WELCOME! To the Stapleton Gallery of Folk History and Conversation, and the FREEDOM, FAIRNESS AND PROGRESS PARTY, The FFPP. Join now! Here’s how!
By Richard John Stapleton
From a passage I wrote on page 645 of my book, BUSINESS VOYAGES: Mental Maps, Scripts, Schemata, and Tools for Discovering and Co-Constructing Your Own Business Worlds, a business bible, written in 2004, first published in 2008 by our publishing company, Effective Learning Publications:
“I am not a Democrat, or a Liberal, and for sure I am not a Republican, or a Conservative. I am a member of the FFPP, my own creation, the Freedom, Fairness, and Progress Party. If you would like to join this party, send no money, but act in such a way as to encourage all people to act in truly free, fair, and progressive ways. Most Democratic congress people seem about as devoid of workable solutions for real problems in today’s world as Reagan and Bush II, although I will say I think Democratic politicians in Washington in general have been more Christian-like than Republican politicians in Washington since 1980. At least they did not take from the poor and give to the rich. Most Republican and Democratic politicians have done little in the last 25 years but slavishly vote for their party line, as they were told by their party bosses, to conserve their chances of getting help from their party bosses in their next election.”
Vote the rascals out ASAP and replace them with free, fair, responsible, progressive members of the FFPP, who want to do the right thing for all people.
Vote in Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, as President of the United States in November 2016!
And all other progressive independents you can find.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, October 22, 2016, it appears most demos and repubs that voted in the primaries do not have good political judgment, not having the sense to vote in their own interests, since most voted for Hillary, the establishment candidate, and Trump, which will result in another federal administration not doing anything for ordinary citizens.
The Senate and House are still controlled by establishment politicians.
The last thing we need now are more party-line pandering career politicians out to feather their own nests and the nests of their sugar daddies ensconced in their corporate headquarters atop skyscrapers and their favored elite rich few by slavishly voting for bills, acts, laws and rules in their favor, at the expense of we the people on the street, in the on-going US class war, exponentially increasing the incomes and wealth of the elite rich from year to year, creating ever-widening inequality, inexorably destroying our society from the inside, as climate change destroys it from the outside.
Most local politicians are ethical conscientious citizens doing their best to serve their fellow citizens, but the farther from home the government is located the more likely politicians are to be corrupted and bought off by large corporations and the elite rich, causing them to vote in their interests, rather than in the interests of their fellow citizens.
Get rid of federal flat taxes. Large corporations and the elite rich now pay about the same after loophole effective tax rate as the middle class. Reset the top ALETR to above 70 percent where our wisest ancestors set it before 1980, who knew you have to have progressive income tax rates to prevent inequality from destroying society. Use the new tax revenue and borrowed and printed money to directly fund infrastructure jobs in green energy, transportation, education and the like to help the unemployed and underemployed and small businesses on main streets, to create a multiplier effect that will create even more jobs as people spend the money the new jobs provide, restoring a semblance of fairness in our society.
The problem now with our stagnant economy is that digital stimulus money created by the Federal Reserve System did no good as far as job creation is concerned; it wound up in the hands of large corporations that used it to buy back their own stock to enrich their executives with stock options, inflating stock markets, making it seem the economy had recovered, which it did for the elite rich owning stock. But both stock markets and bond markets are now in bubbles that could burst at any time, causing the rich to give back about fifty percent of their gains.
Real savers and conservative investors thanks to the low interest rate policies of the Fed cannot now make sensible investments for retirement, and the pension plans and investments of current retirees are being deprived of interest income needed to survive.
Bring back the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which was gotten rid of in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, signed by Hillary’s husband when he was president, possibly the most unethical and harmful piece of US legislative action of the 20th Century, almost criminal, which gave banksters in too big to fail Wall Street banks permission to gamble with bank money backed by depositors and citizens using derivatives of all sorts, financial weapons of mass destruction, turning the money and banking system into a giant gambling casino, putting the deposits and pension money of all citizens at risk to this very day.
I used a spinning arrow over 30 years in all my university case method business courses at Georgia Southern University to point out and randomly select the discussion leader of the day, thereby insuring every student in the class had an equal opportunity to be the class leader of the day, thereby teaching democratic leadership behaviors. I am now convinced you could randomly select intelligent knowledgeable citizens off the streets of the US and send them to Washington replacing all sitting politicians and the US government would improve overnight, since these citizens could use their common sense to vote for things benefiting we the people, having not been paid with corporate and elite rich money to fight on the side of large corporations and the elite rich in the US class war.
The US federal government would improve almost overnight if you sent Jill Stein to Washington as president, a highly intelligent, conscientious, ethical woman, an MD with a degree from Harvard medical school, with years of political experience leading the Green Party, which is now on the ballot in all but six states, with write-in capabilities in three of those six states, including Georgia. Why? Because, if for no other reason, Jill Stein is not bought and paid for by large corporations and the elite rich.
I thought Bernie Sanders should have fought it out with the Democratic National Committee and Hillary to the bitter end by accepting Jill Stein’s offer to hand him the nomination for president of the Green Party; but, alas, he turned it down. There are rumors he was threatened by the DNC and this caused him to throw in the towel and support Hillary.
Hillary and Trump were selected by about seventeen percent of possible voters each in the primaries. About sixty-five percent of possible voters either voted for Bernie Sanders or did not vote at all in the primaries. If all of them voted for Stein on November 8 she could win, a long shot, but a possibility nevertheless. Vote for Jill Stein and let the chips fall where they may. As evil as things are now voting for the lesser evil is clearly Jill Stein, who has a much higher probability of bringing about structural improvements in the economy, and not creating another disaster, such as starting a war like the Iraq War, than Hillary or Trump.
Randomly selecting leaders is not a novel idea. The ancient Greeks had the idea and used it as early as the 6th Century bce. The process is called sortition.
Random selection of political leaders would be far better than the election systems we now use—for the simple reason randomly selected leaders would not be beholden to vested interests, or corrupted by the money current politicians have to raise from rich patrons to purchase TV and mainstream media print advertising to get elected to federal offices, money that has to be paid back once they get in office, insuring the government is run primarily to benefit large corporations and the elite rich, not we the people.