Reply #5: It's kind of like why we have insurance dragon-run health care and no public option. [View All]

A public option would drive health insurance prices down. It would be good for everybody--but especially for the poor and middle class majority. It's not the best program, true, just a compromise, allowing some profit-taking from illness, but a public option would have, by itself, put a lid on insurance prices and would have helped to drive down medical costs. Single-payer health insurance is, of course, the best solution. NO profiteering from illness.

Wind turbines may not be the best solution or the only solution. Reducing consumption and waste should be primary. It could even prompt development of OTHER enterprises that DO pollute, and that do great environmental destruction, by providing TOO MUCH low cost energy. We need to curtail consumption and waste, on all fronts. (For instance, low cost wind energy might inspire a plastics company or a pesticide producer or military equipment corporations to locate where the energy for manufacture is cheap, and would encourage those industries, and/or housing developments eating up more green spaces, and/or more shopping malls to service them--the problem is not just coal; the problem of environmental damage and global climate change is much bigger than that).

BUT, at least as to the cost of energy for most people--the disregarded poor and middle class--and as a clean alternative to the dangerous and polluting energy sources, it is an excellent idea, and should be funded and implemented (along with other measures).

And Daveparts is exactly right as to why it isn't being funded and implemented. In a true democracy, the best ideas rise to the top and are implemented. Facts, logic, reason prevail--as Thomas Jefferson and the other Founders hoped would occur and tried to design into our system. When multinational corporations and war profiteers and their lobbyists get their vulture talons on a country, they strangle democracy and dictate policy for their own profit. That is what has occurred.

I don't think that this humungous problem--corporate rule--can even begin to be solved until we rid ourselves of the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, now controlled mainly by one, far rightwing corporation (ES&S, which just bought out Diebold) with virtually no audit/recount controls. It is the ultimate "privatization" and was and is intended as the final blockade to desperately needed reform, especially as to our throwing off corporate rule. There has never been anything more anti-democratic in our entire history, with perhaps the exceptions of slavery and the decimation of the Indian tribes. 'TRADE SECRET' vote counting is so anti-democratic as to be mind-boggling and unthinkable. Imagine someone proposing to re-introduce slavery. That's how bad it is. Yet that is what we have--a complete loss of control over the counting of our votes. The elections in half the states in this country CANNOT be verified, and in the other half (which have a paper ballot) they are NOT verified (only 1% of ballots are counted against machine totals--a miserably inadequate audit). We are now dependent on ONE corporation--a corporation with hair-raising, rightwing connections, which has acquired an 80% monopoly over the U.S. voting machine "market"--to tell us who won.

Voting is our most fundamental democratic power. Voting is what gives us sovereignty, as a people, It IS power--which WE delegate to our representatives by majority vote. It is no wonder that the corporates took it over. Their lobbying and other corruption, and control of the media, were not sufficient to keep the American people disempowered and stupid. And we now MUST undo this horror to even get reform started. It is still a doable thing. Control over voting systems still resides at the state/local level, but it will take a big citizen movement--a genuine "Boston Tea Party" movement--to accomplish it.