Much is written about Wes Clark’s ideas on foreign policy and national security and the like. A few months ago the General spoke at Central Michigan University. His talk was about America’s role in the world and national strategy but he held a press conference with members of the campus media before the speech and some wise questioner asked him about his domestic ideas. It's something he really doesn't get to talk about often enough but that doesn't mean he isn't thinking about it...Here’s what he said...
Q: What are some issues that you would like to see tackled domestically?
WKC: Health care, a better business environment, a revised labor policy in America, a real energy policy in America and an investment in America’s future through technology and the environment. So, all of that, and all of that has to be done in a way of engaging our people more in our form of government. So let me just tick off a couple of things.
Education. Start with pre-school. Every child in America should have pre-school before kindergarten, a real learning experience. And we need to fix Americans’ secondary education through improved parent-teacher work at the elementary school level and additional programs to emphasize high school graduation and competency. There shouldn’t be a child in America who’s qualified to go to college who can’t go because they lack money. We’re the wealthiest society in the world and we’ve got to invest in our future and the best way to do that’s through education. And then the fourth plank I would say is that there must be continuing adult education. Americans today can’t expect to stay in the same job or even the same profession for the majority of their working lives and so they have to graduate from high school or college with the expectation of continuing adult growth which will include periods of classroom education, online education or other skill and knowledge acquiring efforts throughout a lifetime of personal growth and development. So, that’s the education piece.
Health care. I’m in favor of, first of all, making sure that every person has access to affordable, meaningful health insurance by expanding the Children’s Health Insurance Programs from the bottom, working Medicare from the top, and moving toward a national single payer system. I think we’ve got to be able to reduce the costs in health care through greater reliance on evidence-based medicine and with evidence-based medicine there will come some reform in the legal processes and also some reform in the provision of malpractice insurance. The next element in health care that I want to emphasize is preventive and diagnostic care. I think that we’ve got to really work to reward people’s good health behavior and ensure that every American, as they hit the magic age of 40 or maybe 38, they get the kind of preventive and diagnostic care that can work to inform them and offset, or educate them on how to beat the sort of debilitating aging illnesses like hardening of the arteries or diabetes, these kinds of preventable aging diseases which are responsible for so much hardship in America.
A better business environment. I think we’ve got to make this country the country of choice for every energetic entrepreneurial young person in the world. Whether that’s reform of the visa system alone or whether it means provision of greater public-private partnerships, greater opportunities for university associations, more government money put into small business administration to provide lower cost small business loans for high technology companies, we’ve got to grow jobs in this country that are meaningful jobs with real technology.
Labor unions have played an important part in America’s economic future but now it’s about more than collective bargaining, because we’re really in a global labor market. Corporations go where they can produce for the least and then they use transportation to send goods or ideas back across borders. So what we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to be able to help the working people in America grow, not being dependent on a corporation but being dependent on their own support network, whether this comes from unions or some union-like, quasi-union-like, concept like a guild where people can go in and receive employment counseling, education counseling, personal development counseling, support for moving...(phone rings)These are all things that can be done and should be done inside the American labor movement.
I talked about energy. We should be 20% sustainable by 2020 and that means we’ve got to move more toward wind and solar. We’ve got to really work carbon capture so we can use America’s coal reserves. And we’ve got to improve the efficiency of energy usage in America.
And then technology. We need to move beyond the defense technology. We need to be looking at other kinds of technology--material, science, green technology, new alternative energy systems, batteries, many other types of technology need to be exploited, supported by the government and moved out, as well as life science technology.
Those are some of my ideas.
Later in the press conference, a questioner asks about nuclear energy....
Q: (regarding energy policy) would nuclear fit into that at all?
WKC: We’ve a got a little bit more work to do on nuclear. We’re fortunate. We’ve got nuclear now and since Three Mile Island we haven’t had any problems but we are building up residues of spent nuclear fuel and we don’t really have an adequate means of handling nuclear fuel in America. If you were to go out to Nevada and ask that question, people in Nevada would tell you 12,000 years is not long enough to protect the ground water under my land and they’d be right in speaking it because we just don’t know. Nuclear materials are highly corrosive and they’re very dangerous and the danger is very long lasting. So I’d like to see us do a lot more research on materials required to safeguard spent nuclear fuel--things like carbon fiber, new carbon fiber, bucky tubes and that sort of thing which are very very strong but not able to be corroded by the kinds of heat and acidity that typically comes with the spent fuel.
Audio of the press conference and the speech (although the speech audio is really hard to listen to), courtesy of The Central Monitor, can be found here:
http://www.thecentralmonitor.com/wordpress/2007/04/03/audio-from-gen-clarks-press-conference-and-speech-available/
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