Letter to my senators, representative, and others in the government

I don't entirely disagree with Trump nor do I disagree with you but I believe no one is really speaking to the root issue.

The root issue isn't jobs or the economy.  Rather it is choices that America has made.  Choices that most of us still agree with.

We want equal opportunity.  We want a clean environment.  We do not want children in the work place.  We do not want an unsafe work place.  We want reasonable work hours.  We have passed laws on all of these issues and generally I believe Americans agree with their sentiments.  These decisions are costing us due to the taxes and regulations that we have chosen to enact.

But other countries have not agreed with us.  Other countries still pollute more, use children, have harsh working conditions, etc.  That allows them to pay lower wages (or no wages at all in some cases).  That's fine.  That's their choice.

The problem comes up when American consumers buy products from those countries.  And I would argue that most Americans do this without really thinking and without really understanding the consequences of their actions.  This is the root of the issue.  And the solution is not taxes or laws or penalties or incentives.  The solution is education.

What I'd like is a label on each product with a letter from A to F.  A is good, F is failing.  The letter on the product is based upon where the product comes from and where the components of the product come from.  e.g. if the final assembly of the car is in the states but all the parts come from China, I want it to have a much lower rating than a car that has all the components come from the states as well as the final assembly.  It needs to be weighted somehow but everything needs to be clear, open, and relatively simple.  Twenty 8x10 pages would be the limit of how the grading system works -- not 20,000 impenetrable pages of self contradictory lies.

Actually, it is not really "from" that matters.  What matters is if the country as a whole has lax pollution, work, and health laws, if the site where the product is being produced is polluting, and if the site where the product is produced has the work standards that we value as well as wages of the workers compared to the surrounding area's cost of living. 

This would allow "good" producers to exist within "bad" countries.  Their letter grade would not be A but it would not be F either.  These "good" produces would create internal pressure to their governments to clean up the country's laws so their grade could go from, say, C to B and that would make them more attractive to American consumers.

Utopia would be if this rating system was internationally recognized but then we would get into international politics much like the UN.  As much as I hate big government and government waste, I would consider supporting a federal entity that would develop this type of system.  I would start small and label each country as a whole.  And if a particular producer asked for a better grade, then some process would be developed where they could earn a higher grade.

After that... I would still want everything to be by choice.  A company may or may not put the label on its product and consumers may or may not choose to consider it. 

The only laws needed may be for fraud when a company mislabels a product -- but those laws probably already exist.

It would be a "do gooder" campaign much like organic sustainable farming is today.  I believe many of the mid and low income Americans would want to try to buy A products rather than F products if it is at all possible for them to do so because they would know in the long run it will benefit them to buy A products rather than F products.

Lets backup and address that last statement.  Why would it benefit them?  It benefits them due to a number of reasons.  There is no point to legislate for a clean environment when other counties continue to pollute and there is no incentive to the other countries to clean their act up if Americans continue to buy their goods.  Likewise, while we might reduce hazardous work places in the US, if other counties profit from hazardous work areas, then we are only hurting ourselves.  Sure we have safe work areas but they are all empty.  The net of human suffering hasn't decreased when this occurs.  It has just move overseas and out of sight.

If everything is kept optional, then the other countries would have a great incentive to clean up their environment and their work places.  They could not scream "protectionism" because the US government isn't doing anything except educating their citizens.

The stick and the carrot are not working.  Its time to try the apple.

I'm going to try to get this same message to my senators and representative but I have very little hope they will do anything.

Thank you for your time,
Perry Smith

Letter to my senator and representative

The short message: don't go into Syria.

Ever since the WMD farce and now with the NSA situation, I don't trust
the government in what they say.  Colin Powell told us he knew EXACTLY
where the WMDs were and it turns out that the WMDs were only in his
mind.  To really convict the Syrian government of using chemical
weapons you need to not only establish the fact that chemical weapons
were used but they were used by consent of the higher offices of the
Syrian government.  It seems very stupid for them to have used them
and much more likely that someone else is trying to dupe America into
another war by framing the Syrian government.

Remember what Perry Mason use to say: you need means, motive, and
opportunity.  I don't see a motive for the Syrian government but I do
see one for one of the other groups fighting over there.  Or... one of
our military contractors who is likely to benefit substantially if we
go into yet another fake war.  Where was Halliburton, GE, and Lockheed
on the night of the event?

To test if Barack Obama is actually confident that the Syrian
government really is behind this, then have his daughters be the first
ones sent over to fight.

We keep talking about terrorism but the American government is the
biggest terrorist group in history.  It is now even terrorism its own
citizens by spying on them 24/7 and making public encryption techniques
purposely weak.

Now... if you would convict George W. Bush of war crimes or if I saw
someone pay the price for the NSA situation or if I saw someone really
look into the 9/11 event then I might start to trust the government a
little bit.  But until I see some of the big wigs get their just
comeuppance, I'm not going to believe anything the government or its
mouth, the mass media, says.

email to feedback at reason dot tv

Subject: Response to "Tiling at Wind Turbines"

First an unrelated set of questions: I download the Reason.tv podcasts because my internet link is so slow I can't view videos on line. But when I visit Reason.tv on the web, I see that I have videos not on the web site and the web site has videos not in the podcasts. Why is that? For example, I don't see the "Tilting" article on the reason.tv site. I also don't see pages open for comments.

Now for my comment. I have come to believe, perhaps mistakenly, that most of our military expense should be classified as an oil subsidy. Whenever we go to war, it is to "protect American interests" and those interests are consistently oil. I doubt if the chart you put up showing the wind and solar getting 20 times the subsidies as oil and gas factors in any amount of the military budget. Why are we in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or most anywhere? I (again, perhaps mistakenly) have come to believe that it is all about oil.

Thoughts?

email to redeye at foxnews dot com

Subject: Comment on Show¹

I wanted to comment on the show you had with Matt Welch talking about the Arizona shootings.

I think you need to go further back in history than 2004 or 2001. I think you need to review the French revolution and also World War I and II.

According to historian Stephen Ambrose, World War I was an uprising of the lower classes and that embitterment carried over into World War II. The same for the French Revolution where the lower classes rose up and overthrew the ruling dynasty.

We have (if you just listen to the other videos on reason.tv) the government in bed with large corporations and the rich (the ruling dynasty) getting more power and the underclass getting weaker. Eventually things are going to explode. The rhetoric is simply echoing the truth. You can't blame the rhetoric (which you didn't) but I disagree that the guy was "crazy". There is no sign from anywhere, especially from Obama, that things are going to change. There is more evidence that the new batch of tea party members are going to fold than there is evidence that they are going to stand.

I do think it was clearly going to happen. We saw the same sort of rage in Austin with the guy crashing his plane into the IRS building. And I would be surprised if it did not continue to happen. But its not because of the rhetoric. Its because of the government. They continue to remove rights. They continue to hype fear and terrorism. They continue to take from the poor. They continue to give to the rich. They continue to disobey the laws they were sworn to uphold.

When is the last time you saw a powerful person actually go to jail and do hard time? That, to me, is one of the things that the O. J. Simpson trail proved. Rich and powerful people do not go to jail. The country has become "color-blind" as far as black and white but not green. It was only after Simpson had all his money stripped from him from civil law suites that he finally went to jail. The people from Enron should be in jail. The people from AIG, Countrywide Mortgage, Goldman Sachs should be, at least, prosecuted. These people are not even being prosecuted. Do you believe that the general public isn't howling about that? The media and its rhetoric isn't creating the heat. It is just reporting it (although in a very shameful way).

Perry Smith

1: MATT WELCH DISCUSSES THE ARIZONA SHOOTING ON RED EYE

Fear of Speaking

Writing in this blog is hard for me because I have fears that it will trigger some government agency to start watching me. Perhaps they will even concoct false accusations and charges against me.

True... that is just arrogance on my part. I doubt if anyone in the government cares what I say. But it does point to a general feeling that others have expressed to me. We are being silenced. Not by laws directly attacking our free speech but by other laws hemming us in tighter and tighter.

Take for example, the effective laws of political correctness. I have to be careful what I say at work or it might get labeled as sexist or racist and I'll get fired. As long as I've been at work where I work now, there have been stories of people getting fired for "inappropriate remarks" even when they did not offend the person they were made to.

Texas has laws against photography (see section 21.15) which seems to me would be against the first amendment and also arbitrarily vague since it talks about "intent" to arouse "any" person. Yet, there it sits on the books and being prosecuted in various cases.

How am I to know when this law is going to be applied to my photography? And even if I beat the charge, I still have lost huge amounts of time and probably money fighting against the legal system.

Remember the case in New Mexico where a couple declined to photograph a gay wedding and where eventually fined $6,637.94 for not doing something. (For reference, Google: new mexico wedding photography case). and... that something was against their personal beliefs. It seems we can not even act (or not act) according to our own beliefs or we will get punished.

Where are we now? It is like a friend sketched out to me recently. We are huddled inside our homes in fear. The image he referenced is that of pre World War II Germany where most of the people lived in fear of their own government. Their response was to huddle inside their homes and not speak out.

With this in mind, I am going to go ahead and post my next open letter although I have some trepidations about doing so.

email to Organic Consumers dot Org

In response to this email that I received, I replied via their web site:

Subject: "Fair Trade" as a trademark

I told you guys years ago that you need to start getting trademarks. For example, get a trade mark of "True Organic" and then YOU can set the standards of what "True Organic" means. You could have gotten the "Fair Trade" trademark and then YOU could define who could use it and as such you could define what it means.

You need to take a lesson from the Free Software Foundation and Richard Stallman. He uses copyright law to ensure that the open software remains open. Its not that hard to do

Get off your ass and do something beside just bitch.

Purpose

The purpose of this blog is to record and make public letters that I send to various organizations. Almost all the time, the letters go without response. Consumer groups, Congressmen, PBS, NPR, the list is endless and I decided I should start putting them out for the public to see. I will post any replies that I received.

It isn't just congress that ignores us!