Tea Party Ought to Dump Oil and Get Better, Cheaper Afghanistan Plan

A contemporary Tea Party today should advocate for a halt to fossil fuel use in transportation especially after the BP (a.k.a. British Petroleum) debacle flowing tens of millions of barrels of crude oil into U.S. waters. Motivation to stop the economically debilitating reliance on crude oil to power century old automotive vehicle concepts should be replace by more intelligent technologies for low cost, high quality personal transportation. A status quo can be hard to change in previously successful societies and often become the fin de siecle primer.

The U.S.A. imported 4,267,110,000 barrels of oil in 2009. http://www.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm

Oil prices averaging about 55-60 dollars per barrel and rising steadily creating an ongoing outflow of disposable income to foreign interests existentially.

For the United States Afghanistan is a long-range financial drain, with more than 300 billion dollars being spent so far and hundreds of billions more anticipated ahead in future years. The U.S.A. lacks a coherent leadership plan to address Afghanistan problem planning for combating terrorism, insurgents, narco-traffickers, ethnic civil conflict and multifarious concepts about how much and what form of government should exist. To cast out the devils occupying Afghanistan and then leave to allow seven worse devils to enter that house would be tragic and a stimulus to terrorism. Neither can the U.S.A. afford to spend more than a third of its present expenditure levels annually on a long-range foreign foundation. Better policy is needed to address the employment problem in Afghanistan as well as the military security needs. Washington tends to spend everything on government workers in one form or another in Afghanistan too. Even with medals and merit pay promotions government workers to commonly have a milieu exclusive of the civil interests of private citizens.

Pakistan’s regional political issues have brought their military and intelligence services to support the Taliban historically. A number of outside powers fund destabilization of Afghanistan—even Saudi Arabia has supported the Taliban financially before. The Tea Party today should form a policy to most effectively change the game toward a positive sum strategy of central Asia instead of simply funding top down government temporal slopping of the area to de frappe formation of terrorist control. A railroad project from the Russian system to Afghanistan enabling Europe and Vladivostok commercial shipment would create many jobs and a lasting business infrastructure connecting the Khyber Pass to the outside world. The U.S.A. should create a physical project of scale with international support and not just leave another dead-end bureaucratic puff of smoke like the space station, Vietnam and so forth. Transformation of existing social structures positively may require real improvements rather than bureaucratic and military spending phenomenalities.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf U.S. anti-terrorism war costs so far

Afghanistan as traditionally done well with limited government. Creating a modern superstructure of government without an underlying economic hull able to support the bureaucracy, police and military force seems implicitly unstable and unable to float for-itself. Bringing a railroad to a frontier changed things in the west with new jobs and development forming along the line, perhaps it could work in Afghanistan too. Construction, commercial and security work might be lasting changes for Afghanistan the United States could afford to help get started.

A modern Tea Party should try to develop solid ideas for stopping all illegal immigration from Mexico in order to compel Mexicans to stay in Mexico and fix their own spinning-out-of-control society developing an insurgency of narco traffickers killing thousands annually. Stopping illegal Mexican immigration will let wage values for cheap labor in the U.S.A. rise and make a demand for low-skilled, unemployed American workers .

A modern Tea Party would coordinate free health care for the poor with an improved V.A. hospital system needed the next few decades to treat the million or more Iraq and Afghanistan vets injured from sundry causes such as suffering post combat stress psych and concussion challenges.

I don’t know if many have thought of this, but Mexico’s able and injured may illegally migrate to the U.S.A. And get free health care at emergency rooms, while the poor and weak tend to remain in Mexico and suffer. If the U.S.A. sealed it border to illegal immigration from Mexico and also created a public health system for the poor, it could also begin a long process of agitating for Mexico to construct a same national health care program for its poor citizens. With illegal immigration the Mexican economy and that of the United States take worst-case development courses with poverty, low wages in each nation, drug and human trafficking and corruption. The default real economic fact is reinforcement for collectivism in corporatist and neo-socialist forms amidst corrupt patronage loops, venality and social stratification with a hard core of poverty, arrested space program material developments and non-renewable economic procedures without low-entropy calculations.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons as does India and potentially Iran one day. U.S. central Asian and subcontinent policy should be forward looking toward getting these nations to support mutual ecologically and economically practical prosperity and reinforce state security.