Musings: Enlightenment American Culture for 21st Century – Issues at Hand

Engineer, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist

As the Presidential elections are almost upon us, many (including me) are concerned about the state-of-affairs of our country and more importantly where the country is headed for our children and grandchildren at home and in the world. In my humble opinion, this is one of the most challenging elections facing our country and the world in its modern history. For several months I have been in discussion about this with my wise good friend Stan Siegel, who has done a phenomenal job in researching and authoring this newsletter. Thank you Stan! Included in the newsletter are what we consider to be the most pressing issues. These issues need to be discussed and addressed in the upcoming Presidential elections, so that our new administration points our country in a “positive” direction … a country that is inclusive, compassionate, committed to peace … a world that works for everyone.  ~ Azim Khamisa

Stan Siegel

Our country is nearing the end of the process to elect our next President, and we have four parties offering candidates; Democrat Hillary Clinton, Republican Donald Trump, Libertarian Gary Johnson, and Green Party Jill Stein. These candidates offer significant differences in what they say they will do if elected, and yet there are important issues on which most of them have been silent. There is a planned series of debates starting this month. There are important cultural issues that should be included in the discussions; some suggestions are the subject of this newsletter.

More on the debates later in this discussion, but for now let’s turn to the issues at hand.

In her talk at the Democratic convention in July, Michelle Obama was correct in saying that the U.S. is a great country. We have many privileges and opportunities that simply don’t exist in other countries. And yet it’s undeniable that we have serious social and culture problems that keep many of our citizens at serious risk for their well-being. We can and must do better if we’re to remain a great country.

What are some of these problems and what can we do about them?

Gun violence is tragically high in the U.S. where over 108,000 people are shot each year. Over 32,000 Americans die from gun violence each year, and while we tend to focus on homicides, which result in 11,000 deaths, it’s important to observe that we typically have 20,000 gun deaths from suicide.

Why are so many Americans dying from being shot by guns? The issue is complex with causes stemming from diverse factors ranging from gang violence, to mass shootings, to suicides. While the exact number of guns in the U.S. can’t be known, it seems that with our population of some 317 million people, there are about 357 million guns. Cleary, many Americans are gun owners and will argue strongly against giving them up. Why? Who needs guns? With the NRA having a stranglehold on Congress, these questions never get asked. It’s clear that the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution provides that all people can own guns. But that provision is over 200 years old. Can we not question why anyone needs guns, and if so, what type of gun and for what reason? In Australia, these questions are dealt with rationally in their national gun laws. With so many people dying from guns, we should want to see a national conversation about these questions.

The NRA and others like to say that if more people had guns then the country would be safer. While there is no evidence to support this and no clear correlation between the number of guns in the country and the 32,000 deaths from gunshots, Japan offers a clear contrast. Japan is a democracy with a population of about 100 million. The country has very strict gun laws, very few guns and very strict gun licensing policies that are enforced. A person in the U.S. is about 175 times more likely to die from gun violence than is someone in Japan.

Suicides are clearly an issue of mental health. What can be done to have the medical community in the country become capable of recognizing the symptoms that might lead to suicide or to mass shootings, and to head these off?

In the U.S., in 2014 the gun homicide rate was 3.43 per 100,000 people and the gun suicide rate was 6.7 per 100,000 people; for Canada the comparable numbers were 0.4 homicides and 1.5 suicides; for Germany and Australia there were 0.2 homicides and 0.8 suicides. Does the U.S. need to accept gun violence that is 10 times higher than in other developed countries in the world?

A National Research Council (NRC) report issued in 2014 provides clear insight into how the U.S. has created serious social injustice within our borders: “After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States more than quadrupled during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just less than one-quarter of the world’s prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation’s population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience.”

How can we claim to be a great and free country when over 2 million of our citizens are in prison? Our so-called “War on Drugs” has failed. We have not and cannot eliminate drugs so we have chosen instead to wage war on drug addicts. The number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to approximately 500,000 today.

Locking up drug offenders is only part of the larger story behind mass incarceration. Other reasons for the high rates include the severity of non-drug sentencing, the attitudes of judges and prosecutors, a high rate of violent crime such as murder, and rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s. “The increase in U.S. incarceration rates over the past 40 years is preponderantly the result of increases both in the likelihood of imprisonment and in lengths of prison sentences,” according to the NRC report.

To make matters worse for drug addicts in the U.S., while we’ve been focused on sending people to prison, we have serious drug addiction health issues that are not receiving much attention. Drug overdose deaths in the country have been on a steady rise for the past 10 years or so and should be viewed as a serious health epidemic. The issues cover a range of drugs from prescription painkillers to heroin. Heroin overdose deaths in the U.S. have grown to about 12,000 in 2014, six times as many deaths as there were in 2001. Where is the national outcry and investment in science to find out how to treat addictions and put a stop to people dying from drug overdoses?

In the U.S., we have 725 of every 100,000 people in prisons. In Germany, 76 of every 100,000 citizens are in prisons – a factor of 10 lower. Can we reduce our prison population to align with other developed nations? According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. annually experiences about seven drug overdose deaths per 100,000 of population – 3rd highest in the world. The corresponding death rate in France is about 1 per 100,000 of population. Can we start treating drug addiction as a health issues instead of a crime? Can we adapt our health care system to deal with this problem?

The year 2015 was the hottest on record, and scientists have said that 2016 will likely be even hotter. Announcing NASA’s July data, climate scientist Gavin Schmidt reports that the July data shows a “99% chance of a new annual record in 2016. July 2016 was the hottest recorded month – ever.” As the planet continues to warm, we will experience 100-year and 1,000-year weather events on a regular basis with catastrophic results. These include results such as those being caused by the storms in Louisiana and the fires in California. As an extreme, were the entire Greenland ice cap to melt, sea level would increase by 22 feet flooding much of Southern Florida and lower Manhattan.

While the science community has a clear and strong consensus that the warming of the planet is a result of manmade activities, there continue to be skeptics. See this link (http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-world/) where NASA has shown that none of the natural cyclic activities correlate with the warming of the Earth but that the increases in greenhouse gas emissions does indeed show a correlation. In other words, NASA research reveals that we’re not in a natural cycle but that man-made emissions are what’s driving the changes in the planet.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that to stabilize the planet at its current temperature of about 60.3 degrees F, which is 3.6 degrees above the pre-industrial average of 56.7 degrees, total greenhouse gas emissions will need to fall 40 percent (to 27 billion tons annually) by the year 2035, and 80 percent (to 9 billion tons annually) by 2050. Despite numerous conferences and much discussion, we are not on track to meet these goals. If global economic growth continues on its current trajectory, global emissions will not fall at all but rather increase persistently with time.

The issues are clear, and the potential negative outcomes are alarming. While the UN sponsored Paris Agreement on Climate Change was generated in 2015, it requires ratification and support from individual countries to become effective. President Barack Obama has declared his support for its objectives, but the Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to undermine acceptance in the U.S. Donald Trump, the Republican standard bearer and candidate for President has stated that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese. While this position is ridiculous, it aligns well with what many Republicans in Congress support. Since most of them are not stupid people, one must wonder what pressures are being applied to keep them from supporting constructive measures. Are lobbyists from the energy companies working to keep them in line? Without U.S. acceptance and leadership, the necessary changes in the global economy will stagnate. We should note that the lion’s share of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today are the result of economic growth that has taken place in the U.S. and other developed countries over the past 150 years. Since these gases will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, it seems fair that the U.S. should accept responsibility to lead changes to avoid handing our children and grandchildren insurmountable problems.

In 2015 the MIT Press published a book “Greening the Global Economy” by Robert Pollin, a renowned economist and consultant to the U.S. Department of Energy as well as to numerous UN organizations. In his book, Pollin shows that the critical goal to stabilize the planet at the IPCC level of 60.3 degrees can be satisfied with reasonable technology. He also shows that committing reasonable levels of GDP in developed and developing countries to this problem, this effort can lead to strong positive job creation.

Can the economics of job creation in a green economy sway the Republicans to put the good of the country ahead of the pressures from lobbyists?

American infrastructure has been degrading for decades as Congress fails to make the investments that are necessary to maintain a healthy economy. The term “infrastructure” covers a wide variety of categories that include: Water & Environment (dams, drinking water, levees, waste management), Transportation (aviation, bridges, ports, rail, roads), Public Facilities (parks, schools), and Energy (generation, power grid). We are failing across the board.

In 2013 the American Society of Civil Engineers published its grade for the quality of the country’s infrastructure; we earned a D+. The Society published its updated Failure to Act report, which included an economic impact: “The cost of deteriorating infrastructure takes a toll on families’ disposable household income and impacts the quality and quantity of jobs in the U.S. economy… From 2016 to 2025, each household will lose $3,400 each year in disposable income due to infrastructure deficiencies.” These losses are forecasted to grow in the ensuing years to a cumulative $111,000 by 2040. This is a huge penalty being imposed on the country by Congress’ inaction.

In 2013, Business Insider included a summary of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) report on global competitiveness. At the time, the U.S. was ranked 7th most competitive, and that ranking was mostly buoyed by the size of our economy, the quality of universities, flexible labor markets and innovative businesses. The U.S. ranking was dragged down by our infrastructure, which is ranked 25th in the world and falling behind other countries including Canada, Saudi Arabia, Spain and South Korea.

We should all want to see America thrive. We should demand that Presidents and Congress make the necessary investment to move America’s infrastructure from #25 in the world to #1.

5. Elections in the U.S. cost billions of dollars per year. Elected officials are often pressured by lobbyist groups to put the group’s interests in front of the public interest.

Spending on political campaigns in the U.S. seems to grow at an alarming rate. We are all constantly barraged by a stream of phone calls and e-mails asking for donations.

Campaigns to elect Presidents seem to run continuously for four years starting immediately after a President has been elected. Much of this is fueled by the media, which is the principle recipient of the money that is spent. Given this, can we expect the media to be objective?

In 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President talked about introducing legislation to provide public funding which he said, “would level the political playing field and make elections more competitive. It also would let candidates spend more time meeting voters and discussing issues and less time raising campaign funds.”

Could Sanders’ idea be carried a step further and lead to legislation that would preclude all private money from elections? This could allow the federal, state and local governments to limit the length of campaigns so that candidates would not be pressured into constant campaigning and fundraising. This would also allow people that are not wealthy to run for political offices and focus on supporting the public’s interests.

In April 2015, the CBS show 60 Minutes included a segment asking, “Are members of Congress becoming telemarketers?” The segment discussed the persistent need for the members to raise money. Congressional members are provided with scripts for phone calls, and both the Republican and Democratic parties provide members with suggested daily time budgets. A sample daily time budget was shown by 60 Minutes that revealed members being expected to spend four hours making calls and only two hours for Committee / Floor time. The members are expected to spend twice as much time raising money as doing the people’s business. Is that what we send them to Congress to do?

If all private funding was excluded from our election process, could our country benefit by having elected officials freed from fundraising to focus on the public’s interests?

As part of our Presidential election process, we are coming up on a series of debates that will provide opportunities for the voters to evaluate the positions that candidates take on a range of issues. The issues raised above can be used to provide some focused questions that would allow us to hear how the candidates would deal with them – as follows:

1. People in the U.S. are about 175 times more likely to die from gun violence than is someone in Japan and other developed countries: What measures would you propose taking to reduce deaths by gun homicide and by suicide in the U.S. from the current level of 10.5 per 100,000 of population to 1 per 100,000 of population – consistent with other developed countries such as Australia and Germany?
2. America has the world’s largest prison population and our epidemic drug overdose deaths are 3rd highest in the world: What measures would you propose to reduce our prison population from 725 per 100,000 of population to 76 per 100,000 of population as exists in Germany? What measures would you propose to reduce drug overdose deaths in the U.S. from 7 per 100,000 of population to 1 per 100,000 of population as exists in France? What can we do to treat drug addiction as a medical problem and not a crime?
3. Climate change is warming the planet, melting polar ice, and causing growing instability of the planet’s weather systems: What is your position on the U.S. ratifying the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change? What level of funding would you commit in proposed budgets to allow the U.S. to take the lead in mitigating the impacts of climate change?
4. America’s infrastructure is ranked #25 among the countries in the world: Please describe the level of funding you would support as President to increase the U.S. investment in our infrastructure to make it #1 in the world. How will you work to get Congress to provide the required funding?
5. Elected officials in the U.S. spend about twice as much time fundraising rather than serving the public’s interests: What is your opinion on the state of political campaigning in the U.S.? Would you support changes that would keep all private funding out of the election process?

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, there are debates scheduled in the next couple of months where we will have an opportunity to hear what the candidates for becoming our next President have to say. The Presidential Debate Commission has scheduled debates as follows:

• September 26 at Hofstra University – Long Island, New York – Moderator Lester Holt, NBC
• October 4 at Longwood University, Virginia – Vice Presidential Debate – Moderator Elaine Quijano, CBS
• October 9 at Washington University – St. Louis – Moderator Anderson Cooper, CNN & Martha Raddatz, ABC
• October 19 at University of Nevada – Las Vegas – Moderator Chris Wallace, Fox

If you find the topics in this article to be interesting and important, you should want to hear them discussed during the debates. Look for opportunities to make your interests known to the debate moderators as well as to the candidates’ campaigns.

While debates will likely focus on topics that we’re hearing about currently – immigration reform, terrorism, economic growth – the topics in this article don’t seem to be headliners for the candidates or the media. Once we can get them included, maybe we can indeed start to see an “Enlightened American Culture for the 21st Century.”