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Peace War is the most important issue our country faces today, and we have to stop pretending otherwise. War is both the greatest moral evil and economically disastrous. We've been at war for 15 years, with no end in sight. Our federal government, which serves special interests and not citizens, wants war, and we need to put a stop to it. I want to give people a chance to make their vote mean something. A vote for me is a vote for peace. It will send a message of sanity and hope to other citizens, and a wake-up call to weak-willed Republican and Democratic status-quo politicians. If elected I promise to vigorously oppose every effort to lead the US into war, except in self-defense. College Education and Student Debt That society has placed a huge student loan debt on young people is shameful and unacceptable. We have to help those already with student loan debt, and address the root problem of excessive college tuition and fees. I was one of the first to systematically document the problem of college tuition hyperinflation, and founded Californians for Higher Education Reform to combat the problem. We must commit ourselves to debt-free college education. Possible steps to solve the problem include making credits fully exchangeable between colleges, letting students self-study and pass out of courses, more free online classes, and use of free public domain textbooks. For employers to require college degrees is blatantly discriminatory and should be challenged in court. Employers should hire based on skills and knowledge only, treating self- and college-educated applicants equally. Healthcare and Insurance The Affordable Care Act sounds nice in principle, but is an economic disaster in its present form. Neither Republican nor Democratic politicians will confront what is the real issue: that healthcare is simply too expensive. One principal reason is that profit-hungry investors — not physicians, scientists, and patients — determine trends in medical research and practice. Billions of dollars are thrown into research on new procedures with high profit potential but negligible impact on public health. The greatest need — to prevent disease through good nutrition, early screening, and healthy lifestyles — is ignored because it doesn't make investors rich. We should train more physicians in holistic and preventive medicine, and increase funding for research in medical artificial intelligence to leverage rapidly increasing genomic knowledge to customize treatments for individual patients. Younger Adults Millennials and young adults today are being badly treated. In addition to student loan debts, they must prop up a failing social security system, are forced to pay for expensive health insurance that few of them actually need or use, and are inheriting a massive national debt. At the same time housing prices are prohibitive and good jobs scarce. We need to make it easier for young people to buy homes and start families. One place to begin is by ending perpetual warfare, so that at least, in addition to all these other challenges, young people are not also inheriting a world of enemies. Protecting the Environment Oil Trains. We can't allow 100-car-long trains containing highly flammable Canadian tar sands crude oil to barrel past our schools and residential areas. Oil trains have already suffered numerous derailments. In 2013 a derailment, explosion, and fire in a Canadian city demolished half of the downtown. NO OIL TRAINS in the Central Coast of California! Diablo Canyon Power Plant. The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant supplies hundreds of local jobs as well as electrical power for California. But there are serious questions about the safety of nuclear power plants generally, and even more about one located so close to active seismic faults. Power companies would have the public believe that the risk of a serious nuclear accident is one in millions, but the odds are much higher. A professional statistician myself, I've contacted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and verified that the computer simulations they use can't deliver estimates of absolute risk; they're only designed to say whether one risk, say from an earthquake or a fire, is greater than another. We can't afford a Fukushima-like disaster here. Pacific Gas & Electric needs to work much harder to show that the Diablo Canyon reactors are safe. They should be phased out in any case, and we should allocate resources to help workers there with transition. Chumash Heritage National Maritime Sanctuary. I applaud and support efforts to establish the Chumash Heritage National Maritime Sanctuary, which would protect coastal habitat and marine life from the Channel Islands to Ragged Point. This would preserve our unique coastal ecosystems, ban offshore drilling and acoustic testing, and at the same time enhance opportunities for marine research, local recreation, and eco- tourism. |
