(Last updated November 2023)
Have you recently been disenchanted as a whole with the American political system? Have you always kind of thought that the two-party system has been getting us nowhere fast, and that neither Republicans nor Democrats (two sides of the same ugly coin) really represent the American people or the principles our nation was founded on? Do you feel like Congress has far too many wimps to the left, and crazies to the right (or vice-versa)? If this sounds like an advertisement for a third party, you would be correct. But the True Spirit of America Party is no ordinary third party.
Here you will see our party platform, and our vision of an even greater United States of America that fully lives up to ALL its original ideals set forth by the Founders as well as contemporary voices of liberty and justice for all. Unfortunately, America is currently adrift due to decades of bad decision-making from the past five or so generations of leaders who put party (and money) over country. From fiscal to social to foreign policy, We the People dug ourselves a massive hole by electing the same kinds of incompetent leaders time and again from the elephant and jackass duopoly. We have lost numerous freedoms along the way as well, mainly since the 1980s and especially since 2001, piece by politically correct piece. Worse, our planet is also being cooked and destroyed as we speak, and almost no one in either party seems to care (despite lip-service to the contrary). And the True Spirit of America Party (TSAP) represents the way out.
The party can be classified as "moderate," somewhere between Green and Libertarian. It shares many values from both. It is the best of both, and more. And it's still evolving. Hence the name we call ourselves, "progressive libertarian".
WARNING: This blog is not for the faint of heart. This blog is NOT pornographic or a hate site, nor encourages drug or alcohol use, violence, or reckless behavior, but nonetheless many viewers with strong ideologies, prejudices, or preconceived notions will be offended by at least some of the things I say. If I offended anyone, GOOD. That's what happens in a free society. Those that can't handle living in a free society should take advantage of the greatest freedom such a society has to offer--the freedom to leave.
Core values of the True Spirit of America Party
Liberty (of mind, body, and spirit)
True patriotism
Live and let live
Social and economic justice
Equal rights for all
Equal opportunites for all
Personal, social, and ecological responsibility
Real grassroots democracy
Future focus and sustainability
Respect for diversity
Culture of consent, not coercion
Nonviolence first, self-defense if necessary
Feminism and female empowerment
Youth rights and empowerment
NOTE: If you think that some of these values are mutually contradictory, you came to the wrong party!
Party Platform
Here is the current party platform, based primarily on simple common sense:
1) Green New Deal. End our addiction to fossil fuels ASAP! Stop climate change before it's too late and we get both hell and high water. Increase renewable energy, efficiency, and conservation, and rebuild our passenger rail system to eventually rival Europe's. The best way to encourage such change is through a carbon tax-and-dividend as noted in Carbonomics by Steve Stoft, along with other incentives.
2) Two words--National Initiative. A real democracy. Power to the people!
3) Fight overpopulation, one of the worlds biggest problems. Anything else is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Optimum population size is 150-200 million for the USA, 4-5 billion for the world. Yeah I know it's taboo to say, but we gotta shrink the population by encouraging Americans to voluntarily have fewer kids (two or less). The only ethical way to do it. We need REAL, honest sex education and full respect for reproductive rights.
4) Pass comprehensive immigration reform to fix our broken system, but after that, sharply reduce the numbers going forward. Amnesty for those who are currently undocumented, close the camps, and speed up the backlog of those who have been waiting. But after that, tighten the quotas dramatically. After that, no more immigrants entering per year than the number of emigrants leaving. That would be roughly 200,000 people per year at most, plus an additional quota of 100,000 reserved for refugees and asylum seekers. And crack down hard on rogue employers who exploit undocumented workers.
5) Lower the drinking age to 18, and raise the alcohol taxes to $31 per proof-gallon on all alcoholic beverages. That's gotta be far more lucrative, and combined with honest alcohol education should help reduce America's alcohol problems in the long run. If you're old enough to go to war, you're old enough to go to the bar. Stop the MADDness!
6) Crack down on drunk driving like never before. The terrorists of the highway. Ferret them out with roving patrols as well as the "fish in a barrel" method. Have graduated penalties. Repeat or high BAC offenders lose their license forever and have to wear size 29 clown shoes, pantaloons, and a red clown nose in public, as well as to bed. And a shirt that says "I'm a drunk driver. Please kick me in the groin."
7) Legalize, tax, and regulate cannabis and (if possible) most other recreational drugs. Treat cannabis no more stringently than alcohol or tobacco. Increase education and treatment, but ultimately let natural selection run its course. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make 'em drink. Watch the crime rate plummet by 50% or more. Watch the recent violence in Mexico slow to a crawl. (Failing that, adopt a Portuguese-inspired model of decriminalization for substances other than cannabis.)
8) Two words: PRO-CHOICE. Full reproductive rights for women, period. Never go back to the back-alley days.
9) Pass the NEED Act. Nationalize the Feral Reserve, transforming it into a truly public national bank that actually lives up to its name, and do the same to all big banks.
10) Pass our Twelve Step Program of American Prosperity via Monetary Sovereignty (see below).
11) No income tax for anyone making less than $100,000 per year. Replace lost revenue with a Universal Exchange Tax (UET) of 0.1% or less. But maintain an income tax of 10% on every dollar above $100,000 and at least 50% over $1 million that an individual earns from any source, and 50% for the largest mega- corporations. No more loopholes anymore, period. The rich benefit the most from the government, whose job it is to protect them (and their massive property) from the poor, so they should pay more. Tax 'em, so we don't have to eat 'em. Even Adam Smith would agree. Real small businesses will pay virtually NO taxes at all.
12) End "endless war" yesterday. Do you rip the band-aid off quick or slow? How do you ask a man (or woman) to be the last to die for a mistake?
13) Stop policing the world. We absolutely must retire from that position NOW. The Founders are rolling over in their graves as we speak. We were NEVER designed for that, and the world got along just fine before we transitioned from a Constitutional republic to an unconstitutional empire starting with the Spanish-American War in 1898. This foreign policy often does more harm than good. Warmongering gets us nowhere in the long run. New (old) foreign policy: First, do no harm, second, take no crap. Take care of our own first. Let other countries fight their own battles for a change. Natural selection writ large. And any foreign war that lasts more than 90 days must be approved by Congress with a formal declaration of war, full stop.
14) Do NOT bring back the draft. It is involuntary servitude and thus violates the 13th Amendment. And end draft registration while we're at it. A country than needs a draft to defend itself (or police the world) deserves to lose. But if we must bring it back in extremis, draft people in their 40s and 50s as well. They're the ones who start the wars, while the young do all the dying. Phil Ochs said it best. And put all wars up to a vote, and draft only those who vote yes or abstain.
15) Peace in the Middle East via a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
16) One million dollars combat zone death benefit for soldiers, and $500,000 per lost limb or vital organ. They earned it. Plus, that will make our armchair "leaders" think twice!
17) Cut defense spending by 50% or more over a five-year period since we will no longer be an empire, but increase combat pay and veterans' benefits significantly.
18) Our healthcare system is broken. Let's join the rest of the civilized world and have free, universal, single-payer Medicare for All. Period. No more greedy HMOs. We all have the right to live, no matter how poor one is.
19) Make college tuition at public colleges FREE like it was in some states in the 1950s-1960s. It's ridiculously high now, and has grown faster then inflation for decades, even as college has become more and more of a necessity. In the richest nation in the world, no one should ever be too poor to go to college. Plus, college-educated folks of all backgrounds are less likely to breed like jackrabbits, thus less overpopulation. Education is the ultimate contraceptive.
20) Pass the Outsourcing Prevention Act (written by Bernie Sanders) yesterday to keep good jobs in America. Outsourcing/offshoring is un-American. Buy American first!
21) End the cycle of poverty. We're the richest country in the world. Make all work pay a living wage. Raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15/hour. And index it to inflation (or average wages) from then on. On the other side of the coin, cap CEO pay at no more than 25 times what the lowest-paid worker earns at his or her company--anywhere in the world.
22) Replace the Earned Income Tax Credit and many other programs with a Universal Basic Income Guarantee (citizen's dividend) of several thousand dollars per year for every American, similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund. Tax all fossil fuels and other natural resources, and give the proceeds directly to the people in equal amounts. (This can also double as a carbon tax.)
23) Create more jobs via WPA-style programs, with a goal of full employment.
24) No more corporate welfare or bailouts, period. No more rewarding bad behavior, greed, and stupidity. The elite rentier class are the real parasites. No one is "too big to fail." Let them ALL fail--that's capitalism, buddy. Take your debt and choke on it, you greedy bastards! And while we're at it, let's abolish corporate personhood as well.
25) Get tough on REAL crime. We'll have a lot more police and court resources, not to mention prison space, available to do so after abolishing laws against consensual, victimless crimes. Sentences should mean what they say. No more coddling murderers, rapists, muggers, violent gangs, con-artists, white-collar criminals, corrupt politicians, and their ilk. No killings ("honor" or otherwise), rape, domestic violence, child abuse, incest, or pedophilia can be tolerated from anyone in a civilized society. I don't care if it's part of your "culture" or religion. Do the crime, do the time. Period.
26) One American, One Vote. One dollar campaign contribution per person maximum. Natural persons only. Overturn Citizens United--corporations are NOT people, and money is NOT speech! Get the big money out of politics for good.
27) Let Native Americans patrol the borders. They have the experience. They've been fighting terrorism since 1492!
28) All politicians should have to take a lie detector test when trying to make a case for war, and during all campaign speeches as well. If you fail, you're fired.
29) Take the dangerous edge off of America's legendary gun violence problem by passing various common-sense gun laws while still respecting the Second Amendment. The "middle path" in the gun politics debate, basically, somewhere between the Wild West and modern-day England. Our favorite part of the Second Amendment is where it says "well-regulated."
30) Tax the hell out of bullets. No more 17-cent discount bullets at Wal-Mart. Chris Rock was right. Expensive bullets = no innocent bystanders.
31) Work towards creating the world that Buckminster Fuller envisioned decades ago. That is, a world in which no one has to "work for a living" unless they really want to. And women would reclaim their rightful position as the new leaders of the free world as well. Because let's face it, it ain't gonna be us fellas who save the world!
32) Two words--TORT REFORM. Shakespeare knew exactly what the problem was 500 years ago, and it is still a problem today--LAWYERS. That's one of the reasons healthcare costs are so high, and that pushes up insurance costs as well. Also, every other aspect of life is negatively affected by lawsuit abuse.
33) Censorship sucks. No restrictions on TV programming after 11 pm. We got the V-chip don't we? And stop blaming rock, rap and video games for crime. Violent crime actually plummeted since 1992 (the year Mortal Kombat came out), especially among young people, and media of all kinds got progressively raunchier and gorier during that time. Teen pregnancy and even teen sex dropped as well, regardless of what the media pundits say.
34) Take young people seriously, and let them have at least as much freedom as the ruling Boomers had when they were young in the 1970s. Pretty soon Millennials and eventually Gen Z will be in charge. Be nice to your kids; they get to choose your nursing homes.
35) Either abolish all student, workplace, and government drug testing (except to determine acute intoxication/impairment), or start "non-punitively" testing members of Congress. And publish the results in the newspaper (and online) for the voters to see. Let the voters decide if Senator Snort Face should keep his job. Funny how drug-warrior and surveillance lover Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI) voted against such an idea. Makes you wonder.
36) Let smokers smoke and obese people eat themselves into an early grave. European studies show that they actually SAVE society money by dying 10-20 years earlier than the rest of us. It's counterintuitive, but health care costs and Social Security will actually benefit from that. And smokers pay a lot in taxes as well. But roughly equalize the cigarette taxes among the states to discourage interstate smuggling, which is big money for Mafia and terrorists.
37) Reject junk science and pseudoscience. It's a disgrace to real scientists everywhere.
38) Get all the bad drivers, jerks, and reckless morons off the road. They're more than just a nuisance, they're a major public safety hazard as well. Two moving violations of any kind (other than seatbelt law) and your license gets suspended for up to 90 days. Three and it gets revoked for a year or more. The second revocation in 10 years will be permanent. Road test for all new (and revoked) drivers should be like the British model--a study-proof, hour-long driving test that includes freeways. Not like the 5-minute parallel parking joke we have now. Driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right. Other countries understand that, so why can't we?
39) Maintain strict separation of church and state. It's what Jefferson would have wanted. Religion should never be the sole or primary justification for any public policy.
40) End the elephant/jackass corporate duopoly, and abolish the Electoral College. It's an antiquated system that serves no useful purpose anymore. It gave us eight years of incompetence, debt, lies, and endless world strife, and we still have not recovered. Let the people decide, preferably by ranked-choice voting to guarantee that any president elected will have majority support. And we also need term limits for Congress.
41) Above all, we shall preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. It is NOT "just a piece of paper"--it is the law of the land. And it supersedes ALL other laws, period.
42) And last but not least: get the orange menace and all of his corrupt cronies and enablers out of the White House, yesterday!
Twelve Steps to American Prosperity
The following are adapted from Rodger Malcolm Mitchell's long-advocated Ten Steps to Prosperity, and are based on the theory of Monetary Sovereignty:
0. First, admit we have a problem, expose the Big Lie that federal taxes actually pay for federal spending and that the federal government can somehow run short of dollars. Decouple federal spending from taxes and "borrowing".
3. Provide a monthly economic bonus to every man, woman and child in America (similar to social security for all)6. Eliminate federal taxes on business, except for the very largest corporations.9. Federal ownership of all banks, or at least all big banks.
12. Encourage and help the rest of the world to follow our example after implementing the previous steps.
All of which will be funded by federal money creation. As Mitchell himself notes, the Ten Steps (or in our case, the Twelve Steps) will grow the economy, and narrow the income/wealth/power Gap between the rich and you. These are best done sequentially in the order listed, or at least with all of steps 1, 2, and 3 done before 4 through 10. Step 11, which we added, can be done anytime.
