Of course, the big things are going to take a lot of work: devising an exit strategy from Iraq that doesn’t end up the plunging the nation into civil war or dictatorship; providing universal health care coverage; reviving the economy from the worst depression in the best part of a century; rebuilding America’s reputation in the world; shifting to a low-carbon economy and ending dependence on oil. There’ll be tough jobs and if Obama can get even the majority of them done during his administration, he’ll be assured of a place in history.
Nevertheless, there’s a bunch of things that the new administration can do which cost relatively little, could be passed relatively easily through a Democratic congress or by executive order, would require the expenditure of only minimal amounts of political capital, and would have a dramatic effect in demonstrating that a new era had begun in D.C.
So without further ado, here’s a list of my suggestions, ten quick fixes that the Obama administration can do in its first hundred days to achieve maximum results with minimum pain:
1. Close Guantánamo Bay, transfer the key Al Qaeda operatives to domestic prison facilities pending prosecution, and release the rest.
2. Pass an amendment banning all CIA employees from using practices that go beyond the US Army Field Manual on Interrogation (thereby removing their exemption to torture, waterboard, etc.).
3. Declare a second ‘Good Neighbor’ policy, in which intervention in the internal politics of democratic nations is explicitly disavowed. (And while you’re at it, stop funding anti-Morales opposition groups in Bolivia.)
4. Repeal George Bush’s ban on stem cell research.
5. Declare an explicit goal of leading the process of constructing Kyoto II. Even without action, such a declaration would itself encourage many business firms to continue to gear up for large scale alternative energy investment.
6. Sign up to the Convention on Cluster Munitions accord (see previous post).
7. Reintroduce funding for contraceptive programmes into the US programmes for AIDS reduction in Africa.
8. Distribute 20 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets to children in the most heavily malaria-infected regions of sub-saharan Africa (approximate cost, $100m – or 0.00004% of the national budget).
9. Pass a law requiring all citizens earning more than $500,000 a year to spend at least a week every year working in a soup kitchen. (Ok, maybe this is a bit unlikely, but just imagine...!)
10. Pass a law prohibiting invasive scientific testing on all non-human primates.
Feel free to add your own suggestions to the list!
Think Of the Children
53 minutes ago
1 comments:
My number 1 in the Unlikely-To-Be-Implemented List would be:
1. Recognize reality, and admit that the USA has lost the War on Drugs. Legalize all currently banned consumer drugs, and create appropriate mitigation policies, such as addict treatment centres.
It is truly amazing that a country with the USA's dire experience of Prohibition and its evils would not only fail to learn from that experience, but simply repeat it. It seems that the narco-enforcement-industrial complex is just too powerful for sensible and rational policies to be enacted.
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