Presidential platform of Rick Hohensee, August 2004 I am active in Usenet alt.politics, and announce addenda to this platform there. Please email this to everyone that you think might find it interesting. I am a write-in candidate, which is probably the only way to take down the war duopoly. I also visit EFnet and Undernet IRC as colorg. ren is Kerry and Viperspit is Bush in alt.politics, I believe. Based on what I know from an adult Internet account, basic cable, modest but extremely varied everyday experience, and various print and broadcast media, I want to be President so that I can try to... in short, give the country an overhaul. Investigate and probably prosecute George Walker Bush for crimes against humanity under US law. I note here that the enthusiastic cooperation of the houses of Saud and Bin Laden in this endeavor is anticipated with the same great optimism that a rooster greets a natural sunrise. "Justice for all" can only exist when there is punishment for criminals at the top. Signal the end of Anglophone belligerent imperialism by isolating and peacefully dismantling the Zionist proxy political establishment in Palestine. Fire all Republican appointees and appoint no Republicans. Take the peace dividend we haven't had yet from winning the Cold War, with extreme prejudice toward Halliburton and the Carlyle Group. Make my life as President extremely public. The adult public will be able to monitor most of my personal activity via live motion pictures. Big Brother is already here. I give the people of the USA the option of keeping an unblinking eye on Big Brother if they are so inclined. Guarantee a veto on any and every bill submitted to me longer than 50 pages in length, thus fostering clarity, modularity, efficiency and atomicity in legislation. Replace the Pledge of Alliegance with daily recitals of varying paragraphs of the Constitution. Provide every public school student in grades 5 and up a copy of the Constitution every year. People that like pledges can pledge thier allegiance to the students every day. Reaffirm that the "war on terror" is mostly diplomacy and police work when prosecuted by the competent, and only becomes all-out war when prosecuted by the incompetent and/or corrupt. I am in a war on Tara, the deludedly rich. Overhaul the White House press corps to exclude the major war infomercial networks; ABC, NBC, CBS and so on. I'll probably limit that access to newswire services. Reduce legacy government secrets as close as possible to nothing. That is, I will massively reduce "classified information", particularly older documents, probably everything over 5 years old except for nuclear technologies and similar. Set up a periodic challenge and review system for classified information to remain classified on about a 5-year periodicity. Implement a closely controlled self-prescription program for adults to use such drugs as cocaine, heroin, marijuana and penicillin. That is, I will call off the corrupt counter-democratic drug war and de-glamourize narcotics. Drugs are for sick people. This will reduce the US black market economy, reduce the outflow of capital from the country, improve the image of small business, improve patient information recieved by doctors from thier patients, vastly reduce the area of the world hostile to the US, reduce medical costs, reduce the use of needles, and many other unimaginable benefits one would expect from choosing to discontinue losing a war. Remove the term "intelligence" from what it was the CIA used to claim to do. Think "strinfo", a contraction of "strategic information". De-commission the CIA entirely, and un-authorize them totally, immediately. Out them all in about 6 months. Re-deploy them if they choose to hang on under INS. If an agent or analyst wants to go to work for another strinfo agency they will have to get personal approval from me, and I'll be very busy with other things. Eliminate covert operations outside actual war zones immediately. Such behavior is well beneath the greatest and most powerful nation ever, and if you are so patriotic that you want to commit psychopathic acts for your country, you should be willing and expectant to die to do so. Biometrically identify every non-citizen on US soil I can get my hands on. Emphasize undocumented aliens in lieu of the dehumanizing term "illegal". Aliens are entitled to basic human rights, but security and other concerns greatly compromise further rights of aliens. Naturalization thus becomes a matter of good behavior for a significant period of time. One immigration rule for all countries (per Al Sharpton). This is part of the complete breakfast of simplifying the US Code and the Code of Federal Regulations. Promote the vote for ex-criminals. There are too many abuses now to disenfranchise ex-felons. Teach evolution as fact and the Bible, Talmud, Koran, the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Aristotle's Ethics, Machiavelli and so on as ethics studies. Foster an Ethics Channel on TV. Foster a newswire TV channel featuring AP and Reuter's text. Possibly require such a channel to operate a satellite or cable TV company, and maybe an ethics channel as well. Newswires involved may include Al Jazeera, Pravda, the BBC and so on. Establish a grade school diploma indicating that the holder can read a reputable newspaper and the Constitution with some comprehension and compute unit prices for groceries in thier head. Enforce the law with emphasis on the most priviledged facing the closest scrutiny. This is my affirmative action policy. I am quite fatigued with rich white men like Skull and Bones giving me a bad name. I do not intend to abolish wealth. I intend to require it to exhibit some class or be abruptly impoverished. This is Trickle-Down Social Darwinism. Legalize insider trading. Abolish leveraged buyouts if they haven't been already (Bobby). Investigate deportation or imprisonment of Sun Myung Moon for illegal donations and information transfers to North Korea. Not to mention he quite literally thinks he's God. Get out of Iraqi cities immediately, including vacating the Green Zone, and retreat to functions of state and federal governments, until the cities form regional alliances analagous to, and perhaps with external, nations, as they, the representatives of the Iraqi cities, see fit. This may involve a turf trade between Shi'a and Kurd areas of Iran, for example. Eliminate the "not for profit" designation for corporations, churches, schools, trust funds and anything else. Charity is taxable income. If the government wants to subsidize something it can do so accountably, by direct subsidy. This is the only way to "close loopholes"; all of them at once. A radically simplified tax/welfare system will include eliminating foodstamps. USDA infrastructure to distribute agricultural surpluses may be overhauled to provide a subsidized USDA brand, or not. The distribution of surpluses and so on may be further expedited by government grocery stores in low-income areas, or not. The extremely indigent will have federally provided debit cards via regular banks to regulate the flow of funds on perhaps a daily basis so they don't "sell thier foodstamps" or put thier SSI check in a slot machine all at once and so on. Similar controls will be created analagous to WIC. The total funds going to poor people will increase. Ensure voting systems accountable to the electorate nationwide, such as my own "votescript". ftp://linux01.gwdg.de/pub/cLIeNUX/interim/votescript Pardon Martha Stewart due to the brazen political nature of her selection for prosecution, and the general joke nature of insider trading enforcement. Invite the Congress to take over the Anthrax and Chandra Levy investigations using the U.S. Capitol Police and any Executive Branch law enforcement capabilities they may wish to avail themselves of, such as the Postal Inspector's forces. In other words, promote law enforcement upon the Executive Branch by another branch, perhaps with some improved latitude for the President to manage strictly executive affairs, such as promotion issues in the military. List all prisoners at Guantanamo and what they are accused of. (Most will probably be released) Eliminate economic status requirements, particularly college degree requirements, from positions and licenses granted by the government. This will be enforced very promptly in the US military as pertains to rank. Federally audit license testing, and allow associations to make up thier own tests, if re-testing the licensed is periodic. Land grant universities will probably lose students, but gain some license testing business. Plead to the Supreme Court to exclude Florida from the Electoral College for the rest of JEB Bush's governorship plus 13 years. Investigate and probably prosecute Katherine Harris for treason. Investigate and probably prosecute the management of Diebold Corp. for treason. Invite 70% of the US military above the rank equivalent to Sargeant Major in the Army to resign immediately, with congratulations on winning the Cold War. And with the idea that they will not contribute to the loss of the peace crucial to the finances of the Bush Crime Family. I'll keep generals with surnames starting with, say, F through L or something to maintain some continuity during The Big Stand-Down. Maintain a potent, progressive, but perhaps significantly smaller military in terms of active personnel, and definitely significantly smaller in terms of weapons aquisitions and costs. Require that motorcycles have 2 headlights 3 feet apart. Explicitly allow articulating motor-tricycles that lean like a 2-wheeled motorcycle. Honda has made small vehicles with this characteristic. Hand over Halliburton functions in Iraq to the US military and mideastern engineering firms. Let Iraqis rebuild Iraq. Task the National Endowment for the Arts with promulgating cycluphonics. ratiolity, and the unwound cycle of fifths as a method of subsetting tonal clusters. http://linux01.gwdg.de/~rhohen Get some computer programmers at DARPA to finish Ha3sm, Hohensee's Autonomous 3-stack machine, a computer operating system. ftp://linux01.gwdg.de/pub/cLIeNUX/interim/Forreal.tgz Make it unlawful for entities other than individuals to contribute funds to political campaigns. In particular, corporations shall have no political funding rights. I'm also very curious about how the whole board of directors thing works, and my current view of that phenomenon is quite jaundiced. Conduct or review a variety of politically curious autopsies, such as on Nicholas Berg, Lori Klausutis, and the guy that was murdered in Bush's State Department right in headquarters. Establish a position of national participatory sports promoter and invite Cal Ripkin and/or Carl Lewis to take thier on-going work federal. Establish a US Executive Organic Demonstration Farm within the Beltsville national agricultural research center and get all food consumed at the White House from that farm, or as close to that ideal as possible, with all deliberate speed and as the maturation times of various crops permits. The White House culinary staff shall advise on the crops and varieties grown, and culinary considerations of husbandry. Consultancy shall be sought from persons such as Kent Whealey of the Seed Savers Exchange. Abolish Daylight Savings Time. Convert the Executive Branch to use of open-source computer operating systems, such as Linux, BSD, or Plan 9 From Bell Labs. The military will be ordered to do so. I hope they aren't waiting for orders. Tip: learn the ed editor. Make all publications of the government available by FTP download from the Internet in effectively non-proprietary data formats. Implement checks and balances on law enforcement such that no jurisdiction can monopolize the evidence pertaining to any death. The word "police" does not occur in the Constitution, and the balance of power needs to be extended to police entities policing each other, federally and between the States. This can be limited to matters of wrongful death. Whereas the US is a nation of laws, the sovereignty of the several States does not mean a license to murder. Task the FBI with a detailed study of every case of someone dying in police custody in the US in the last ten years. Manage the White House grounds and monumental DC landscaping organically. Increase personal financial accountability of members of Congress and lobbyists and lobbying organizations. Implement a graduated progressive debt-monetization schedule for the Reagan/Bush National Debt to eventually eliminate the regressive debt costs left by fiscal incompetents. Generalize the definitions of criminal anti-competitive behavior to better protect small businesses and economic diversity. Lots of things Microsoft does legally will become illegal, such as kickbacks to system administrators. Provide two copies of every required schoolbook to every public student in America; a hardback that stays in the classroom, and a paperback that becomes the property of the student. Task the dairy industry with deciding upon a variety of real fermented cheese to bear the legal designation "American cheese", and without compensation, remove that designation from artificial imitations of cheese. Uphold the contractual obligations of the USA while allowing certain bad investments to lose thier value abruptly, such as excessive capacity to create weapons. Maintain the research elements of the military industrial complex while conducting a general down-size in terms of total aquisitions. Ensure that transportation policy emphasize pedestrians and other human-power transport first, then mass transit, then roads. I will encourage buses, in particular, publicly and privately operated. Running a bus line will become a right of a business entity wishing to do so, assuming reasonable safety regulation compliance. Establish a cabinet-level auditing office, with a general permanent mandate and authorization to eliminate corruption and improve efficiency throughout the Executive Branch. Grant Wayne Williams (the convicted Atlanta child strangler) a new trial. Reduce the implementation costs of the tax system and the welfare system by simplifying the income tax code to a single simple formula with a positive component, formerly mis-named as the proposed "negative income tax". Thus there will be no brackets. The top tax rate should be about 50% and the top positive tax rate should provide a homeless man with about $10-- a day in 2004 dollars. (Another thing I'm looking at is a flat top rate of 50% so that a large segment of low income people pay no income tax, but that's just an item of curiosity so far. It depends where the level is that will produce revenue comparable to Clinton-era tax levels. Another idea here is to consider all gross revenue as income, rather than considering profit as income. At a much lower nominal tax rate on a much larger tax base, this can inately eliminate the distinctions between not-for-profits, businesses, and private parties. Regardless, any changes I make to tax codes will be huge net simplifications. Complexity itself is a reduceable cost.) Eliminate parasitic "protectionist" tariffs, farm and other subsidies to the advantaged. Require all products bodily ingested by humans, such as cigarettes, have thier ingredients listed as is now the case for most foods. This will include products with long-standing exemptions from such requirements, such as COCA Cola. The regulation to list ingredients on medicines wiped out narcotics-based "patent medicines", and should have a positive overall effect on cigarettes and what is in them. Eliminate the current parasitic relationship between the government and tobacco company fines. Outlaw kickbacks to doctors on prescriptions, with draconian penalties. Closely investigate a legal doctrine of reduced liability proportional to pre-existing risk. That is, childbirth and old age are risky. Fault in such cases is to be taken into account somehow. Wrongful loss of life is to be pro-rated to 80 years, or ten years older than the decedent, which ever is greater. Or something like that. Allow imported drugs. Improve employability and general functionalization services to the homeless, literacy programs generally, and many other areas currently exhibiting barbaric and outrageously costly neglect. Another area that I personally find emblematic of the neglect the USA bestows upon it's helpless, my pet peeve if you will, is the condition of the average public basketball backboard. A decent outdoor basketball goal is a very cost-effective thing. Expect to see full regulation-dimensions rectangular backboards with straight rims appearing when I am President. Maybe even nets. Expect neglect to decrease generally. Solicit involvement of professional athletes in adult literacy outreach programs. My experience with illiterate homeless men is they need a Ray Lewis or similar to help them with thier phonics. Institute a sentancing premium on illiteracy for jail and prison terms, which can be overcome by learning to read while incarcerated. Make the premium greater for shorter incarcerations, up to 2 to 1 for sentences of less than 6 months. Require that house trailers for permanent residence be built and founded for 100 mph winds. Closely review the remedy ruling in the Microsoft anti-trust case decided by Judge Collen Kollar-Kotelly. Emphasize the Internet and other non-traditional channels in education. Formal education is a contradition of terms. Also emphasize sports and gardening. Manage my legislative agenda like an open source software project, with input from the general population via an FTP site or web wiki. Organize the Executive branch like a heirarchical filesystem. Some renaming of departments would, I believe, make government more lucid generally. The top level of the "cabinet" should be reflective of the relative amount of executive attention appropriate to each department. Make public spaces in DC, Montgomery, and Prince George's Counties available to the National Arboretum and Beltville research farm for planting and long term observation of ornamental, fruit and shade tree and shrub varieties developed at those facilities. Promote such plantings in low-income DC in particular. Increase the federal payment to DC. I support statutes and regulations that result in a decrease in the gross bulk of statutes and regulations for the sake thereof, such as more use of parametric "schedules" such as the well-known "GS-16" schedule of government salaries. A quick glance at the US Code suggests that it could easily be smaller by a factor of 4 or more. Gun control is a population density issue. A moose gun is insane in Manhatten. Being without one is insane in most of Alaska. A simple tax can be developed based on how many people are in range of a weapon. Let's say the tax is 5 cents a year for each human within range of a weapon. That's 20 cents for a moose gun in the outskirts of Nome, and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a moose gun in Manhatten. The details need some work, but therein lies the solution. There are a number of possible side-effects, like gun shops become inately rural businesses, which is a good thing. A gun collector may be forced to move to the country to retain his collection. There's also the issue of a one-second factor, like 5 cents for each round the thing can fire in one second, times population density. Thus automatic weapons cost more in proportion to thier fire rate. I suggest several Constitutional amendments. This listing is not the exact language contemplated..... The President may not pardon his own minions. He may petition the Congress to do so. This is the Nixon/Ford amendment, long overdue. Growing any naturally bred photosynthetic plant species in any quantity is a basic right of adult citizens. Voting in all elections of the USA shall be by approval basis, one vote per voter per candidate. Plurality shall be the elective margin. Vote counting shall be by direct popular count. There shall be hard physical documentation of each ballot. All ballots in the USA shall include a "None Of The Above" synthetic candidate. If None Of The Above wins, the contested office shall be filled by a suitable lottery of voters for None Of The Above. Border States may secede from the USA. Border jurisdictions of States may change States. I favor the creation of at-large Representatives and Senators. The above amendment to allow growing any herb could be constructed so as to foster family farms and serve as a permanent seedbed for small businesses. Reassess the health risks of cyclamates and other alternatives versus aspartame. Note that Donald Rumsfeld was a key lobbyist for aspartame. Abolish diplomatic immunity outside embassies. The US doesn't have royals, and doesn't acknowledge them before the law on our soil. Change the names of Blair Mansion, the Ronald Reagan White Elephant and Internationalist Boondoggle Center, Reagan National Airport, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and the Herbert Hoover Building. Destroy the LBJ Memorial. Increase compensation to federal elected officials. Closely scrutinize zoning laws. One idea here is to make it illegal for any area to be precluded from use as a residence. This idea is to make it more problematic to pollute, create hazards, and to help reduce dependance on transportation. This may also have side-benefits for the homeless. Closely scrutinize the concept of personal trust funds. Set up a history ftp/website in the Education department Keep America's shipyards open at a low level with ships with potential civilian or humanitarian roles. The US doesn't currently need submarines, destroyers, aircraft carriers and so on. Freighters, troop ships and so on can continue to be built. They might be nuclear powered, but will be lightly armed, if at all. A tanker disaster response ship might be worth consideration. Provide a low-cost clinic option besides a hospital to every county in the USA (the one good idea in the Repug platform) Promise exhibition MLB baseball games in Cuba if Castro adopts a constitution based on the template on my webpage. Another thing I hope to do to annoy Castro is smoke Phillies Blunts in public. Marriage is not a federal concern. The proposed tax formula will provide positive taxes (back to the person) to dependants, not married couples per se. Personal social and philisophical issues are a huge area the federal government can beneficially recuse itself from, and such issues are not mentioned in the Constitution. Marriage may or may not be the backbone of society, but it is not the backbone of government. The legal tradition of the USA has some fundamental quirks going back to English Common Law that need fixing. Malice, intent, custodial relationships, sanity and other subtleties are sentencing issues, not corpus delecti. That is, intent is not part of the crucial body of a crime. In the language of computer programming, and Charles Moore in particular, the legal system is mis-factored. "What" and "why" are beneficially separable, and this is a fundamental departure from English Common Law. The US military will be excercized in the third world to project sustenance. That is, when the global situation allows, the US military will be used as a variant of the Peace Corps. The courage of the military will be required to sustain losses to disease and to operate substantially unarmed in theaters where the US military is a guest. There is no specific labor policy as such at this time. Labor interests should note the elimination of degree requirements from positions licensed by the government, the elimination of various subsidies to various sectors other than the working man/woman, the possible huge increase in manpower to the INS via the de-commissioning of the CIA, the improved immigration enforcement possible in the absence of a corrupt drug war, the biometric identification of all immigrants, the reduction in impetus of Latin Americans to emigrate to the US in the absense of a corrupt drug war, substantive measures to reduce health costs, the top tax rate of 50%, and other policies that help the working man, woman or family directly, but not explicitly. Ultimately, the distinction between labor and management must be obliterated. I oppose capital punishment. It's not cost-effective, and is distracting to Governors. Homosexuality occurs in nature. Homosexuals "parenting" in the nuclear family sense is plainly unnatural. It takes a village to raise a child. There may well be some homosexuals in that village. They likely don't have parental control over anyone, naturally. The better tone of American foreign policy was set by the Monroe Doctrine the better part of two centuries ago. The USA must consider free nations it's allies, and less than free countries less than nations. In a sentence, A nation is a secular democracy, and other areas are primitive countries needing help to become or join real nations. This latter category currently includes Israel, and to my knowledge, the entire Arabian Peninsula, as examples. My policy is to side with nature in all things, and to favor such regions evolving into nations, as is clearly the long-term trend of human history. Template constitution at http://linux01.gwdg.de/~rhohen Life begins when you no longer blame everything on your mother. If I don't get the into White House, I blame my mother. Rick (Richard Allen) Hohensee independent candidate for President