The essentials of healthy living — nutrition, exercise, a robust social network and a positive state of mind — have been well known for centuries, even millennia.  Yet our current health care system has little to do with these basic building blocks.  Instead, it focuses on the consequences of unhealthy living.  For most people, health only becomes an issue when they end up in the emergency room.

A system that focuses on consequence and not fundamentals is a system that is inherently dysfunctional.  It is also a system that generates a significant amount of money.  Instead of asking why cancer develops, for example, companies can make more money by “treating” it.  So we spend hundreds of millions of dollars researching “treatments” and very little money on figuring out what causes cancer.

A system that focuses on consequence and not fundamentals also produces a horrifying perspective on the issue of aging.  Under our current health care system, we slowly but surely find ourselves confined to a bed-ridden state as the consequences of a lifetime of unhealthy living take their toll.  An unnecessary obsession with “preserving life at all costs” strips people of their dignity.  Old age becomes a hellish existence of pain and suffering, when it should be a state of wisdom and preparation for the next state of existence, whatever that may be.

Our approach to medicine treats the body as a machine to be repaired instead of a living organism that must be brought into a different homeostatic state.  The fight against disease becomes a technocratic war against the body, as medical science attempts to wipe out invaders — be it a virus, a cancer or high cholesterol — instead of employing the body’s natural ability to heal itself.

A paradigm of preventive care would begin with a primary health care provider, who would analyze a patient’s entire life situation and identify sources of potential problems well before they materialize as a physical condition.  It would take a holistic approach to wellness:  analyzing not only physical conditions but also mental and social well being.

A paradigm of preventive care would focus on diet and would help people identify those foods that are most nutritious for them.  A paradigm of preventive care would focus on exercise and help people create an exercise regimen that would keep their bodies active.  A paradigm of preventive care would focus on a person’s social network and would help that person create a vibrant community of friends and family.  A paradigm of preventive care would focus on attitude and would help a person take a positive outlook on life so that he or she could materialize their dreams and desires without needing to worry so much.

Just a few little changes in our daily lives would do much to prevent disease down the road.  Eating right, reducing levels of stress, getting exercise:  we’ve heard these things a million times, yet ignore them in favor of a health model that says, “I’ll deal with it later.”

Is it any wonder that health insurance companies are so powerful?  The current health care model, which focuses on expensive treatments, pharmaceuticals and hospital visits, produces real inefficiences in terms of human health but tremendous amounts of money for the providers of those services.  These companies are literally make a killing off of human suffering.  Real health care reform requires questioning this entire model in favor of something much more healthy and sane.

The heady days of the early 2000s — an economy powered by an unsustainable housing boom — are over, never to return.

With unemployment at record levels, and after trillions of dollars in stimulus and funding to bloated financial institutions, there are growing doubts as to whether the American economy will be able to fully recover.

What will recovery look like?  We’re probably looking at it — a slow, slogging process muddled down by lack of direction and the failure to create lasting economic growth based on investment instead of speculation.

For the last decade, the American economy was running on lies.   The late housing boom was created and nurtured by financial institutions — including the Federal Reserve — as a means of continuing the momentum of the dot-com bubble, which had popped in late 2000.  By keeping interest rates at record lows, and by abdicating responsibility to monitor and audit mortgage and securities markets and institutions, the government looked the other way while banks and securities dealers sold and packaged bad loans in every global market.

Trillions of dollars were created on paper — but nowhere else.  The wealth was a myth.  Home prices rose, but only because of artificially created demand.

Now that everything has popped, people appear to be clamoring for the good old days.  But those days are gone.  As the bankruptcy of General Motors symbolized, America’s manufacturing base has disappeared, and there is nowhere else for money to go.

To date, government efforts have focused on banks, and not citizens.  And those efforts have certainly paid off:  Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase recently announced record profits from the last quarter.  Meanwhile, average people are struggling to make ends meet.

This is perhaps the most sinister outcome of the current recession:  the growing power of banks and financial institutions in directing government action.

100 years ago, financiers and industrialists such as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie largely controlled American economic and financial policy.  We appear to be returning to an era when large financial conglomerates have their hands at the levers of power.

Ironically, the existence of these mega-financial institutions — “too big to fail” — is the greatest obstacle to genuine recovery.   The growing division of wealth between rich and poor and the concentration of resources into a handful of financial institutions is the root of the problem with the modern American economy.  To date, government has only strengthened this concentration.  A vibrant American economy requires the opposite.  Only time will tell if anyone in Washington D.C. — or anyone at all — will have the gumption and ability to address this fundamental issue.

There are people for whom everything a Democrat does is treason, and for everything a Republican does is idiocy.  Instead of commenting on individual policies and actions, people look to party affiliation as a shortcut in determining political appropriateness.  Like any stereotype, this type of thinking hides more than it reveals, and does nothing to further the aims of good government.

In his 1796 farewell address, President George Washington called political parties the “worst enemy” of government.

Washington commented:  “[T]he common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

Washington had been caught in the middle of a war between Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans and Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists.  Forced to choose a side, Washington declared himself a Federalist, but in his final act as President he called for both sides to settle their disputes and put the interests of the republic to heart instead.

Mark Twain, as well, wrote harsh words on party loyalty.  He wrote:

Look at the tyranny of party — at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty — a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes — and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.

Twain’s point was that party politics was a way for people to control the minds of others with an us-versus-them mentality.  No matter if the party is corrupt, or duplicitous, or engages in activities that are harmful to democracy; the only thing that matters in party politics is that your party wins and the other one loses.

The dominance of the two-party system in the United States has led to a political framework where there is little alternative in public policy.  The two parties squabble over smaller, hot-button cultural issues such as abortion and the definition of marriage, while much more pressing and meaningful issues — health care, militant foreign policy, expanding federal power, climate change, energy policy — are given little attention.

For example, 72 percent of Americans — an impressive majority — favor a government administered health care plan to compete with private insurance, yet it is this very proposal that faces the most opposition in the halls of government.

The reason for this consensus is that powerful corporate interests have maintained a grip on positions of power for some time, and they strut arm-and-arm with the dominant political parties in ensuring their authority.  The whole notion of “Red” and “Blue” states is a simple divide-and-conquer strategy that splits the American public in order to prevent fundamental and democratic change.

The result is a type of “zombie politics”, where individual Americans unthinkingly fall in lock-step behind a political leader and party without considering the consequences of the policy.

There is no pretense of critical thinking, but simply unwavering uniformity:  a nation of zombies.

There should be no doubt that both political parties and their adherents are guilty of this zombie approach, but there is also little avoiding the truth that adherents to Republican Party ideology are particularly unmoored from genuine principle.  A party that once supported good ideas such as small government and a non-interventionist foreign policy has transformed into a party that waves the banner of religious bigotry, small-minded populism and the literal use of torture against anyone who disagrees with them.  This is the kernel of fascism, and the fact that even 10 or 20 percent of Americans go along with this is in many ways chilling.

Consider a world without the chains of political party, where candidates simply ran on their individual position.   Without the backdrop of a party, candidates could propose novel or creative solutions without needing to worry about a larger party agenda.  More candidates could enter the field without needing to worry about “dominant” candidates supported by powerful parties.  And without the label of a political party, individual citizens would actually have to pay attention to the candidate and engage in critical thinking to determine if the policies make sense and are worthwhile.

For the last fifty years, corporate power, government, the empire, and the division between rich and poor have all increased dramatically — regardless of who has been in office.  Clinton expanded government, but so did George W. Bush.  Nixon bombed Vietnam, but it was Kennedy who got America involved.  George W. Bush lied to the public to start a war in Iraq, but Johnson did the same thing in the Gulf of Tonkin.

And this entire time, corporations have benefited at the expense of individual people.  This is the result of a dysfunctional two-party system and the dominance of zombie politics.

Enough is enough.  At some point Americans need to see the Democratic and Republican parties for what they are: two different handmaidens serving the same greedy power centers, the same corporate elite, the same ostentatious political circles.  And they can do this by dropping their allegiance to their political party, and affirming their allegiance to the Constitution and the republic itself.

But none of them have ever fully died, and the latest enemy of copyright law is a technology called “BitTorrent.”  For the last few years, anyone with a modicum of internet know-how could download a BitTorrent program such as uTorrent or Azuerus and click on BitTorrent hyperlinks (so called “torrents”) that connected to a wide variety of data all over the internet.   

And then came The Pirate Bay.  Certainly not shy in its avowed intent (they are self-proclaimed pirates, after all), the administrators of The Pirate Bay set up a website which indexed BitTorrent hyperlinks in one location.  Users from all over the world could come to their website and search for torrents all over the world.

So far, so good — up until a few months back, when a Swedish court found the administrators of The Pirate Bay guilty for inducing copyright infringement, slapped millions of dollars in fines and imposed jail time.  

The Pirate Bay defendants (and this is not a joke) employed the “King Kong defense.”   The defense lawyer argued that none of the defendants had control over their users, including a user who carried the handle “King Kong.”  Thus, if “King Kong” was engaging in illegal activity, then the proper avenue was to subpoena his records and put him on trial, not the administrators of the website.  

The argument didn’t fly with the Swedish judges, and probably wouldn’t have flown with many federal judges here in the United States either.  Like the defendants in Grokster, a judge would probably have said that The Pirate Bay administrators were “inducing” infringement by the layout of their website, and were materially contributing in a more-than-innocent way.  

A classic battle between old industry and new:  specifically, old-school compact-disk-in-a-jewel-case distributors of music versus the burgeoning development of online music distribution.  

Almost at the same time as The Pirate Bay conviction in Sweden, a federal jury in the United States found in favor of the RIAA and leveled a $2 million dollar verdict against a mother of four in Minnesota for hosting 24 tracks on the Kazaa peer-to-peer network.  The verdict against Jammie Thomas-Rasset came after an original verdict was overturned on account of faulty jury instructions and a dismal defense on the part of the defendant, who claimed that a hacker must have taken control over her wireless router (though she didn’t have a wireless router).  She also then blamed her children.  (Incidentally, Thomas-Rasset was defended by Kiwi Camera, the youngest attorney to graduate from Harvard Law School who called African Americans “nigs” on his law school course outlines and didn’t think it was a big deal).

The policies that guide copyright law are intended to promote creativity and reward inventors.  But it seems clear that copyright law as it stands in the United States is in need of a real makeover.  Thomas-Rasset was charged $2 million dollars for songs that she could have downloaded for $1 each on iTunes — no reasonable argument could be made that the fine is proportional to the harm that was caused.   And it is telling that the brains behind the Thomas-Rasset and Pirate Bay lawsuits are the recording industry big-wigs, not the artists themselves.  Indeed, any neutral observer would be unable to deny that the biggest winners by far under the copyright regime are industry groups who already possess a disproportionate amount of power.  The artists themselves continue to make pennies on the dollar under current copyright arrangements.

It is telling that laws are continually revamped in favor of big industry in ways that hamper innovation.  In the early 1990s, The Walt Disney Company lobbied aggressively for legislation that would keep Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters under copyright protection, as they was due to enter in the public domain.  Once in the public domain, any person in the United States would have been able to use the Mickey Mouse character in a book, movie — any creative work — without paying a dime to Disney.   Congress did what it was told, and the “Sonny Bono Act” was passed by both houses and signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

Copyright serves a purpose, but it increasingly is used simply as a way to privatize creative works in the hands of a small, privileged few.       As the barrier between thought and expression is chipped away by technology, does a robust copyright regime make sense?  And why?  How far does copyright extend into the human mind?  What purpose is served by a handful of small companies making the most money from current law?  These questions are not being answered by anyone in power.  Already in Europe, groups like the Pirate Party (no affiliation to The Pirate Bay) are demanding a re-working of copyright law.   

Incidentally, The Pirate Bay is going legal.  A Swedish Company called Global Gaming Factory is purchasing the company for close to $8 million, a sum that will no doubt cover the fines imposed by the Swedish court and possibly even legal expenses (technically the case remains on appeal).  Global Gaming Factory wants to convert The Pirate Bay into a site where individual users are paid to provide legal torrents for other users to download.   A future the RIAA and other industry groups have resisted for a long time is slowly but surely coming into fruition.  The real question is whether legal sites like iTunes (and ostensibly The Pirate Bay) will be the fruit of the concerted effort by industry behemoths to stomp out innovation; or whether it’s just a matter of time before the next progeny in the Napster-Gnutella-BitTorrent line of technologies emerges to take on the very notion of copyright itself.