My Obama Cabinet Picks

Here’s what I wrote in to Obama’s transition site regarding picks for the upcoming administration’s cabinet appointees.

White House Chief of Staff
                Dennis Kucinich – Senator

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
                Al Gore – Speaker

Director of the Office of Management and Budget
                Ralph Nader – Senator

Director of the National Drug Control Policy
                Cynthia McKinney – Green Party

United States Trade Representative
                Noam Chomsky – Writer, Analyst

Secretary of State
                Michael Frente – Musician

Secretary of the Treasury
                Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia

Secretary of Defense
                Jeremy Scahill – Reporter

Attorney General
                Steven Shapiro – ACLU

Secretary of the Interior
                Lawrence Lessig – Creative Commons

Secretary of Agriculture
                Michael Pollan – Reporter, Writer

Secretary of Commerce
                Naomi Klein – Writer, Reporter

Secretary of Labor
                Mary Beth Maxwell – American Rights at Work

Secretary of Health and Human Services
                Eric Schlosser – Writer

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
                Jesse Jackson – Speaker

Secretary of Transportation
                Chris Paine – Filmmaker

Secretary of Energy
                Cathy Zoi – ACP

Secretary of Education
                Nicholas Negroponte – OLPC Maker

Secretary of Veterans Affairs
                John Kerry – Senator

Secretary of Homeland Security
                Barbara Boxer – Senator

Congress.org – Oppose $25 Billion Auto Industry Emergency Loans

I oppose the $25 billion in emergency loans to the auto industry because these companies got themselves into this mess with a short-sighted, unsustainable, and inconsiderate business model that should not be rewarded in any way.. and that’s what this would be, a reward for bad behavior.

If they’d spent their money making cars made to last, cars that used less and alternative fuels, cars that were still made in America – they wouldn’t be in this mess. If they hadn’t spent billions of dollars lobbying to fight regulation for greater fuel efficiency, paying their executives 400 times more than their employees, and gambling profits they would never earn on the stock market – they wouldn’t be in this mess.

If they’d still been making fewer, quality cars and earning steady, modest profits held responsibly, then they’d instead be weathering through this downturn in purchases without suffering any “crisis”.

So they want billions of our hard-earned tax dollars? How about they stop making cars we don’t need and start making wind, solar, and thermal generators that we DO need?

to Obama – Chief Technology Officer

Net for neutrality, jobs, education, voting & free access

The internet has the potential to be an amazing means to right the wrongs of the past and remain an agile society faced with resource depletion.

Network transmission must be kept free, open, and unbiased – that makes the rest possible. National effort must be put into solving some of the employment crisis by hiring people to build free access hardware, educational materials, independent media, governmental transparency, and bring it all back together with Democracy 2.0 online.

Power that with electricity from “green economy” energy infrastructure and you’ve got a bright future for this country.

For various reasons, these would be my picks for CTO in order of priority:
Brad Templeton of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia
Lawrence Lessig of the Creative Commons
Brewster of Internet Archive
Craig Newmark of Craigslist
Rob Malda of Slashdot.org

to Obama – my vision of the future

My vision of the future is about a change of national and international priorities from empire, conquest, profit, and control; and into making our cultural goals being sustainability, tolerance, balance, culture, and awareness.

As for actions, they can be prioritized into the following categories:
1. Diverting funding from the absurdly rich to the working class.
2. Turning our foreign actions from aggression to healing.
3. Holding the crimes of the Bush administration to account.
4. Healing our population and planet.
5. Reforming our government to fully represent us.

My expanded action list can be found at ihoby.com/plan but I can also summarize further in future posts.

1. Diverting Funds – Bankers and Billionaire Corporations have been receiving free handouts in the form of subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks funded by the hard work and tax dollars taken from the majority of Americans. This has gone too far for too long. While Americans are increasingly prudent and in need, they are being neglected by the collusion of business and government setting disaster capitalism to run amok. Business is treating government and government is rewarding business.. this exclusive relationship is poison for this nation’s people, land, sea, and air. It’s a poison that has built slow but it’s effects are unmistakable in causing this financial crisis and climate change. Trickle-down economics has been proven time and time again to never work. Trickle-up however, obviously works very well.

The rich have this power because we are allowing them to keep it – either from kindness, obedience, or ignorance. The time has long since past when we need to claim our eminent domain on the hoardings of the rich, to cut off their supply of corporate entitlement programs, corporate welfare, corporate socialism. They have enough money to be just fine while we route our federal spending back into America’s communities:

– bail out the families facing foreclosure, make their mortgages be affordable
– start the Green Economy with jobs building wind and solar generators
– supplement medical costs to make health care affordable
– increase the minimum wage and lower taxes for smaller businesses

All this and more can be funded by cutting off the corporate free lunch and requiring the richest CEOs and bankers to pay their fair share.

2. Foreign Actions – Our wars of aggression into Afghanistan and Iraq (among other places) are clearly both internationally illegal and extremely immoral. They were started out of a series of dysfunctional world views and need to be ended immediately so that pacification, reconciliation, and healing can bring about the changes and improvements that war can never, ever accomplish.

– remove combat from countries we’ve invaded, replace with infrastructure services
– cut aid to countries who are committing atrocities
– halt all contracts to mercenary, service, and construction profiteers
– cut spending on military procurement programs

3. Holding Accountable – Many many people in and well outside of the Bush administration are clearly guilty of some involvement in War Crimes, Treason, Crimes Against Humanity, and other more minor but serious breaches of law and moral turpitude. Since these crimes were not thwarted at the time or dealt with swiftly after through impeachment – they’ll have to be treated to justice slowly and carefully over the next few years. The perpetrators of these modern atrocities have done these deeds in our name, with our flag, and they must not be allowed to continue their evil deeds under new titles.

– set Congress to investigate War Crimes, Invasion Pretext, War Contractors and Mercenaries, Election Crimes, 9/11 “false flag” evidence, Domestic Spying, etc.
– prosecute perpetrators of crimes being investigated in federal and international courts
– draft regulation to help keep these tragic atrocities from happening again

4. Healing – The endeavor of medicine should simply not be run by organizations who’s primary goal is to maximize profit. That is unfortunately what we have and that is why our medical system is failing to meet the needs of Americans. We also have industries trampling across our fragile earth in a reckless surge of exploitation and pollution. Our natural systems, our global ecosystems cannot handle this level of abuse. We must enact ambitious programs to provide free healthcare for all citizens, affordable healthcare for all people, and a livable planet for ourselves and our successors.

– build a free, universal healthcare system
– dismantle the insurance companies and replace them with assistance programs
– ban the building of any new “dig and burn” plants
– build “green” sources of energy
– shut down the existing “dig and burn” plants

5. Progressive Reform – The Bush administration has been the most secretive, corrupt, criminal, deadly, and unrepresentative office ever. They have privatized, militarized, and marginalized more aspects of our country than ever should have been. All of this has to stop, all of it must be reversed. We want a government who is accountable, transparent, just, peaceful, respectful, and receptive.. a government who spends our money wisely and truthfully.

– do all of the previously stated action items
– expand citizen access to continually participate through democracy
– regulate yourselves
– solve problems instead of creating or exacerbating them
– declassify, declassify, declassify

Congress.org – How could you vote for the bailout?

How could you or anyone vote for this terrible, horrible, worthless Bailout Bill? These banker and wall street crooks have already taken and lost our money once. You have to give them MORE of it? You think they’ll give any of this back to us, the American people? Fat chance..

To every senator who failed to stop the war(s), impeach the Bush administration, this and all the other failures of congress, don’t expect to get re-elected.

Congress.org – Oppose the $700 Billion Mortgage Bailout

I oppose the proposed bailout plan because it gives evil, reckless, rich swindlers even more profits from their irresponsible gambling with our money, with guess what, tax dollars which are again, our money.

The general public.. the working class, is getting screwed over TWICE if this proposal is enacted.

If rich people are gambling futures on payments they knew we’d never be able to pay – THEY are the ones who should be tapped to bail US out. Not the other way around.

Ever heard of fiscal responsibility?

Palin puff piece and ignorant comments

This piece was about as puff as one can get.. serving to do nothing more than plaster images and keywords of a very bad candidate on more web pages.

Regarding lost elections, when there is significant fraud in 2001 and 2004:

– ballot miscounts, caging lists, and supreme court “arrangement” in 2001
– voter harassment both via phone and while waiting in line to vote
– voting machine shortages in poor neighborhoods
– voting machine “glitches” that always favored republicans
– central tabulators that were wildly different from exit polls for the first time since they’ve been recorded
– programmers hired by republicans to write programs for swapping voting totals
– absentee ballots from soldiers overseas being thrown out
– and these caging lists consisting primarily of names common among black and hispanic democrat voters (which, when found and checked for accuracy by county officials, turned out to 95% WRONG on listing people ineligible to vote)…

..well, there’s certainly cause to cry foul. There is also plenty of reason to question how well our votes will be accounted for in this year’s election. Most of these insecure, compromised, or buggy voting machines and central tabulators are still being used. The caging lists are still growing, being filled with even more names of people who have every right to vote. Polling stations have not been given more resources. The people who harassed voters were never found and stopped.

If the loss had been fair and square in either case then we’d have no one to blame but ourselves. But when there is so much thwarting of fair elections by the people in charge of providing them, the burden of responsibility rests overwhelmingly with the cheaters.. cheaters who have used their false-win to undermine everything that America is supposed to stand for – turning us more rapidly than ever from a nation of Freedom, Justice, Opportunity, and the pursuit of Happiness into a nation of Oppression, Secrecy, Occupational War, Torture, Neglect, and rampant Corruption.

All of the major problems being faced by the US: Iraq, Afghanistan, Torture, Katrina, Gas Prices, Mortgage Crisis, Lending Crisis, Food Prices/Shortages, Climate Change, Federal Overspending, National Deficit, Outsourcing, Low Wages, Unfair taxes, etc. etc… these are all present or worse from the direct decisions made by Republicans on behalf of corporations and other sources of privately held wealth.

They don’t care about the future and they certainly don’t care about you. They think of you as a national resource, something to be neglected and exploited… like a feedlot animal, a strip mine, or an oil well.

Palin is no different in that respect, in that she has no respect for life or dignity beyond her own inner circle. She sees herself as a Christian Soldier.. a General even, ordering all women to be mothers – be they poor, abused, raped, or otherwise – so they may give birth to fodder for endless war and corporate servitude. She believes it to be God’s will that the rich be powerful and pampered; and that the Earth and its poor are here to be neglected, controlled, and exploited for the whims of the powerful.

In Palin’s vision of the world, every mother is on her own.. as is every child, once born. When they leave the womb, their right to life and happiness ends.

Then in her ideals, your children may be allowed to starve on the street, die of a preventable illness, treated as a criminal, tried as an adult, put on death row, sent to war, accused of being a terrorist, abducted and held in secrecy, tortured, deported, harassed, or drown in the aftermath of a hurricane.

No help from the government.. because helping a nation’s residents is not what McCain, Palin and the rest of them see the role of government to be.

Congress.org – Support Alternative Energy Incentives First

Alternative energy IS the answer both in the short term and especially in the long term. And by alternative I mean energy derived from the wind, tide, sun, and thermal vents – energy that is infinitely renewable, does not pollute, and has the potential to be generated as well as consumed by the general public,

Drilling is NOT the answer for anything but higher gas company profits, higher gas prices, more oil spills, and rampant exploitation of land, sea, air, & people that should be protected forever. Once areas are lost, they may never fully come back.

Other forms of digging for energy that aren’t answers are nuclear, coal, and in a way, ethanol. These are dirty forms of energy, which not only damage the Earth but keep the process of generating power out of the hands of the public – making us all needlessly dependent on for-profit corporations who are the only source of fuel.

Congress.org – Why Obama

I will vote for the Obamiden ticket for President because they are by far the lesser evil.. also because there is much more of a chance that if elected, Obama will be receptive to the needs of citizens who pressure him to make our policies better serve the people of this country – all the people of this country. That chance will not exist with McCain and his token running mate.

I have plenty of criticisms surrounding all four of them (Obama, Biden, McCain, & Palin) that I wouldn’t have if better candidates had not intentionally excluded from the running (like Kucinich, Nader, McKinney.. maybe even Paul) by media and political – for lack of a better word – elites. But far more criticism can be heaped on the Republican ticket, McPalin and everyone surrounding them are some of the most evil people on the planet; we can’t let them continue the shameless inhumanity of leadership which defines the Bush administration.

With Obama, I have some hope of not just change but improvement, of the chance that he and his administration will listen to us – we the people, not we the corporate lobbyists.

I know he’s making a lot of concessions to gain support from the owners of powerful industries.. but I also know that he has a shred of compassion for people beyond than his inner circle. If he doesn’t lose that on the way to the white house, then we have a chance to start saving this country.. this planet, from significant disaster. Because the road to disaster is what we are on, what Bush has accelerated, and what McCain would continue if he had a chance of being elected.

So it’s not all tea and roses.. but that’s why Obama and Biden will have my vote. They’re the best choice that industry has allowed us to vote on. They are the best chance we have for a better future.

Tracking Web Users

It would be one thing if this tracking was being done for scientific purposes.. or social research, even some sort of altruism. But it’s being done for the sake of profit and illegal authoritarian spying.

It would also be defensible if users had access to the data being collected on them – to be able to turn the tracking on and off, to delete data they don’t want or isn’t theirs. But it’s not being made that way – it’s being constructed to operate secretively, with no regard to our wishes or well being.

It’s basically predatory. If it’s one thing we don’t need, it’s another way for people to prey upon each other.

“Just how do they expect the online world to pay for itself?”

How about using some progressive corporate taxes (Exxon’s consecutive record profits anyone?) to subsidize websites instead of war? Plenty of untapped Billion$ there each quarter.

Another funding source could be similar to how the TV cable companies were required to provide public access channels and fully equipped stations to towns that had no airwave TV access.

If the web site or service can be deemed an asset to the public, it would be a viable choice for funding as a public service.