Did You Say Regulation? You Don't Know From Regulation!

Every time I hear McCain or Palin putting down regulation as the cause of every working person's agony, like yours, Joe the Plumber, I think about: child labor laws, safer workplaces, anti-discrimination laws, minimum wage and maximum hours.

What's so wrong about those laws? They made every working person's life better.

As I mentioned before, I am reading Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." During the eight years of Bush denial that global warming began with the industrial revolution when humans increased our burning of carbon-based fuels, (and not welcomed evidence of the "end of days"), we lost our leadership position to turn the coming environmental disaster around.

Al Gore tried to get our attention, but he was demonized by Republicans, and the entire subject of global warming became a political issue instead of a scientific one.

As the world's biggest consumer, we could have signed the Kyoto Protocols, voluntarily cut our own emissions, jump started some new green technologies, stopped producing SUVs and start building hybrids (instead of killing the electric car), thereby avoiding the export of all our money to the Middle East, especially to Saudi Arabia, that uses our money to keep women veiled, literally, and to export its weird and anti-modernistic brand of desert Islam throughout the Middle East and beyond so that there are more and more radical Islamists to hate us.

There once was a time when most Muslims were moderate, they ate dinner with their families at the same table, and their wives, daughters, and sisters were not forced to cover themselves, be escorted by male family members, and when they were free to go to school and work.

Unless we do something to reverse global warming, and this aggravates me about this presidential campaign, because no one is talking about it, we will be living in a very, very regulated state, the real scary kind that prevents riots, because of scarcity, famine, lack of fresh drinking water, and massive dislocation.

Global warming happens exponentially and faster than anticipated by scientists.

Like what we are seeing now in parts of Africa.

So let's understand that we are running out of time. America has to take a leadership role as the world's biggest consumer of everything, or else we will be the cause of the planet's demise.

War As Corruption

No matter who ends up writing the history of the American invasion of Iraq, no matter whether it's five, ten, or one hundred years from now, it will necessarily include the lust for oil, the grab for Iraqi oil reserves, no matter how much "democracy" icing Bush and his cohorts wanted to put on the story back in 2003 or ever.

Here's a new fact to get angry over: According to Harper's Index for November 2008, the US government has paid Blackwater, the private security firm, $110,000,000 from federal small business contract funds!!!

According to its own website, Blackwater has operations domestically in: Moyock, North Carolina; Mt. Carroll, Illinois; San Diego, California; and Tampa, Florida. Internationally, Blackwater has offices in East Africa; Amman, Jordan; Baghdad, Iraq; Kabul, Afghanistan; and UAE. Blackwater claims to operate in nine countries.

Blackwater hardly qualifies as a small business, although it remains privately held and therefore not subject to many transparency requirements. But as we have seen time after time, this Bush administration doesn't understand the rule of law.

I'm currently reading Thomas Friedman's new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." If the Bush administration hadn't been in a delusional state about global warming and not quite so greedy to fill its own pockets with the proceeds of the sale of the last of the planet's oil reserves, we might not be in this global financial crisis. Instead the US could have shown real leadership, opening the doors to new sustainable technologies, recycling everything the consumer uses, finding alternative fuels, which translates into good jobs at home and abroad, trade with other nations, and a quieter planet. By sending all of our money to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, we have succeeded in funding the very source of anti-modernist, misogynistic fundamentalism. We didn't need the Patriot Act to try to stop the flow of money to support terrorism, that's all we had to do was trade in our SUVs for hybrids.