America is positioned for permanent and total collapse as a recognizable social order and national administration in very short order. Right now we are faced with the early symptoms of something that can be fast and cataclysmic. While I admit that I have higher goals and aspirations than mere survival. In anything I do I find that I am working on goals at several levels of success and several spans of time. Most people do act that way. The truth is that if one only works to solve an immediate crisis one is very often back in a state of crisis very soon. Yet none of these long-term plans or efforts to improve one’s overall position will replace the need to address an immediate and serious crisis. When one has symptoms of a heart-attack it is not the time to work-out a detailed retirement plan. The heart-attack must be tended to first and then other issues can be tended to after the heart-attack has been survived. America shows many signs that it has reached a point where every refusal to confront the great challenges that demand our attention exacts an ever higher cost. I want to briefly examine five aspects of our current crisis.
These concerns are our borders, all aspects of waste management, the soundness and effectiveness of our country’s fiscal concepts, the health and progress of our military overall and the totality of sex in our culture and society. I would argue that although clearly we are less distressed than the weakest countries in almost all of these areas the rules that apply to great powers and large societies are distinct from those which apply to Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, or Nicaragua. Nor or we (or anyone else) absolutely superior to every small and troubled country in the world. Countries like ours (MEANING RELATIVELY LARGE, RICH AND POWERFUL) draw in upon themselves a great deal of negative energy, resentment and opposition that is both skilled and determined. We also have friends and allies but nobody as committed to holding us up as there are people committed to tearing us down.
America can face these challenges effectively but not without real effort and sound decision-making in the start of all the processes that will be necessary. So what are the dimension of this crisis I am discussing? The answer to that question is too long for this blog post but I will cover some of the five main points I have selected here. it is not necessary to rank the order of these priorities of issues to resolve and it is not even necessary for all who would attempt to work with this essay and its goals to even agree that these are the five most important points in the national crisis. So I will spend some of the time and space that I might have spent justifying this set of priorities to address instead in defining some of the ways I think about societies as a whole. I would like to discuss how I see this subject of national crisis. It will be different than how most (and perhaps any) others have constructed the subject and framed it for analysis and discussion.
So bear in mind these principles when trying to understand my point of view and analysis. I do not think one can have it every possible way in an argument and have it make sense or be in any way useful. Simply to say things that make one feel better is not really an argument. I am not some kind of objectivity purist either but as John Adams said “facts are stubborn things” America has to face a variety of important and disturbing facts. I also don’t believe one can use the same excuses as having the same effect which applied to other societies and eras. Yet again, this can be taken too far — one surely must learn comparatively about other nations and times to understand the challenges of one’s own time and nation. There may be a few books needed to really explore what I mean by these ideas but we will have to deal with these as important assertions that I simply cannot bother to address or describe very well in this place and time.
Thousands of people cross our physical southern border every day without legal permission, identification, or other clearance. We have lots of shooting and large justified (and approved by us) troop movements just south of our border by a government with whom we have a very mixed history. The Governor of California is an immigrant whose father was an Austrian Nazi and who has shown an affinity for many Nazi values (but not the most objectionable ones) in his body of work and who governs a state (at least for a few more months) with a frontier with this border of open crime. The governor of Michigan is a dual citizen with Canada and our history with that country is not the fantasy love fest most Americans believe it is. Her state is able to provide access to the North in all sorts of ways. One of our largest ports (that of New Orleans) is governed by in the State governed by a man who is a second generation descendant of Indians who are one of the most up and coming trading powers in the world and whose ties with the United States in key areas are expanding rapidly beyond almost any precedent and beyond all proportion in the balance of our geopolitics. Our President is the most destabilizing and disruptive person imaginable to be head of state and commander-in-chief. To a remarkable degree our country has already ceased to exist as a real country and always was on the low-end of national integrity and coherence. It would hard for things to be much more threatening before total collapse. It is not so much what is happening but what we can see nobody will stop that speaks volumes about our national demise.
Much of what is reported as wealth and success in this country is actually simply waste. Almost all our systems of accounting reward and honor some kind of waste and hide its nature as waste. Yet in spite of greatly diminishing the amount of waste that we report from the real ocean of waste produced we still know that we produce more waste per capita than anyone in history. That is seen as horribly offensive to every responsible person in the world. It is storing up horrors for the future, straining our environment and literally killing innocent productive people in all kinds of ways that are not reported. It is a massive national crisis in and of itself.
The next part of the crisis ties into this issue of waste. Our fiscal ideology as a nation must be changed. We need to create a work safety net and a study safety net that acknowledges that many people simply know they cannot find any meaningful work and not just give such people money or force them into death or crime. Counties, cities and others should be encouraged to operate week and day labor farm and shops that produce real good in high standards and are free to mix tax money with market generated funds. Family farms which use high labor, high-grade production, nature conservation, hunting, experimentation and things like weather watching need to be given special rights to take them out of the horrific tyranny of our psychotic concept of free-market capitalism. Wastes and ruins need to become a major separate area of property law. Foreclosures need to be taxed a little bit punitively, stock market transactions minimally assessed for insurance premiums and bankruptcies made more not less painful. Floating Quatrimetalism is what I would espouse as the ideal for US Monetary Policy. The Treasury and Federal Reserve would certify four metals for circulation. Platinum, gold, silver and copper would be related in adjustable formulae and on percent of the total value of all legal tender would be issued in “single metal coins” with a steel outer and inner ring and with the alloys adjusted within a limited range to approach market value during the issuance of the coin denomination. Three percent of the total value of all legal tender would be issued in two metal coins made the same way. All of these would be able to be carried on strings like Chinese coins of the past. The FDC would require every bank to carry one percent of its assets in these coins on hand. Banks would all be required to own half ( in value) of all the real estate assets in which they operate under their own publicly displayed names. The government would have a bureaucracy to support true micro- loans to true micro-businesses. However, there would be a blatant understanding that no anti-trust laws would be interpreted in a way that allowed the accumulation of great fortunes by companies and individuals who created barriers to competition by securing assets they produced. Restraint on trade would require some form of hostility toward the assets of others in a fuller sense.
To say that President Obama is giving up on our only really clear advantage is harsh but true. To say that George Bush had chosen to pursue a policy I call “Pissing Off Russia as A Mean Weakling” is harsh but true. To say that our space policy is an elaborate and expensive form of suicide is harsh but true. Our military is one of the things that works best in our country but it is to really remarkable degree an unbelievable mess. I just cannot justify saying all that needs saying here.
Sexual policy in the United States is almost hopeless. Almost beyond hope or repair we see conditions that make me certain our best days or behind us unless we act decisively. Things that need doing include:
1. Formal recognition of extended family associations.
2. Harsh and full investigation and prosecution of typical violent stranger rape and clear division from less clear forms of sexual coercion without destroying them as prosecuted crimes all together.
3. Change of the Full Faith and Credit Provision to a full provision on interstate and a nd federal recognition of domestic regimes.
4. Their must be a bureaucracy supporting women gynecologists, midwives, farmwives, women’s cottage industries and house to house marketing. This must be independently and securely funded.
5. Under federal law in the district of Columbia and elsewhere there would be reformed laws. States (and any other Constitutional Jurisdiction) must be able to recognize betrothals, concubinage and polygamy under laws which are able to accord them a secondary status to regular monogamous unions. That would include a gradation of inheritance laws and titles of filiation. All children would be presumed to have some claims on their parents but they would be allowed to vary. For men their would be the traditional (but lost) distinctions of legitimate, natural, illegitimate and bastard children and the children of donated sperm, each would have a distinct claim on their parent’s estate but none would have no claim at all. Each class would be determined by the relationship with the mother. For women all children would have rights to her (name concealed) basic medical records and some federal benefits. The first of the classes of filiation would be children born in marriage to the natural father and reared. The second class would be other children conceived, born and reared. The third children given up for adoption. The fourth surrogate children wombed and given to others. The fifth children of donated eggs. It is my honest opinion that we are in our current state of law best described as hypocritical savages or barbarians at best..
So this is how I see these things. There is much more to say. There is much more to discuss. However, we must face the facts are be destroyed in my opinion. That is the whole crux of the matter.
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