostly true, but it insinuates that everyone is for education. Quite frankly, that is far from the truth.

We have a political field full of people who have never set foot inside a classroom on the teaching end, and they make decisions that affect how we educate our children and affect the United States as a whole. We have an entire party that wants to cut education and make it a for-profit company and another party who claim to be for education but when we need cuts, education is the first to go.

Dwight Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, [and] the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Although he does not specify the education system specifically, it is obvious that this is part of what he was talking about. Each year, we raise the defense budget, regardless of conflict, or lack thereof. We go to wars for oil, cut taxes for the richest people, and pay for it by making cuts to our future. We use buzz words like ‘Job Creators,’ ‘Entrepreneurs,’ etc. to justify making the rich richer and the poor poorer. We have a military-industrial-complex, a prison-industrial-complex, a pharmaceutical-industrial-complex, and an Oligarchical government that we allow to tear this nation apart for their pocketbooks. But we cannot allow anymore.

With the system being against the people, there is no more time to wait. They own the police, they own the education system that is making us dumber, and they own everything you buy and everywhere you go. We must not take it anymore. We must stand up. We must fight. There is a war against the people and we are losing. We did not start this war, but, We The People, must win it. It is time that you are honest with yourself… What is worth fighting for? What is worth going to jail for? What is worth dying for?

http://teapartywpbfl.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/we-the-people-have-had-enough/

The Perpetuating Cycle

Second presidential debate is now over and I have spent the last 3 hours inflamed while debating people on Facebook. And the funny thing is, it is the same debate I have every time. It is a debate against the Republicans and not for the Democrats. I have just been proving what most have already known. We do not have an election to vote for the best and brightest, we have an election to vote the lesser of two evils.

The election process is no longer an expression of why you are a good candidate. It is an expression of why you suck less than the other guy. It is downright sickening. What’s worse, is that we have such an idiotic populous that we don’t even see it. The people outside of Washington see this as a fight between left and right; conservative and liberal; Black and White. Well, ok, it is a fight between Black and White, but it’s a fight that no one wins except the rich who invest in both candidates. It is a fight between a right-wing conservative, Romney, and a right-leaning moderate, Obama. If you are a liberal, you have no dog in this fight. If you are an old-school, fiscal-conservative, you have no dog in this fight. This fight really comes down to, who can win over the “uninformed voter,” or as I like to call them, the idiots.

I am losing faith. I am becoming unhopeful, bitter, and I am downright ANGRY. We have a populous who will sit outside for days to get a phone that is exactly like the one they already have, but who won’t take twenty minutes to read what is going on and become informed. We have a populous that is anti-union (the people who brought us minimum wage, the 40 hour work week, weekends, child labor laws, etc.), but are all about unions when it comes to their football.

I have spent so much time complaining about the Electoral College and all the money involved in politics being the reason why third parties can’t win and why our vote is for “the lesser of two evils.” This is a very serious problem, yes. But I am realizing that it doesn’t even scratch the surface of our problems. We have a perpetuating cycle of stupidity in this country. Poor education puts out stupid people; stupid people have stupid kids; stupid kids grow up to be stupid adults; stupid adults don’t read; people who don’t read are not informed; uninformed people are apathetic; apathetic people are uninformed voters; uninformed voters vote like idiots. What more can I say? Stupidity is contagious.

 

 

My Political Platform

No emotional jargon, no party bias. This blog is going straight to the point. I don’t have any real plan as I begin writing this blog, aside from saying what I believe in, politically; so it may bounce some. In no particular order, here we go: 

1.      I believe that adults can make adult decisions. I don’t think it is the government’s place to tell you what you can do with your body. This includes, but is not limited to, decriminalizing drugs, decriminalizing prostitution, keeping abortion legal, making birth control readily available, and making gay marriage legal.

a.       By decriminalizing drugs, we can not only save billions by ending the worthless and expensive war on drugs, we can use the money that has gone towards arresting and detaining the non-violent offenders and use it towards rehabilitation. As history shows us, prohibition does not work; it only creates a Black Market. By legalization, regulation, and taxation, you eliminate the black market, take the violence out of the drug industry, clean up the product and produce revenue.

b.      To go along with the same thinking as drugs, prostitution must also become legal. We live in a country where capitalism is legal, consensual sex is legal, but it is illegal to combine the two. Again, prohibition does not work; it only creates a violent and dirty black market. By legalization, regulation, and taxation, you get the violence and STD’s out of the industry while creating revenue.

c.       Abortion did not begin at Roe v. Wade, women dying from abortion stopped and Roe v. Wade. Again, history shows us that prohibition does not work. Keep it safe.

d.      Not only is birth control an adult choice that fits “personal responsibly,” where they are choosing to wait to have children until they are financially and emotionally ready, it is a health and economical issue. By educating people on birth control and safe sex, you lower the amount of teen pregnancies, abortions, and you lower the amount of welfare recipients.

e.       Making gay marriage legal is a civil rights issue. It is allowing all citizens to be able to reap in the benefits of becoming a legal partner to the person they love without the issue of the dreaded, “Separate, but Equal.” It is also an economical issue. It will add in 10% of the population to possibly spending money in the $72 billion wedding industry adding a boom to the economy.

2.      Get money out of politics. Give each participant a set amount of money they can spend on the election. This will put a huge dent into the economic burden of the Military Industrialized Complex, the Prison Industrialized Complex, Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutical, and all the other companies that are flooding politics with money to lead to more profits. It will help return the government back to the people and end the oligarchy.

3.      Get rid of the Electoral College. It is outdated, makes votes unequal, and causes the candidates to focus on a small amount of states, instead of the entire country’s interests. It also makes it to where it is mathematically possibly to only win 22% of the popular vote and still win the presidency. In fact, 5% of all presidential elections have allowed the loser of the popular vote win the election. This is not democracy.

4.      EDUCATION!!! We need to revamp the education system

a.       Get rid of tenure. Make all teachers go through evaluations every 3 years. If you fail the evaluations, you have one year of probation to fix it and undergo reevaluations before you lose your job.

b.      Increase the pay of teachers nation-wide. Make the teacher profession a desired career path that is both fulfilling and financially stable.

c.       Start with a top-down approach (college-kindergarten) to standards based education. Get rid of grades. Set a standard for where students should be at all subjects before they are ready for college and teach toward the standard.

                                                              i.      Have classes based on ability, not age. If they are twelve and are ready for college, that is fantastic. If they are 22 and not quite ready, that’s fine too. We want prepared citizens.]

5.      Cut the military budget. Our military budget is overinflated, and is more than the next 20 countries combined. We need to stop policing the world. We have over 1500 bases worldwide. We need to close all bases in allied countries and move our focus to diplomacy over intimidation.

6.      Take away subsidies for things that are bad for our health and our environment and move the subsidies to things that benefit our health and our environment. For example, end the subsidies on oil and corn, Multibillion dollar industries, and shift it towards healthier foods and clean, renewable energy sources. It will lower our health costs in the long haul and help us become energy self-sufficient. We should also tax the things that are unhealthy for us like drugs, fatty foods, high polluting companies, etc.

7.      Universal Healthcare (Medicare for All). Studies have shown that a single payer/private provider is the best bang for your buck. Not only will it save us money on healthcare, but it will cover all the people. It is the right thing to do while remaining good economics.

I have many more ideas, but these are the most noticeable ones and I believe that if these ideas were implemented, we would fix our economic crisis and become a better country overall.

 

I’m Bryan Lindstrom and I approve this message.

The 'Honey Boo Boo' Nation

As this year’s presidential debates kick off tonight, I am compelled to point out the fact that it is one big light show. We have the ridiculously extreme right of the Republican Party facing off against the right-leaning, moderate Democrat Party. The Libertarian Party candidate, Gary Johnson, The Justice Party Candidate, Rocky Anderson, The Green Party Candidate, Jill Stein, and the Constitutional Party Candidate, Virgil Goode, are all blacklisted. We have 50 contestants for Miss America, 100 flavors of chips, a dozen fast-food restaurants, but for the most important role in America, we have a choice from two.

 

They call this ‘Freedom.’ They call this ‘Choice.’ But what we all neglect to see is that we have the illusion of choice and the illusion of freedom. We don’t have either of these things. In our Oligarchical system we call Democracy-- where the rich “Job Creators” can flood both parties with billions of dollars-- they are the ones who call the shots. We are a screwed country until some drastic fundamental changes happen in our government:

1.      Overturn Citizens United and get money out of politics.

2.      Remove the filibuster. It is a political coup and only makes the parties more dogmatic.

3.      Remove the Electoral College. It is outdated and makes citizens have their votes count unequally and can mathematically allow a presidential candidate become president with as little as 22% of the popular vote.

4.      Get rid of the two-party system. Open up the debates to anyone running and allow all people onto the ballots in all 50 states and remove the party title next to candidates’ names. Force voters to become educated on the candidates.

Until these changes take effect, our political system will continue to be an Oligarchy that the masses call Democracy. It seems like common sense to most of the people I talk to but as Voltaire said, “Common sense is not so common.”

But yet again, I don’t expect anything to change. With the masses being so uninformed, uneducated, and overall, apathetic to anything that really matters, we’ll continue to be this shitty, lazy, “Greatest Country on Earth.” Do us all a favor, turn off Honey Boo Boo, Fox News, Jersey Shore, and House Hunters and read for a change. You might learn something.