Radical Avenue

“The earth has always been the center of the universe”, common sense, circa 1508.

“We can tell if someone is a witch by throwing them in the river to see if they float”, common sense, circa 1708.

“Nothing will ever replace the horse and buggy”, common sense, circa 1908.

“Our government needs to take a more common sense approach to solving problems”, nonsense, circa 2008.

Science v. Mythology
“Common sense” is a phrase from those comfortable old TV shows like Father Knows Best. “Common sense”, as in “You small children have no common sense. Why not let daddy take care of everything for you?” In a democracy, the people know best.

Fortunately we already have an excellent tool which we can use to evaluate and improve public programs. It’s called scientific analysis and design. High school students know all about it. You develop a hypothesis. You test the hypothesis, measure the results and then make conclusions.

American engineers don’t rely on common sense to build bridges, cars or spaceships. Americans politicians rely on common sense to mislead voters about what’s best for our country.

Proof v. Theory
In the US, politicians will say anything to convince us to ignore facts. If a group of efficiency experts recommend closing some Air Force bases, then the representatives from the districts where those bases are located will tell everyone that the experts got it all wrong. That’s why voters must be especially vigilant about identifying objective standards which all public officials must follow. Spin has no place in good government.

Long term solutions don’t sell in today’s political marketplace. Every new Congress adopts a fresh agenda. Priorities shift every time the presidency changes hands. Programs that take 10 years to show clear results have no chance in this environment. But we still need to find durable solutions to our nation’s chronic problems.

Water Conservation

When storms blow through the state, rain pours off our roofs into the oil covered streets and down the storm drains. All of this rain water gurgling through the gutters could be collected and used later to water our lawns. This would save drinking water and help keep our rivers and streams clear of polluted run off.

We’ve certainly had the technology to collect and store groundwater for a while now. It’s just another proactive solution our government should promote more heavily than it does.

Crime Prevention

Prison overcrowding continues to plague California, and is now made worse by the massive budget deficit projected for the coming year. A federal judge has already intervened. This chronic problem has been exacerbated by “get tough” sentencing mandates over the past 20 years.

A program of aggressive intervention in the lives of at risk kids would work better. It would require a long, slow process of reaching out to one youngster at a time with training or mental health counseling in an effort to turn them away from a life of crime. Apparently plans of this sort don’t have the same emotional appeal as do tough law and order regulations.
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Democratic presidential candidate Mike Gravel has proposed a national referendum through his nonprofit organization The National Initiative for Democracy. This organization supports a constitutional amendment which would allow voters to directly enact legislation. Their website describes such a referendum as a new check in our system of checks and balances. Indeed.

The Coalition for National Referendum also promotes popular democracy. It has distributed a petition for a national advisory referendum on establishing a national popular vote for President of the United States. The coalition cites successful national referendums in Canada, England, France and South Africa.

A national referendum would:

• Allow voters to make the difficult decisions that politicians ignore. For example, most Americans want a new direction in Iraq but Congress is paralyzed. We need energy independence but it always seems to be around the corner.

• Get Americans more directly involved in their government. As it is now, we elect representatives and hope that they govern in accordance with our wishes. Since a ballot measure can’t change its mind, voters know exactly what they are supporting.

• Thwart self serving lawmakers. Politicians are lousy at policing themselves. Voters should establish work schedules and ethical standards.
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Like many other nations, Brazil faced an energy crisis in the 1970’s. Unlike the others however, Brazil had the foresight to establish a long term strategy for eliminating their countries’ dependence on foreign oil.

Brazil has now achieved energy independence through a decade’s long effort to develop alternative energy sources. They dramatically boosted production of ethanol from sugar cane. Brazilian service stations were retrofitted. And since 2003 automakers have been selling “flex fuel” cars, which run on either ethanol or gasoline. Now Brazil doesn’t depend on the Arab world for energy and doesn’t involve itself in the politics of Arab countries.

The United States could have obtained energy independence by now as well, but our politics won’t allow it. We’re lousy at implementing long term solutions. Our presidents have a tendency to cast aside programs initiated by previous administrations and Congress is constantly tinkering with agency budgets. You can’t move in a straight line while changing directions every four years.
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Armies have fought wars over small strips of land for centuries in the Middle East. Battles seem to break out in an instance while lasting peace agreements take years to develop. Iraq won’t become a stable democracy any time soon. The civil war of the 1980’s in Lebanon continued for over ten years. The United States has a limited ability to determine the final outcome in Iraq at this point.

The entire world now knows that we did not have an effective long term plan for establishing a stable, representative government in Iraq. Our leaders expected to get in and out within a few hundred days. But we’ve always done nation building in the past, why would anyone expect Iraq to be any different?

Given the longstanding animosity between political factions in the region, a more prudent pre-War plan would have included laying the groundwork for 20 years of intense political negotiations. We should have prepared our diplomatic corps for an extraordinarily challenging assignment and set aside enough money for the job. But we didn’t do any of that.

The US election cycle doesn’t lend itself to long term planning. Newly elected presidents know that they have only eight years at the most to make an impression. So they sometimes pursue a highly ambitious agenda and end up leaving behind a mess for the next administration to clean up.
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The outpouring of support for the victims of the southern California firestorm makes me proud to be an American. Americans are extraordinarily generous when it comes to responding to emergencies, whether at home or abroad. I only wish that we would bring that same energy into preparing for catastrophes.

Many natural disasters are eminently predictable. The potential for massive flooding in New Orleans was well documented prior to hurricane Katrina. The fierce Santa Ana winds have blown through the canyons of southern California for centuries. We all know about the dangers, but we leave ourselves vulnerable anyway.

There is a planned community called Stevenson Ranch near Santa Clarita, California that always escapes the flames. These homes have survived unscathed again this year despite massive destruction of other structures in the area. It is a community that makes its own luck. The homes were built with fire resistant materials like concrete roofing and dual pane windows.
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