The Only Way To Save US

The USA is mucked up and nobody is doing anything about it.

Destruction of the USA has been accelerating over 40 years. People may not be keenly attuned to the destructive process, but they know something is wrong. Something is up. Something’s gotta give.

How do we even approach fixing a half-continent sized country full of economic and political corruption rooted in endless greed emboldening the few while sacrificing the many?

Fixing The US Through Governance

Governments exist for a reason: people are awful without oversight.

The economically strong will eventually overwhelm the disadvantaged and re-establish 10th century feudalism if no regulatory checks exist. Capitalism only functions in the presence of oversight to prevent monopolistic overgrowth and industrial scale societal abuse.

Modern governments exist to serve the common good including, but not limited to:

preserving and growing the environment
maintaining shared protected lands
ensuring adequate healthcare
ensuring adequate housing
maximizing widespread prosperity and competition
protecting the helpless against baddies (both physical and economic)

You know, the whole “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness” thing.

As of December 2017, the USA is a failed state given those criteria. Half the elected representatives are actively attempting to destroy the environment, public lands, public resources, healthcare, and economic protections for the masses. They’ve fully committed to “disaster capitalism: the exploitation of national crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too emotionally and physically distracted by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance.”

All is not lost though. We can still fix the US with three simple changes.

Three Changes For Maximum Prosperity

Regional Governance

Large scale projects in the US are difficult or impossible because of state boundaries. We don’t have country-wide rail service because you have to bribe 1,000 individual cities and counties to get anything done at scale.

How can we accomplish societal improvements given embedded corruption? Just factor out corruption and crony self-interest.

How can we factor out corruption and self-interest when the mere act of putting someone in charge tends to corrupt them?

We need a closed system of checks-and-balances among verified non-societal-saboteurs. We will filter non-saboteurs by soliciting input from interested parties and running proper conflict of interest assessments. After the selection process is complete, we will empower 13 Regional Heads of Governance with unilateral authority to enact infrastructure and policy improvements as they see fit.

The USA has no standing mechanism for improving anything. The model is “build it once, then it’s somebody else’s problem!” That’s why there are 60,000 structurally deficient bridges throughout the country — build it once then hope somebody else performs maintenance, without a budget, for the next 100 years. That’s why the San Francisco public transit system is dangerously under-maintained and 30 years out of date. That’s why LGA feels like it was abandoned 20 years ago and why arriving at LAX feels like fighting through a collapsed civilization just to reach public transit.

Each Regional Head of Governance will have responsibility and budget for enacting plans to grow transit infrastructure, housing, disaster preparation, healthcare, education, social services, and protect healthy competition within their jurisdiction.

The 13 Regional Heads of Governance will agree to both short and long term Grand Plans. Each Regional Head of Governance will be responsible for implementing the Grand Plan in their own region as well as cooperating with adjacent regions.

Regions will not be entirely disjoint. Adjacent jurisdictions of the 13 Regions will overlap by 10% to enforce planning and consensus across region boundaries. The goal of the Regional Heads of Governance is country-wide cooperation, not partisan divisiveness or to be “laboratories of democracy.” These are not laboratories. People’s lives and futures are not playthings to be kicked around every 8 years. We strive for a better future, even if it takes so long to build we don’t get to live it ourselves.

Governance guidelines will prioritize immediate stabilization of current issues including, but not limited to:

approving housing in “dumbass restriction areas” (DRAs) by any means necessary (cf. the entire Bay Area)
conducting reviews of non-owner-occupied housing purchases with authority to repossess and redistribute
re-balancing food supplies away from sugar
decreasing beef and dairy production by 50% immediately, down to 80% of 2017 production by 2025, with blocks on imports as well
re-balancing drug schedules and drug practices and drug penalties and drug treatments
deconstructing car heavy suburbs in favor of replacing them with high density walkable ICE-free towns
ceasing all carbon extraction on US land and pursuing prosecution for environmental crimes already committed
dissolving freehold private property rights on in-demand areas in favor of leasehold agreements
revoking legacy water rights in areas of drought

Future plans ensuring ongoing stability will include, but are not limited to:

build country-wide high speed rail
normalize federal taxes based on regional cost of living
universal youth education
- ages 4-13 (primary)
- 13-16 (secondary)
- 16-18 (be productive; choose: vocational or pre-undergrad)
- 18-22 (undergrad)
universal continuing education
universal healthcare
- including prescription price controls
- including prescription packaging improvements (DT/ODT instead of pills/capsules)
- hospital price controls
- building new medical facilities according to population growth estimates
- increase supply of doctors without reducing quality of care
- universal fitness
universal clean water (water is a human right)
universal basic food (food is a human right)
establish guidelines for reducing economic inequality

Civilian Oversight of Armed Officers

Police departments must have oversight from unaffiliated citizen review boards. The era of “The Police investigated The Police Misconduct and decided The Police did nothing wrong” must end.

People feel like castaways lost at sea looking out on another lonely day when government force remains unchecked and unaccountable. They need to be rescued before they fall into despair. Maybe someone will get our message.

As reported by The Washington Post:

but like many officers who have faced the same discipline, his career did not end. He instead became one of the hundreds of fired officers across the nation who have been rehired after arbitrators overturned police chiefs’ decisions. As The Washington Post reported in August, more than 451 fired officers have been reinstated to 37 of the nation’s largest police departments since 2006. San Antonio has rehired 31 officers.

Garza, through the union’s collective bargaining agreement, appealed his firing.

On June 22, 2015, an arbitrator reduced the indefinite suspension to a 15-day suspension. He also ordered that Garza be compensated for lost wages and benefits and, if possible, “be returned to his former assignment.”

All armed officers must wear live cameras streaming their activity to a stable non-deletable storage service. The remote non-deletable storage service will be run for the public good and not run by crooked parasite companies like TASER/Axon.

Any officer using force out of prophylactic fear will be removed from duty and remain ineligible for further armed employment for life.

Any imposition on a civilian’s personal space will be considered “force” and subject to citizen review. Imposition includes, but is not limited to: pepper spray, rubber bullets, actual bullets, TASER or any other electronic shock mechanisms, and physical restraint.

Citizen review also includes oversight of all contracts entered into by police facilities including prisons and other related policies prone to corruption or kickbacks.

Police unions with any history of corruption will be disbanded and all misconduct settlements will be paid out of officer pension funds.

Elections

Electoral College

We know the Electoral College is garbage. It actively disenfranchises highly populated cities to the benefit of sparsely populated cow towns. Due to political traps laid hundreds of years ago, we’re stuck with disproportionate representation (ever wonder why we need two Dakotas?).

The electoral college must be revoked and all elections must use popular ranked voting going forward.

We no longer report election results by messenger pigeon 20 days after elections take place. We have the will and the technology to certify elections in real time including instant runoffs.

Whiners may complain about “but but muh staytes ryghts!” Those disagreeable persons aren’t living in modern times and their antiquated opinions are irrelevant.

Term Limits

Congress must restrict membership to a maximum of ten years per elected official per lifetime. Career congresscritters serve only themselves and their lobbyists to the detriment of society at large.

Buyer’s Remorse

Citizens may recall any elected official, be it local, state, or federal, by a majority popular vote of no confidence at any time.

Regions

How would the regions work?

The US can be divided in many regions beyond typical regions of south, west, midwest, northeast.

Regional Maps

Official 10 regions for dividing government services: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USFederalRegions.svg

Official 12 regions for federal reserve districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Federal_Reserve_Districts_Map.svg

Official 11 regions for court jurisdictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Court_of_Appeals_and_District_Court_map.svg

Our Regions

The federal reserve map is a good starting place if we make a few changes:

Square up boundaries with adjacent state edges
Reorganize the middle a little
Split the west coast region in half vertically (coast vs. interior)
California / Oregon / Washington State
- Carve out the extreme west coast into a new state combining:
  - everything west of the San Andreas fault
  - everything encompassing the Cascadia subduction zone
New York / NJ / CT
- Carve out NYC into its own state not subject to the corrupt whims of Albany
  - Combine NYC/NJ/CT boundaries where it makes sense
    - Extend NYC to everything the Port Authority touches including EWR
    - Extend NYC to every joint MTA/NJT service area
    - Close the “live in NJ or CT to avoid NYC taxes” loophole

Meta-Regions

Many present and future issues will impact multiple areas of the country.

For maximum cooperation and planning oversight, communal councils will be established consisting of multiple Regional Heads of Governance working in concert to achieve shared goals.

The 13 regions will start with 7 inaugural communal councils:

East Coast (topics: hurricanes, rising sea levels, rapid transit up the coast and inland)
West Coast (topics: earthquakes, fires, rapid transit up the coast and inland)
Gulf (topics: hurricanes, rising sea levels, rapid transit sideways and inland)
Snow-town (topics: winter prep, snow-proof rapid transit)
Disaster-town (topics: tornadoes, floods, fires)
Farm-town (topics: agriculture)
Leftbehind-town (topics: economically and socially disadvantaged populations due to modern advancements)

Additional communal councils may be formed to address any meta-issues involving multiple regions where consensus is needed.

Checks and Balances

Each Regional Head of Governance operates with full autonomy, provided nothing goes wrong.

Every decision and path of action taken by a Regional Head of Governance will be officially logged in a public online platform accessible to all. Should the need arise, actions of any Regional Head of Governance may be countermanded by a majority vote of the other Regional Heads of Governance in real time.

Each Regional Head of Governance essentially operates with implicit majority consent. If an action is improper, a vote may be called and implicit consent may be withdrawn on an action-by-action basis. Repeat impropriety may be grounds for dismissal.

Implementation

We Need

How do we even approach re-structuring society on such a scale given all current embedded actors who violently defend their own self interest at the expense of society at large?

We need something akin to a Declaration of Independence From Corporate Malfeasance On Society. Virtually all political corruption can be traced back to politicians being owned by crooked corporations.

We need the dissolution of the corpro-religious Republican party brain-washy litmus-test cult of death and misery.

We need to recognize objective truths exist in our shared reality. We need to recognize the interconnected wellbeing of people, planet, society, and economy all joined together. Willful violation of prosperity for all must be subject to criminal prosecution and economic disempowerment.

But How

People can’t do this alone.

Politicians only pretend to answer to people once every 4-8 years during elections, but the slow time-delayed “laboratories of democracy” model has failed us.

We need immediate responses to critical issues, not “maybe in 20 years after this 60 year old incumbent who has already held office for 30 years dies off in a senility coma.”

People need to influence corporations to such an extent they will wield their hundred billion dollar cash hoards to step on the backs of politicians. Politicians must be forced to conform to the public will even outside of election years.

Politicians must surrender their current governance control in favor of shared cooperation with the newly installed Regional Heads of Governance.

Budget

How do we manifest a budget to empower these advancements?

Simple steps:

cut federal military spending by 50% immediately
implement 60% tax rate on personal incomes over $2 million USD per year regardless of source
implement 80% tax rate on personal incomes over $5 million USD per year regardless of source
implement a net worth tax of 8% per year based on value of real property and equity holdings for HNW individuals worth over $10 million USD
implement an 80% inheritance tax on estates valued over $15 million USD
eliminate tax breaks for companies involved in natural resource extraction

Budget solved.

Bigger Issues

An often disputed and controversial fact we must address is: the USA belongs to a larger phenomenon known as “Earth.”

Still with me?

We can’t create a sustainable future for the USA without also addressing the remainder of this “Earth” thing.

Far-right asshole parties in other countries are ramping up their carbon extraction, brainwashy propaganda, and natural destruction as fast as they can. Oligarchs see free money-in-the-ground and want to claim it for their wrinkly 80 year old perv selves. We’re going to have to put the screws to BRIC at some level and curtail the backwards naive excesses of strongman leadership gone wrong.

That’ll be fun, right?

Go Do It

Complete implementation is left as an exercise for the reader. Please hurry. We are already out of time.