Common Sense Revival

                                                                                                              Table of Contents

                                                                                                                      Page Numbers

    1.   Uncommon Sense and Fair-Mindedness                                                               3 - 30

    2.   A Proposed Bill of Rights for Future Generations                                             31 - 34

    3.   Clear-Eyed Patriot Issues a Clarion Call for a Second American Revolution        35 – 62

    4.   One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies                       63 – 69

     5.  Sustainability Index                                                                                       71 - 76

“Who the Author of this Production is, is wholly unnecessary to the Public, as the important thing is the IDEAS THEMSELVES, and not the author.  Yet it is necessary to say that she is unconnected with any Party, and under no sort of influence, public or private, other than the influence of reason and principle.”

            --- Thomas Paine (paraphrased)

                                                                                                        Dr. Tiffany B. Twain             

          Hannibal, Missouri

          October 24, 2012

                                                                              www.EarthManifesto.com                                

                                                            Contact at: SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com         

       The Earth Manifesto:  Saving the World through Sensible Ideas!

               Copies of this pamphlet are available from Lulu.

DEDICATION:

This Common Sense Revival is dedicated to:

Thomas Paine for his Revolutionary commitment to fair representation of the people.

Abraham Lincoln for his bold recognition of the vital importance of good governance of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Mark Twain for his drawling humor and serious commitment to peace, social fairness during the Gilded Age, and exposing misguided political and religious doctrines.

The Dalai Lama for his simple wisdom and understanding that a unity of the heart and the head is vital for our individual and collective well-being.

Barry Commoner for his ecological visions and realizations about the Four Laws of Ecology and the Three E’s of environmental concern.

                   Uncommon Sense and Fair-Mindedness

                                                               An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

Democracy originated in ancient Greece.  The great idea of fair representation in politics and governance first flowered forth into history in this island nation more than 2,500 years ago.  The citizens of Greece loved freedom and respected reason and clarity of thought, so they embraced balanced perspective, the love of knowledge, and the idea of all things in moderation.  Mariners in Greece at the time “sailed on a sapphire sea washing enchanted islands purple in a luminous air”, Edith Hamilton eloquently observed in The Greek Way.  Evocative music from the harp-like lyre heralds these introductory words.

The people in ancient Greece loved knowledge for its value for living -- not merely for its own sake.  Knowledge was seen to be capable of leading people “away from error to right action.”  They “loved beauty with economy”, as the Greek statesman Pericles put it, and they embraced a kind of economy that was the opposite of mindless lavishness and hubris-filled grandiosity.  To them, their gods were nearby “to watch over deeds of justice and kindliness”, noted the poet Hesiod.

Throughout most of ancient history before the flowering of rationality and fair-mindedness in Greece, despots or oligarchs ruled nations, and people were subjugated to the primacy of kings or a powerful few.  One tremendous conflict in history was to decide whether freedom or tyranny is the stronger force:  the wars between the Persian Empire and the Greeks. 

Darius the Great was the ruler of the First Persian Empire at the peak of its influence and power in the 5th century BCE.  He had conquered what is modern day Afghanistan, India, Iraq, Egypt and the Balkans, so he presided over the most far flung empire the world had yet seen.  Then he marched on Greece, “a rocky land and poor”.  The powerful tyrant and his huge army were miraculously defeated by the freedom-loving Athenians at the legendary battle at Marathon in 490 BCE.  This event is often seen as a pivotal moment in European history.

Ten years lapsed, and the curtain rose again for the final act in this drama.  Darius had died and his son Xerxes came with a large force to wreak vengeance on the Greeks.  He amassed a vast army and sent it in a thousand ships to engage the Greeks, who had sailed to narrow waterways near the island of Salamis.  In the strategically confining straits, the freedom-defending Greeks were able to vanquish the larger force in a decisive victory. 

Perhaps Nemesis, the Greek goddess of divine retribution had smitten the hubris-filled Persians, arrogant with their might and riches, and they retreated back to whence they came.  Herodotus, known as “the father of history”, noted what Aeschylus had written:

“All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears.  God calls men to a heavy reckoning for

    overweening pride.”

We are engaged in another titanic conflict between tyranny and freedom in the world again today, and I feel strongly that we should give our support to the democratic, fair-minded, freethinking, common sense, progressive elements in our society that resist the tyranny of trickle-down economic fundamentalism, orthodox religious authority, and aggressive militarism.

A Revival of Wise Solon’s Ideas

A new form of arrogance bedevils our American democracy today.  It is the arrogance of wealth and privilege.  Wealthy conservatives have been abusing their power ruthlessly, and they have managed to get our representatives to let them pay the lowest tax rates in 80 years at a time of growing needs and record levels of debt.  They have managed to hijack our society and radically remake it, so that power, privilege and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few.  A bold course of corrective action is required;  let us ponder some compelling lessons of history to clearly see the avenues that make the most sense.

Back in the Athens of the 5th Century BCE, the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor had become so extreme that the city-state was in a dangerous tinderbox condition.  Talk of violent revolt was being stoked by a pressure cooker of societal unrest.  The rich, angry at the brazen challenge to their privileges and property, prepared to defend themselves by force.

As these conflicts escalated between various interests vying for perks, privilege and power, many people recognized that a transformational leader was needed to seek a fair compromise between the competing factions, and to do so in an equitable and peaceable manner.  Somehow good sense prevailed and moderate elements secured the election of the Athenian statesman and lawmaker Solon, and he was given wide-ranging legislative powers to mediate between concerned parties.

Solon made a number of fair-minded reforms of the Greek political system and its economy.  He gave the common people the power to elect officials, and to demand that their representatives be called to account.  Because of all these reforms, Solon is considered to be the person who established the true foundations of a real democracy for the first time in history. 

Solon wisely made many revolutionarily progressive reforms, including the establishment of a more steeply graduated income tax plan that made rich people pay taxes at a rate that was 12 times as high as the poor.  “The rich protested that his measures were outright confiscation; the radicals complained that he had not divided the land; but within a generation almost all agreed that his reforms had saved Athens from revolution,” wrote Will and Ariel Durant in The Lessons of History.

Today, the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has reached new modern extremes, and the nation seems to be in a dangerous condition.  It appears that we are confronted with three possible outcomes:  (1) to continue to allow the middle class and poor people to fall into increasingly desperate states of insecurity by imposing austerity measures on the people;  (2) to compromise together to make our society truly fairer by implementing more steeply graduated income taxes so that there would be money to finance social programs that reduce inequities;  or (3) to embark on new repressive measures and incarcerate more people to suppress growing outrage over glaring social inequities and increasing desperation. 

The first course of action would likely lead to the people taking to the streets in revolt;  the second course of action would seem to be the most sensible plan by far;  and the third course of action would cost an unaffordable amount of money and bring our historic experiment in democratic governance to a sad conclusion.

The lessons of history teach us that he most sensible plan is to choose wise leaders who will implement smart, decent, and fair-minded reforms.  Those who do not heed the lessons of history are said to be more likely to be doomed to repeat them, so let’s heed the lessons!

A Comedy, or a Tragedy?

In classical literature and theatre, artistic creations were classified as either comedies or tragedies.  The main difference was that comedies had happy endings, while tragedies had tragic ones.  Surely we should be striving in our modern times to redesign our society to improve the probability that 100 years from now we will be able to look back and say we committed ourselves to happier endings, and not severe inequities and tragedy-of-the-commons disasters.

“Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest

   in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

                                                                                  --- Garrett Hardin

To achieve the greater good, honest and clear-eyed understandings are needed, together with fair-minded resolve.  Now is the time for us to insist that our representatives begin to work together with an overarching goal of choosing wiser, fairer, and more peaceable national directions.  The providentially positive provisions of a proposed Bill of Rights for Future Generations should be used as guidance.  This is the counsel of the great ghost of Virgil, the veritable voice of reason, and of the spirit of beautiful Beatrice, whose empathetic heart can provide us with the inspiration to embark on a more virtuous, redemptive, and morally fair-minded path into the future.

    “These are the times that try men’s souls.” 

                                                           --- Thomas Paine

Common Sense Arrives on the Scene

Thomas Paine was an Englishman who became the consummate American patriot.  He helped change the course of history by writing Common Sense, a highly influential pamphlet that was published in January 1776.  Common Sense originally had the working title Plain Truth, and it spoke plain truths and made straightforward arguments about society and government.  In this, the proportionally best-selling pamphlet ever, Thomas Paine forcefully advocated independence from tyrannical rule by the British.  He also proposed enlightened ideas about the need and desirability of establishing a new form of government that was more fairly representative, so that the voices of all would be heard. 

I imagine the stirring music of fifes, drums and bugles accompanying the march of these ideas.

It is noteworthy that Thomas Paine published Common Sense anonymously because the pamphlet was treasonous to King George II and the ruling British Empire.  From our perspective today, this act of treason was one of the most laudably patriotic salvos against tyranny ever written, because we see the cause of independence of the American colonies as having been central to the freedoms we enjoy today.

This relativity of patriotism and treason casts a bright light onto our political strife today.  Think about this.  “Conservatives” in modern-day America want to give the rights of personhood to corporate entities, and to thus undermine the rights and power of the people.  They want to eliminate protections of the environment, stimulate consumerism, and facilitate the exploitation of resources.  They want to give rich people larger tax breaks, and finance this generosity by slashing spending that helps poor people survive and middle-class folks to be more secure.  And the simple fact of the matter is that we have consistently been shortsightedly borrowing huge sums of money from all people in future generations to achieve our misguided priorities. 

“Conservatives” have become increasingly unwilling to compromise with more moderate people for the greater good of society.  They adamantly refuse to require high-income earners to pay higher rates of tax on the higher levels of their incomes.  They want to reduce protections of public lands to benefit private interests, and undermine efforts to conserve resources, and allow national parks, national forests and other public lands to be privatized or more easily exploited.  They want to increase wasteful spending on the military, and act more aggressively on the world scene.

These ideological stances and narrow attitudes are radically contrary to true and honorable conservatism.  These are not patriotic approaches;  in fact, relative to our descendents in future generations, they are downright treasonous.  They are treacherous to the future of humankind, and mindlessly inconsiderate of life on Earth.

I, Tiffany Twain, Doctor of Philosophy and the illegitimate great granddaughter of Mark Twain, have a vision for the greater good of humanity.  This vision is informed by ideas of sustainable stewardship of our home planet, and of overarching fairness principles.  It includes ideas that would help foster cooperation on the international stage and attain common sense goals of less strife, greater fairness, and better prospects for peaceful coexistence.  The Earth Manifesto is a modern and more elaborate incarnation of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and it proposes a wide-ranging set of solutions to our common problems.  See One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies for some of the best of these ideas.

Barry Commoner, known as “the Paul Revere of Ecology,” died at the age of 95 on September 30, 2012.  Commoner was a scientist and ecological activist who realized that pollution of the environment, social inequities, and war are related issues of a central problem.  This problem is that capitalist economic systems emphasize profits and technological progress without adequate regard for the detrimental impacts they have on people and natural ecosystems, and they discount the real harms that are caused to the environmental commons.  The time has come today for us to address the big problems we face, and to stop denying them, and to take bold steps to solve them.

“In the nineteenth century, anti-capitalist critics like Karl Marx insisted that economics must be contained within an ethical context;  they contended that social justice counted for more than industrial efficiency or private profit.  In the late twentieth century, the environmental movement is trying to teach us that both economics and ethics must be contained within an ecological context.”

             --- The Voice of the Earth, An Exploration of Ecopsychology, Theodore Roszak

One of the first great legal decisions in U.S. history to halt environmental despoliation took place in 1884, when U.S. District Court Judge Lorenzo Sawyer declared a sweeping injunction to abruptly stop all hydraulic gold mining activities in California because of the terrible damages that this form of mining wreaked on people downstream.  The Sawyer decision leads us to a variety of vitally important insights for humanity, as explored in Huckleberry Finn, the Forty-Niner Gold Rush, and a Resurrection of Mark Twain’s Perspectives in the Earth Manifesto.

In Annie Leonard’s most recent film in her excellent The Story of Stuff series, she asserts in The Story of Change that the real power to create a fairer, healthier and sustainable economy lies not in individual choices we make in buying things, but in coming together as citizens to build a better future.  Read on for some valuable perspectives and recommendations.

“If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology.  We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it.”

                      --- President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon signing the Wilderness Act of 1964

Fair-Minded Communications

We stand before a great crossroads in the history of our country.  Daunting challenges lie before us, many of them highly complicated, serious and contentious.  Many of the substantive issues that face humankind are not being discussed at all in the 2012 presidential campaign.  The failure to talk about crucial challenges is dangerous to our collective well-being, and to all people in future generations.  We must stop burying our heads in the sand, and begin to pay close attention to big problems in our elections, in American political discourse in general, and in all of our national decision-making. 

These issues include the need to conserve resources, protect the environment, develop cleaner sources of energy, reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere to mitigate the damaging impacts of ominous changes in global weather patterns, and deal sensibly with big problems like global poverty and malnutrition, overpopulation, the overfishing of the oceans, and the destruction of rainforests, wetlands, coral reefs, and other vital ecosystems. 

Many domestic problems also require committed attention, like improving public education, preventing risks that are associated with corporations becoming too big to control and too big to fail, coping with segregation by race and class in schools, reducing the high levels of incarceration in U.S. prisons, stopping the costly war on drugs, and reducing the unaffordable costs of America’s military, security state, and wars.  We need to talk about these things, and boldly deal with them!

Professor Jared Diamond makes a valuable observation in his insightful book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  He contends that we need a paradigm shift in how our leaders think.  America needs leaders with “the courage to practice long-term thinking and make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems become perceptible, but before they reach crisis proportions.”  Let’s elect progressive leaders who will act accordingly!

A lofty vision of hope, fair-minded social justice, and ecological salvation sails onto the scene, with the sounds of a soaring Beethoven symphony swelling into the interstices of our minds.

A Spiritual Take on Our Society Today

Virgil, the great Roman poet of antiquity, was widely regarded as the voice of reason.  He is famous for having declared:  “We make our destinies by the gods we choose.”  Think about this.  We surely should choose gods that are propitious to the greater good, gods that help us to advance positive directions in our lives and our societies. 

A God that elevates responsible stewardship of Earth’s natural resources to a top priority would surely be a better God to worship than one who urges people to dominate and exploit life on earth and natural ecosystems without consideration for the harmful impacts that this has on the foundations of biotic well-being.

Mark Twain made some interesting observations about gods in a sequel that he started to his great novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Curiously, he had written 15,000 words of this sequel in 1885, and then stopped right in the middle of a sentence and never resumed work on it.  In the pages he penned, he imagined the religion of the American Indians to be eminently sensible.  As Huck remarked about one of the novel’s protagonists:  “He said Injuns hadn’t only but two Gods, a good one and a bad one, and they never paid no attention to the good one, nor ever prayed to him or worried about him at all, but only tried their level best to flatter up the bad god and keep on the good side of him;  because the good one loved them and wouldn’t ever think of doing them any harm, and so there warn’t any occasion to be bothering about him with prayers and things, because he was always doing the very best he could for them, anyway, and prayers couldn’t better it;  but all the trouble come from the bad god, who was sitting up nights to think up ways to bring them bad luck and bust up all their plans, and never fooled away a chance to do them all the harm he could;  and so the sensible thing was to keep praying and fussing around him all the time, and get him to let up.”

I believe there is great risk in focusing on the worst elements of our human nature rather than the better ones.  If we pay attention only to our heads, and ignore our hearts, then adversities and negative outcomes are more probable.  If we cultivate nobler and fairer principles, then our relationships and our societies would be much healthier.  This is a much better idea than embracing principles that are ignoble, authoritarian, fear-inspired, ignorant or backward looking.

People everywhere should be free to believe in whatever God they like;  they should be guaranteed this freedom.  There should also be a fair-minded separation of church authority and the government, for the simple reason that too many abuses of power by repressive regimes have been perpetrated throughout the course of history by means of unholy alliances between political authorities and religious ones.  Just ask anyone who lives in Iran or Saudi Arabia!

When it comes to fervent beliefs in propagated ideologies that adversely affect other people, Golden Rule fairness principles must be given precedence.  These principles lead us to a vital and necessary conclusion:  an honest assessment of the greater good of all people in a nation must be made in formulating every law, regulation, and tax and spending policy.

The highest-income earners have gained the privilege of paying the lowest tax rates since the late 1920s by abusing their influence in our political system.  When we realize that the human population has increased from 2 billion in 1930 to more than 7 billion today, we see that needs have grown dramatically for us to spend more money on environmental protections, resource conservation, public education, social justice initiatives, smart incentives and disincentives, universal healthcare, sensible family planning programs, social security safety net programs, truer national security, and disaster preparedness and recovery plans.

We can no longer afford to let political shills for the rich dictate tax policies that let wealthy people pay ever-lower tax rates in the face of these needs.  It is a Big Lie that everyone will do better only when rich people pay lower tax rates;  it is a simple truth that everyone will do better only when everyone does better.

In Revelations of a Modern Prophet, the fascinating evolutionary roots of religion and ethics in prehistoric human clans are explored.  The relevant part to realize here is that new overarching understandings can provide us the best hope in dealing with the daunting challenges that face humanity today.  Read on!

Look at it this way.  If we worship Mammon and regard money as the most important thing in life, and allow a small group of rich people to grab the biggest share of the monetary gains generated by the exploitation of the Earth’s resources, this wrong-headed priority will make us a much different people than if instead we were to extol virtues of greater social fairness and environmental justice, and commit our nation to an overarching fair-minded Bill of Rights for Future Generations. 

      -- Huckleberry Finn, the Forty-Niner Gold Rush, and a Resurrection of Mark Twain’s Perspectives

It is disconcerting to ponder the entire litany of harms we are foisting onto people in future generations.  To right a wrong, it is best to first most clearly understand it in contexts that are comprehensive, expansive and accurate. 

Think clearly about the detrimental ways we are treating the prospects of our children, and theirs, and theirs.  We are using up natural resources with profligate abandon;  allowing significant costs related to pollution and toxic wastes to be externalized onto people and the environment;  failing to conserve energy, mineral and water resources;  causing rainforests to be destroyed, wildlife habitats to be decimated, and vital natural ecosystems to be damaged;  letting corporate power rule the day rather than assuring power to the people or preserving collective bargaining rights for workers;  spending unaffordably large amounts of money on the military and wars and prisons;  mortgaging the future by borrowing trillions of dollars to stimulate all of these shortsighted activities and to simultaneously give historically low tax rates to the highest-income earners;  and promising even more trillions of dollars in unfunded entitlement benefits to retirees, military veterans, and many others.  These are ridiculous expediencies!

The great journalist Bill Moyers was honored by the Harvard Medical School with a “Global Environmental Citizen Award” in 2004.  In his acceptance speech, Moyers noted that when he reads the news about all the things humanity is doing in the world, he concludes that it is not as if “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.”  As he reads the news, and looks at photos on his desk of his five grandchildren, he observes:

   “We do know what we are doing.  We are stealing their future.  Betraying their trust.   

       Despoiling their world.”

The Perspective of Dante

In his great Christian allegorical tale The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved the lowest places in his imagined nine circles of Hell for those who commit conscious acts of fraud or treachery against others.  He regarded the worst form of treachery to be the cold-hearted exploitation of relatives, country, friends, guests, or benefactors.  He judged treachery that has the most adverse historical and societal consequences as the worst of all sins.  Deceivers, corrupt politicians, duplicitous hypocrites, scam artists and others who perpetrate cunning kinds of fraud can be seen today to be exceeded by a new modern form of treachery, one that exerts its influence on a more far-reaching scale, and one that we are all participating in:  the defrauding of vulnerable young people and everyone in future generations through the above-summarized litany of harms.

It has become increasingly clear in recent decades that there is a sweeping ecological extent to which all actions are interconnected, so the exploitive undermining of the prospects of people in future generations for purposes that are selfishly shortsighted is egregious beyond all other forms of treachery.  Bold and sensible steps must be taken to correct this state of affairs!

To unlock the gates of hope, and to boldly embark on a providential path of positive change and transformation, Dante imagined the need for a silver key of repentance and a gold key of reconciliation.  Humility was regarded as the greatest virtue in medieval times, and pride was seen as the root of all sins that contributed to our missing the mark and falling short of the Buddhist ideal of right relationship.  I believe we can integrate the head and the heart better, and achieve a wiser balance in our societies.

Woke up this morning with an ache in my head

 Splashed on my clothes as I spilled out of bed

  Opened the window to listen to the news

   But all I heard was the Establishment's Blues.

           -- Sixto Rodriguez, the surprising hero of the wonderful film Searching for Sugar Man

The Evolution of Democracy

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

                                   --- Sir Winston Churchill

Capitalist economic systems could also be said to be the worst economic systems, except for all the others.  They have great advantages in motivating productivity, harnessing resources, marshalling workers to produce goods, and maximizing profits.  They also have overarching disadvantages because they facilitate the externalizing of costs onto society, exploit workers, act with amoral resolve, and are myopic in their aggressive depletion of resources and ignoring of the longer-term greater good of society.

Since a multitude of interests competes for advantages in democratic capitalist systems, the greatest good can only be achieved by managing these systems well, and with a maximum amount of fairness.  To accomplish this goal, the interests of all factions must be taken into account, including the interests of the long-term greater good of the nation and the social and ecological underpinnings of prosperity.

It is my strong belief that better guidance is needed in determining how to achieve optimal outcomes, and that a visionary Bill of Right for Future Generations must be adopted to provide this guidance.  This would be the best way to ensure that the interests and prospects of people in the future are not mercilessly sacrificed to short-term expediencies today.  Such a Bill of Rights is proposed in specific detail in the Earth Manifesto.

Social Insurance

Consider the social programs in the U.S. today that help retired people, veterans, disabled people, college students, people too young to vote, and everyone on the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder in our society.  Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, disability insurance, Social Security, food stamps and other social programs are a kind of social insurance that serves to reduce the tension between people on the edge of desperation and the people on Easy Street who have the lion’s share of the world’s wealth.  These people on Easy Street are jealously guarding their privileges and exhibiting hostile, unempathetic attitudes toward the underprivileged.  This is ironic considering that people on Easy Street have generally gotten there, in part, by paying the lowest tax rates in generations on their incomes.

Think about the poorest 25% of Americans who have a net worth of zero or less, and the bottom 60% of Americans in total, who have an average family median net worth of less than $50,000.  Financially, these people are distinctly insecure. 

And think about the concept of social insurance.  This is a capital idea.  The social programs that provide benefits to the bottom 60% of Americans are a form of social insurance that serves to mitigate the desperation of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.  These programs thus dampen impulses toward revolutionary unrest.  This insurance basically allows the most privileged people in our society to maintain their perks and privileges, and to continue being the main beneficiaries of the way our economic and political systems are structured. 

Despite the fact that this social insurance is partially for the benefit of rich people, many of these wealthy people have perversely been increasingly unwilling to finance it.  Such hard-nosed stances are myopic.  Wealthy conservatives are arrogantly acting in ways that are increasingly uncompassionate, selfish, greedy, and outrageously anti-social.

Our society functioned significantly better in terms of the public financing of its physical infrastructure, schools, military, research and development, and government operations during the years from 1936 to 1980 when the top income tax rate was at least 70% every year.  Then in 1981, Ronald Reagan launched his anti-tax revolution, which was designed by, and primarily for, the highest-income earners and the wealthiest Americans.  Reagan reduced top tax rates from 70% in 1980 to 28% in 1988.  This was not merely tinkering with the tax code;  it was a radical reduction.

The fact that people on Easy Street are allowed to pay the lowest tax rates in 80 years, at a time of great and expanding needs, is crazy.  It is a sad reflection of anti-democratic abuses of power and wealth.  Fair-minded tax reform must be enacted.  One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies proposes an excellent plan in its Fair Taxation Initiative.

This excerpt from The Bailout Blues and Gut Check Soul Revue provides provocative perspective:

The U.S. has been driving a hard bargain for the poor for decades by scolding them for lacking personal responsibility.  We have reduced welfare rolls and payments, made taxation more regressive, passed ever-harsher and more costly punishments for crimes, reduced the influence of workers by limiting collective bargaining rights, abandoned many inner cities and schools, exported jobs overseas, and encouraged corporate prerogatives and profits that contribute to inflation in the costs of food, gasoline, electricity, rent, mortgages and health care.  In contrast, no such hard bargain for the rich has been undertaken.  Give us a break -- this is a democracy, folks!  We’ve got ‘em outnumbered!

An “immense wedge” is being forced through American society by “the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity,” according to journalist Henry George.  Bill Moyers noted that inequality has exploded in recent decades into what historian Clinton Rossiter described as “the great train robbery of American intellectual history.” 

The unreasonable anti-tax movement has been led by economic fundamentalists who espouse trickle-down deceptions, and it is being backed by influence-abusing wealthy people, right-wing think tanks, shrewdly Machiavellian political operatives, judgmental religious fundamentalists, bombastic talk radio personalities, and argumentative talking heads on Fox News.  And these attitudes have been made much worse by the opposition of Tea Party politicians in the House of Representatives to fair compromises.

It is time to change course, and elect representatives that are more reasonable and fair-minded!  This is the best route to a greater overall well-being for all Americans.  Bruce Springsteen croons out a song in my imagination about a social wrecking ball.

Freedom and Equality

“The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell

      of democracy.”

                --- We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore, Garrison Keillor

The increasing concentration of wealth and power that has been taking place in the U.S. since 1980 is highly unfair to the majority of people, so it is distinctly contrary to the founding principles of our democratic republic. 

Money is power.  Money is power due to its determining impact on our elections.  Money is power also because it has a defining influence on the laws enacted and the benefits provided in our country.  This unwarranted influence arises because of the large number of lobbyists who are continuously at work to influence legislation and generally corrupt our political process.  Money is power due to its effect in manipulating people’s perceptions through political advertising, misleading spin, and deceptive propaganda. 

When the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens strongly expressed his dissent from the narrow 5-4 decision.  He declared it to be “a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”

People are going to begin to hate our democracy if it means an on-going hyper-barrage of manipulative attack ads and increasingly obnoxious, often negative and dishonest political messages that impinge on our consciousness so frequently.  Let’s get Big Money out of the driver’s seat in our campaign financing!

Republican policies that gained force beginning with Ronald Reagan’s presidency have been designed to increase the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.  The adverse impact of this goal has been to increase the desperation of the bottom 60% of the American people.  Astonishingly, the wealthiest 400 people in America today own more wealth than the bottom 150 million people. 

This outcome has resulted from three primary “conservative” initiatives:  (1) the implementation of extremely regressive changes in taxation like Ronald Reagan’s radical reduction in tax rates on the highest-income earners;  (2) an undermining of the collective bargaining power of American workers while corporate entities have been given more power, more tax loopholes, and more ways to privatize profits by socializing costs; and (3) the ramping-up of the federal debt from under $1 trillion in 1981 to over $16 trillion today to finance stimulative economic policies -- and to allow the rich to pay the lowest tax rates in generations at the direct expense of all people in future generations.

All of the financial benefits of productivity increases in the past 30 years have been usurped by the top 10 percent of Americans by means of these three gambits.  This outcome is basically a form of redistribution of the nation’s wealth from working people to wealthy investors.  The fact that these investors are allowed to pay very low capital gains taxes on the income they get from these activities is unfair to workers who must pay much higher rates on the income they receive for their work.  This triumph of capitalists over workers was the main goal of the policies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.  And, make no mistake about it:  this is the main goal of the sketchy economic proposals that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are making.

This state of affairs is not only outrageously unfair and contrary to the fair-minded founding principles of our democratic republic, but it is also economically foolish.  Consumer spending accounts for 70% of economic activity in the U.S., so when the financial well-being of the majority of people is undermined, the economy ends up in the doldrums.  This contributes to stagnant demand and serves to increase the number of people who do not have jobs, and to create an undesirable feedback loop that exacerbates the situation. 

The goal of giving rich people more and more money and power is being achieved by exploiting the primary institutional mechanisms that facilitate the concentration of wealth:  allowing corporations to gain domineering power and abuse it, and helping narrow ideologies prevail through manipulative machine politics.  Our Founders would be shocked, awed and dismayed!

Mitt Romney is making shrewd efforts to gain power by telling people whatever they want to hear.  He has flip-flopped on issues like one of the worst deceivers in history.  He is hyper-amplifying his morphing visions through the use of secretive Super PAC-funded propaganda.  And he is preying on people’s trust, hope, and gullibility in his attempt to get elected.  

I urge voters to reject his candidacy, and that of other even more extreme right-wing politicians of the misguided Tea Party.

“Oh what a tangled web we weave


  When first we practice to deceive.“

                                      ---- Sir Walter Scott

In addition to making our country more unfair, policies that help increase the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few tend to concentrate power more narrowly.  This allows rich people to use the increasing influence of their increasing wealth to hijack our national priorities and increasingly exaggerate this trend.  Dastardly!  This is an inegalitarian feedback loop that threatens our future well-being, and that of our children and grandchildren.  It also threatens the soundness of our economy, and the health of natural ecosystems, which is the bedrock of all future prosperity.

Thomas Paine would be scratching his head, astounded at our modern day lack of common sense when we allow corporations to run roughshod over the greater good, if he were around today to witness these developments.  Paine had forcefully advocated the independence of the American colonies from the tyranny of abuses of power by the British in 1776, so he would no doubt be studying his Bible with renewed zeal and furiously penning a new treatise in support of the independence of the American people from the tyranny of abuses of corporate power, if he were alive today.  Let’s respect his perceptive and fair-minded intuitions, and act to establish fairer laws that ensure our nation will enjoy greater freedom from this new form of tyranny.

Economics 101

One of the principal claims of economic conservatives in recent decades is that lower tax rates for high-income earners will stimulate the economy and create jobs.  They assert that low taxes are the best way to facilitate entrepreneurial activity.  This contention completely contradicts historical facts.  Between 1950 and today, the Gross Domestic Product in the U.S. grew more than 6% in 8 different years when the top tax rate was above 70%.  It grew at a rate in excess of 4% for 16 other years, most of which were years with much higher marginal tax rates than today.  The economy has not grown 4% since the year 2000, when marginal tax rates have been below 40% every year. 

This correlation may seem counterintuitive.  But think about it.  Regressive changes in tax rates undermine the financial well-being of the vast majority of people.  They reward the few high income earners but fail to adequately help others, so most people are less able to afford to buy as many goods and services.  Businesses consequently see a downturn as demand declines for their products. 

Demand-side economics would be a wiser plan than deceptive and unfair supply-side economics.  This is the best way forward.  Fairly-shared prosperity would simply be better for all.  In 1980, George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic arguments “voodoo economics”, and today, 32 years later, the evidence is in:  mumbo jumbo economic ideologies are wrong!

These facts provide a strong economic argument for a more progressive restructuring of tax rates.  There is also a wide array of cogent moral arguments for fairer and more just national policies. 

An Assessment of the Intelligence of Economic Policies

Brazil has been notably successful in the past 20 years in creating a growing middle class.  An estimated 35 million people have moved from the ranks of poverty to the middle class between 2003 and 2009.  This progress has been achieved by implementing a smart economic strategy that promotes social mobility, increases access to credit, expands access to public education, reduces income inequality, improves economic security, and mitigates poverty.  The burgeoning size of the Brazilian middle class has driven a boom in business, so these initiatives have fueled economic growth, stimulated demand for products and services, and increased employment. 

Brazil’s strategy seems like a much better plan than the U.S. trickle-down ideology of cutting taxes on rich people so that they will stimulate the economy by investing in businesses and spending money on consumer goods, yachts, vacation homes and luxuries.  Robust demand created by a prosperous middle class is a key to business creation and job creation, especially in the U.S. where 70% of all spending is done by consumers.  Businesses need a broad base of people who can afford to buy their products.  Social policies that eviscerate the middle class and slash support for the working poor are generally bad for our nation. 

The net result of American policies has been a significant increase in inequalities in the past few decades.  The U.S. poverty rate is at the highest level in decades.  In contrast, the upshot of Brazil’s fair and intelligent policies has been to reduce poverty, strengthen the middle class, and reduce the size of inequalities between the super-rich and the poor.

Ensuring Domestic Tranquility and the General Welfare

One needn’t look to Brazil to find clear evidence that smart national policies can contribute to the greater good.  Look at the United States during the period from 1945 to 1980.  Policies were implemented during this 35-year period that helped create a vibrant middle class.  These policies included the G.I. Bill, public investments in higher education, and the construction of an extensive interstate highway system.  To pay for these initiatives, marginal tax rates on the highest levels of income were never less than 70%. 

Ronald Reagan had these rates slashed to 28% by 1988, and rich conservatives are clamoring vociferously for even lower rates.  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan staunchly contend that 25% would be a much fairer rate to create an exceptional country.  They claim insistently that cutting taxes on high incomes and highly profitable corporations is the only acceptable national plan, despite the facts of what is really most likely to constitute the greater good.

American politicians often use carefully orchestrated deceptions to gain support for policies that are favorable to narrow constituencies.  The super-rich always cite the loss of family farms, for instance, when they are trying to justify lower taxes on inherited estates.  The fact of the matter, however, is that lower inheritance taxes almost exclusively benefit rich people, not family farmers.  If we truly want to create a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy of inherited wealth, privilege and power, we need a well-designed progressive tax on large estates.  Reductions in estate taxes since 2001 have been one of several gambits that have served to shift the burden of taxation from the richest people to everyone else.

The 400 richest people in the U.S. have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined, and the U.S. has the highest inequality of wealth in the industrialized world.  The richest 2% of people in the world own more than half of all assets.  These are sobering facts.  In the long run, such extreme inequalities are surely a negative thing for everyone.  Policies that make the majority of Americans more insecure, more stressed, and more desperate are downright crazy.  Turning up the heat on a pressure cooker with an improperly designed pressure-release valve is exceedingly ill advised!

Billionaire businessman and investor Warren Buffett has repeatedly pointed out the folly of having a tax system in which people who make millions of dollars pay much lower effective tax rates than their secretaries.  Rich people pay a much lower percentage of their incomes because they have used their outsized influence to get extremely favorable tax treatment for capital gains compared to wages.  Unyielding ideological arguments are adduced by representatives of rich people to have taxes be low on income earned from owning capital assets. 

It seems outrageous, however, for people who work hard for their money to be required to pay much higher tax rates on their earned incomes than people who get money from inheritances or investments in stocks or real estate.  Those who have inherited money, common sense tells us, or those who have accumulated it due to the unfair nature of our capitalist system, should be required to pay rates on their incomes that are at least as high as rates working people pay!

Warren Buffett also sagely observes that opportunity and motivation are stifled by unfair schemes of taxation.  He testified before the Senate Finance Committee in November 2007 in defense of the federal estate tax, the nation's only tax on inherited wealth.  He invoked the historical roots of the estate tax, which was established in 1916 to prevent anti-democratic concentrations of wealth and power.  "Dynastic wealth, the enemy of meritocracy, is on the rise," Buffett told the panel.  "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline.  A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy."  He continued:  "Tax-law changes have benefited this super-rich group, including me, in a huge way."  It is time to reverse these changes with a more steeply graduated system of taxation!

“The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind, as well as in degree, from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.  Therefore, I believe in a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective:  that is, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate." 

                                                     --- President Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, 1910

Where to Look for Positive New Direction

Three types of social institutions dominate our society:  corporations, governments, and churches.  All three of these kinds of institutions are failing us today in times of increasingly desperate needs.  This failure is taking place because all of these institutions are subject to a variety of influences that pervert and corrupt their higher purposes. 

Corporations and churches are distinctly undemocratic institutions that are driven by small groups of people with dominating hierarchal authority.  Corporations are legally bound to narrow purposes, so shareholders and people in top management receive most of the benefits of corporate activities, and short shrift is given to employees, communities, society as a whole, and environmental protections. 

This legal purpose of corporations was confirmed by a case in 1919, Dodge vs. Ford Motor Company, in which the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of its shareholders, and that it must thus give overriding consideration to the interests and dividends of shareholders.  Any other motive, like acting ethically or with socially responsibility toward workers and the environment, is constrained by this obligation. 

In the early years of the automobile industry, Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, believed in paying relatively high wages to his workers so that they would be able to afford to buy the products his company was producing.  His attempt to pay generous wages to employees was subverted by this lawsuit.  One result of this mandate to maximize profits for shareholders is that corporations are not only driven to improve their products and operations, but to cut corners, externalize environmental costs onto society, circumvent socially responsible regulations, indulge in unfair competitive practices, evade taxes, cheat customers, invest in lobbying efforts to gain more subsidies and tax breaks, indulge in tax avoidance schemes, and support pork barrel spending and war profiteering.  These things are socially undesirable!

Churches are even less democratic than corporations.  The Catholic Church is headed by a Pope who is selected by about 120 cardinals, all of whom are conservative old men.  Its goals are so undemocratic that women are given completely inferior influence, and the Church’s official positions are dictated by inflexible doctrines and dogma.  Societies ruled by Islamic theocratic hierarchies, like those in Iran and Saudi Arabia, are even more retrogressive and repressive.

Our main hope for democratic fairness in decision-making is to be found with governments.  Our U.S. federal government is partially corrupted by the powerful influence of anti-democratic religious establishments and corporations, but progressive elements still have significant influence, and the government is still nominally ruled by the fairness-oriented Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the precedents of established laws which have evolved over the past two centuries.

It is to the government that we must look for progressive leadership in dealing with the great issues that confront us:  environmental protections, peaceful coexistence, guaranteed personal liberties, improved public education, fairness in the strife between rich people and all others, and reasonable compromises in all overarching conflicts between capital and labor.

Voting Rights in Our Great Nation

Thomas Paine wrote passionately about fair representation of the people.  We Americans should be proud about the marvelous progressive expansion of fair representation in our country since we gained independence way back in 1783 after the Treaty of Paris was signed to end the Revolutionary War. 

The Founding of our country makes a sensational story.  A bunch of aroused colonial leaders had gotten so angry at British oppressors in 1776 that they courageously declared independence and valiantly embraced the visionary principles of the Enlightenment Era, asserting that “all men are created equal”.  Then, a dozen years later, they created a brilliant Constitution to ensure a more perfect Union. 

Having committed our great nation to these ideas in principle, they weren’t quite able to match their rule-making to their ideals.  They granted voting rights in the first national elections of 1788 only to white males who owned property -- about 6% of the population. 

By 1830, voting rights had been expanded by individual states to include most adult white males.  Former black male slaves were given the right to vote after the Civil War, when the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1870.  Women were finally given a voice in our society when they won the right to vote after a long, hard-fought battle for women’s suffrage, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.  Native American Indians were given the right to vote in 1924.  The American citizens living in Washington D.C. were given the right to vote when the Twenty-Third Amendment was ratified in 1961.  Poll taxes that had been used to restrict voting rights were outlawed in 1964.  Literacy tests and racist voting practices were prohibited by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  The voting age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1971, so that those who served their country in the military would also have a voice in national decision-making.

Unfortunately, conservative politicians in the past two years have been fighting vigorously to reverse this fair-minded trend.  They have been working to restrict voting rights, especially of Latinos, blacks, disabled people, poor people, and minorities in general.  These undemocratic initiatives are being implemented in many states that are controlled by Republican Governors or Legislatures.  Such unethical and reprehensible tactics should be staunchly rejected!

Republicans rationalize these voter suppression efforts as a means to prevent voter fraud.  Statistics show that proven instances of voter fraud are extremely rare.  In stark contrast, Republicans want to disenfranchise millions of people with their vote-restricting initiatives in dozens of states. 

Irony often raises its entertaining head.  Right in the heat of the presidential battle in 2012, a concerted plot at voter fraud actually was discovered.  Aha, caught in the act!  Who are the miscreants perpetrating this fraud?   Republicans themselves!  A formal criminal investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement has begun into this fraud, which involves a company hired by the state’s Republican Party to register voters.  Politics is dirty, no doubt, but Republicans seem to be trying to gain a monopoly on its use.  In their quest for domineering power, they are brazenly trying to justify their ends by using every means possible, no matter how unethical.  Shame on them!

Politics Now

Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are currently trying to sell the American people an amped-up version of the policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  These policies would likely be harmful to workers, women, children, students, the environment, future generations, and most species of life on Earth.  The tax plans proposed by Romney and Ryan are regressive, because they are designed to give rich people a bigger slice of the economic pie and to cut spending on a wide variety of programs that benefit Americans who are less financially secure. 

The Romney/Ryan economic plans just do not add up -- not in the least.  The reason that middle class people and the working poor are in such desperate straits today is because Republican policies of the last 30 years have been jerry-rigged to primarily benefit people with the highest incomes, like Mitt Romney himself.  Ronald Reagan began this ideological crusade with huge tax cuts for the rich, together with efforts to undermine collective bargaining rights of workers and a dramatic run up in the national debt.  Make no mistake about it, no matter how deceptive the rhetoric:  the national debt has consistently increased since 1980 at much faster rates when Republicans were in the White House than when Democrats held the office. 

Republicans are trying to portray Paul Ryan as a fiscal conservative.  Really?  Paul Ryan is an opportunistic politician who is trying to cast himself as a born-again fiscal conservative, because he sure wasn’t in any way fiscally conservative when he supported George W. Bush’s tax cuts financed by trillions of dollars of borrowed money.  He was NOT a fiscal conservative when he voted for the Big Pharmaceutical-approved Prescription Drug Act of 2003 that has added another trillion dollars to the national debt.  Surely he was not a fiscal conservative when he consistently supported debt-financed wars and military spending.  He may be a genial man, but this attempt to deceive the American people into thinking he is a fiscal conservative make him look like a dishonest snake-in-the-grass! 

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but

   you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”

                                                               --- President Abraham Lincoln

Paul Ryan is supposedly a deeply religious man.  I wonder if he is aware that Dante consigned hypocrites to the eighth, next to worst, circle of Hell.  Dante considered that the people who went to the Inferno deserved harsher punishments commensurate with the harmfulness of their actions to others, so he regarded hypocrisies related to consequential matters as more serious sins than regular sanctimonious kinds of hypocrisy.  Those who were repentant, and who had sinned mainly in intention rather than in action, were allowed to go to Purgatory to begin a transformative journey of redemption instead of going to Hell.

Ronald Reagan’s plans also included efforts to deprive workers of collective bargaining rights, and to eliminate regulations on corporations, banks, hedge funds, and other Wall Street entities.  This ideology directly contributed to a costly Savings and Loan crisis in the late 1980s, and a much more costly credit crisis and recession that began in late 2008.  These laissez-faire policies have created economic bubbles, wreaked havoc on the economy, and caused a hurtful spike in unemployment and home foreclosures.  One result is the worst levels of poverty in the United States since 1965.  Another is that enormous bailouts have been necessitated, and desperately risky liquidity moves have had to be made by the Federal Reserve and central banks worldwide.

“And what else, day after day, endangers and destroys cities, regions, individuals so much as yet another amassing of wealth by someone.  This very amassing releases further desires, which cannot be satisfied without someone paying the price.”

                                                                                   --- Dante, Convivio

In 1954, Republican Dwight Eisenhower wrote a letter that addressed the need for what he called “moderation” in government.  He made this cogent observation:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.  There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. …

Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

How is it possible that Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the Republican Party can now brazenly propose to slash spending on social safety net programs in order to give even lower tax rates to people who earn the highest levels of income?  The main reasons for this apparent political kamikaze act is that our democracy has become so obedient to the demands of the top 2% of income earners that politicians from both political parties vastly over-represent the desires of moneyed interests -- and significantly under-represent the interests of the majority of people. 

As a result of Republican-driven tax cuts, a travesty of social justice is taking place in which the rich are getting richer while the nation is falling apart, public schools are deteriorating, prisons are overcrowded, inner cities are getting gritty, and the majority of people are seeing their fortunes and prospects in life diminish.

How is it possible that the Republican Party has embraced such anti-social outcomes?  Times have changed.  In 1954, we were still in the near aftermath of World War II, when tens of millions of Americans had come together to make shared sacrifices in the global effort to ensure that democracy would triumph over fascist aggressors.  Today, our democracy has largely degenerated into a plutocracy ruled by Big Money, and selfish rich people are refusing to make any sacrifices or concede any of their outrageous privileges or domineering influence.

Since our Congressional and judicial systems are powerfully influenced by the corrupting influence of Big Money, the greater good is being undermined and fair representation of the interests of the majority are being subverted.  As a result, radically inegalitarian initiatives have gained sway.  Our corporate-dominated media machine is partly to blame for this negative state of affairs, because it is too much influenced by propaganda and the ideological assertions of corporate interests and right-wing front groups. 

Deceptive arguments, divisive tactics, effective uses of framing and fears, hyped-up extreme partisanship, arrogantly uncompromising stances, the promotion of narrow ideological doctrines, and dissatisfaction with continued high unemployment have been used to dupe evangelical voters and adherents to Tea Party dogmas into supporting the narrow Republican agenda. 

Confident and overly simplistic proclamations of Republican politicians are transparently designed to fool the majority of Americans into accepting on-your-own-economic plans and trickle-down deceptions.  Mitt Romney is suddenly pretending that he is primarily concerned about the middle class, but his plans have the same goal as George W. Bush’s:  to enrich people who are millionaires and billionaires at the expense of everyone else.  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s plans would, if enacted, almost certainly create much worse extremes of unfairness in our country. 

Republicans have been trying to convince people for more than 30 years that everyone in the U.S. will do better only when the rich pay lower taxes, but it must be repeated:  everyone will do better only when everyone does better. 

“Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel (a cable?) to go through the eye of a needle, 

   than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

                                                                 --- Matthew 19:24

Observations about Political Compromise

Our political system has always involved give-and-take compromises between various interests that compete for perks, privileges, and power.  Sadly, the Republican Party has become much more extreme and uncompromising over the past decade.  Many Republicans have taken a “purity pledge” to anti-tax iconoclast Grover Norquist, whose overriding belief is that the government should be shrunk down “to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”  They regard the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the public sector as a goal more important than the common good. 

This orthodox purity is a stubborn refusal to compromise.  It is a crude and fantastically simplistic form of dogmatic ideology that requires adherents to suspend disbelief and throw in with self-serving narrow-mindedness.  Cynically contrary to the greater good, the Republican Party has also become more socially reactionary in the past few years due to the influence of the Tea Party.

Remember that Jesus was a liberal and our Founders were Enlightenment progressives.  Modern day Tea Party types, on the other hand, are anti-progressive.  The Indiana Tea Party candidate who defeated the more moderate long-time Republican Senator Richard Lugar has declared:  “I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”  This obtusely ideological mindset is completely antithetical to the fairness principles upon which our nation was founded. 

Many Republicans in the House of Representative lost their jobs to more extreme right-wing candidates in the 2010 elections.  One of these relative moderates pointed out that he believed a simple fair-minded truism:  Once a candidate is elected, he or she has a duty to work across the aisle with other people who have also been elected.  This is the only way to achieve truly fair-minded solutions to our national and global problems.  This seems like common sense to me!

The Republican quest for ideological purity has caused the current 112th Congress to be one of the worst ever, as judged by their record low approval ratings.  One of the main reasons for this pathetic performance is the unwillingness of Tea Party politicians to compromise. 

Romney and Ryan’s proposed plans also seem to be designed to foist a reactionary form of social engineering on the American people, and to deprive women of family planning options and rights to make personal decisions relating to their healthcare and reproductive choices.  It’s really astonishing that politicians who are running for the U.S. Senate could have a chance of winning when they advocate extremely misogynistic policies like the anti-abortion plank in cases of rape or incest that are propounded by Paul Ryan, and “legitimate rape” Missourian Todd Akin, and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, who has stated that when a woman becomes pregnant during rape, "it is something that God intended," so the government should prohibit her from getting an abortion.  Obscene!

In many countries, the idea of religious freedom means the right for women’s freedoms to be restricted.  The most important aspect of the freedom of religion that is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is arguably the freedom from religion -- the freedom from the unreasonable dictates of religious authorities. 

The attitudes of Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, and dourly pious Richard Mourdock towards women’s healthcare and their personal rights, contraceptive options, and abortion even after being raped reveal that all of these fervently religious men are vowing, Taliban-like, to have the federal government impose restrictions on women’s prerogatives, and to limit their rights, and to deprive them of the freedom to make personal reproductive decisions in their lives.  All Americans should oppose such misogynistic tyranny!

Note that two primary camps existed amongst our Founding Fathers:  Jeffersonian advocates and Hamiltonian advocates.  The Jeffersonians believed in democracy and equality of political opportunity, with a priority to plain folk and debtors, coupled with strong opposition to elitism, special privilege, aristocracy and even a strong Constitution itself.  The Hamiltonians were federalist nationalists who emphasized the importance of having a strong Constitution and a central government with expansive powers, particularly in the arenas of the funding of the state, building national infrastructure, paying for the national defense, and establishing good trade relations with other countries.

Debates were acrimonious back then, but the Founders managed to compromise together to form a more perfect Union.  Today’s Republicans?  “Damn the Union!” they seem to be saying.  More tax cuts for rich people!  And, “tough luck”, women!!

National Debt Considerations

As noted, the national debt has increased from less than $1 trillion when Ronald Reagan took office to more than $16 trillion today.  This debt has more than tripled since January 2001 when Bill Clinton left office, and it is now projected to increase by another $10 trillion in the next 10 years.  What this amounts to is a blatantly irresponsible mortgaging of the future.  It is a consequence of two competing “Santa Claus” strategies of political economics that reflect a weak-willed inability to rein in fiscal profligacy, shortsightedness, and distinctly risk-laden expediencies.  Read all about it in Sad Implications of the Two Dueling Santa Claus Strategies in Political Economics in the Earth Manifesto.

Mitt Romney is now proposing to slash the top marginal rates from the current 35% to 25%, an action that would reduce government tax revenues by an additional $5 trillion over the next 10 years.  He also says he wants to increase spending on the military by an additional $2 trillion.  These policies are on top of the Bush tax cuts that are still in place until December 31, 2012, and they are in addition to Bush’s rash increases in spending on the Military/Industrial complex.  Romney claims that he will balance the budget by tweaking the tax code and cutting spending, but the devil is in the details.  He would not have a chance in hell of winning the election if he were to spell out the deep cuts that would be required to achieve these goals, because these cuts would make life significantly more challenging for the vast majority of Americans.

Mitt Romney has honed his debating skills to a sharp point, but he seems to rely on deceit, not truth, in his contentions.  When he was running against the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party in the primaries -- Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum -- he claimed he was an “extreme conservative” and endorsed radical positions against women’s rights, immigrants, government employees, students, people’s power, gay people, and environmental protections. 

Now he has flip-flopped again, betraying his promises to right-wing conservatives, and he is pretending that he cares about 100% of the American people.  He has shifted his positions on contraception for women, and given lip service to fair-mindedness in general.  Behind closed doors, at a $50,000 per plate fundraiser, he has basically said he doesn’t give a damn about 47% of Americans who are inconsequential to him because they do not earn much money.

We cannot take the risk of electing Mitt Romney to the presidency.  With conservatives dominating the House of Representatives, and a close balance in the Senate, Romney as president would rubber stamp a whole host of laws that would help corporations but harm women, minorities, immigrants, gay people, poor people, society in general, and the environment.

Romney and Congressional Republicans basically want the American people to double down on trickle-down economics.  This gamble would be a terrible risk to the middle class and the poor.  Trickle-down economic policies have resulted in a gushing-up of wealth to the top 2% of the American people, and an accompanying stagnation or outright deterioration in the fortunes and well-being of the vast majority of Americans.  This is NOT fairly shared prosperity.  In a democracy, 98% of the people should oppose policies that have such inegalitarian goals.

I recommend that everyone vote against Republican politicians.  Such a rebuke would send them back to the drawing board to come up with fairer and more honest plans!

One of the best ideas to ensure fairer societal outcomes would be for us to work together to create a society that has fairer opportunities and a more steeply graduated system of taxation so that the rich pay at least as high a percent of their incomes as middle class people.  This would enable us to invest more money in crucial domestic programs and sensible environmental protections, and to begin reducing risky levels of deficit spending that are likely to cause a new credit crisis and severe economic disruptions in the future.

The Anti-Democratic Development of Increasing Corporate Power

Mitt Romney represents government of business interests, by corporations and corrupt politicians, and for rich people.  One of the most far-reaching and negative aspects of his plans is his proposal to pander more rashly to corporate interests.  He has declared:  “Corporations are people, my friend.”  Oh, really?  If giant multinational corporations are people, what kind of people are they?

When judged by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, they all-too-often fit the profile of “psychopathic” people:  they show a reckless disregard for the safety of others, an eagerness to deceive people through persuasive marketing and cost-externalizing gambits that are oriented around making bigger profits by socializing costs, a callous unconcern for the feelings of workers and consumers, an incapacity to experience guilt, and a failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.  Professor Joel Bakan has made this assessment clear through numerous examples in his provocative book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and also the documentary film The Corporation. 

It is compelling to consider the fact that corporations often act in ways that are psychopathic.  The inescapable conclusion is that we must not allow corporations to be given the same legal rights as real people.  The Supreme Court’s narrow 5-4 Citizens United ruling essentially gave corporations the ability to subvert our democracy by spending huge amounts of money on shrewd propaganda so that they can gain even more power.  This Big Money spending is helping “conservative” politicians realize their arrogant plans to wield domineering power over the American people and our political system.  This is a persuasive reason for rejecting the attempt by deceitful Republican politicians to seize power.

Mitt Romney has routinely exploited the jerry-rigged provisions of the capitalist system to make enormous profits using no-value-added “vulture capitalist” scams and tax evasion swindles.  He has been cold-hearted, shrewdly calculating, and ruthless in his hedge fund dealings and debt-leveraging gambits.  And now he is trying to spin his career into a narrative in which he was primarily interested in creating jobs, caring about workers and the middle class, being an honorable nice guy, and being fair-minded and reasonable.  These characterizations seem transparently inaccurate! 

Romney’s flip-flops and rhetoric seem to be overwhelmingly motivated by selfish personal advantages, not by fair-mindedness.  He is covering up the details of his tax returns, hiding the details of his fiscal plans, and slickly concealing his true plans if he gains power.  We cannot afford to gamble that a good Mitt would show up in the White House rather than the conniving, exploitive, aggressively self-interested, and inegalitarian Mitt.

In the second debate with President Obama on October 16, Romney gave a revealingly evasive answer about equal pay for women for equal work when he declared that he sought out “binders of women” so that he could include some females in his Administration at the time he became Governor of Massachusetts.  He wouldn’t level with the American people that he opposes the Lilly Ledbetter Act for equal pay, and he was not being truthful about having sought out those binders full of women.  Since he is such a champion of corporate profiteering, he likes cheap labor and thus opposes fairer treatment of women.  But women are a disproportionately large component of the middle class and the working poor, so his position would significantly undermine the hopes and well-being of this segment of society.

The Follies of Militarism

Another terrible aspect of our American capitalist system is the hyper-stimulus of spending on the military.  Again, this was one of the central pillars of the “conservative” Reagan Revolution.  And again, this gambit has multiple benefits for the few at the expense of the many.  First, ramped-up spending on the military generates enormous profits in the military-industrial complex.  These profits are primarily gained by big investors, who are taxed at low capital gains taxes for the windfall income. 

Second, this spending allows the U.S. military to project domineering power across the globe and helps defend the interests of giant corporations worldwide.  Third, military power is used to ensure access to oil and other natural resources of countries around the world through Shock Doctrine policies and too-big-to-fail disaster capitalism banking schemes. 

Fourth, militarism serves to distract the attention of people from crucial domestic issues by harnessing people’s nationalistic, ethnocentric, and patriotic impulses.  This distraction keeps people from rising up and demanding domestic policies that are fairer, wiser, more farsighted, and more sensible.  The associated misallocation of funds crowds out smarter investments in public education, research and development, clean energy, saner environmental protections, public transportation, infrastructure maintenance and improvements, and a more secure social safety net.

Broader and deeper perspectives on this issue can be found in Reflections on War – and Peace!

It seems starkly clear:  militarism, increasing inequities, rash debt financing, the subversion of democratic fairness, and the obedience to amoral abuses of power by giant corporations are all extremely undesirable.  Republicans must not be entrusted with more power to advance these retrogressive goals even further.

Consider the Far-Reaching Influence of the Supreme Court

Another crucial issue that makes it unwise to let Republicans gain control of the White House or the U.S. Senate, or to add to their uncompromising power in the House of Representatives and on the Supreme Court, is that the next president will likely be able to appoint new Justices on the Supreme Court in the next four years.  Since Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life, if we allow conservatives to add to their narrow advantage on the Supreme Court, it would let them give more unaccountable power to corporations for generations to come, and thereby reduce fair representation of the people.  It would also allow conservatives to advance their ideological causes, which include undermining environmental protections, overturning Roe vs. Wade women’s rights, reducing people’s civil liberties, and upholding discriminatory policies against gay people.

It would be a sad day for the world if voters choose to let extreme conservatives gain more power in the November 6, 2012 elections.  It is sensational that our nation, founded in reaction to the tyranny of the British Empire in the 18th century, is now so close to being bamboozled into actually electing more of the people who are selling these swindles. 

I encourage Americans to vote for Democrats, and then to demand that they begin to chart a more responsible course to a fairer future. When Republican politicians are sent back to the drawing board to plan for future contests, they will be forced to formulate fairer, wiser, more moderate, more honorable, and more long-term-oriented policies.

Santa Claus Strategies in Political Economics

Our poorly controlled deficit spending forces us to periodically increase the authorized U.S. national debt limit.  A dramatic clash between two opposing strategies of our partisan political representatives resulted in a stubborn impasse on this issue in August 2011.  A Supercommittee was created to solve this impasse, but it abjectly failed in November 2011.  This failure to reach a sensible compromise caused a risk-laden “fiscal cliff” to be created in which federal spending is scheduled to be slashed across the board on January 1, 2013. 

As this dangerous juncture looms before us, it would be auspicious to understand bigger picture perspectives.  Liberals generally espouse increased spending on social programs to appeal to voters, and the opposing camp of conservatives counters to gain voter support by single-mindedly promising lower taxes.

The failure to come up with a fair-minded deficit reduction plan was an expression of pathetic and uncompromising political ideologies, not genuine and sensible leadership.  This failure provides us with a stealth epiphany, like a flash of lightening illuminating a dark night sky.  This impasse reveals the extent to which both liberals and conservatives have been entirely ignoring the interests of everyone in future years in order to finance short-term-oriented expediencies.

Conservatives are doubling down on their Santa Claus strategy of giving wealthy people ever-lower tax rates, even going to the extreme of signing the aforementioned “purity pledges” that commit them to narrowly opposing any solution to debt problems that involves higher tax rates or the elimination of tax loopholes that favor giant corporations and rich people.

A Bill of Rights for Future Generations would sensibly help ensure that we “pay forward” fairer provisions for people in the future, and prevent narrow-minded, short-term-focused ideological purity from facilitating wrong-headed national policies.

It’s Three AM, It’s Me Again

The Republican Party has put forth its most handsome, smooth-talking, dissembling, promise-anything candidate to try to trick the American people into giving unchecked power to a narrowly-principled elite that feels entitled to their many advantages.  This narrowly elite is pandering to giant corporations and is basically amoral, anti-egalitarian, right-wing fringe placating, patriarchal, Strict Father domineering, unempathetic, and anti-environmentalist.

The Party has adopted a transparently false populism and a “hard-times swindle” strategy to help them gain power.  They have propagated a simplistic and deeply deceptive narrative, and mounted an ideological obstruction-oriented agenda designed to make President Obama fail.  They have drastically undermined the health and well-being of our country in the process.  They have used the persuasive power of Fox News, right-wing radio and TV personalities, billionaire-financed front groups, radically conservative think tanks, and Karl Rove and other Machiavellian operatives in this gambit to gain power, and they are now within striking distance of actually triumphing.

It would be disastrous for our country to trust these politicians and their heartless, anti-democratic, anti-science, cynically shortsighted manipulations.  Their goals are too narrow, matching their cultivated suspicions and dogmatic worldviews, and their vaulting ambitions seem dangerously despotic.  Vote for Barack Obama and moderate representatives, and once the election is over, demand fairer policies!

We live in times where political opinions are profoundly affected by simplistic sound bites, short attention spans, bumper sticker sentiments, gotcha politics, and selfishly unempathetic attitudes by wealthy conservatives.  This situation is contrary to the need for cooperative efforts to mitigate tensions between people.  It is not a balanced approach to healing the discord between competing interests, or to achieving the critical goal of providing better protections to the ecological commons.

The Earth Manifesto is a stream of consciousness that explores complexities, deeper truths, and broader perspectives, rather than being simplistic or conducive to short attention spans and blind faith in dogmatic certainties.  Hope springs eternal, and I believe that reason and nuance and intuition and honest concern for the greater good have a vital place in our world, and are necessary in our collective journey to a saner future.

In any personal relationship, it is valuable to find effective ways to release the tension that naturally occurs between people.  One of the most provocative insights in A Clear-Eyed Patriot Issues a Clarion Call for a Second American Revolution is that there are a record number of about 46 million Americans who live below the official poverty level in the United States today.  Social Security keeps another 21 million Americans from poverty, and social programs like unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and nutrition assistance programs keep an additional 12 million people from poverty. 

Another 4 million people are in jails or prisons.  This number of incarcerated citizens, relative to our population size, makes us the most prison profligate nation in the world.  Another related fact is that gun sales are at a record high, and gun ownership in the U.S. far exceeds that of any other country on earth.

Also, almost 50 million Americans have no medical insurance, so they use emergency rooms for medical adversities instead of having preventative healthcare checkups or adhering to smarter routines of better nutrition.  This results in socializing the cost of treatments in the most costly method possible.

These disparate facts reflect some deep psychological underpinnings that are partially to be blamed on the cultivation of fear and intolerant attitudes by people like Rush Limbaugh and paranoid Tea Party types and social reactionaries and Strict Father ideologues. 

Conservatism and liberalism themselves are, to a degree, inherited propensities, as studies of the Startle Reflex have proved.  So, when deep-seated fears are stimulated and provoked by manipulative politicians and angry talk radio personalities, and fomented by billionaire-funded, spin propagating, Super PAC-stoked, emotion-hijacking, repression-minded personalities, this is highly negative to the healthy functioning of our society.

I strongly believe that we could design much fairer societies, and that we need to start NOW!

To paraphrase a story Bill Moyers told just after 9/11, personally, I'm optimistic.  "Then why do you look so worried?!" … "Because I'm not sure my optimism is justified."  An existential Ha!

Concluding Observations

“The flowering of genius in ancient Greece was due to the immense impetus given when

   clarity and power of thought was added to great spiritual force.”

                                                                           --- The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton

Concerns for individuals and concerns for the community are both vitally important in our world today.  Fair-minded compromises must be made to assure a wholesome balance between these two often-conflicting sets of concerns.  Fair-mindedness represents the greater good, the general welfare, and the commonality of humanity.

“The bitterest conflicts that have divided the minds of men and set family against family, and brother against brother, have been waged … for one side of the truth to the suppression of the other side.”

                   --- Edith Hamilton

Turmoil and dissension envelop our modern world because we cannot figuratively see the forest for the trees, and are thus literally unable to find a fair-minded balance between the claims of individuals and the claims of the majority.  In particular, there is a terrible imbalance between the demands of rich people to pay low tax rates and the wide-ranging needs of society to make farsighted investments in education, infrastructure, clean energy, affordable social safety net programs and environmental protections.  Low tax rates for the highest-income earners also make it all but impossible to balance federal budgets.  We must find ways to stop financing operations and low taxes through the unfair expediency of borrowing from future generations. 

Dante Alighieri, cynical about his native Florence for the harsh way it had personally treated him, wrote that Florence was “the embodiment of a society that had lost its way, a society that had sacrificed … the good of the community to the interests of powerful individuals:  in short, a society which, by obsessively seeking heaven on earth, had made a Hell of life on earth.”

With more modern understandings, we can do better than Florence did 700 years ago when Dante was alive.  Because true justice and injustice have been blurred in the complex interplay between competing interests in our societies today, wholly inadequate value has been given to the beauty and balance of Earth’s natural ecosystems.  Harmony and completeness can only be achieved by striking a better balance between personal liberties and fair-minded rules of law.  A new ethical and spiritual perspective is needed that provides us with a better balance in our selfishly shortsighted and materialistic world.  It would resemble a Golden Rule commitment to our descendents.

It is, in particular, astonishingly foolhardy for us to collectively continue encouraging increases in human numbers in developing countries while stimulating activities that diminish the carrying-capacity of Earth’s ecosystems to provide for all of humanity.  Better ideas on how to remedy these problems are investigated throughout the Earth Manifesto.  Let us take a stand together to commit our nation to greater fairness in our dealings with our heirs!

The Dalai Lama made a provocative statement at the Vancouver Peace Summit in 2009:

       “The world will be saved by the Western woman.”

Maybe so!  The freedom of expression is a powerful thing, and surely there have been many occasions in history when the pen has proved to be mightier than the sword.  Eh, Voltaire? 

For greater illumination, I recommend reading A Feminine Vision of an Achievable Better World:  Anima Should Reign! to understand the many ways that sensible feminism and the fair-minded empowerment of women and our feminine sensibilities could advance greater good causes in the world.

     Truly,

          Dr. Tiffany B. Twain       

                                             A Bill of Rights for Future Generations

   “The status quo has many guardians, but the future is an orphan.”

                                         --- Timothy E. Wirth, United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund

The original Bill of Rights was passed by Congress in 1789 to guarantee essential human rights and personal liberties to the American people.  This Bill of Rights consisted of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  As stated in its Preamble, these rights were added to prevent the “misconstruction or abuse” of the powers of the federal government over its citizens, and to extend “the ground of public confidence in the Government.”

Our Founders gave Congress the power in the Constitution to provide for the “general Welfare”.  In the long run, the general welfare and the common good are completely dependent on fair institutions, the conservation of resources, a healthy natural environment, sensible fiscal discipline, and honest economic accounting.  These needs can only be satisfied in the long term by a rigorous framework of respected rights for our descendents.

Competition is intense in our society for greater advantages and more perks and benefits from the government.  Many interests compete in our society, and some are very well represented, like rich people and big corporations, while others are poorly represented.  The most severely under-represented interests in our political system are young people under the age of 18, because they cannot vote, and every person to be born in the future.  To remedy the extreme inequalities that result from this disenfranchisement, we must make an overarching commitment to fairer guiding principles in the form of this proposed Bill of Rights for Future Generations. 

Today, mindful that the well-being of all people in future generations is seriously threatened by shortsighted activities and present-day expediencies, this new Bill of Rights must be designed to ensure that future generations have reasonable prospects for freedom, dignity, prosperity, financial stability and survival.  This Bill of Rights must help ensure that irreparable harm is not done to Earth’s ecosystems and the diversity of life on our home planet.  To make clear our vital commitment to the greater good in the long run, Congress and nations worldwide should “pay forward” some good deeds to improve the prospects for our children and their descendents by enacting this new Bill of Rights.  This action could restore greater confidence and trust in our governing institutions.

PROPOSED BILL OF RIGHTS FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS:

Article 1.  Sustainable Resource Use.

Enact an Ecological Sanity Initiative which includes powerful incentives designed to encourage resource conservation, cleaner energy, renewable resources, healthy forests, robust fisheries, protected fresh water supplies, urban renewal, the preservation of biological diversity, and protections of open spaces, parks and wilderness areas.  This Initiative should give priority to safeguarding the health of natural ecosystems and the vitally important, critically valuable services they provide to humanity.  This Initiative would achieve this goal by strengthening protections of wetlands, wildlife habitats, national forests  and marine sanctuaries, and thus enhance the symbiosis and resilience contained in healthy biological diversity. 

This Ecological Sanity Initiative would have 12 primary provisions, as enumerated in Three Bills of Right: A Triumvirate of Responsible Actions for the Greater Good in the Earth Manifesto.

Article 2.  Pollution Control and Mitigation.

Require corporations that pollute rivers, lakes, oceans and the atmosphere to pay for the prevention or mitigation of the harmful impacts of their pollution-causing activities.  These costs must be included in prices of all products and services rather than being allowed to be externalized onto the public and future generations.  Concrete steps should furthermore be taken to ensure that corporations and governments adhere to precautionary principles that require cost-effective measures to be implemented to prevent the degradation of the environmental commons.

Article 3.  Prevention of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.

Levy a cost on carbon dioxide emissions to deal with the adverse impacts of the greenhouse effect and related changes in weather patterns.  Use the funds generated by this plan for two purposes:  (1) to create a “rainy day fund” that covers the costs of natural disasters that are associated with climate disruption, including intensified hurricanes and more widespread floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves, cold snaps, ocean acidification, and rises in sea level;  and (2) to help finance an incipient and necessary ‘green transition’ to a cleaner and more renewable energy future.

Article 4.  Stabilization of the National Debt.

Prevent the federal government from using the expediency of deficit spending to mortgage the future.  People today should not be allowed to obligate future generations with high interest costs on rapidly accumulating sums of borrowed money.  This goal should be accomplished by establishing a powerful mechanism to reduce deficit spending, as outlined in a Balanced Budget Initiative proposed in One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies.

Such an initiative would have a profoundly effective influence on the primary drivers of our national policies to seek common cause with the American people, rather than being stubbornly opposed to sensible solutions to our daunting budgetary challenges. 

Proposals are made in Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues that would also have a significantly positive impact.  These proposals contain detailed and fair ideas on how we can help solve our tax, budget deficit, Social Security and healthcare challenges.

Article 5.  Peaceful Coexistence.

Strengthen international institutions to build peace between nations, and to prevent violent conflicts between countries over resources.  Finance this effort to minimize wars by levying a surcharge on all U.S. sales of arms abroad.  Target this surcharge to raise a total $100 billion per year.  Also be aggressive in ratifying nuclear arms control agreements with other nations. 

Article 6.  Sensible Family Planning and Women’s Reproductive Healthcare.

Significantly increase funding at home and abroad for women’s healthcare clinics, family planning services, AIDS prevention, and free contraceptives for all women who want them.  Support comprehensive sex education programs, and make sure they are medically accurate and socially sensible so that they will be successful in preventing unwanted teen pregnancies.

Article 7.  Social, Environmental and Intergenerational Justice

Increase the fairness of economic opportunity and economic security to all citizens.  Increase environment justice to assure that disadvantaged and oppressed peoples do not bear an undue burden of exposure to toxic wastes, air pollution, and environmental damages.  Provide fair treatment and generous foreign aid to developing countries in the world to mitigate harms caused by irresponsible profiteering by multinational corporations.  Ratify this Bill of Rights for Future Generations to protect the interests of those in the future from need-driven and irresponsibly greed-driven and mindlessly materialistic consumerism.

       Truly,

         Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

Note:  See the numerous specific proposals in the Earth Manifesto on how we should be making our nation fairer to future generations.  In particular, see One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies, and the Progressive Agenda for a More Sane Humanity.

“As people alive today, we must consider future generations:  a clean environment is a human right like any other.  It is therefore part of our responsibility toward others to ensure that the world we pass on is as healthy, if not healthier, than we found it.”

                                                                                                    --- The Dalai Lama

“We are living at the expense of future generations.  In this respect, it is plain that 

    we are living in untruth.”         

                                --- Light of the World, Pope Benedict XVI

“Let us cease thinking only of ourselves and reasoning only in the short term.  Let us assure for the children to come the same rights that have been declared for their parents.”                                  

                                                                                                   --- Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“Whatever happens to the Earth, happens to the children of the Earth … All things are connected, like the blood that unites one family.  Mankind did not weave the web of life; we are but one strand within it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

            --- Attributed to Chief Seattle in 1844, in a warning to the U.S. government

                    against the misuse of land, water, air, and animal life. 

“Each generation, sharing in the heritage of the Earth, has a duty as trustee for future generations to prevent irreversible and irreparable harm to life on Earth and to human freedom and dignity.”                    

                             --- Jacques-Yves Cousteau

“Behold my brothers, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!  Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life.  It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land. 

Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race -- small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing.  Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them.  These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not.  They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.  They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse.  The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.”                       

             --- Sitting Bull, the Lakota Sioux Chief, 1877

“Freedom is not license but responsibility -- the gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath.  Although our sojourn in life is brief, we are on a great journey.  For those who came before us, and for those who will follow, our moral, political and religious duty is to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are equal under the law, is in good hands on our watch.”

                                                                                  --- The great journalist Bill Moyers

           A Clear-Eyed Patriot Issues a Clarion Call for a Second American Revolution

                                                               An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen and women, lend me your ears.  I come to champion good ideas, not to praise all the bad ideas and shortsighted expediencies that have gotten us into the perilous straits we find ourselves in today in the world.

Eleven score and sixteen years ago, our Founding Fathers declared independence from the despotic hegemony of the British Empire.  These courageous colonists then fought an American Revolutionary War against the “redcoats”, and eventually triumphed.  They then they set about working together to bring forth upon the North American continent a new nation dedicated to liberty and the proposition that all men are created equal.

To secure the “unalienable rights” which they declared to be self-evident for all citizens, they convened a Continental Congress of representatives of the people.  Having asserted that the government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, our Founders assumed the important responsibility of hammering out a master plan for a new form of fair-minded democratic governance that would be guided by a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and rules of law.  Their experience with the despotism of King George II had left them wary of abuses of power, so they created a sensible balance of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government.  They wanted to make sure the American people would be free from tyranny, and that they would be fairly represented in all national decision-making.

In the Preamble to the Constitution, our Founders identified six overarching purposes for which this body of fundamental principles was created:  (1) to form a more perfect Union;  (2) to establish Justice;  (3) to insure domestic Tranquility;  (4) to provide for the common defense;  (5) to promote the general Welfare;  and (6) to secure the Blessings of Liberty to themselves and to Posterity.  It is worthy of note that they did not endorse uncompromising partisanship, divisiveness or religious righteousness.

In the many years that have passed since those formative times, great progress has been made in expanding concepts of equality, fairness, guaranteed liberties, and fair representation so that they include racial minorities and women.  These initiatives were designed to strengthen our Union in these United States of America, and to ensure that considerations of the general welfare are not ignored in the fierce competition between interests vying to gain advantages for themselves.

In the course of human events, and with the passage of time, corrupting influences have crept into our system of governance.  Our representatives have been bought, and they now primarily serve rich people and corporate masters instead of the majority of people.  Our representatives are somewhat cowardly pragmatists who are afraid to tell the simple truth that our current system is extremely unfair to younger generations -- and downright treasonous to the best interests of all people in future generations.

The Founders of our great nation stated in the Declaration of Independence that whenever government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

These understandings make it clear today that it is our right, indeed our duty, to throw off the hegemony of the misguided influences that have come to dominate our national decision-making.  It is time to enact policies that make the vast majority of Americans more secure.  It is time to honestly embrace initiatives that gives Americans fairer opportunities to achieve happiness.

Backroom decision-making and machine politics have been allowed to dominate our government for too long.  Common sense tells us it would be wise to avoid revolutionary strife associated with “politics in the streets” by striving to reach a bold and fair-minded consensus on how to honestly actualize the ideals and values we hold in common.

A Wise Guy Speaks Out

   “You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.”

                                                                                                           --- Mark Twain

The honorable Abraham Lincoln waxed eloquent about the ideals of our great nation after the Battle of Gettysburg in the middle of the terribly uncivil War Between the States.  In one of the greatest speeches ever, he proclaimed his vision of the importance of representative democracy and governance “of the people, by the people and for the people.”  In 2002, the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota stated that he believed politics should be about far more than power, money, and winning at any cost.  He observed:  “Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives, lessening human suffering, and advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in the world.”

The plain truth of the matter, however, is that idealistic visions are not the main forces that guide our national policies.  Much narrower pragmatic motives drive most of our efforts to codify into law the collective impulses of the constituencies that compete for ascendency in our society. 

Ambrose Bierce, a renowned journalist who was a contemporary of Mark Twain’s, created a pithy satirical dictionary in which he defined words with incisiveness and perspicacity.  Here is one of his definitions that provides a relevant and intriguing insight:

   Politics, n.  A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce was sure right-on in this definition of politics.  All the high-falutin’ rhetoric during the 2012 presidential campaign about vision, righteousness, the moral good and caring about the middle class belies the fact that the current intense competition for control of our government is really a conflict between greedy rich people and social conservatives, on the one hand, and people with more empathetic, fair-minded, liberal and future-respecting perspectives, on the other.  Ambrose Bierce himself was an investigative journalist who courageously dared to take on the railroad “octopus” which was controlled by the famous Big Four whose railroad monopoly wielded enormous power and influence in his day. 

David Sirota observes in Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government -- and How We Take It Back that giant corporations and wealthy people largely dominate our government, and that these interests are working resolutely to make sure that the government operates in their own best interests, and not in the best interests of the people. 

This confirms Ambrose Bierce’s second definition of politics in his dictionary:  “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”  This common sense evaluation expresses a much truer reality than all the political rhetoric we hear from our political leaders today.  Yes, siree!

True patriotism consists of questioning and opposing abuses of power in one’s country, and not merely accepting them without question.  As Mark Twain once said:

“My kind of patriotism and loyalty is loyalty to one’s country, and not to one’s institutions

     or officeholders.” 

Patriotism is not an unthinking obedience to the politicians in power.  Patriotism in America should really be an honest commitment to the principles and ideals this country represents.  This includes the primary concerns of our Founding Fathers:  fairness, social justice, assured personal liberties, guaranteed human rights, limited government intrusiveness, and fair representation of the best interests of the people. 

Bravo for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The primary concerns expressed in the Earth Manifesto are environmental.  That’s why the provisions for a proposed Bill of Rights for Future Generations include important ecological ideas.  Everything on Earth is interconnected and interdependent, naturally, so considerations for the health of natural ecosystems cannot be made independent of concerns for economics and the greater good of society in the long run.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. warns Americans not to “treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation”.  He wisely told people at a business conference in Toronto, “To me, environmental advocacy is not just about protecting the fish and the birds for their own sake.  It’s about recognizing that nature is the infrastructure of our communities.  When we actively destroy nature, we diminish ourselves.  We impoverish our children.”

Sensible business owners know that they must operate their businesses using the income they generate, and that they cannot stay in business for long if they squander their assets and equity.  It is folly for us to allow corporations to try to convert natural resources to cash as quickly as possible.  Such a strategy may give us an illusion of a prosperous economy, but all gambits that allow giant corporations to deplete resources and externalize costs onto society effectively force our children and descendents to pay for these shortsighted activities.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also pointed out that we must make investments in environmental protections because they help ensure the economic vitality of our generation and future generations.  In our free market capitalist system, when we under-value natural resources, we contribute to their excessively wasteful usage.

Smart environmental planning is more important than ever in the world today, and it is getting more crucial with every year that passes.  This fact makes it absurdly ironic that the current session of the House of Representatives has the worst environmental record of any session in history, as assessed by the League of Conservation Voters.  The time has come for leadership that is more sensible, so I urge the American people to vote for leaders who acknowledge and emphasize the importance of environmental concerns.

Once again, the cogent words of the great fair-minded journalist Bill Moyers resonate in the interstices of my brain.  In his 2004 acceptance speech of the “Global Environmental Citizen Award”, Moyers noted that when he reads the news about all the things humanity is doing in the world, he concludes that it is not as if “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.”  As he reads the news, and looks at photos on his desk of his five grandchildren, he observes:

“We do know what we are doing.  We are stealing their future.  Betraying their trust. 

   Despoiling their world.”

It is our collective duty to act more responsibly.  It is for very good reasons that Franz Kafka observed that “Nobody wants to introduce as many reforms as children do.”  Nobody’s reforms would be as fair to future generations as those made in the best interests of children.  Think clearly about the treacherous nature of the way we are treating the prospects of our children, and theirs.  We are profligately using up natural resources;  we are failing to conserve vital energy and water resources;  we are allowing natural ecosystems to be damaged and wildlife habitats to be destroyed;  we are wantonly foisting the negative health and environmental costs of pollution and toxic wastes upon people worldwide, and upon everyone in future generations;  and we are borrowing trillions of dollars to stimulate these activities. 

This whole litany of collective short-term-oriented activities in the U.S. is being seriously compounded by our shortsighted expediency of promising a cornucopia of unfunded obligations for healthcare and retirement costs for government employees, military veterans, and people over the age of 62.  It is estimated that there are more than $60 trillion in obligations like this, promised but unfunded -- or four times the amount of our national debt.  This represents more than $500,000 for every household in the United States. 

Our national policies can thus be seen to be an unkind form of intergenerational treachery that is characterized by unfair favoritism, accounting gimmickry, fraudulently irresponsible financial scams, and financing that resembles a bizarre new variant of Ponzi scheme.

It boggles the imagination to think that we could be acting with such a lack of responsibility toward people in the future.  Note that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s father, “Bobbie” Kennedy had the inside track on getting the 1968 Democratic nomination for President at the moment of his assassination, and he would likely have won the Presidential election.  Imagine how different the world would have been if Robert F. Kennedy had been elected President rather than Richard Nixon.  Read Robert F. Kennedy, His Life, or listen to the exceptionally well-narrated CD, to understand how passionately committed RFK was to social justice in the last years of his life, and to fair opportunities for people, to the well-being of children and poor people, and to the cause of extricating the U.S. from its costly and immoral involvement in the war in Vietnam, in which more than 50,000 Americans died, and two million Vietnamese people were killed, and terrible chemicals like Agent Orange were dropped in massive quantities on the countryside.

Today we are faced with another crucial turning point in our national elections.  There are a variety of very good reasons, some surprising, that make Barack Obama a much better prospect for the Presidency than Mitt Romney.  These reasons are explored in detail below.

Now is the time for clearer understandings, and for taking a fair-minded stand for a better future.  The Dalai Lama is one of the wisest, most spiritually pure, and cool, calm, and collected men on Earth.  The meditative Buddhist once declared:  “In order to accomplish important goals, we need an appreciation of the sense of urgency.”  Hold that thought.

An Echo of Wise Solon Reverberates through the Airwaves

Economics drives politics.  In Athens more than 2,500 years ago, disparities of wealth between the rich and the poor created a dangerous political and social upheaval.  One faction favored democracy, and another favored oligarchic rule by the wealthy few.  A third preferred a mixed form of rule with a strong constitution.  Clan rivalry and regional conflicts also played a large role in the strife of Athens in the 6th century BCE.

According to Will and Ariel Durant in The Lessons of History, the historian Plutarch wrote that, in the Athens of 594 B.C., “the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances … seemed possible but despotic power.”  The poor found that their status got worse every year because the government was in the hands of elite factions, and the courts were corrupt, deciding every issue against the masses.  The pressure cooker of societal unrest stoked talk of violent revolt.  The rich were angry at the brazen challenge to their privileges and property, and prepared to defend themselves by force.

As these conflicts escalated between various interests vying for perks, privilege and power, many people recognized the need for a leader who would sort out the differences between competing factions in an equitable manner.  Good sense prevailed and moderate elements secured the election of the Athenian statesman and lawmaker Solon to the supreme archonship because he was seen as having the wisdom to fairly mediate between the parties involve.

Given extraordinary legislative powers by his fellow citizens, Solon made a number of fair-minded reforms of the Greek political system, the economy, and a broad agenda of moral issues like debt, slavery, abuses of the system of inheritance, and civic involvements.  The most important reform that Solon made was creating a graduated income tax plan that made the rich pay tax at a rate twelve times as much as the poor.  This idea forms the basis for my proposals to reform the U.S. tax code by making it significantly more steeply graduated.

My fellow Americans, make no mistake about it;  the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has reached new modern extremes today, and the nation is in a dangerous tinderbox condition.  The lessons of history provide us with an excellent alternative:  wise leadership -- and smart, decent, fair-minded progressive reforms.  Those who do not heed the lessons of history are said to be more likely to be doomed to repeat them.  Let’s heed the lessons!

To be, or not to be, that is the question

 Whether ‘tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

  The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,

   Or to take Arms against a Sea of trouble,

    And, by opposing, end them …

       Ay, there’s the rub!

                 --- Soliloquy in Hamlet, William Shakespeare

The Author Offers an Aside

Alert readers will note the repetition of some observations in these Earth Manifesto writings.  I have long admired poet David Whyte remarkable voice and his use of repetition in his evocative and powerfully readings of poetry.  Earth Manifesto essays, however, tend to be repetitive for a different reason.  The most cogent ideas keep carrying themselves forward as the manifesto evolves, and as the swirling course of events repeatedly reveals their relevance and evokes their truth anew.  Several items in A Clear-Eyed Patriot have been carried forward to Uncommon Sense and Fair-Mindedness.  They have been left here for now, because of the deeper and more clarifying sense of this earlier context.

A Question of Ensuring National Security and Domestic Tranquility

Edward Stettinius, the U.S. Secretary of State in 1945, identified two fundamental components of human security.  “The battle of peace has to be fought on two fronts,” he stated. “The first front is the security front, where victory spells freedom from fear.  The second front is the economic and social front, where victory means freedom from want.  Only victory on both fronts can assure the world of an enduring peace.”

Think about the fact that there are a record number of more than 46 million Americans living below the official poverty level in the U.S. today, and that Social Security and other social programs like unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and nutrition assistance programs keep an additional 33 million people from poverty. 

Since these social programs keep tens of millions of Americans out of more desperate circumstances, they are a kind of insurance against the extreme insecurity of the masses.  Thus, social programs are a form of insurance against revolutionary unrest.  These programs mitigate impulses toward the politics of anger in the streets, so they effectively allow the current system, jerry-rigged so impressively in favor of wealthy people, to be perpetuated as it is, without Solon-wise reforms.

The flagrant fact that rich people are refusing to pay for this insurance, and are growing ever-more adamantly opposed to pay for this insurance, is forcing huge costs to be foisted onto our children, and all people in future generations.  It should irk every American that conservative wealthy people exhibit opposition to even having this insurance policy at all.  Such opposition, in its effect, is crassly unempathetic, and it smacks of severe shortsightedness and arrogant mean-spiritedness.

Examining the National Debt

The national debt has recently reached a record high of $16 trillion.  This debt represents about $50,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.  This amount of debt is creating grave risks to our economy, and it is undermining the prospects of people in future generations.  We clearly can no longer afford to allow the all-but-criminal evasion of taxes by rich people that has contributed so dramatically to this unprecedented level of debt.

We should be clear about the starkly wrongheaded nature of borrowing huge sums of money to finance low tax rates for rich people.  Even if the principal balance is never paid back, the American people are obligated to the interest expense on this debt.  The interest cost on borrowed money amounts to 100% of the amount borrowed every 15 years, assuming a long-term average interest cost of 5%.  It is completely crazy to borrow trillions of dollars to give it to rich people today, knowing that the ephemeral boon to the wealthy will cost people in future generations multiple times the amount borrowed, 100% every 15 years, over and over and over and over again.  It’s a downright stupid expediency!

A good way to reduce deficit spending is proposed in the Fair Taxation Initiative in One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies.  The specific details of this proposal use Solon’s eminently sensible idea of establishing a more steeply graduated income tax system in which rich people must pay taxes at a rate 12 times that of the poor.  I call on all our American leaders to come together to help get this proposal enacted as soon as practicable.  This change would almost immediately make our economy fairer and healthier, and allow us to invest in national infrastructure maintenance, improve our communities, make Americans more secure, reduce the size of future deficits, and help save our democracy.

Annie Leonard simply and brilliantly relates how “The Story of Broke” is being used to short-change the American people and radically transform our country into a more inegalitarian place.  I heartily recommend Ms. Leonard’s animated online films about The Story of Stuff, the Story of Broke, and the Story of Change.

Let us not be deceived by the propaganda today that asserts the Republican Party is staunchly opposed to deficit spending.  The fact of the matter is that the national debt grew the fastest in the last 30 years under Ronald Reagan, by far, and the slowest under Bill Clinton.  History shows that Republican administrations tend to contribute to increases in debt more than those led by Democratic administrations.  The reason for this is that Republicans refuse to consider changing the status quo of historically low tax rates on the highest incomes.  This prevents them from being able to fairly and adequately control the national debt.

“Our national debt is our biggest national security threat,” declared Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 2010.  Irony is a subversive devil.  Here we have spent an estimated $15 trillion on national security since 1980, and our national debt has gone up by almost the exact same amount.  The conclusion is inescapable:  we have spent a huge amount of money on national security, and financed it by borrowing the cost instead of “paying as we go”;  so, consequently, we have put our nation’s financial health in a precarious state that in itself represents the biggest national security threat of all.

“Circumstances are like Clouds continually gathering and bursting -- while we are laughing, the seed of some trouble is put into the wide arable land of events -- while we are laughing it sprouts, it grows, and suddenly bears a poison fruit which we must pluck.”

                                                --- Excerpt from a letter by the English poet John Keats

An Objective Assessment

Republicans have obstructed every measure in the last four years that would have helped Barack Obama succeed in righting the economy and making our country a fairer and more progressive nation.  This intransigence is consistent with their misguided top political priority:  “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” declared Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after the 2010 elections. 

To deal with the gargantuan $10 trillion in additional budget deficits projected to be incurred in the next 10 years, President Obama had sought a “grand bargain” with Republicans last August that would have reduced this projected debt increase by $4 trillion.  Republican opposition to any new revenues whatsoever led to a stalemate, and as a result a risky “fiscal cliff” of tax hikes and mandatory cuts in military spending and entitlements now looms before us on Dec. 31, 2012. 

This uncompromising stance by Republicans is blatant political sabotage.  Though it is designed to make the President fail, it has had the terrible side effect of harming millions of people in the process.  By adopting a top political priority of defeating President Obama, Republicans have given this goal precedence over improving the economy, helping create jobs, honestly dealing with the huge national debt, ethically making our country fairer, or even Republican pet projects like curtailing the reproductive rights of women and eliminating protections of the environment so that corporations can make bigger profits.  Republicans generally want to do aggressive nation-building abroad, but they seem dead set against it at home -- particularly if it would help the black guy succeed, I reckon.

The President Shares a Perspective

Barack Obama suggests that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out, not from the top down.  “It’s time for a new economic patriotism rooted in the belief that growing our economy begins with a strong and thriving middle class,” he states.  The American people have been forced to try the top-down method ever since Ronald Reagan launched his Revolution, and the results have not been good.  Well, admittedly it has been extremely advantageous for the super-rich.  But everybody else?  No!

Let’s try the other way!  Let’s enact a new and simplified income tax system -- one that is more steeply graduated.  This means that everyone will pay exactly the same amount of tax on every dollar they earn, and higher rates will apply on higher levels of earnings.  That is the right way forward.  It is the proper way in fiscal and economic terms, as well as in social and moral ones. 

The detailed proposal for a more progressive tax structure in One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies would generate significantly increased revenues that would allow us to reduce budget deficits, finance infrastructure improvements and investments that are needed in sustainable energy alternatives, better and more affordable higher education, universal healthcare, and dramatically-enhanced environmental protections.

A Propitious Way To Establish Justice and Promote the General Welfare

Common sense dictates that we should strive to create a national framework that maximizes the security of the majority of Americans, and gives everyone fairer opportunities to achieve happiness.  Given this simple understanding, it is astonishing to find out what studies have revealed about the money people make. 

Studies and polls indicate that when people earn an annual income of $50,000 to $75,000, they feel happier than people with lower incomes in every category assessed, including employment, housing, health, relationships, spiritual life, and community involvements.  Surprisingly, however, people who earn more that $75,000 per year do not profess to be happier when judged by these measures.  Here is a powerful and convincing reason why our national system of taxation should be made fairer and more steeply graduated!

   --- Huckleberry Finn, the Forty-Niner Gold Rush, and a Resurrection of Mark Twain’s Perspectives

The implication of this?  We could achieve a better average quality of life for the American people by refusing to let rich people corrupt our economic and political systems in ways that give them an ever-bigger slice of the economic pie.  The startling realization that the greater good of our society can best be achieved by enacting fairer tax policies makes one thing perfectly clear:  We should refuse to allow wealthy people to continue to pay extremely low tax rates on the highest levels of their incomes.  To maximize the happiness of the vast majority of Americans, national policies should be instituted which will ensure that income and opportunities are shared more broadly.  It is high time that we stop allowing the super-rich to jerry-rig our national policies in ways that concentrate wealth and privilege more and more narrowly in the hands of the few.

Another Aspect of Social Justice

“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

                                                                                                      --- Martin Luther King, Jr.

The most expensive medical care available is emergency room care.  It is downright stupid to have a system in which 50 million people get their medical care only in emergency rooms.  I strongly believe in the value of preventative health care, and annual medical check-ups, and a greater emphasis on good nutrition and exercise programs rather than on prescription drugs and surgeries. 

An estimated 45,000 people die each year because they do not have health insurance and thus cannot obtain necessary medical care, according to Harvard Medical School researchers.  Our healthcare system has a primary focus on profit making by health insurance companies and drug companies, NOT on fairly providing for the health of American citizens. 

Americans spent a mind-boggling $2.6 trillion on health care in 2011, reports the Institute of Medicine.  Of this gargantuan cost, the Institute further noted, about $750 billion was wasted on fraud, unnecessary services, and administrative inefficiencies in 2009.  This represents almost one-third of the total amount of healthcare spending.  The system, the Institute cogently points out, has become “too complex and costly to continue business as usual.”

This is no way to run a country.  To stick with the system we have is foolhardy.  It is crazy for conservatives to be petulant and indignant about the Democratic Affordable Care Act that President Obama signed into law.  Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, after all, has reluctantly agreed the law is Constitutional.  This law represents a fair beginning toward addressing the supreme inequities and high costs of healthcare in our nation. 

Vastly better reforms are possible;  a revolutionarily good one is proposed in Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has made a classic “flip flop” on these healthcare issues.  When running for the Senate in 1994, he declared he supported universal healthcare.  He further charged that having millions of people get “free care” from emergency rooms is “a form of socialism.”  Then, as Governor of Massachusetts in 2006, he laudably helped to put a universal healthcare plan into effect in that state.  Today, he attacks the Affordable Care Act, even though this national plan was modeled on his Massachusetts plan.  He now says that emergency room care is sufficient for the uninsured as their only form of healthcare.  But the current system is extremely expensive, unjust, unwisely impractical, and an odd “form of socialism”!

Romney’s flip-flops on healthcare are another of many instances of Republican politicians being opposed to policies that they had once advocated.  Their main motive for such opposition is to undermine Barack Obama, who supports such policies.  This obstruction of bipartisanship and fair-minded consensus seeking has characterized our politics since the day President Obama took the oath of office.

The time has come for our representatives to work together to create a more reasonable consensus on how to solve problems, not just mount staunch opposition to fair-minded people who are trying to improve our society!

Observations after the Presidential Debate in Denver

Mitt Romney made an aggressive attempt to sound presidential and to pretend that he is fair-minded in the first presidential debate on October 3, 2012.  But his prescriptions simply don’t add up.  He makes wild promises and sketchy plans, but refuses to disclose how he will manage to slash taxes on rich people and increase spending on the military, and at the same time balance the budget without slashing programs that are important to the middle class, like the home mortgage deduction, Pell grants for students, and Medicare.

David Gergen, the senior political analyst for CNN, observed that President Obama was astonished during the debate because “he thought Romney was just flat-out lying.”  Gergen chronicled 50 instances during the debate of “Mitt’s mendacity”.  The 50 specific instances of distortions that Gergen identifies reveal Romney’s statements that were not true, or wildly misleading, or painfully untrue, or demonstrably wrong, or ridiculously untrue. 

The most revealing “zinger” in the debate was Mitt Romney’s accusation:  “You’re entitled, Mr. President, as the president, to your own airplane and your own house, but not to your own facts.”  Romney, of course, uses his own “facts” promiscuously, apparently making them up as he goes.  His astonishing declaration that President Obama is not entitled to his own facts is a classic example of “projection”, which is one of the most primitive of all defense mechanisms. 

Projection is one of Karl Rove’s most cynically Machiavellian tactics.  For years he has charged opponents with exactly what his Party was guilty of itself.  To mislead the American people like this is slick scheming, and a cunning and conniving form of opportunism.  Such fraud and coldly-calculated deceptions are pathological tactics to use in trying to regain the most powerful leadership position in the world!

We cannot afford to let Mitt Romney fool us with all his pandering and flip-flopping.  His words are reminiscent of one of George W. Bush’s inarticulate utterances, the classic “Bushisms” in which he stammered:  “… fool me once, shame on -- shame on you.  Fool me -- you can’t get fooled again.”  We cannot afford to be fooled into letting Republicans gain more power by deceiving us as to their true intentions.

Mitt Romney represents government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations.  “Corporations are people, my friend”, he remarked in a condescending tone directed at a heckler in the crowd while he was on the campaign trail at the Iowa State Fair in August 2011.  Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren recently pointed out the obvious:  “Corporations are not people.  People have hears, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance.  They live, they love, and they die.  And that matters, because we don’t run this country for corporations, we run it for people.”

Corporations are entities that have only two legal purposes:  to allow shareholders and owners to evade liability, and to maximize profits no matter what the costs to workers, communities or society as a whole, and no matter how harmful their activities are to the environmental commons.  If they were people, and acted the way they do, they would be clinically shown to be acting exactly like a psychopath, as is provocatively revealed in the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power -- and in the excellent film based on the book, The Corporation.

In his famous epic poem The Divine Comedy, Dante makes a transformational journey through Limbo and the eight lower circles of Hell.  He uses Virgil as his guide, who was the great Roman poet of antiquity and veritable voice of reason.  As Dante and Virgil descended into the lowest two circles of Hell, they found historical personages who have been guilty in their lives of the worst sins, the malicious ones of coldhearted fraud and treachery.  Dante and Virgil descended down a vast cliff into these pits of Hell, riding on the back of the winged monster Geryon, the personification of fraud.  Geryon has the smiling face of an honest man, but a sinisterly reptilian body with claws, and a poisonous sting in its pointy snake-like tail.

Mitt Romney seems to be a modern personification of Geryon, smiling and trying to act sincere, yet tricky, shifty and devious.  We cannot afford to trust this man!  That’s my opinion!  See The Odd Brilliance of Dante’s Epic Poem, The Divine Comedy for additional understanding of Dante’s great poem, and its personal, political, historical and moral underpinnings.

The Way It Is

Mischief is afoot in the land of the free and the home of the brave -- and no one knows what course it will take.

The Republican Party is attempting to convince the American people that uncompromising Republican plans are the best way to fix all the daunting problems we face.  But let’s not be gullible or stupid.  The lessons of history tell us to be suspicious of people who propose nebulous prescriptions;  who offer half-baked ideas;  who propagate naked semi-truths;  and who indulge in merciless Machiavellian machinations and dirty politics in their attempts to gain power.  An agenda characterized by farsighted fairness makes much better common sense for the greater good of the people and the nation.

The rhetoric of apologists for the wealthy and social extreme conservatives is quite deceptive.  Their proposals strongly resemble the wrongheaded policies that have thrown our economy into turmoil, and made our political system so dysfunctional, and undermined the noble fairness principles upon which our nation was founded.

  “The Republicans are the party that says that government doesn’t work -- and then gets

    elected and proves it.”   

                              --- P.J. O’Rourke    

Extreme conservatives already hold a narrow majority of control on the Supreme Court and in the House of Representatives.  The Republican Party today is dominated by Tea Party radicals, and supported by Super PACs flush with cash contributed by billionaires.   Using this perverse influence, the Party is now spending record amounts of money in efforts to gain control of the White House and the U.S. Senate. 

Their goal is to gain dominating control, and they appear to be willing to use any means to achieve it, including dastardly efforts to suppress voting by minorities.  It’s as if they disdain the whole idea of democracy itself. 

The Romney campaign frequently uses disingenuous attack ads, dishonest tactics, and outright lying to try to sell the American people on voting for him.  One spokesman for the Romney camp justified the deceptive nature of their attack ads against Barack Obama by candidly remarking, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” 

The Republican Party is using a classic “hard-times swindle” to exploit the passions inflamed by the economic crisis of the past four years.  Thomas Frank’s brilliant analyses of these swindles should be more widely understood.  Check out his books, What’s the Matter with Kansas -- and, Pity the Billionaire: the Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right. 

Republicans are trying out several new initiatives in this swindle, as advocated by the billionaire Koch brothers.  Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and his allies passed a law that effectively ended the collective bargaining rights of most workers in the public sector.  (A Wisconsin judge recently overturned this law.)  In the state of Michigan, Republican Rick Snyder got elected as Governor and immediately set about trying to subvert democracy entirely.  As Jim Hightower observes in his September 2012 Lowdown, Snyder rushed through a law soon after he took office in 2011 which let the governor “seize control of any local government he deems to be in fiscal trouble, suspend the people’s democratic authority, impose a corporatized version of martial law, and install his own ‘emergency financial manager’ to govern by diktat (like some hybrid of Soviet czar and tinhorn potentate …).”

One reason local governments are having severe financial difficulties in Michigan, notably, is because Governor Snyder slashed taxes on businesses by more than $1 billion per year, and offset the lost revenue by cutting the amount of state funds that went to local school districts.

In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the Republican Party was repudiated for its failings.  Today, it has managed to stage a valiant comeback from its fall from grace after the disastrous Bush years.  It has done so by spinning its economic policies as a grand solution.  In reality, the Republican policies of 2001 to 2008 were the real cause of the economic hard times that got dramatically worse in the fall of 2008 when the economic recession began.  To formulate a grand solution, smarter and fairer national policies are needed.

The plain truth is that proponents of governance of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich are striving to gain more power.  Republican leaders basically want the American people to double-down with them on the inequitable tax cutting, deregulatory, and anti-environmental policies of the Bush/Cheney years.  They are using deeply deceptive spin and manipulative propaganda to try to convince the American people to entrust them once again with dominating power.  They are taking advantage of the passions and gullibility of libertarian-leaning Tea Party folks to advance their narrow agenda.  But the truth is clear:  their policies would be beneficial mainly to high-income people at the expense of the greater good.

A Eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr.

The night that Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy spoke these words in Indianapolis: 

“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings.  He died in the cause of that effort.  In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are, and what direction we want to move in.  … What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country …”.

Let us seek to heal the stark divide between rich and poor, and create a fairer nation!

The Value of Big Picture Perspectives

Big picture perspectives can provide us with more accurate understandings.  That is a good thing.  Big picture understandings create more clarity, a deeper sense of context, and a truer connection to values that are more meaningful in our lives and work.  Accurate understandings can lead to better decision-making, wiser approaches, more optimal practices, and outcomes that are more positive for all concerned.  That’s the theory of it, anyway.

Take football -- please!  Football is the king of sports in the United States, and NFL teams are owned by powerful billionaires.  So when professional football referees were locked out of their jobs by NFL owners, no one seemed to take much notice, even though one of the replacement referees had actually been fired for incompetence by the Lingerie Football League.  Really, the Lingerie Football League!  Fired for incompetence!  I’m not making this up. 

As Mark Twain once said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities;  Truth isn’t.” 

In a game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Green Bay Packers on Monday Night Football, replacement referees ignored a blatant foul and ruled that, on the final play of the game, a Seahawks’ receiver actually caught a Hail Mary pass, rather than a Packers defender having intercepted it.  The ruling threw some $200 million in bets on the game’s outcome from those who had gambled on the Packers to those who had bet on the Seahawks.  Jubilation and outrage ensued.

This ruling made football-loving Americans cry out in rage, and put pressure on NFL owners to come to terms with the referees’ union which represents its 121 members who are professional referees.  Many people have been bamboozled into thinking unions deserve to be demonized, and even that collective bargaining rights of workers should be eliminated.  But after replacement “scab” referees had made too many wrong calls, culminating in the Seahawks/Packers game, suddenly millions of people took notice, and the wealthy owners were forced to negotiate in better faith, and to come to a fair agreement to end a three-week lockout.

Here’s the big picture.  The Industrial Revolution began about the same time as the thirteen American colonies gained independence from the British Empire.  This technological, economic and social revolution has featured a titanic struggle between capitalists and workers.  The 1848 Communist Manifesto itself had been galvanized into existence because of striking inequities that are involved in the strife between capitalists and workers.  The Gilded Age of the late 19th century witnessed many colossal conflicts between ruthless business owners and worker organizations.  The labor movement began to combat terrible working conditions and the harsh policies of corporate conglomerates, captains of industry, and assorted robber barons of the times.

The need was glaring to address the many ills associated with industrialization and urbanization, and to make the economic system fairer, and to improve American society.   Great progress was made during the Progressive Era, from the 1890s until the start of World War I, to accomplish vital reforms.  Monopolies and giant corporate trusts were broken apart into less powerful organizations to ensure that competition was fairer.  New laws were enacted to create products and workplaces that were safer, and a shorter work week, minimum wages, modernized schools, child labor restrictions, collective bargaining rights, saner fiscal policy, more sensible business regulations, a more secure banking system, numerous urban parks, the conservation of national lands, and incipient environmental protections.  Valiant efforts were made to reduce the blatant political corruption that existed in those days.  Initiative and referendum processes were authorized to give citizens more power in their communities by allowing them to recall officials and introduce proposed laws that would be fairer to the people. 

This entire litany of hard-fought battles for expanded rights came into existence through epic struggles by millions of workers and families against captains of industry who have dominated this arena of strife for so long.  When the Great Depression came along in the 1930s, the severe shortcomings of capitalism were highlighted anew, and wealthy people were forced to make significant concessions to working people to make society fairer.  A New Deal was created which ushered in an age of more broadly shared prosperity after World War II, and gains in worker productivity were shared more fairly until 1980.

Median household income increased by about 100% from the end of World War II and 1980, roughly in line with increases in the productivity of workers.  But wealthy people generally feel supremely entitled to their riches, so a resurgent movement began to crush the power of workers beginning in 1981.  This movement was stoked by Ronald Reagan’s permanent firing of more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.  This ruthless ploy stoked a long downward slide for American workers.  Since then, all productivity gains in the U.S. economy have gone to the wealthiest 10% of Americans, instead of being shared with workers for their hard work.

The inflation-adjusted compensation to workers has remained stagnant since 1980 despite a doubling in worker productivity.  This essentially represents a redistribution of wealth upwards.  It is an outcome that nakedly reveals the extreme inequities in our economic and political systems.  It is an outcome that powerfully reinforces the simple fairness of the idea that income and wealth should rightly be more fairly distributed by means of more steeply graduated tax rates on income, capital gains, and inheritances.

It is sensational that the productivity of American workers has roughly doubled in the past 40 years while the average hourly compensation has basically remained unchanged.  As a result, wages are at their lowest share of GDP on record -- and corporate profits are at the highest share since the 1960s.  Meanwhile, total taxes paid by corporations as a percentage of GDP are the lowest on record.  These facts reflect highly unfair trends that should be reversed through sensible and fair-minded public policies.  Otherwise, the pressure cooker of inequities will wreak increasing adversities on the majority of Americans.

A Closer Analysis, and a Synthesis

Thomas Paine was an Englishman who emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774.  He published the revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense in January 1776.  This tract became an immediate success, and was instrumental in galvanizing the colonists into declaring independence six month later.  Interestingly, the pamphlet Common Sense began with the working title, Plain Truth.  Since one of Paine’s purposes was to serve the oppressed colonists, he donated all of his royalties from Common Sense to the Continental Army of George Washington to financially assist the just cause of independence.

Bill Clinton expressed some exceptionally common sense understandings in his speech to the attendees at the September 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.  His explanations were brilliantly simple.  He pointed out how Republicans had crashed the economy by means of their tax-cutting, risk-stimulating, middle-class-undermining, deregulatory bubble-economic policies during the tenure of the Bush/Cheney era.  Then the Republican Party, after having been deservingly humiliated in the 2008 elections, effectively handed the mess to Barack Obama, and in the four years since then, Republicans have sabotaged every effort that the President has made to fix the economy and reduce the high rate of unemployment.  And now Republicans are cynically attacking President Obama for not having fixed the economy fast enough, and they are insisting that American voters put them back in charge. 

If Republicans managed to regain the power of the presidency, they promise to resume their regressive tax cutting, irresponsible profit enabling, dangerous leveraging and economic risk-taking, and almost certainly policies that harm women, immigrants, children, the environment and future generations.  Solon says: Don’t let them do it!!!

An Interlude of Asides

Think about Auguste Rodin’s most famous sculpture, “The Thinker”.  Rodin originally called his masterpiece “The Poet”, in commemoration of the greatest epic poet in world history, Dante Alighieri.  This sculpture was a part of a monumental portal that Rodin was commissioned to create for a museum in Paris that was never actually built.  Many of Rodin’s original sculptures from the portal were enlarged and became works of art on their own.

Rodin called his portal project The Gates of Hell, linking it to a famous work of the Renaissance, Ghiberti’s gilded bronze doors, with their Biblical themes, that are found on the octagonal Baptistry in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence, Italy.  Michelangelo had called the beautiful sculpted portico The Gates of Paradise when he first saw them.  

The theme of The Thinker was Dante’s great epic poem, The Divine Comedy.  Dante wrote this allegorical masterpiece about 700 years ago.  It has three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso -- Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.  The original Thinker sits atop a portal looking down on the characters in Inferno, as if it is Dante brooding reflectively on the many famous characters he imagined in Hell.  Other scholars have suggested that The Thinker is a representation of Adam contemplating the destruction brought upon mankind because of his original sin in the Garden of Eden. 

Dante essentially expressed the opinion in Inferno that the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.  Let’s not be complacent with inequities and injustices in our world today.  Hold that thought!

Dante consigned those who committed acts of fraud to the eighth circle of Hell.  He thus placed them just above the worst of his nine circles of Inferno, where those who committed cold-hearted intentional acts of treachery and treason were to be found. 

Four centuries after Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, another famous satirist named Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels.  This parody of the genre of literature known as travelers’ tales was a biting satire on human nature and folly.  In it, Jonathan Swift regarded fraud as amongst the worst of all sins:

"They (the Lilliputians) look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death;  for they allege that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves;  but honesty has no fence against superior cunning: and since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted or connived at, or hath no Law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone and the knave gets the advantage."

                                                                                      --- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

In the documentary film Inside Job, narrated by Matt Damon, the director Charles Ferguson provides a comprehensive analysis of the global financial crisis of 2008.  This crisis cost more than $20 trillion, and it caused millions of people to lose their jobs and homes in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.  Ferguson states unequivocally that pervasive Wall Street fraud was involved in this crisis, which nearly caused a global financial collapse. 

“Three years after a horrific financial crisis caused by massive fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail,” Ferguson said.  “And that’s wrong!”  No reports have yet come out as to whether any of the financial executives have yet arrived in the eighth circle of Hell. 

It is noteworthy that millions of small-time criminals, poor people, desperate people, and even harmless marijuana users fill our prisons and jails in the U.S.  The really big crooks, however, who have engaged in various shades of fraud in crashing the national and international economy, and who have secured trillions of dollars in bailouts to prevent another Great Depression, are treated as heroes and luminaries.  These members of the hyper-privileged elite of our society are ironically the primary people that most of our national policies are designed to reward. 

No one has gone to prison for the Inside Job that caused the Great Recession, or for all the widespread mortgage fraud.  No one is incarcerated for having used risky financial derivatives to make huge sums of money.  No one is being punished for the ruses that resulted in a harsh recession that necessitated federal government bailouts.  Not a single person has gone to prison for these schemes that have caused tens of millions of people to lose a good portion of their retirement security. 

Meanwhile, millions of hard-working Americans like teachers, firefighters and government employees are being blamed for budget deficits, instead of the blame being assigned to the bankers, Wall Street fat cats, and corporate CEOs who largely control the economy and helped cause the dire economic straits we have been collectively enduring since late 2008.  Tens of millions of people are being required to face austerity measures as an unintended consequence of these adverse developments.  Scandalous is far too mild a word for this state of affairs.

A Bizarre Development

A secretly-taped video surfaced in mid-September 2012 of Mitt Romney talking to supporters at a $50,000 per person fundraiser.  In the video, he declared that his job is “not to worry about” the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax.  In the video, he conflated “47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” with 47% of people who pay no income taxes, and he expressed disdain that bordered on contempt for the 47% of Americans “who are dependent on government, who believe that they are victims … who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

Embarrassed by the revealing attitudes that he expressed to his rich supporters in the video, but unyielding, he defended his statement the next day, conceding only that perhaps it was “not elegantly stated”.  Inelegance, Mr. Romney, is not the problem.  It wasn’t merely an unfortunate choice of words;  it is a poor choice of ideological beliefs.  In particular, it is an unfortunately bad choice of words and beliefs for a really rich guy to profess in his attitude toward the middle class and the working poor. 

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks provided a damning perspective on the Romney video.  “The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers.  They are Republicans.  They are senior citizens.  They are white men with high school degrees.  As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefitted from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.” 

Romney’s words reflect a glib willingness to oversimplify issues, and to distort them to try to make them conform to his overarching capitalist worldview.  One problem with his hewing to right-wing economic orthodoxy is that it represents a basically untenable position of advocating a doubling-down on the regressive and unsustainable Bush era tax policies.  Another problem is that it is real difficult to sell unempathetic “you’re on your own economics” to people who are struggling with economic hard times.  Romney’s attitude seems so out of touch and narrowly self-serving;  he would be far better off by embracing more genuine attitudes that are fairer to the majority of Americans, and to people in future generations!

The video is sensational because it basically shows Mitt Romney launching a hostile salvo against millions of Americans who he is trying to dupe into supporting him and Republican candidates for Congress.  It turns out that half of the nearly 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes don’t earn enough money to pay income taxes.  Most of the rest who pay no income taxes receive tax credits that offset their meager incomes because they are senior citizens, low-income parents, or working poor people.  Many military personnel and veterans are amongst the 47%.  Revealingly, the top ten states where these 47% of people live are in the South, where Republican Governors preside over economic policy in states like Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.

There are also, curiously, 4,000 households that earn more than $1 million per year amongst this 47%.  Somehow these people twist the tax code into a tax-free triumph for themselves. 

The President of the United States is responsible for serving all the American people, and not to abandon those who favor more progressive ideas and policies.  “Personally,” concludes David Brooks, “I think Romney’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not -- some sort of cartoonish government-hater.”  I guess it’s too late for Mitt to try the “I’m a maverick” approach that John McCain used four years ago, so maybe he should come clean and begin advocating much fairer, more respectful, and more moderate policies!

Peggy Noonan, the conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, has described Mitt Romney’s campaign as “a rolling calamity.”  Rush Limbaugh, unrepentant, offers his advice:  “Go ideological!”  He wants Mitt to pander even more slavishly to the extreme right.  He assumes that Romney hasn’t yet gone far enough toward the loony-tunes crowds’ enthusiasms.

Mitt, trying to evade specific details of his policies, says, “The devil is in the details.  The angel is in the policies.”  If that’s true, the angel policies are arguably the ones that make the lives of the vast majority of people more secure, rather than just making the rich richer.  The right policies are the best plan, NOT the far right policies!

Let’s be fair.  If Mitt Romney seems a lot like “a well-oiled weathervane”, there is good reason.  He was a more sensible and moderate politician as Governor of Massachusetts, but then he had to try to wrest the Republican nomination from a strange and fractious coalition of religious fundamentalists, social conservatives, angry taxpayers, frustrated small businessmen, opponents of healthcare reform, opponents of collective bargaining by workers, immigrant scapegoaters, exploitive capitalists, apologists for unlimited power by giant corporations, billionaires, deluded deniers of science, patriarchal dominionists, Strict Father absolutists, gun lovers, and tax evaders. 

Mitt had to pander to this wacko right-wing fringe and abandon the more centrist zone that once represented the Republican Party when it had more honorable integrity.  He had to suck up to the new extreme right because he was competing with characters like Newt Gingrich, Donald Trump, Michelle Bachmann, Hermann Cain, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, and Rick Santorum.  Now he’s having a Hell of a hard time maneuvering his Etch-A-Sketch.  Good God!

The Republican Modus Operandi

The Republican Party had a preposterously entertaining soap-opera-like primary election season, and finally settled on Mitt Romney as their candidate.  His main plank is to slash income taxes on high-income earners and giant corporations from a current top rate of 35% to a top rate of 25%.  This is simply the wrong medicine for a patient that is seriously ailing.  With the national debt now exceeding $16 trillion for the first time ever, it is time to stop borrowing money from future generations to give it to rich people today.

Romney has actually been more liberal than the Republican Party base for most of his career.  This is one reason he had such a dog-gone hard time securing the nomination from Republican voters who were wary of what he actually stands for.  He had to lie to them and claim that he was “severely conservative” as Governor of Massachusetts, and he had to make some of the most impressive political flip-flops in American history to try to convince them to choose him as their candidate. 

The Republican base wanted a candidate who would represent their extreme positions.  They wanted a candidate who would guarantee them that women would be denied reproductive rights and all freedom of self-determination if they got pregnant.  They wanted an ironclad guarantee that legal “rights of personhood” would be assured for a woman’s egg as soon as it was fertilized by a sperm, no matter how the squiggly little guy got into her fallopian tubes. 

The Republican base wanted more radical positions on tax cuts, on reductions in the size of government, on the elimination of social programs and federal agencies, and on the rejection of all initiatives designed to control guns and military spending.  The Republican base also wanted to completely repeal the health care reform bill passed by Democrats in Congress in 2009, so they were uneasy about the fact that it had been created on a template that used the same mechanisms and rationales as the Massachusetts healthcare law enacted by Romney in 2006. 

The Republican strategy in the general election has been to pretend that their takeover attempt is approved by Almighty God.  They want the American people to believe that their attempt to gain more power is a reflection of supreme righteousness, the sanctity of family values, and honorable commitments to the greater good of the people.  But give us a break!  Look at the stated political platform of the Republican Party and the actual details of vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s economic plan, and figure out their real values from these stated proposals and party planks.

Romney has called Paul Ryan’s economic plan “marvelous.”  Anyone who acquaints themselves with its details will find out that it is ideological orthodoxy, and completely unlikely to be fairer to the majority of Americans.  The plan calls for tax breaks for corporations and high-income earners, coupled with a sad variety of austerity measures to be imposed on the masses. 

Republicans rhapsodize with vaulting rhetoric about American Exceptionalism, but their bait-and-switch policies worship exceptionally generous policies for the top 2% of American income earners and drastically more stingy policies for everyone else.  They claim to represent “a shining city on a hill”, but their blurry vision can be seen more accurately to resemble a glaring searchlight atop fortress walls that is blinding many Americans so that they will be deluded into voting against fairer, more common sense solutions to our society’s numerous solvable problems.

In addition to their overarching goal of cutting taxes for people who are already wealthy, their goal of imposing a more reactionary form of right-wing social engineering upon the American people -- especially women! -- is anathema to our ideals.  The American people value liberty, and hate authoritarianism.  If one reads Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, one stumbles across this disconcerting observation:                                                                                                

  “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying the cross.”

One of the Tea Party darlings at the Republican National Convention was Florida Senator Marco Rubio.  Listen in to his speech at the RNC:  “We are bound together by common values … faith in our Creator is the most important American value of them all.”  Whose God?  And, is this value more important than honesty, personal freedoms, the protection of children, protections of the environment, peaceful coexistence, ensuring that poverty doesn’t become so widespread that there is violence in the streets, and caring about others, including people in future generations?

Look.  Listen.  Think clearly and honestly about what’s happening here.  Two radically different visions are being peddled to the American people in the most costly propaganda blitz of all time, as the run-up to the November 2012 elections continues. 

The attack ads are literally addling people’s brains.  The American people are beginning to hate this barrage of propaganda, so it’s high time to pass legislation and ratify an Amendment to the Constitution to prevent corporations and rich people from making unlimited contributions to the great brainwashing machine of election politics.  Even the five “conservatives” on the Supreme Court who have authorized this tsunami of political spending may someday see that their partisan decision is one of the worst rulings in the history of the Supreme Court.  Right, Supreme Justice John Roberts?

Mitt Romney is trying to convince the American people that he has a better plan for our nation than Barack Obama.  He refuses, however, to divulge any real details of what his plan actually entails.  By spelling out only one thing clearly -- his plan to cut taxes on rich people and big corporations from a top rate of 35% to a top rate of 25% -- he is essentially doubling down on the discredited trickle down theory, and lionizing the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few.  Read all about this gambit in Sad Implications of the Two Dueling Santa Claus Strategies in Political Economics.  It’s a real Laffer!

Mitt Romney will not reveal any details about the large spending cuts that he would make to offset the enormous loss of revenues associated with his proposed huge tax-cuts.  His plan would almost certainly increase the amount of deficit spending and the national debt, which are already at such dangerously high levels that they risk far worse economic turmoil in the future. 

Budgets are not just accounting documents.  They are not just financial constructs.  They are plans that reflect moral priorities.  Again, it seems imperative that we do the right thing!  -- and NOT the far right thing!

It should be perfectly clear in this contest that Barack Obama is the better candidate to lead us for the next four years.  He is better by temperament, intelligence, sensibilities, savvy, tact, and considerations of policy fairness.

“As a candidate, Mitt Romney is awkward, off-putting and hollow, so bad that if he were a

   Bain company, he would shut himself down.”

                               -- Maureen Dowd, Sept. 23, 2012 Column in the New York Times

It is time to reject Mitt Romney’s attempt to become president.  But that is not nearly enough!  The uncompromising, war-on-women enthusiasts who are Tea Party politicians in the U.S. House of Representatives should be replaced because of their hostile disinclination to work with more reasonable people for consensus solutions to national problems.  They should be thrown out of office for refusing to raise taxes on high-income earners and fairly reduce spending on entitlements and the military. 

If Republicans were to succeed in gaining more power, it would be an astonishing comeback for the political party whose domination of government from the year 2001 to 2009 resulted in the crashing of the international economy.  Their stubborn adherence to ideological dogmas have caused an international recession and heightened risks of national bankruptcies in many nations in Europe.  Another Great Depression was only barely prevented by bold actions of the Federal Reserve and treasuries of governments worldwide.  These entities were forced to print up trillions of dollars to increase liquidity and forestall a much worse economic downturn. 

Paradoxically, many Republicans have angrily denounced these remedial measures, completely misconstruing the true nature of “moral hazard”.

I urge all Americans to vote for candidates who are more moderate for all national and state offices.  Then, after the elections, the American people must demand real reform, and move confidently toward a dramatically fairer, healthier, more financially stable, and more ecologically sane future.

True patriots would reject the new strain of extremism that has hijacked the Republican Party, and send the architects of cynically divisive partisanship back to the drawing board to come up with more positive visions and a fairer, more forward-thinking set of plans for a better future for all.  They would demand a new breed of conservative that is more moderate, more honorable, more fair-minded, more ethical, and more empathetic toward the vast majority of American men and women and children whose well-being has been undermined in the past 30 years by trickle-down supply-side voodoo economic deceptions which have been propagated to give rich people ever-bigger slices of the American pie.

Parallels between Republican Electioneering Ploys and Hostile Takeovers in Business

Today in the 2012 presidential campaign, Republican proposals, maneuvers and propaganda resemble what in business is known as a “hostile takeover”.  Let us ponder how this state of affairs has come to be, because it’s scandalous and outrageous, and deserves closer scrutiny.

Mitt Romney was a shrewd businessman, and the epitome of a ruthless Wall Street fat cat.  He formed the private equity company Bain Capital in 1984.  This corporation used a slick scheme to make huge profits.  His mode of operation was similar to, if somewhat more genteel than, the brazen gambits of specialists in corporate raids, asset stripping, and hostile takeovers like Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, and many other former clients of the convicted felon Michael Milken. 

In business, hostile takeover attempts are a means of trying to take over another company against the wishes of the target company’s executive management and Board of Directors.  Mitt Romney’s approach was less hostile.  He essentially bribed the target company’s management so that they also would benefit from the deal.  But in general, the deals he conjured up hurt the majority of employees of the company that was being taken over.  Many employees were terminated in order to make companies more profitable.  More than 20% of the companies that Bain targeted between 1984 and 1999 either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or went out of business by the end of the eighth year after Bain had invested.

Warren Buffett has characterized private equity firms like Bain Capital as “deal flippers” who often do little to increase the real value of their targets.  By the time Mr. Romney left Bain Capital, “the investments it had sold off had made enough money to deliver an average annual return that amounted to as much as 100 percent before fees,” according to several of its investors.

Other people criticize private equity fund managers like Mitt Romney because their gambits have resulted in getting politicians to let them pay very low tax rates on their profits.  This is true political corruption.  “When you look at the amount of money these guys are making,” said Victor Fleischer, a legal scholar who has consulted with the Senate Finance Committee about changing the law, “the effective tax rate is just sort of shocking to the conscience.”  Just sort of shocking!

Today, filled with hubris and bristling with money made from these schemes, and supported by social conservatives and a phalanx of self-interested billionaires, Mitt Romney has identified another poorly-managed and potentially even more highly lucrative takeover target:  the United States government itself. 

Mitt Romney is basically asking the American people to trust him.  We should examine the real facts, and consider whether his record indicates he really merits our trust.

Romney’s strategies at Bain Capital essentially involved the identification of undervalued or poorly managed companies.  Once identified, he then sought to get the top management and the Board of Directors to agree with plans to improve its corporate performance and profitability.  Often he would utilize a masterful scam called a leveraged buyout.  This is a tactic that involves taking over a company with a relatively small down payment by borrowing against the assets of the acquired company to pay most of the purchase price.  These highly leveraged gambits generated very large fees for partners and investors.

The unfortunate consequences of these takeovers often included widespread layoffs in the vulnerable target companies, or ruthless efficiencies like the export of jobs abroad to cheaper labor countries.  The outcomes for communities where these companies were located were often negative and costly, and were generally harmful to society as a whole.  This is the reason that Texas Governor Rick Perry famously described Romney as a “vulture capitalist.” 

The huge profits that were generated by these schemes enriched a small number of partners and investors.  Furthermore, the taxes paid on the large profits were assessed at only 15% instead of the regular top rate of 35%.  This cheated American taxpayers who were left holding the bag for costs related to increased joblessness and the harm caused to communities where the companies operated.  The profits have often been hidden in foreign tax havens or private Swiss bank accounts -- this is one reason that Romney doggedly refuses to divulge any more information about his tax returns.  Ronald Reagan, suspicious of the Soviet Union, liked to use an appropriate old Russian proverb:  “Trust, but verify.”  Trust Mitt Romney?  Demand details!

Money corrupts our politics.  Private equity investors contribute huge sums to politicians to get them to advance their narrowly self-serving goals.  Then they use the power of their big profits to buy politicians and get new policies enacted that are ever-more favorable to their selfish advantages. 

Politicians pander to these smooth operators by doing their bidding and giving them perks or subsidies that are often financed with borrowed money.  The federal government’s debt has increased more than 12-fold since Bain Capital began in 1984, partially as a consequence of the unfair influence of such Wall Street scams.  The U.S. National Debt was less than $1 trillion in 1981 when Ronald Reagan came to power.  It is incredibly irresponsible for us to have allowed this debt to get to $16 trillion today!

Hostile takeovers are one of the more nefarious aspects of a capitalist economic system.  They are often catastrophic for both the management and employees of the target company.  Bain Capital was one of the most notorious players in the field of corporate takeovers, and Mitt Romney’s actions can be seen to be shrewd, ruthless and conniving.  I’m sure Romney can be a kind and decent man, but his actions have been highly negative for many, many people.

Equivocation, Prevarication, and Tergiversation

Mitt Romney simply cannot be trusted.  He’s like a snake oil salesman of old.  He is a chiseled-handsome elitist with wealthy parents who sometimes manifests a snarky attitude.  He is making a brazen effort to convince the American people to elect him to the most powerful position in the world.  His ruse to gain power is being engineered by a shrewd cast of characters that includes his running mate Paul Ryan, who reportedly has a genial personality, but who holds extreme right-wing social attitudes.  And his economic plans are environmentally, socially and fiscally irresponsible. 

Romney and Ryan are being financed by billionaires and right-wing absolutists who believe that any means is justified to achieve their ends of gaining domineering power.  This hostile takeover attempt is being aided by Karl Rove, the wily and ruthlessly Machiavellian political operative who was known as Bush’s Brain for his influence in getting George W. Bush in office -- and for acting as Senior Advisor in the White House from 2001 to 2007 to advance a variety of distinctly opprobrious “conservative” policies.  These policies have been, in many ways, a terrible fiasco for our nation. 

Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are two of the men who are helping finance this takeover attempt.  They are almost unbelievably self-serving industrialist polluters, universal healthcare opponents, and union-busters.  The far right-wing gambling casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the eighth wealthiest American, and others of his ilk are also helping finance this takeover. 

Sheldon Adelson plans to spend as much as $100 million to help Romney in his bid to win the election.  This is a sensational amount of money that dwarfs contributions of millions of regular Americans.  Revealingly, if Romney were to win, it would prove to be a fortuitous gamble for Sheldon Adelson, because Romney’s tax-cutting proposals could personally give him and his gambling companies billions of dollars worth of tax cuts and other benefits. 

Even Sheldon Adelson was opposed to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that allowed unlimited political contributions.  He told Forbes Magazine: “I’m against very wealthy people attempting to, or influencing, elections.  But as long as it’s doable, I’m going to do it.”  He has already made $70 million in campaign contributions to Republicans in the 2012 elections, tripling the previous record for an individual trying to buy influence.  Many donations to Republican Super-PACS, however, are done secretly.  No disclosure is required. 

Secrecy is worrisome in a democracy.  What else is secret?  Well, for one, the identities of Mitt Romney’s advisors on energy policies.  Right, right, there’s oilman Harold Hamm, the 30th richest person in the U.S., who has given almost $1 million to Romney’s cause.  But Mr. Hamm is the only energy adviser disclosed to the public.  All others are secret.  Anyone want to bet about how many of the same people and organizations who influenced the energy policies of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are now coaching Mitt?

    “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again;
        there is nothing new under the sun.”

                                                      --- Ecclesiastes 1:9

What else is secret?  I mean other than all of Romney’s tax return information from before 2010.  Well, frankly, almost all of the details that Romney specifically proposes as economic policy are undisclosed.  What would he do with health care?  Medicare?  Social Security?

Romney, Ryan and Republicans nationwide are casting dishonest aspersions on President Obama and distorting his record while staunchly advocating anti-tax, anti-union, anti-immigrant, anti-government, women-oppressing, science-denying, and anti-environmental ideologies that are contrary to the greater good of the American people.  Many “conservatives” try to paint Barack Obama as a socialist, a fascist, or even the antichrist, rather than as a good man with a commendable family who is trying hard to make the United States a better country.

“A great number of people think that they are thinking when they are merely rearranging  

   their prejudices.”

                        --- William James

The Bush/Cheney years were disastrous from the point of view of fiscal discipline, government spending control, oversight, accountability, social responsibility, fair-mindedness, peaceful coexistence, and protections of the environment.  We simply cannot have these years repeated!

These words are not merely rhetorical.  We cannot let Republicans grab power again until they develop much fairer policies.  Don’t fall for their devious Super PAC-funded attack ads and hard-times swindles.  We must focus our efforts and priorities on vibrant and fair-minded nation-building at home, and NOT on tax cuts for rich people or hubristic, militaristic nation-building abroad.

I call on women in particular, and men willing to give women a fair modicum of respect, to see beyond Mitt Romney’s handsome face, gleaming smile and inauthentic assertions.  He is lying through his teeth!  He has flip-flopped throughout the course of his political career, and is now reassuring people in the backward-looking, socially conservative Republican base that he will slavishly pander to them if he and Paul Ryan are elected.  One way he has promised to do this is by amending the Constitution to deprive women of all rights to make their own reproductive decisions.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for

   which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

                                            --- Official U.S. Pledge of Allegiance from 1942 to 1954

Note that the words “under God” were added to this Pledge in 1954 as a kind of propaganda initiative in response to fears of godless communism.  This was during the Joseph McCarthy era and the Cold War.  Republicans are now, seemingly cynically, using the name of God to try to divide the country to advance their narrow agenda. 

All religions have a spectrum of adherents that runs from the liberal left to the far right, and it is high time that moderates and progressives in every faith reject the power-abusing right-wing elements that have dominated their religious establishments.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio gave a speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention in which he declared:  “Our national motto is ‘In God We Trust’, reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all.”  Correct me if I’m wrong, Senator Marco Rubio, but I hear you saying that your belief in God is more important than any of the noble principles that our Founders proclaimed.  Do you really value faith in “our Creator” as more important than striving to ensure the domestic tranquility or the general welfare?  Do I hear you correctly stating that your belief in your Catholic God is more important than other people’s beliefs, like atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Mormons, Moslems or any other religious faith?

Marco Rubio’s attitude is divisive, and not likely to help us form a more perfect Union.  There is a very good reason that when politicians take their oaths of office, they place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and that they DO NOT put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.  A robust separation of church and state is an important principle for peaceable coexistence and democratic fairness.

If we really want liberty and justice for all in our great nation, we will need to work together to actualize this fair-minded democratic vision.  Let’s strive to reach unity through building a win/win consensus, and reject ploys to establish win/lose gambits of ever-more unfair policies.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once stated: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  This arc can, and does, get bent backward toward more injustice for periods of time, and as one of our Founding Fathers once stated:  “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

A second American revolution is needed to overthrow the insidiously despotic aspects of the new monarchs of tyranny in our nation.  This second American Revolution must ensure that the architects of radical social and environmental injustices are removed from the halls of power. 

The first American Revolution threw off the tyranny of an imperial and undemocratic political system and an unfairly exploitive mercantile economic system that taxed people in the colonies without fair representation.  The second American Revolution must throw off the tyranny of corrupting corporate politics and the hegemony of wealthy partisans whose selfish greed has oppressed the people and is stealing from future generations to enrich themselves today.

This new revolution should be peaceful, progressive and fair-minded.  It should be guided by a visionary Bill of Rights for Future Generations, as specifically proposed in the Earth Manifesto.  This is just Common Sense!

I believe that English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton was onto something when he coined the adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”  The salvo of ideas in the Earth Manifesto is my attempt to see if sensible ideas can overcome conservative spin and propaganda.  Let it be!

                        --------------       THE END       --------------

      Truly,

         Dr. Tiffany B. Twain          

           Hannibal, Missouri

             Thanks for reading!  Help strengthen these ideas with convincing editorial feedback!    

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    “Whatever you think or dream you can do, begin it. 

         Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

                                              --- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

       “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

                                                                                  --- Victor Hugo

        “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. 

        Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” 

                                                                  --- Margaret Mead

“My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role,

  Is to try and express what we all feel.  

   Not to tell people how to feel.  

    Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”

                                                                            --- John Lennon (1940 – 1980)

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                         <<< Subliminal Message:  Get organized! >>>

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DEDICATION

A Clear-Eyed Patriot is dedicated to one of the most perceptive and visionary persons I’ve ever met, who died tragically of a sudden heart failure not long ago at the age of 49.  He was an eminently remarkable man who was boyish at heart and yet exceptionally intelligent, aware, energetic, alert, and gregarious.  He greeted his friends and acquaintances alike with enthusiastic bear hugs, and conversed with them passionately about important causes and ecologically sane ideas.  He was commendably committed to making the world greener and more sustainable.  He worked tirelessly as a county official who took courageous stands on local, regional and international issues to help advance more sensible priorities in public planning.  He was a keen listener who was forward thinking, open-minded, and sensible in his assessments of the merits of ideas.  He loved his dog, and his cats, and animals in general, and consequently became a vegetarian in the last year of his life.  He also loved nature and the out-of-doors, and was a strong proponent of finding ways to ensure that open spaces will be protected for people today and in future generations. 

            One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies

                                                               An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

1.  ECOLOGICAL SANITY.  Make a revolutionary commitment to sustainable existence and a better quality of life for people today and in the future.  To accomplish this goal, a farsighted Ecological Balance Initiative should be enacted which gives higher priority to the smart ideas specifically articulated in Three Bills of Right:  A Triumvirate of Responsible Actions for the Greater Good.

2.  BALANCED BUDGETS INITIATIVE.  Stop the federal government from recklessly indulging in the short-term expediency of borrowing enormous amounts of money to squander it on tax breaks for rich people, fighting wars, financing corporate bailouts, and giving overly-generous “entitlements” to people.  Make a binding commitment to reduce the spiraling use of debt, and to stop the lavish waste of taxpayer funds and borrowed money.  To achieve this, a new mechanism should be established that that will be effective in discouraging our expedient inclination to live beyond our means.  We should create a Fiscal Responsibility Act that will force lawmakers and the White House to set honest priorities and end shortsighted government “borrow-and-spend” tactics that result in spending on waste, misguided subsidies, corrupt profiteering, wars of aggression, and unaffordable entitlements.

The following five-year plan is guaranteed to be effective, because it will give powerful motives to the primary deciders in our system -- wealthy people and big corporations -- to support annual budgets that are more nearly balanced.  Implement this plan gradually over the next 5 fiscal years according to a fair-minded methodology:  Require Big Businesses and the Wealthy to be assessed for federal deficits at the end of every fiscal year.  For the fiscal year running from October 1, 2012 to September 30, 2013, assess 20% of any federal budget deficit as follows:  half of this obligation will be assessed to businesses that earn net incomes of more than $2 million, and the other half will be assessed to individuals with taxable incomes above $1 million.  Allocate these assessments on a progressive scale with higher percentages for higher incomes.  Then, in the following fiscal year, assess 40% of any deficits using the same methodology;  and in the year after that, assess 60%, then 80%, and then 100% of any such deficits. 

These powerful vested interests have been the primary beneficiaries of the expediency of mortgaging the future to gain irresponsible benefits today, and this plan will cause them to shift from strongly supporting deficit spending to finding definite ways to end this short-term-oriented and exploitive scheme.

3.  FAIR TAXATION INITIATIVE.  Make taxation more steeply graduated.  Do this by lowering taxes on low levels of income for everyone, and by increasing taxes on all incomes in excess of $250,000.  In keeping with the sensible compromise of the wise Solon, the incomes of the wealthiest people should be taxed at rates that are 12 times the rates on the poor. 

These egalitarian changes in tax law could be called the Social Justice Taxation Act. Here is a providential recommendation for this restructuring of income tax rates:

                                                Expected 2012           Proposed

                                                  Federal Tax            Federal Tax

                                                   Rates on                  Rates on                 Net

                                                 Net Income *          Net Income *         Change

$              0    to $     17,400               10%                           4%               Lower

$      17,400    to $     70,700              15%                         12%               Lower

$     70,700    to $    142,700              25%                        25%            Unchanged

$    142,700    to $   217,450               28%                        28%            Unchanged

$    217,450    to $   388,350               33%                       33%            Unchanged

$    388,350   to $   500,000               35%                        38%               Higher

$    500,000    to $ 1,000,000              35%                        40%               Higher

$  1,000,000    to $5,000,000              35%                        42%               Higher

$  5,000,000   to $25,000,000             35%                        45%              Higher

$25,000,000 and above                        35%                        48%               Higher

*  Note:  These rates are for the example of the status “Married, Filing Jointly”.

It should be recognized that the lower tax rates on the first $70,700 of net income are very fair because they apply to each and every taxpayer in this category equally.  The higher rates on incomes over $388,350 are higher, but still a sensationally good deal for high-income earners, considering that the top rate was at least 70% for every year from 1936 to 1981.

Taxes on capital gains should also be revised to be more steeply graduated.  Likewise, taxes on rich kids’ inheritances should be made more progressive.  Here is an Estate Tax reform proposal:  Allow a generous exclusion of a non-taxable amount for each estate, like $2,500,000.  For estates worth more than $2.5 million, a 30% tax should be assessed on the amount of estates between $2.5 million and $5 million, 40% on amounts between $5 million and $10 million, 50% on those amounts between $10 million and $25 million, and 60% on any amounts in excess of $25 million.

“Half of the net increase in tax revenues that is generated by this Initiative should be applied to reduce budget deficits.  The other half of the net tax increase should be dedicated to combat the social and environmental injustices that exist in our society today, including provisions to prevent the externalizing of costs upon society that are creating profound environmental injustices amongst poor people and minority communities.”

              --- Three Bills of Right:  A Triumvirate of Responsible Actions for the Greater Good

Four other strategies should be used to ensure that taxation inequities are minimized, as adduced in Three Bills of Right:  these include the elimination of tax loopholes that allow giant corporations to evade tens of billions of dollars in U.S. federal income taxes each year, the requirement for hedge fund managers to pay taxes at regular rates instead of low capital gains rates, the reduction in tax advantages that investors receive for dividend income and capital gains, and the reform of Estate Taxes on inheritances of rich kids so that they are more steeply graduated. 

To reassure Americans that these tax changes will not result in a large and more wasteful federal government, an overarching commitment should be made to modestly reducing the number of government employees through attrition and smart planning.  Wasteful spending should be cut in the military budget, pork barrel spending should be rigorously controlled, corporate welfare subsidies should be eliminated, and bureaucratic red tape should be evaluated and streamlined.

4.  A SOUND ECONOMY.  Protect the economy by reestablishing sensible banking and financial industry regulations to prevent the harm done by speculation, overly-risky debt leveraging, corporate conglomeration, and unchecked conflicts of interest.  It is high time that the unaccountable power of big corporations is controlled.  Broadly-distributed prosperity must be promoted in our nation, and abuses of power and unfair privileges for insiders must be prevented.  Economically sound policies and innovative ideas must be embraced.  Sensible public investments and prudent risk-taking and greater transparency must be encouraged.  Values, not profits alone, should guide economic decisions. 

The overarching goal of the economy must be economic justice and farsighted environmental policies and the sustainability of our aggregate activities.  We must stop pandering so exclusively to wealthy people, CEO’s, speculators, war profiteers, polluters, the radical religious right, and economic fundamentalists who oppose sensible regulations and oversight.  Trends in our society and government must be reversed to discourage actions that create serious systemic risks, such as highly-leveraged speculation, fraud, fiscal irresponsibility, discriminatory practices, deception, dishonesty, and extreme partisanship.  Government bailouts should be used only to safeguard the greater interests of the mainstream public, and not just the interests of investors and Wall Street banks.  All economic stimulus and recovery efforts should contain socially just provisions and ecologically sound plans.

The practice of increasing profits by externalizing costs onto society must also be addressed.  This will help prevent serious misallocations of resources.  Here is a fair recommendation for how to immediately begin accounting for real costs that are being unfairly and irresponsibly externalized onto society.  An estimated $300 billion in costs are being incurred in the U.S. every year associated with pollution and toxic wastes, related respiratory diseases, harms to the environment, and natural disasters like intensifying storms, heat waves, flooding, and crop failures which are being made worse by global warming-exacerbated changing weather patterns.  This $300 billion represents about 2% of the annual U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

Proposal:  Assess an average of 2% Future Viability Assessment on all products and services.  This action would effectively require the inclusion of these real costs where they should properly be reflected.  Do this on a progressive scale, with higher assessments for polluting industries that are involved in practices that are distinctly unsustainable, and lower assessments for greener industries.   All industries should be classified by a panel of independent-minded Nobel Prize-winning economists according to the degree the industries contribute to unsustainable production and consumption.  For instance, the most polluting industries should be required to include a 4% assessment, while the greenest industries would be accorded a 0% assessment. 

Use 50% of the proceeds of this Future Viability Assessment to reduce the annual U.S. budget deficits that are being incurred.  Use the other 50% of the proceeds of this assessment to invest in pollution prevention and mitigation activities, the clean-up of toxins and pollution, coverage for medical costs related to asthma and other environmental-damage afflictions, the costs of climate change impacts and natural disasters, and more robust protections of forests, wetlands, oceans, coral reefs, fresh water resources, National Parks, wilderness areas and open spaces. 

To partially offset the regressive impact of higher costs on people who are least able to afford it, a $300 deduction from total tax due should be given to every person on their tax returns.  This would offset the average 2% higher costs on the first $15,000 of annual spending.

5.  ENERGY POLICIES.  The United States needs to achieve independence from its addiction to finite resources of non-renewable fossil fuels.  The best way to do this is to boldly change course on national energy policies and to invest in a world energy-modernization program along the lines of the “Ten-Point Plan for Good Jobs and Energy Independence” as proposed by the Apollo Alliance.  This coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community leaders advocates revolutionary changes that will shift the emphasis of our national energy policies to greater efficiency of energy use, conservation of energy resources, and the development of fossil fuel alternatives.  Such changes should be designed to help us make significant reductions in climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions.  These are extremely important steps for us to take in order to create a sound economy, improve our national security, and ensure ecological well-being.

6.  MIDDLE CLASS FAIRNESS.  Strengthen and expand the middle class and improve the opportunities for social mobility.  To do this, commitments must be renewed to policies that benefit the majority of people, rather than merely pandering to the rich.  The health of the middle class has been significantly undermined in recent decades by unfair and regressive tax and social policies.  To strengthen this vital segment of American society, we must once again implement strategies that helped build the middle class in the first place:  (a) regulate Big Business so that it primarily benefits “We the People”, and not just investors and wealthy people;  (b) make higher education more affordable for everyone by providing inexpensive financing and a program similar to the post-World War II “G.I. Bill”;  (c) invest in our nation’s crumbling physical infrastructure rather than in wars abroad;  (d) restore taxation that is fairer and more progressive;  (e) create balanced incentives for home ownership that are fair to a maximum number of people; (f) enact and enforce laws that give workers more power in their struggle against the abuses of capital;  (g) create a social safety net of universal healthcare, and reduce the severe inequities that currently exist in medical care;  and (h) provide for a true Social Security retirement insurance program that protects retirees from having their payroll taxes squandered by the government.  These goals would be advanced by implementing the proposals in Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues.

7.  WAR AND PEACE.  Find a way to courageously commit the United States to diplomatic and peaceful resolutions of conflicts between all nations in the world.  We must pursue foreign policies that enhance the mutual security of all and respect the sovereignty of other nations.  We must reject wars for oil and other resources.  Effective ways must be found to prevent military aggression and preemptive warfare and endless military occupations of other countries.  Policy deciders must be prevented from waging wars to divert attention and money from domestic problems.  We cannot allow power to be abused in the name of national security. 

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the war hero of World War II and U.S. President from 1956 to 1961, warned Americans about the “military-industrial complex” and the "disastrous rise of misplaced power".  He emphatically and wisely counseled:  "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” 

A Cabinet-level Department of Peace should be created to advance cooperative problem solving and statesmanship on the international stage.  This will help responsibly resolve current armed conflicts and prevent the impetuses that drive future ones.  Stronger international agreements, laws, and institutions should be supported to prevent wars, torture, and genocide. 

A summit of Middle Eastern countries should be convened to develop strategies to solve conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in ways that are most likely to ensure that these nations do not become failed states.  A bold new plan must be developed to guarantee a safe homeland for Palestinians and to make sure that peaceful coexistence with Israel is assured.  An initiative should be launched to reduce the influence of radical extremism and fundamentalism in religions worldwide.  International social justice, human rights and sustainable development should be actively promoted as top priorities along with these proposed peace-building initiatives.  Significant taxes should be levied on all sales of guns, ammunition and military weapons, with the funds generated by these taxes to be used to create more just societies and to engage in proactive peace-building programs. 

8.  CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS.  Defend our Constitution and its checks and balances from infringements by the Executive Branch.  The responsibilities of Congress and the civil liberties of citizens must not be reduced by aggressive expansions in the power of the Presidency.  Unwarranted secrecy must yield to greater openness.  The exploitation of public fears to divide people, and the use of propaganda and deceit must not be allowed to suppress dissent.  Spying on the American people with warrantless monitoring of communications must be curtailed.  Violations of international treaties on torture should be renounced, and any future uses of “extraordinary renditions” of prisoners to offshore prisons should be prohibited.  Secret military tribunals, the abridgement of habeas corpus rights, the obstruction of oversight and investigations, and the disdain for human rights must be circumvented.  Workers’ rights and collective bargaining powers must be fairly protected.  The use of signing statements by the President to evade rules of law, which were so abused by George W. Bush, must be limited.  The judicial system must be made fairer by ensuring that right-wing judges do not consistently side with corporate interests over those of the people and dominate our federal court system and the Supreme Court.

9.  ETHICAL POLITICS.  Politicians and our government must be made more responsive to the needs of the people.  To accomplish this, publicly financed Clean Money, Clean Election legislation should be enacted and far-reaching campaign finance reform should be instituted. A far-reaching Congressional Ethics Act should be enacted to prevent politicians from giving in to the corrupting influence of corporate lobbyists and Big Money.  Bipartisan initiatives should be implemented to reduce the influence of institutionalized bribery.  Misguided perks and wrongheaded subsidies should be eliminated.  The overarching power that big corporations have in Congress should be reduced. The interests of workers, women, children, minorities, entrepreneurs, small businesses, and future generations should be protected.  Our American democracy should be strengthened by eliminating ethical conflicts of interest and influence peddling.  Deceptive practices, rash risk-taking, favoritism for the rich, cronyism, shortsighted profiteering, media manipulation, and outright fraud should be more effectively constrained.

10.  HONEST ACCOUNTING.  Require the General Accounting Office (GAO) to improve internal controls and accounting and reporting practices, with the goal of having an unqualified audit opinion rendered to Congress and the American people on the U.S. government.  This audit opinion should certify that the financial statements of the federal government are fairly stated in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles.  In connection with this audit, the GAO (or newly-created civil Grand Juries of distinguished and responsible citizens) should be empowered to make recommendations designed to make government spending, and Defense Department spending in particular, better controlled and more frugal, honest, and accountable. 

11.  FAIR AND EQUAL HUMAN RIGHTS.  Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment to give equal rights to women and men.  The ERA was first proposed in 1923, and was once ratified by 35 of the necessary 38 states (3/4 of the 50 states).  This cornerstone of fairness should be incorporated into our great Constitution.  Likewise, a new Constitutional Amendment should be created to give gay men and lesbian women fair treatment, equal civil rights, and reasonable protections under the law.  The U.S. Constitution should be strengthened to make clear our common agreement that no Church should be able to impose its dogmas on society, and that the guarantees in the First Amendment that ensure a separation between Church and State are strongly established.

12.  POPULATION GROWTH.  One of the fundamental contributing factors to all of our social and environmental problems and conflicts in the world is the surging number of human beings on Earth.  Global human population growth needs to be reduced from its current net increase of more than 70 million people per year.  To do this, we must provide better education and opportunities to girls and women worldwide.  Women’s reproductive healthcare clinics should be established that provide free contraceptives to women everywhere.  This would have a great humanitarian collateral benefit of simultaneously reducing the transmission of sexually-transmitted diseases like AIDS.  Steps should be taken to ensure that the ‘Global Gag Rule’ that restricts U.S. support for family planning programs abroad is never again imposed.  The United States should increase its annual contributions to the United Nations Population Fund.  Women should be guaranteed the right to make their own personal reproductive choices.  Women who do not want children must not be forced to have them.  To codify this fair-minded goal, an Amendment to the Constitution that establishes reproductive rights for women should be enacted, as defined by the practical Roe vs. Wade decision of the Supreme Court. 

       ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To accomplish these twelve big initiatives, political leaders should be elected who promise to act as fair, reasonable and honorable representatives who champion the greater good.  Politicians should be expected to keep the best interests of the American people foremost in their minds in all policy-making considerations.  Effective systemic changes must be made to prevent the control of our government by those who represent special privileges for small elites like wealthy people, CEOs, war profiteers, polluters and the radical religious right.  We must champion and celebrate honesty and deny power to those who deceive us and exploit people’s fears.  We should choose politicians who advocate fiscally responsible and egalitarian policies, eschew authoritarian abuses of power and military interventions, oppose discrimination against minorities, and reject ecologically unwise courses of action.  

        Truly,   

            Dr. Tiffany B. Twain    

              Hannibal, Missouri       

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                           Sustainability Index

                                                              An Earth Manifesto assessment by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

 This Index has been created to assess the status of human activities and related trends in order to provide a measure of progress toward sustainable existence for humankind.  A cursory review of the four broad categories of measurement, and the 45 specific parameters, reveal how challenging it will be to achieve long-term sustainability.

The need for an enlightening Sustainability Index is becoming increasingly clear.  In 2005, after a thousand experts in 95 countries had spent four years compiling the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the findings of this evaluation were published.  The report disclosed the extensive details of how an estimated 60% of vital services provided by healthy ecosystems are either being significantly degraded or used unsustainably. 

Scientists estimate that ecosystem services contribute about twice as much value every year in the international economy as the total global gross national product.  The implications are clear:  we simply must better protect Earth’s ecosystems to ensure a sustainable and providential future for our heirs.  There are no two ways about it.  See the Notes below the Index for important commentary.

Evaluation Parameters of Sustainability

Ecological, economic, societal and political factors are each valued on a scale of 1 to 5.  These numbers mean:

  5  -  Sustainable for an indefinite period of time

  4  -  Sustainable if important reforms are made

  3  -  Unsustainable, but remediable with concerted efforts

  2  -  Unsustainable, and requiring transformative changes in incentives and human behaviors

  1  -  Definitively and shortsightedly unsustainable

                                                                                                     Initial Rating     Latest Rating

                                                                                                      July 4, 2011      Oct. 21, 2012

                                                                    Lower numbers = Worse state

I.  Ecological Factors

  1.  Global deforestation rate                                                                    3                     3

  2.  Depletion rate of oil reserves                                                             2                     2

  3.  Depletion rate of natural gas reserves                                                3                      3

  4.  Status of clean fresh water supplies worldwide                                  2                       2

  5.  Success in recycling, reusing, and reducing wasteful consumption       2                         2

  6.  Proportion of power generated from renewable sources                     2                        2

  7.  Depletion rate of agricultural phosphate minerals                              2                        2

  8.  Carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere (Footnote 1)           4                          4

  9.  Wetlands protection trend                                                                 3                      3

 10.  Fisheries health                                                                                 2                     2

 11.  Adherence to the Clean Air and Clean Water Act                               3                       3

 12.  Ecological footprint impact  (see Footnote 2)                                     3                       3

 13.  Rate of species extinctions                                                               3                       3

 14.  Living Planet Index status evaluation                                                  3                      3       

 15.  Progress toward a new holistic and ecologically sane worldview          2                        2

II.  Economic Factors

  16.  Level of U.S. deficit spending                                                            1                     1

  17.  Total government debt in nations worldwide                                      1                       1

  18.  Retirement security for the majority                                                2                     2

  19.  Fairness of the structure of graduated income tax rates                  1                         1

  20.  Commitments to infrastructure maintenance and investment      2                       2

  21.  Financial volatility gauged by the Dow Jones Industrial Average       2                       1

  22.  Unemployment rate in the U.S.                                                          2                     2

  23.  Inflation rate and interest rates                                                       4                     4

  24.  Cost of weather-related natural disasters                                        3                       2

III.  Societal Factors

  25.  Inequality status                                                                               1                    1

  26.  Global population growth rate                                                            2                    2

  27.  Teenage pregnancy rate                                                                    3                     3

  28.  Rates of child mortality and maternal death rate in pregnancy         3                        3

  29.  Poverty gauge in aggregate                                                                2                     2

  30.  Improving overall average quality of life                                            2                    2

  31.  Life span of people worldwide                                                            4                    4

  32.  Legal open-mindedness in personal right-to-die decisions                    3                      3

  33.  Educational awareness of proper long-term priorities                        2                      2

IV.  Political Factors

  34.  International level of violent conflicts                                               2                     2

  35.  Global spending on armaments and wars                                              1                     1

  36.  Ascendancy of cooperation over competitive ruthlessness                2                         2

  37.  Balance between conservatism and liberalism                                    1                       1

  38.  Political corruption and repression gauge                                          3                      3

  39.  Anti-environmentalism fervor gauge                                                 2                       2

  40.  Fairness of the criminal justice system  in the U.S.                          2                      2

  41.  Corporate and government transparency and accountability              2                        2

  42.  Commitment to curbing the externalization of costs onto society        2                       2

  43.  Medical marijuana prohibition status                                                 3                     3

  44.  Status of women’s rights                                                                   2                     2

  45.  Progress toward a Bill of Rights for Future Generations                    1                        1

                                           Totals                                                       102                    100

SUSTAINABILITY STATUS EVALUATION: 

 Under 100  -  Poor prospects, and definitely unsustainable, with epic future disruptions likely.

   100 - 140  -  Risky prospects, with transformative changes needed to be sustainable.

   140 - 180  -  Encouraging progress toward sustainable existence.

   180 - 225  -  Salubrious progress toward sustainable existence.

HISTORICAL RECORD OF CHANGES IN ASSESSMENTS:

Factor 24.  Heat wave in late July 2011 and the summer of 2012 sets record hot temperatures in hundreds of locations across the U.S.

Factor 21.  Stock markets worldwide experience extreme volatility in August 2011 on fears of contractions in economic growth and downgrades in the trustworthiness of the United States government in dealing with its record levels of debt due to refusals by politicians to honestly deal with vitally important financial and social issues.

Footnote 1.  Bill McKibben, the creator of an international effort (350.org) to limit climate-disrupting greenhouse gas emissions, has posited that a carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere of 350 ppm is a safe level that will not cause insidious disruptions to normal global weather patterns.  The concentration of carbon dioxide currently exceeds 350 ppm;  it is about 394 ppm.  Greenhouse gas emissions associated with logging, animal husbandry, and the burning of fossil fuels have caused this concentration to increase every year for many decades, as confirmed by frequent measurements done high atop the Mauna Loa volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii in the remote reaches of the Pacific Ocean. 

The Sustainability Index will assume the following:

   Carbon dioxide below 350 ppm       = Sustainable for an indefinite period of time (5)

   Carbon dioxide at 350 to 400 ppm = Sustainable if immediate remediate reforms are made (4)

   Carbon dioxide at 400 to 450 ppm = Unsustainable, but remediable with concerted efforts (3)

   Carbon dioxide at 450 to 500 ppm = Unsustainable, and requiring radical changes (2)

   Carbon dioxide above 500 ppm       = Definitively unsustainable and highly disruptive (1)

Footnote 2.  The Average Carbon Footprint of all people on Earth indicates that we would need 1.5 planet Earths to sustain current levels of production and consumption.  There is, of course, only one planet Earth to provide for us.  If everyone consumed at the profligate per capita rate that people in the United States do, more than 5 planet Earths would be needed.

The Sustainability Index will assume the following:

  Global need for 1 planet Earth            = Sustainable for an indefinite period of time (5)

  Global need for 1 - 1.5 planet Earths   = Sustainable if far-reaching reforms are made (4)

  Global need for 1.5 - 2 planet Earths  = Unsustainable;  remediable with concerted efforts (3)

  Global need for 2 - 3 planet Earths    = Unsustainable, and requiring radical changes (2)

  Global need for 3+ planet Earths        = Definitively unsustainable and inevitably disruptive (1)

Notes from Dr. Tiffany B. Twain, creator of this Index:

Ecosystems services are provided principally by forests, wetlands, oceans, wild areas, mineral deposits, pollinators, and natural systems like the hydrologic cycle.  The human race must begin to give greater respect to these factors because they are fundamental underpinnings of our prosperity, flourishing, and even survival.  We must find ways to stop mindlessly messing with Mother Nature and harming her ability to continue providing these vital ecosystem services!

I strongly recommend the great film Home, which was produced by the eminent ecologist and aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand.  It has beautiful cinematography and a profoundly important message.  The film provides a great appreciation for the nature and scope of the ecological challenges that we collectively face.  The film can be found online by Googling Home film on YouTube.  The 93-minute-long film makes ecological truths come alive by providing cogent and compelling insights into the nature of reality and of our existence on Earth. 

One of the “inspirations” for the creation of this Sustainability Index is the entertainingly absurd “Rapture Index”.  Google it, and print it out.  Review the 45 components that are listed in this Index, and think about the implications of the doomsday fundamentalist dogma that is assumed by the person who cooked up this Index.  This must be a person who is quite confused about causative correlations of Cause and Effect in the real world.  This is a TRUE BELIEVER!  Contemplate the laughably superstitious suppositions that went into the choice of categories in The Rapture Index, and in the assessments that it makes.  The Rapture Index supposes that things like volcanoes, earthquakes and wild weather are leading to End Times.  Such ridiculous premises and fatalistic attitudes mislead us, and divert our energies from acting in positive ways to make the world a better place.

The Sustainability Index, in distinct contrast to the Rapture Index, is based on knowledge, intuition, intelligence, common sense, and extrapolated trends.  It evaluates 45 factors that have a direct bearing on our ability to live sustainably for the indefinite future.  This is an assessment that is being made with empathetic awareness and visions of an achievable better future.  Progress in creating a more sustainable future society would ensure that greater good goals are met, and that people worldwide would be more mutually secure.

Our economic systems are completely inadequate as currently constituted.  They simply must begin to take into account the mounting costs and escalating harmful impacts of our collective activities.   Common sense says the greater good will be found in improving our Sustainability Index rating from “Risky prospects” to “Encouraging progress” within the next 20 years.

It is staggering to realize that there are now more than 7 billion people alive on Earth, up from 2 billion in 1930, and 3 billion in 1960.  An estimated 15 billion more people will be born in the next 100 years.  Yikes!

Using cooperative problem solving and empathetic understanding, we could formulate mutual win/win solutions to intergenerational conflicts that so bedevil our societies and the prospects of our descendents.  We could thus ensure that we can all continue to live on Earth without destroying the vital balance of Nature and the health of the ecosystems upon which we depend.

A crucial first step would be to make a Mandatory Agreement amongst all interested parties and all nations to include a small surcharge in the price of every product and service that would be used to finance higher-priority and more ecologically sane initiatives.  Such an Agreement would help create a more propitious future for the human race, and for all life on Earth.  This Agreement would be a first step toward requiring that privatized profits are not artificially increased by the expedient and dishonest gambit of allowing costs to be socialized.

See One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies in the Earth Manifesto for great plans that would help rectify the undesirable aspects of the insidious wrong-headedness of allowing costs to be externalized onto society, now and in the future.  In particular see the fourth initiative in this list:  A Sound Economy.

When I reflect on the absurd thinking that has gone into The Rapture Index, it reminds me of Mark Twain’s entertaining cynicism contained in Letters from the Earth.  Check out Rapture Mania: Bizarre Beliefs and Epic Epiphanies in the Earth Manifesto for clearer perspective.  What, after all, are the chances that an angry God is soon going to destroy the Earth in a way prophesized by an ancient Holy Book? 

Are prophesies credible, in any way, that are part of a manipulative sublapsarian Garden of Eden story which contains a shrewd hook holding that believers must absolutely believe this story in order to be saved?  Could it be possible that millions of people really believe the Word of a book written almost 2,000 years ago that alleges there is a desirable afterlife in Heaven for believers and a grotesque burning in Hell forevermore for those who do not believe? 

It is all but certain that the world is not going to end the way the Bible says.  An enormous amount has been learned about the geological nature of the Earth in the last 50 years alone, including the earth-shaking understanding of Plate Tectonics and the true causes of volcanic activity and earthquakes.  We have also become increasingly aware of the real challenges that humanity is facing, and the likely ecological adversities we will encounter in coming decades.  These understandings provide a much better comprehension of the probable fate of the Earth and its denizens.

It is far more likely that there will be no “end of the world”, but that there will be severe damage to life on Earth.  God will not be the cause of this damage;  it will be caused by us truly, Homo sapiens. 

“Homo sapiens” means “wise humankind”, so let’s wise up and work together to improve the prospects of our thriving and survival.

I challenge all readers to print out the Home Page of the Earth Manifesto, and to review its contents.  Part Four online contains a wide range of specific ideas on how we could reform our economic and political systems to move in a direction that is much more salubrious and likely sustainable.

Conservatives tend to simplistically claim that we can solve our national and global problems by downsizing the government -- to the point of “drowning it in the bathtub” -- and by giving giant corporations and religious authorities more power and influence.  There are cogent and convincing reasons to doubt this, as explored extensively in the Earth Manifesto. 

Liberals tend to say that corporations and religious establishments are highly undemocratic, and that the best hope is that governments will be led by wiser and more fair-minded people who will be able to manage our economic systems more effectively, more fairly, and with greater far-sighted intention.  This, they maintain, is the best hope for humanity to make the world a better place through cooperative problem solving.

“I honestly believe that true good leadership involves a willingness to honestly address difficult issues -- and not to sweep them under the rug!”

            --- A Clear-Eyed Patriot Issues a Clarion Call for a Second American Revolution

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    Feedback?  Contact Dr. Tiffany B. Twain at SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com

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