Solutions for America.
M. Orhan Tarhan
July 14, 2008
Thomas L. Friedman wrote an important article in the New York Times on June 29 titled "Anxious in America" in which he told us all the wrong things in this country in politics, economics, finance, and energy. However, he did not suggest any solutions to these problems. Most of them are subjects that I discussed in these LETTERs in the past, and for which I suggested reasonable solutions. In this LETTER I want to summarize these solutions and show how they are inter-related.
Friedman is talking of a need for Nation-building in this country. He tells that just about everything does not work well. That makes sense. The entire American population is the product of the faulty public education system. It is a system that does teach the youngsters considerable practical knowledge but no conceptual thinking. In the early 1980´s the United States Government created the National Commission on Excellence in Education and generated a report on the quality of education in America. The report came out in 1983 under the title "A Nation at Risk -- The Imperative for Educational Reform", in which the American Education is described as follows: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well viewed it as an act of war". That bad system still exists today and is the cause of all the poor performance of the American population. We should not be surprised of that. The solution is quite simple. Change the Dewey system in schools and replace it by teaching conceptual thinking. Teach sciences systematically. European schools are teaching this way for hundreds of years. If necessary, learn from them. Once this is achieved, many of the other problems would disappear. Also if the education problem would not be solved, most of the effort in solving the other problems would be mostly wasted.
The reasons for the credit crunch that is now wrecking our economy was the ignorance and gullibility of the people who agreed to buy houses they could not afford. The real estate people , the banks that extended these credits to them, and the government all knew that they were setting up these poor people for a terrible surprise. They themselves were ignorant enough not to foresee what the result would be nationally. Now the tax-payer is footing the bill. They should be made to pay that bill. We are paying the bill, because Congress listens to Business and not to citizens.(We will see below why).
Right now, we are electing each party´s candidate for President. I wonder whether Obama or McCane ever took foreign history and geography while in school. Are we going to let people who probably know next to nothing on the rest of the World run the foreign policy of this country? We should say "It is better late than never" and teach these candidates an intensive course of world history and geography now, before they are elected to the white House. There is enough time for it.
Our Congressmen, Senators, and Presidents are loyal to the corporations who finance their election, and are not loyal to the citizens who vote for them. If we want that our government is loyal to us the citizens, we should pass laws that finance the election by public financing. We the citizens should make clear that we are not going to vote for any one who does not promise in writing to create public financing. That will change the entire politics and will pass the Sovereignty from the corporations to the citizens. Slowly laws that have been made for the benefit of corporations will be changed in to laws that benefit citizens. That will change the face of this country. Right now laws are beneficial to companies that export jobs, that exports entire plants to low-labor cost countries. Those laws can be revised so that it may become more profitable to keep the citizen´s jobs here in America. A government´s duty should be to protect the interests of its citizens. In the U.S. the government rather protects the interests of corporations. That has to be changed.
The last presidential election was won with 31 % of the registered voters. My good friend Bob Dickie is reminding me that our forefathers were warning against a tyranny of the minority. That means that two third of the people did not vote and did not really care about what kind of people are elected. They should not complain now. We should broaden the idea that voting is part of patriotism, and not voting is unpatriotic. In Turkey there is a fine for not voting and voting percentages are pretty high.
The present energy problem we are facing is the result of having designed decades ago our life by the petroleum industry, for the benefit of the petroleum industry. In stead of buying our groceries from a corner market , we are driving several miles to a large supermarket. Let us redesign our lives for the benefit of the citizens. Let us reduce or even eliminate the distances between our homes and our job and our home and the corner grocery. The computer makes it possible to do many kinds of work from one´s home, thus at least reducing the rush hour and the traffic jam.
Transportation inside the city must be done by electric cars and electric busses that can be recharged at night. Electric cars can now go at least 150 miles without charging. Transportation between cities must be done by electric trains. Those train companies must have their own solar and wind turbine generators. They would not consume any oil or coal. The solution of the present petroleum shortage is not to have more oil from some where else or from new wells, but to replace oil by solar, hydroelectric, or wind energy. New homes must be heated or cooled only by electricity, and as many of old homes as possible must be converted to electrical heating. As the inter-city transportation is taken over by electric trains, there will be no need for air transport, that is getting anyway unaffordable.
Automobile companies have not seen what the people really need, they manufactured huge S.U.V. gas guzzlers that cannot be sold today. Now they must see the light and in a hurry retool to make small electric cars. Then, somewhere near the city new power generation must be added as solar or wind units to meet the additional power demand by electric cars, otherwise, there will be power shortage in the cities.
All these changes must not be done by technically illiterate politicians, but by expert engineers, architects, city planners, and scientists.
The Petroleum people are not helping us to get out of the present hole we are in. To the contrary, to add insult to injury, they are trying to ridicule our efforts to find new sources of non-petroleum energy. According to Gal Luft in the Washington Post of July 6, 2008, the National Petroleum Council calls energy independence "Unrealistic".. A recent book by Robert Bryce calls it "a dangerous delusion". Gal Luft´s article does not even mention solar and wind energy that are the most realistic replacements for petroleum.
Friedman is talking of a need for Nation-building in this country. He tells that just about everything does not work well. That makes sense. The entire American population is the product of the faulty public education system. It is a system that does teach the youngsters considerable practical knowledge but no conceptual thinking. In the early 1980´s the United States Government created the National Commission on Excellence in Education and generated a report on the quality of education in America. The report came out in 1983 under the title "A Nation at Risk -- The Imperative for Educational Reform", in which the American Education is described as follows: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well viewed it as an act of war". That bad system still exists today and is the cause of all the poor performance of the American population. We should not be surprised of that. The solution is quite simple. Change the Dewey system in schools and replace it by teaching conceptual thinking. Teach sciences systematically. European schools are teaching this way for hundreds of years. If necessary, learn from them. Once this is achieved, many of the other problems would disappear. Also if the education problem would not be solved, most of the effort in solving the other problems would be mostly wasted.
The reasons for the credit crunch that is now wrecking our economy was the ignorance and gullibility of the people who agreed to buy houses they could not afford. The real estate people , the banks that extended these credits to them, and the government all knew that they were setting up these poor people for a terrible surprise. They themselves were ignorant enough not to foresee what the result would be nationally. Now the tax-payer is footing the bill. They should be made to pay that bill. We are paying the bill, because Congress listens to Business and not to citizens.(We will see below why).
Right now, we are electing each party´s candidate for President. I wonder whether Obama or McCane ever took foreign history and geography while in school. Are we going to let people who probably know next to nothing on the rest of the World run the foreign policy of this country? We should say "It is better late than never" and teach these candidates an intensive course of world history and geography now, before they are elected to the white House. There is enough time for it.
Our Congressmen, Senators, and Presidents are loyal to the corporations who finance their election, and are not loyal to the citizens who vote for them. If we want that our government is loyal to us the citizens, we should pass laws that finance the election by public financing. We the citizens should make clear that we are not going to vote for any one who does not promise in writing to create public financing. That will change the entire politics and will pass the Sovereignty from the corporations to the citizens. Slowly laws that have been made for the benefit of corporations will be changed in to laws that benefit citizens. That will change the face of this country. Right now laws are beneficial to companies that export jobs, that exports entire plants to low-labor cost countries. Those laws can be revised so that it may become more profitable to keep the citizen´s jobs here in America. A government´s duty should be to protect the interests of its citizens. In the U.S. the government rather protects the interests of corporations. That has to be changed.
The last presidential election was won with 31 % of the registered voters. My good friend Bob Dickie is reminding me that our forefathers were warning against a tyranny of the minority. That means that two third of the people did not vote and did not really care about what kind of people are elected. They should not complain now. We should broaden the idea that voting is part of patriotism, and not voting is unpatriotic. In Turkey there is a fine for not voting and voting percentages are pretty high.
The present energy problem we are facing is the result of having designed decades ago our life by the petroleum industry, for the benefit of the petroleum industry. In stead of buying our groceries from a corner market , we are driving several miles to a large supermarket. Let us redesign our lives for the benefit of the citizens. Let us reduce or even eliminate the distances between our homes and our job and our home and the corner grocery. The computer makes it possible to do many kinds of work from one´s home, thus at least reducing the rush hour and the traffic jam.
Transportation inside the city must be done by electric cars and electric busses that can be recharged at night. Electric cars can now go at least 150 miles without charging. Transportation between cities must be done by electric trains. Those train companies must have their own solar and wind turbine generators. They would not consume any oil or coal. The solution of the present petroleum shortage is not to have more oil from some where else or from new wells, but to replace oil by solar, hydroelectric, or wind energy. New homes must be heated or cooled only by electricity, and as many of old homes as possible must be converted to electrical heating. As the inter-city transportation is taken over by electric trains, there will be no need for air transport, that is getting anyway unaffordable.
Automobile companies have not seen what the people really need, they manufactured huge S.U.V. gas guzzlers that cannot be sold today. Now they must see the light and in a hurry retool to make small electric cars. Then, somewhere near the city new power generation must be added as solar or wind units to meet the additional power demand by electric cars, otherwise, there will be power shortage in the cities.
All these changes must not be done by technically illiterate politicians, but by expert engineers, architects, city planners, and scientists.
The Petroleum people are not helping us to get out of the present hole we are in. To the contrary, to add insult to injury, they are trying to ridicule our efforts to find new sources of non-petroleum energy. According to Gal Luft in the Washington Post of July 6, 2008, the National Petroleum Council calls energy independence "Unrealistic".. A recent book by Robert Bryce calls it "a dangerous delusion". Gal Luft´s article does not even mention solar and wind energy that are the most realistic replacements for petroleum.