Noting that we apparently need “content” I have sat down at my PC to try and bang out some thoughts that go through my Pirate Mind, and pop out through my fingertips. Think of this as a stream of consciousness and hopefully this series will help you understand our platform a bit more.
1. Government transparency.
First of all, let me be clear, I have an extreme distaste for government in nearly any form that is in common place use today. We have big shows of protestors picketing out there on their “rights” and government makes some show to make the people feel better, all while spying more and being less transparent about what it’s doing. Partially this comes from a teenager like attitude of secret keeping, because government knows that the people will not like or approve of the actions it takes on a daily basis. So it comes up with terms like “classified”, “top secret” and agencies that have no duty to the People like intelligence agencies that are permanent fixtures now that we have created a world culture of constant and unending warfare. Warfare and “national security” become the excuses. Excuses to hide and cover up behavior and actions that would never be tolerated in peace time or in a society that actually cares for the civil rights of it’s citizens.
I warned you, stream of consciousness… So, IS there ANYTHING that the government should hide from it’s citizens? I say NO. Complete transparency is the best policy. I will concede that military commands and troop movements and reports from the battlefield may have a short delay of being secret, in order to keep intelligence out of the hands of our enemies…. But that being said, in a Pirate world, all of these foreign wars would come to an end and we would spend very little of our GDP on defense. Sorry Military Industrial Complex….
Bottom line, I personally see only bad things coming from government secrecy. Shining light on the darkness of top secret and black budget BS is only right in allowing the citizens to decide what they want. Voting is how we change things without violence, yet if we cannot be fully informed, and are kept ignorant as to what our government is doing in the dark, we cannot ever properly exercise our franchise.
Drew Bingaman
2. Corporate transparency
While I recognize that Corporations will need to keep trade secrets, those secrets must not endanger the public, their employees or customers. Corporate secrets MUST NOT cover up wrongdoing, illegal acts, gross negligence, or putting profits before people. This is where many corporations go wrong. They push a culture of ethically problematic practices, and when something bad happens, they attempt to cover up the culture that created the problem in the first place.
These types of corporate culture also extend to fraud and “cooking the books” in order to look good for shareholders. This too hurts people who are expecting to invest in an honest company. The truth eventually comes out. Especially in the corporate world.
If you want to see multiple corporations cutting corners, endangering the public, silencing whistleblowers, and a disregard for the seriousness and potential damage they could cause, I want you to watch the Netflix series on Three Mile Island. https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/meltdown-three-mile-island-release-date-cast-news
This was not just MET-ED who was responsible for the first failure and meltdown, but subsequent corporations who came in the aftermath that cut corners and nearly caused an even bigger accident years later. It was this documentary that has inspired the “corporate death penalty” plank in the PA Pirate Party platform. The issue with a corporation is that you cannot put a corporation in jail for it’s crimes. And in many instances these problems are institutional in nature. The corporate culture breeds cost cutting no matter the consequence, fraudulent or fake safety reporting, and ignoring recommendations of experts in the field. Therefore when a corporation violates the public trust in such a way, that corporation and all of it’s assets must be siezed and reorganized as completely new entity where all of it’s management gets the boot. Also all shares of the original company are to go to Zero and new stocks will be issues to non managerial employees.
Once again I will reiterate that this process, is a stream of consciousness, and there are plenty of bad examples of corporate malfeasance out there. I honed in on the TMI incident as it was repeated problems by multiple corporations, sitting in the middle of an urban area that had the potential to kill or injure tens of thousands of people if not many more.
It’s easy to find corporations who go wrong, many of them cease to exist on their own based on their wrongdoing. But other times that wrongdoing is seemingly excused in the public. The corporate culture that created the wrongdoing is allowed to continue. I find this to be appalling and unacceptable. And the first part of making corporations better is to push corporate transparency and accountability.
Drew Bingaman
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