Uncommon Sense and Fair-Mindedness

                                                                    An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

                                                                        One Minute to Midnight, December 31, 2012

Democracy originated in ancient Greece.  The great idea of fair representation in politics and governance first flowered forth into history in this beautiful island nation more than 2,500 years ago.  The citizens of Greece cherished freedom, and they respected reason and clarity of thought, so they loved knowledge, balanced perspective, and the concept of everything in moderation.  Mariners in Greece at the time “sailed on a sapphire sea washing enchanted islands purple in a luminous air”, as Edith Hamilton eloquently observed in The Greek Way.  Evocative music being played on a 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 statesman Pericles put it.  The Greeks embraced a kind of economy that was the opposite of mindlessly lavish consumerism and hubris-filled grandiosity.  To them, their gods were nearby “to watch over deeds of justice and kindliness”, according to 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.  From his native Persia, Darius had conquered most of what is modern day India, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans and Egypt, so he presided over the most far flung empire the world had seen until that time.  Then he marched on Greece, “a rocky land and poor”.   A legendary battle took place at Marathon in 490 BCE, and the powerful tyrant and his huge army were miraculously defeated by the freedom-loving Athenians.  This event is often seen as a pivotal moment in European history.

Ten years lapsed, and the curtain rose again for the next episode 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 1,200 ships to engage the Greeks, who had sailed their much smaller force of men in triremes to narrow waterways near the island of Salamis.  In the strategically confined straits, the freedom-defending Greeks were brilliantly led by a famed Athenian General named Themistocles, and they 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.  In any case, 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.  Its character is assessed at length herein.  I feel strongly that we should give our support to democratic, fair-minded, freethinking, common sense, progressive elements in our society, and resist and throw off the tyranny of economic fundamentalism, trickle-down deceptions, disaster capitalism, aggressive militarism, and orthodox male supremacist religious authority.

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 tax rates that are near the lowest in 80 years, despite our growing needs and record levels of public debt.  They have hijacked our society to radically remake it, so that power and privilege and wealth become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few.  A bold course of corrective action is required.  Some compelling lessons of history provide us with some clear avenues forward that make excellent 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 in 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 that vied for perks, privilege and power, many people recognized that a transformational leader was needed to find a fair compromise between competing factions, and to do so in an equitable and peaceable manner.  Somehow good sense prevailed and moderate elements secured the election of a wise Athenian statesman and lawmaker named Solon, who 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 the reforms he made, Solon is considered to be the person who established the true foundations of democracy for the first time in history. 

Solon wisely made many revolutionarily progressive reforms, including the establishment of a 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.”  So declared Will and Ariel Durant in their thought-provoking book The Lessons of History, which represented a distillation of insights they had gained from writing a dozen volumes on world history. 

Today, glaring inequalities afflict the people in the United States, and the disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor has reached new modern extremes.  Joseph Stiglitz makes it abundantly clear in The Price of Inequality how economically and socially foolish, amoral and counterproductive this shortcoming of our capitalist economic system is becoming.

As a result of the current deep levels of inequalities, our nation is in a dangerous condition.  We are confronted with three possible outcomes:  (1) to have the middle class and poor people fall into increasingly desperate states of insecurity because we continue to impose austerity measures on society and undermine the well-being of the majority;  (2) to compromise together to make our society truly fairer by implementing more steeply graduated income taxes so that more money would be available to finance social programs that reduce inequities;  or (3) to embark on new repressive measures and incarcerate more people in prisons to suppress the growing outrage over social unfairness and the increasing desperation of the majority. 

The first course of action would likely lead to 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 and pathetic end.

The lessons of history teach us that the 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!

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”

                                                                            ---- Aristotle

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 societies to improve the probability that 100 years from now we will be able to look back and say we committed ourselves to happier endings, rather than to more severe inequities or 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

I hark back to Robert Reich’s unequivocal optimism about the future of our great country.  He has pointed out that the history of the United States has a decidedly progressive trajectory, despite periods of retrogressive influence.  Reformers, he believes, will eventually succeed in making our country a fairer place than it is today.  We are at a juncture where we must heed the will of the people who have just elected relative moderates to Congress and the White House, and boldly act to create a fairer and safer country.

To achieve the greater good, honest and clear-eyed understandings are needed.  So is a hearty measure of 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, more just, and more peaceable national priorities.  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.  For an interlude of fascinating information and introspection, see the Earth Manifesto essay The Odd Brilliance of Dante’s Epic Poem, The Divine Comedy.

Common Sense Arrives on the Scene

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

                                                                    --- Thomas Paine

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.  This was the proportionally best-selling pamphlet ever published.  In it, Thomas Paine forcefully advocated independence from tyrannical rule by the British, and he proposed enlightened ideas about the need and desirability of establishing a new form of government that would be more fairly representative, so that all people’s the voices would be heard. 

It is noteworthy that Thomas Paine published Common Sense anonymously because the pamphlet was highly treasonous from the point-of-view of 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.  We now regard the cause of independence of the American colonies as having been central to the freedoms we enjoy today.  I imagine the stirring music of fifes and drums and bugles accompanying the march of these ideas.

The relativity of treason and patriotism casts a bright light onto our political strife today.  Think about this.  “Conservatives” in modern-day America want to ”drown government in the bathtub” and give the rights of personhood to corporate entities, and to thus undermine the rights and power of ordinary people.  Most of all, 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.  They also want to facilitate the exploitation of resources, stimulate consumerism, and eliminate many protections of the environment, and they want to take away the rights of women to make their own personal decisions regarding their reproductive health care and the size of their families.

The simple fact of the matter is that we have been consistently avoiding difficult decisions that are required to fairly compromise between competing interests in our society, and we have consequently used the shortsighted expediency of borrowing huge sums of money from all people in future generations to achieve misguided priorities.  This is sort of stupid, and extremely unfair to our descendents.

“Conservatives” have become increasingly unwilling to compromise with more moderate people for the greater good of society.  They have been adamantly insisting for years that high-income earners should be allowed to pay lower rates of tax on the highest levels of their incomes.  Many of them want to undermine efforts to conserve resources, and to reduce protections of public lands in order to benefit private interests.  Some advocate that we allow national parks, national forests and other public lands to be more easily exploited, or privatized.  And many believe that we should increase the amount of spending we allocate to the military, no matter how wasteful or misguided or dangerous.  Not incuriously, these are often the same people who advocate more bold U.S. aggression on the world scene -- and who want assault weapons and mega-clip ammunition to remain easy to obtain by anyone.

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 a large number of species of life on Earth.

I, Tiffany Twain, Doctor of Philosophy and illegitimate great-granddaughter of Mark Twain, have a vision for the greater good of humanity.  This vision is informed by overarching fairness principles and ideas of sustainable stewardship of our home planet, and it encompasses ideas that would help foster cooperation on the international stage and attain common sense goals of having less strife, greater fairness, better prospects for peaceful coexistence, and a more sustainable future. 

The essays of the Common Sense Revival, and the Earth Manifesto in general, are a modern, more elaborate incarnation of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.  In them, wide-ranging solutions to our common problems are proposed.  Some of the best ideas are contained in One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies.  Check them out!

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 the pollution of the environment, and social inequities, and aggression in warfare are related issues of a central problem.  This problem is that capitalist economic systems emphasize profits and technological progress without adequate regard for detrimental impacts on people and natural ecosystems.  As a result of this misguidance, real harms to untold numbers of people are discounted, and threats to the environmental commons are disregarded.  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 this form of mining wreaked on people, farms, wildlife and habitats downstream.  The Sawyer decision leads us to a variety of vitally important insights for humanity, and they are explored in Huckleberry Finn, the Forty-Niner Gold Rush, and a Resurrection of Mark Twain’s Perspectives.

Annie Leonard asserts, in the most recent film in her excellent The Story of Stuff series, 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.  Watch The Story of Change online for details -- and 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, most of them profoundly complicated, serious and contentious.  In an odd stroke of misfortune, many of the substantive issues that face humankind were not 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 when it comes to the most important issues.

How can we find a way to begin paying closer attention to big problems in our elections, and in all of our national decision-making?  How can we ensure that, in our national political discourse in general, we will address the greatest challenges in a fairer and more serious way?

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

Many domestic problems also require committed attention, like making improvements to 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 high levels of incarceration in U.S. prisons, cutting down gun violence, stopping the costly war on drugs, and reducing the unaffordable costs of wars and America’s military and security state.  We need to talk about these things, and boldly deal with them!

Think about the provocative perspective of Senior Washington Correspondent Dan Froomkin:

… according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race:  Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth. 

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of ‘false equivalency’ that bind so much of the capital's media elite, and they publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become "ideologically extreme;  scornful of compromise;  unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science;  and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." …

Lies from Republicans in general -- and standard-bearer Mitt Romney in particular -- were not limited to the occasional TV ads.  The party's most central campaign principles -- that federal spending doesn't create jobs, and that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit -- willfully disregarded the truth.

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 give stronger support to progressive leaders who will act accordingly!  Politics-as-usual is becoming too risky to allow it to be perpetuated without far-reaching reforms.

A lofty vision of hope, fair-minded social justice, and ecological salvation sails onto the scene, and is accompanied by 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, once provocatively 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 in natural ecosystems without consideration for the harmful impacts that these activities have 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 pander to people who are exhibiting vices like gluttony and selfish greed, and give inadequate respect to virtues like honorable honesty, fair-mindedness and commitments to advance the common good, then our societies may figuratively go to hell.  If we pay attention only to our heads, and ignore our hearts, then adversities and negative outcomes are more probable.  If we let the analytical left hemispheres of our brains obtusely dominate our more intuitive right hemispheres, the values we embrace will be wrong-headed.

Surely it would be a better idea to cultivate nobler and fairer principles, and to strive to make our relationships and societies healthier, instead of encouraging authoritarianism and ignorance -- and letting our societies be driven by fear and backward-looking conservatism.

It is arguably most desirable for the majority of people to have faith in the right things, and not just faith in absurd myths and wrong-headed economic doctrines.  While it seems quite true that “Fear Builds Walls”, even with regard to hormonal effects, hope and fair-mindedness can be seen to forge closer connections.

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 authorities.  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 everyone together -- must be made in formulating every rule, law, regulation, and tax and spending policy.  What a revolutionary change this would be from designing every new plan in ways that increase the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few!

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 on Earth has increased from 2 billion in 1930 to more than 7 billion today, we see that the needs have grown dramatically for us to spend more money on social justice initiatives, environmental protections, resource conservation, public education, sensible family planning programs, universal healthcare, smart incentives and disincentives, a more sound social security safety net, a healthier corporate culture, truer national security, and better plans for disaster preparedness and recovery.

We can no longer afford to let political shills for the rich dictate tax policies that let wealthy people pay historically low 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 actually does better.

The fascinating evolutionary roots of religion and ethics in prehistoric human clans are explored in Revelations of a Modern Prophet.  The relevant part to realize here is that new overarching understandings can provide us the best hope to deal fairly, honestly and effectively 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 the problem in a context that is comprehensive, expansive and accurate. 

Think clearly about the detrimental ways we are treating the prospects of our children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs.  We are using up natural resources with profligate abandon;  failing to conserve energy, mineral and water resources;  allowing significant costs related to toxic wastes and pollution to be externalized onto people and the environment; destroying rainforests, decimating wildlife habitats, and damaging vital natural ecosystems;  letting corporate power rule the day rather than preserving collective bargaining rights for workers and assuring power to the people;  spending unaffordably large amounts of money on wars and the military and prisons;  mortgaging the future by borrowing trillions of dollars to stimulate all of these shortsighted activities and to simultaneously give very 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. 

This concatenation of expedient actions is blatantly ill advised! 

Thomas Paine recommended that we “bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature,” and to do so we should admit the profound importance of healthy natural ecosystems to the well-being of humanity, and of life on Earth.  Let us not deceive ourselves, and by our delay bring ruin upon posterity.  As Thomas Paine observed in 1776:

  “The present state of America is truly alarming to every man who is capable of reflection.”

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 to be the worst of all sins.  Deceivers, oppressors, 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 -- and one that exerts its influence on a more far-reaching scale.  This new form of treachery is one that all of us are participating in:  the exploitation and defrauding of vulnerable young people and everyone in future generations by means of 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!

Dante imagined that one needed a silver key of repentance and a gold key of reconciliation to unlock the gates of hope.  These keys to Purgatorio were seen as required to allow a seeker to boldly embark on a providential path of positive change and transformation. 

Humility was regarded as the greatest virtue in medieval times, and pride was seen as the root of all sins because it contributed to our missing the mark and falling short of the ideal that a Buddhist would describe as “right relationship”.  I believe we can integrate the head and the heart better, and achieve a wiser balance in our societies by reconciling the right and the left and seeking common ground.

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 Blues.

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

Note: I recommend the film Searching for Sugar Man --- it is an inspirational unfolding surprise!

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 exploit workers, facilitate the externalizing of costs onto society, 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.  It would be a good idea for us to adopt a sensible Bill of Right for Future Generations 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.

Freedom and Equality

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

       democracy.”

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

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. 

Mark Twain famously declared that we have the best government that money can buy.  When we allow our representatives to be sold to the highest bidder, we would be crazy to expect any other outcome than that rich people and highly profitable corporations would control and corrupt our national decision-making.

Money is power.  Money is power due to its large influence in our elections.  Money is power also because of its defining influence on the laws enacted and the benefits provided in our country as a result of the unwarranted influence of large numbers of lobbyists who are continuously at work to influence legislation.  Money is power due to its effect in manipulating the perceptions people have through the use of slick marketing, political advertising, misleading spin, and deceptive propaganda. 

When the Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that rich people, corporations and labor unions could spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens strongly expressed his dissent from the narrow 5-4 decision by “conservative” Justices.  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.”

The great progressive Senator Paul Wellstone would be turning over in his early grave if he could see that his efforts toward campaign finance reform were posthumously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in this case.  And the American people might begin to hate our democracy if it means so negative a hyper-barrage of manipulative attack ads and obnoxious, often dishonest political messages that impinge on our consciousness so intensely.  Let’s get Big Money out of the driver’s seat in our campaign financing!  People are also beginning to intensely dislike the divisiveness of our two political parties, so fair-minded compromises are needed NOW!

The trend for our economic and political systems to be corrupted by the influence of Big Money has gotten significantly worse in the last two years since on the Supreme Court rejected decades of precedents in the Citizens United case.  It is an affront to the fair-minded principles of a democratic republic to allow unlimited amounts of money to be spent by wealthy people and profit-prepossessed corporations to influence elections and buy our representatives.

The Citizens United decision gave special interests much more power, thereby effectively diminishing the voices of the people.  The ruling was made only because corporate apologists who approve of this unfair trend narrowly dominate the Supreme Court.  The resulting tsunami of money has had a distinctly negative and corrupting effect on our elections and on the fair-mindedness of Congressional law-making.  This fact proves that the Citizens United ruling has been one of the worst decisions ever made by the Supreme Court. 

The Costs of Increasing Inequality

The bottom-line purpose of Republican policies that gained force beginning with Ronald Reagan’s presidency has been 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 50% 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 highly regressive changes in taxation like Ronald Reagan’s radical reduction in tax rates on the highest levels of incomes;  (2) the undermining of 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 “rent-seeking” 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 triumphant outcome in the struggle between capitalists and workers was one of the main goals of Ronald Reagan’s policies, just as it was for the policies of George W. Bush.  And, make no mistake about it:  this was a principal goal of sketchy economic proposals that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan made during their failed campaign.

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 makes this situation inexorably worse. 

Joseph Stiglitz makes a convincing case in The Price of Inequality that, when rich people seize a larger share of the economic pie for themselves, it makes the size of the pie smaller than it otherwise would be.  This is due to the suppressive effect on economic growth of wealth being highly concentrated in the hands of the few.  The pie is smaller than it would be with a fairer distribution of wealth -- despite Big Lie ideological contentions to the contrary.

Consider the nature of the Vicious Economic Cycle and the Virtuous Cycle, as evaluated in the compelling new documentary film Inequality for All.  The wealthiest 1% simply cannot consume enough, no matter how hard they try, to generate the revenue that an affluent middle class could.  The secret to a strong economy is to invest in education and strengthen household incomes with a decent minimum wage and stronger unions, and to raise skill levels, thereby generating sustained consumer demand.  This is the “virtuous cycle”, according to Robert Reich.  Strong economies like Germany pursue such policies.  In Germany, workers are highly skilled and educated, collective bargaining rights are protected, and the middle class has money to spend and much more leisure time.

In contrast, a “vicious circle” causes wages to fall and undermines consumer demand, leading to shrinking output.  Such a trend in the U.S. makes our economy fragile and boosts social instability.  When the middle class is skating on thin ice, and jobs offer low wages and benefits, it hurts the prospects for all.  The “trickle-down” story told to the middle and working class every election cycle in America is simply not true.

When most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the Few, the amount spent on public schools, infrastructure and social programs is cut, and stresses on the middle class intensify.  Too many people end up without an adequate education, and they work long hours, do not have enough money to spend, and have little leisure time, which diminishes their quality of life.

Author and activist Naomi Wolf recently asked Robert Reich what three policy prescriptions he would give to an American president and Congress.  He first indicated that we should return to what was done so successfully in the first three decades after World War II, when prosperity was widely shared:  We should make large investments in public education, including higher education, and in infrastructure, and fund these initiatives by a more highly progressive system of taxation.

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 for narrow purposes, and letting deceptive ideological convictions sway many election contests and our governing activities.  Our Founders would be shocked, awed, and dismayed!

Mitt Romney made shrewd efforts to gain power by telling people whatever they wanted to hear.  He flip-flopped on issues as if emulating a wily deceiver who was on the path toward Dante’s eighth circle of Inferno.   He preyed on people’s trust, hope, and gullibility in his attempt to get elected.  His morphing visions were hyper-amplified by means of the use of secretive Super PAC-funded propaganda.

It is an auspicious development for the well-being of our society that voters have soundly rejected Romney’s candidacy, and that of a good number 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 have another tendency:  to concentrate power more narrowly.  This convenience 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 if he were around to witness these developments today.  He would be astounded at our modern day lack of common sense when we allow rich people and giant corporations to run roughshod over the greater good.  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, and all countries in the world, will enjoy greater freedom from this new form of tyranny.

Allegedly Imminent Economic Doomsday

A new friend of mine, an investment specialist, was patiently explaining to me that it will prove to be impossible for the U.S. to afford the interest cost on our $16 trillion national debt in coming years.  He was parroting the predictions of Peter Shiff, CEO of Euro-Pacific Capital, who has been called “Dr. Doom”.  These arguments have some merit, considering that the interest expense on the national debt in 2011 was an all-time record high of $454 billion. 

Interest rates, after all, will certainly increase at some point in the future from their current lowest level in many decades, and more and more of the national budget will be required to be spent for interest expense on the growing debt.  Much of this interest is paid to investors in China, Japan and other countries abroad -- currently, 48% of the portion of the national debt that is held by the public is owned by foreign governments and investors.  This means that this cost is being funneled out of the country to others who are financing our profligacy with their savings.  These interest costs will tend to crowd out spending needed to finance investments in education, national infrastructure, social safety net programs, national security, disaster relief, protections of public lands and the environment, and other vitally important purposes.

Enormous risks are posed by the fact that the U.S. national debt now exceeds 100% of GDP, and there is little prospect of preventing further increases in the debt because we apparently do not have the political will to stop the expedient gimmicks and gambits involved with deficit spending.  Many experts believe that risks to economic prosperity and fiscal sustainability are becoming too big.  My investment friend expressed a feeling of being resigned to an impending debt crisis and accompanying economic disaster, and he counsels people to adopt strategies that will protect their wealth from inflation that will eventually skyrocket, and from stock market declines that he believes will be dramatic.

Then again, there is hope!  We do not necessarily need a worldwide depression after all.  If we were willing and able to think outside the box, and work together to find common ground, we could reduce deficits and significantly mitigate this risk.  We would be wise to take courageous steps to prevent large increases in the national debt that are currently anticipated in future years.

The Institute for Policy Studies, for instance, says that “fiscal cliff” and deficit hawk hysteria could easily trigger a grand fiscal swindle, but that “it doesn’t have to -- because we’re not broke.  The U.S. government can continue to fund and even expand programs that help people in need and rebuild our infrastructure while greening the economy, strengthening national security, and reducing the economic inequality that’s eating away at our democracy.  Plenty of smart ways to cut spending and increase revenue should be on the table.” 

The Institute for Policy Studies recommends specific ways to cut the U.S. deficit by $881 billion per year by taxing pollution, cutting subsidies for dirty energy, reducing military spending, and fairly taxing Wall Street, big corporations, and rich people.  For details, see their report online: We’re Not Broke: A Commonsense Guide to Avoiding the Fiscal Swindle while Making the United States more Equitable, Green, and Secure.

A Shockingly Fair-Minded Plan

If we really want to make our system fairer, we would demand restitution for the fiscal swindles that have resulted in the increase of the national debt from less than $1 trillion in 1980 to more than $16 trillion today.  One way to do this would be to require wealthy people to give up some of the enormous gains they have received in the past 30 years by agreeing to one-time obligations to the federal government that would reduce the national debt by $5 trillion from the current level in excess of $16 trillion.  Presto! -- the risk of a debt crisis would suddenly be substantially reduced.

Just think about it. The overall average well-being and security of the American people would increase.  The costs and dangers of increasing inequities would be attenuated.  Freedoms would expand, and truer prosperity would reign.  The negative effects of Shock Doctrine Disaster Capitalism would be mitigated, and fairer conditions would begin to prevail. 

Imagine my surprise, considering the radical nature of this proposal, as detailed below, when I stumbled across an eminently convincing analysis by the Boston Consulting Group that indicates that a One-Time Wealth Tax on rich people needs to be assessed in order to prevent a severe debt crisis. The Boston group’s report is titled Back to Mesopotamia?: Looming Threat of Debt Restructuring.  The authors David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter contend that the price for nations worldwide to continue kicking the can down the road and failing to address the root causes of the looming debt crisis could be extremely high, and a failure to act significantly increases the risks of the global economy suffering “an unconstrained financial and economic crisis”.  This would be a disastrous outcome, and make the recent recession look like a picnic in the park.  The authors painstakingly calculate that a one-time wealth tax of an average 25% of financial assets is required in the U.S. to resolve the dangerous dilemma.

Here is the background idea to support this detailed proposal.  In the last quarter of 2011, our nation’s attention was focused on efforts by a so-called Super Committee to come up with a plan to cut $1.5 trillion from an anticipated $10 trillion in additional deficits projected to be incurred in the next decade.  The super-partisan Super Committee was unable to agree to any debt deal, so an automatic “fiscal cliff” of budget cuts was created that was to go into effect on January 1, 2013.  The 15% reduction they were seeking was actually a completely inadequate amount.  At the time, President Obama had proposed a “grand compromise” of a $4 trillion reduction, but even that amount is not enough.  After all, such a reduction would still leave us indulging in the shortsighted expediency of borrowing another $6 trillion from future generations to finance out-of-control spending and low tax rates for rich people.

Each and every American has been complicit in wanting lower taxes, and our aggregate demands have driven steady increases in federal government spending.  But the American people want these things without having to pay for them.  The only beneficiaries who have big bucks in the bank to show for the foolishly expedient courses of action we have been pursuing since 1981 are the top 20% of Americans who own more than 92% of the total net worth (excluding home equity) in America. 

Most of this total net worth in the U.S. is highly concentrated at the top.  The richest 1% of people own about 42% of all non-home wealth.  This includes stocks, bonds, business equity, trust funds, savings accounts, non-home real estate, and the cash value of life insurance and pension plans.  This concentration of wealth has been facilitated by rash reductions in taxes on top income earners, an outcome initiated by Ronald Reagan when he slashed tax rates on high levels of income from 70% in 1981 to 28% by 1988. 

Let’s go figure.  The total net worth of all Americans in the U.S. was about $56 trillion in late 2011.  Of this, home equity is about $6 trillion (which is down astonishingly by more than 50% from $13 trillion in 2007, due to the bursting of the housing market bubble).  So there is a net $50 trillion in financial wealth in the U.S.  The richest 1% of Americans, who own 42% of this wealth, thus have about $21 trillion in assets. 

This 1% of people has seen their assets increase by about $18 trillion from the $3 trillion they had in 1981.  During this period, Santa Claus tax-cutting scams have resulted in borrowings by the federal government of more than $15 trillion.  A direct correlation exists here:  we have given the richest 1% of Americans $15 trillion by borrowing it from future generations.  The interest expense obligations on borrowed money will total an additional $15 trillion every 15 or 20 years, depending on prevailing interest rates, so we will be forced to pay this $15 trillion cost over and over again in the next 100 years, or add it to the accumulating national debt.

This is not a grand larceny form of highway robbery, or an armed bank hold-up.  It should be regarded as the biggest financial crime in world history, and it a crime that is being committed against our children and all people in future generations.

There has of course been a much wider participation in this wealth embezzlement scheme than just the top 1% of Americans who have been the ring leaders and the primary beneficiaries.  The top 20% of Americans who own more than 92% of the total non-home financial net worth in our country also have been complicit, and they have also been beneficiaries.

Our nation is desperately seeking a solution to 7 primary big problems that are spelled out in Happy Harbingers in Good Ideas for a Better Future.  Our failure to solve these problems endangers our national security and well-being.  There is little question but that the richest 1% of Americans hold the key to these solutions, so we should look to them for restitution for the monumental scam that they have been perpetrating.  We must demand that they Stand and Deliver!

The principal of restitution is an integral part of virtually every formal system of criminal justice.  Perpetrators of financial crimes are required to make payment to the victims of fraud.  The civil justice system also has provisions for civil recovery of losses and damages.  This civil system does not attempt to determine the guilt or innocence of offenders, or to incarcerate them.  Civil courts determine the amount of civil liabilities that offenders and/or third-party participants in scams have, for harms sustained as a result of a particular crime.

Here is a proposal that would radically reduce the probability of a national debt crisis.  Here’s a plan.  Let’s call it a Fair Play Wealth Assessment.  Immediately assess $5 trillion to the richest Americans.  This $5 trillion will only be a part of the $21 trillion owned by the wealthiest people in the U.S.  Make this wealth assessment progressive, assessing it to the following 4 groups of rich people, and fairly graduating it, as follows:

(1) Americans whose net worth is between $1 million and $5 million           $  1,000 billion

(2) Americans whose net worth is between $5 million and $20 million            1,000 billion

(3) Americans whose net worth is between $20 million and $100 million        1,500 billion

(4) Americans whose net worth is more than $100 million:                      1,500 billion

                                                       Total One-Time Assessment                 $  5,000 billion

This Fair Play Wealth Assessment should be due upon death.  Those assessed can choose to pay this principal balance at any time, with 5% interest payable annually on any amounts that are outstanding.  To most fairly apportion this assessment to each person within these categories, assess whatever percent is needed to achieve the group’s targeted revenue contributions.  The calculations or categories should be adjusted as appropriate to ensure that it is fairest for all, ensuring that no person’s net worth is reduced by:     

                                          Category (1):   More than  5%

                                          Category (2):  More than 15%

                                          Category (3):  More than 40%

                                          Category (4):  More than 60%

Presto!  At the stroke of a pen, we will have $5 trillion to reduce the national debt.  That would significantly mitigate this debt problem here in the United States, making our economic system more stable, our society fairer, and our citizens more secure.  Europe should follow suit to solve their serious debt problems by a similar initiative, because it has also been engendered in part by similar swindles of rich people. 

If we were to decide to distribute 10% of the proceeds, or a total of $500 billion of the $5 trillion, to all the estimated 150 million Americans who are so financially insecure that they have a net worth of less than $10,000, this plan would diminish the extreme insecurity of half of the people in our country and significantly stimulate the economy by giving these people some money to spend for things they desperately need -- and to help cover the costs of a shift in taxation that will incentivize conservation and energy efficiency, and serve to stimulate the move toward renewable energy alternatives. 

To reassure rich people that this is a one-time assessment, a Constitutional Amendment should be enacted that guarantees that no future assessments would be made as long as the national debt does not exceed 100% of the previous fiscal year’s Gross Domestic Product.  

Simultaneously, we must honestly tackle the driving forces behind the annual budget deficits that are being incurred.  Our goal must be to formulate a fair plan for future generations that keeps the national debt from ever again exceeding 100% of GDP.  The only other time in U.S. history that our national debt exceeded 100% of GDP was shortly after World War II, when the debt was incurred to combat the militaristic ambitions of Germany and Japan to conquer the world.  Today, we have incurred this dangerously high level of debt for a much less noble purpose -- to give high income earners the freedom to shirk the responsibility that comes from being the primary beneficiaries of the way our economic and political systems are structured.

The natural conclusion is that we must re-structure our economic and political systems to prevent abuses of power by those who are exploiting the system at the expense of all people in future generations.

Having mitigated big worries over this global debt crisis by means of this restitution plan, we should then proceed to make our world safer, more mutually secure, greener, and more committed to sustainable ways of living.  This leads directly, once again, to the proposals in One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies.

Economics 101

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself;  in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies:  lies, damned lies and statistics.”

                                                                                                 --- Mark Twain

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%.  The GNP 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 relatively few high-income earners, but prevent others from receiving fair after-tax compensation for their work.  As a result, the majority of people are less able to afford to buy as many goods and services.  Businesses consequently see a downturn as demand declines for their products.  And low demand leads to layoffs.

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

All of these facts together provide a strong economic argument for a more progressive restructuring of tax rates.  There are also many 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 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 consumers do 70% of all spending.  Businesses need a broad base of people who can afford to buy their products.  This is one reason that 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 30 years.  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.  National 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, and to reduce the debt incurred in fighting World War II, 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 always clamor insistently for lower rates.  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan staunchly contended that 25% would be a much fairer rate than the current 35% to create an exceptional country.  They claimed 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.  For instance, the super-rich always cite the loss of family farms when they are trying to justify lower taxes on inherited estates.  The fact of the matter, however, is that lower inheritance taxes exclusively benefit the richest 1% of Americans and very few 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.

Not only do the 400 richest people in the U.S. have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined, but 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 very favorable tax treatment for capital gains compared to wages.  Unyielding ideological arguments are adduced by representatives of rich people to keep taxes 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 by intelligently instituting 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 income 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

A Surprising but Relevant Factor in Considerations of Fairness

Here is a pragmatic perspective that is like a transcendent epiphany to fair-minded policy makers and utilitarian philosophers.  As mentioned in the Introduction to the Common Sense Revival, it turns out that when people earn an annual income of $50,000 to $75,000, they feel happier than others who earn less money in every category that affects the quality of life, including job satisfaction, personal health, relationships, housing, spiritual life, and community involvements.  In surprising counterpoint, however, people who earn more that $75,000 per year are not any happier when judged by these measures.  Here is a powerful reason why we should stop allowing rich people to grab all the benefits of our economic system for themselves.  And here is a convincing reason that we should instead reform our national system of taxation to make it fairer and more steeply graduated.

By statute, let’s implement fairer tax policies that will alleviate the sense of guilt that all rich people should feel because of the unfairness of status quo policies!

Let us clearly understand that our nation’s Founders championed Enlightenment Era ideals of equality, democratic fairness, reasonable opportunities for all to pursue happiness, and the greater good as measured by the general Welfare of the people.  None of our Founders would have defended excessive power and influence by a relative few, and not a single one would have favored giving enormous advantages to the top 2% of the people, forevermore, to the distinct detriment of the other 98%.

Another extension of the Bush tax cuts for all incomes under $250,000 would benefit 100% of Americans.  The highest income earners would, in fact, gain most of the benefits.  This extension is nonetheless staunchly opposed by Republicans unless we continue to give the 2% who earn more than $250,000 per year the additional lavishly generous and entirely unaffordable extension of the Bush tax cuts on the amount of incomes earned in excess of $250,000.  It is stunning that people with the biggest incomes have so much power that they can hold all of the American people hostage to their greedy insistence on continued deficit-financed government largess for their on-going accumulation of wealth.

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 nation 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, headily 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 -- and risked their lives -- 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 have been implemented in many states controlled by Republican Governors and 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 instances of voter fraud are actually quite rare.  In stark contrast, Republicans have been trying 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 were the miscreants perpetrating this fraud?   Oops – it was Republicans themselves!  A formal criminal investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was made into this fraud, which involved a company hired by the state’s Republican Party to register fictitious voters and help suppress the vote.  Politics is dirty, no doubt, but Republicans seem to be trying to gain a monopoly on its sleazy uses.  In their quest to gain domineering power, they have brazenly tried to justify their ends by using every means possible, no matter how unethical and antithetical to democratic ideals.  Shame on them!

The Hard Times Swindle of Conservatism

Conservatism has been surprisingly strong in the past few decades despite its increasing extremism.  One of the great political mysteries in modern times is how conservatism, once a marker of class privilege, has been adopted in recent years as the creed of millions of ordinary Americans.  It is a source of fascination that, 236 years after our Founders declared independence and embraced fair-minded democratic principles, a powerful contrary force has gained such strength on the political scene:  extreme economic and social conservatism.  One might wonder what is the matter with America that it has allowed this force to gain so much power.  Why have extreme conservatives been able to adversely affect our country in such profound ways?

To understand this development, author Thomas Frank, a native of Kansas, set out to explore the reasons why the people in Kansas in recent decades have been oddly and anomalously acting in ways that are distinctly contrary to their own economic self-interests.  Seeing that millions of Americans, particularly in Kansas, the Midwest and the South, have given their support to conservative politicians today, he asked, What’s the Matter with Kansas?

People in Kansas 100 years ago were radical defenders of the best interests of workers and farmers.  Today, however, the majority of Kansans tend to oppose policies that help ensure the greater good of blue-collar workers, small farmers, poor people, and the middle class.  Instead, they tend to support the conservative politics of the Christian Right and agendas of established interests that are promoted by wealthy people, large agribusinesses, and giant multinational corporations like Koch Industries of Wichita, Kansas, which is owned by the arch-conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

Thomas Frank’s compelling question yielded a very interesting explanation.  A “marketing blitz” barrage of ideological brainwashing has undermined once fair-minded economic and social sensibilities.  This propaganda has been generated by narrowly-focused economic elites to stoke the resentments of people and hijack their emotions, and to shrewdly marshal their cultural anger for the purpose of giving powerful impetus to unrelated economic policies that radically favor narrow goals of business interests and wealthy people instead of the greater good.  The simple fact of the matter is that we need to develop national priorities that are much fairer to the vast majority of the American people.

Our national priorities are severely distorted by this hijacking of our economic and political systems by shrewd operatives whose main goal is to enhance the perks, prerogatives and rewards of wealthy people.  One of the most insidious and wrongheaded gimmicks they use to achieve their goals involves allowing corporations to maximize private profits by socializing costs and foisting risks and obligations onto others.  The outcome of such activities is to further increase the concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of rich people.  Too many of the extreme partisans amongst the most privileged Americans indulge in being overly selfish and greedy -- and inadequately empathetic to others. 

In the process, the stability, soundness and sustainability of economic activities are being sacrificed, along with the overall well-being of the people and the health of the environment that provides for our needs. 

Economic fundamentalists advocate a more laissez-faire system of corporate capitalism.  Many of our daunting economic, social and environmental dilemmas are made worse by the success of ideologues who espouse such ideas.  Those who enthusiastically embrace fundamentalist economic policies exploit the anger of people over hot button social issues, and then utilize these divisive ideologies in order to help achieve an overriding goal of ensuring that wealthy people are allowed to pay very low tax rates on the highest levels of their incomes. 

By seeking to achieve their narrowly-focused goals through the use of propaganda and emotional hijacking, they often use egregiously unethical means to gain power.  One of the main ways their goals have been achieved has been by stoking people’s cultural anger and fears, frustrations, confusion, prejudices, and partisan political views.  Deceptive spin has been used to trick people into giving more power to conservative politicians, who pay back their benefactors by making regressive changes in tax policies that primarily benefit rich people.  These politicians always seem to strive to find ways to give big corporations more privileges, perks, influence, subsidies, low wage costs, and lax regulations. 

Corporations play hardball with city, county, state and federal governments to get a variety of free services, tax incentives, property tax abatements, cash grants, loans, sales tax breaks, and income tax credits and exemptions, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year.  These generous provisions divert money from public education and public parks and other priorities, forcing municipalities and states to cut public services and raise taxes, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Laura A. Reese, director of the Global Urban Studies Program at Michigan State University, advises local governments to invest in local residents through education and training rather than by giving large incentives to companies where it is harder to pick winners.  Smarter economic development policies are needed.

Hot Button Social Issues

Conservative stances on hot button social issues -- “God, guns, and gays” -- helped George W. Bush get elected in 2000 and 2004.  Intoxicated with this Pyrrhic victory “success”, the Radical Right has continued moving further to the extreme right.  They have moved so far to the right in the narrow confines of their echo chamber that they have convinced themselves their social engineering plans are popular, righteous, necessary, and even the best idea.  They have believed this despite the fact that they seriously disrespect and harm the interests of large groups of people in the process, including women, immigrants, racial minorities, gay men and lesbian women.  By rudely alienating these voters, they lost many races in the November 2012 elections.

Paul Krugman makes an interesting point about these issues:  “Notice that, to the extent social issues played in this election, they played in favor of Democrats.  Gods, guns, and gays didn't swing voters into supporting corporate interests;  instead, human dignity for women swung votes the other way.  This was a huge night for truth, justice, and the real American way.”

A Fair-Minded Pro-Life Perspective

The most blatant examples of cultural anger generated by the barrage of attack ads and manipulative persuasion are those relating to anti-abortion activists and anti-immigrant passions and the dogmas of religious fundamentalists.  The fervor generated by provoking these passions has been exploited to achieve an economic goal of ensuring that wealthy people are allowed to continue to pay very low tax rates on the highest levels of their incomes.

Cultural anger seems to be, in part, a harsh backlash against desegregation laws, women’s reproductive rights, sensible gun control initiatives, the collective bargaining rights of public employees, increasing trends toward allowing gay people to have fair-minded civil rights, and aroused frustrations with the scapegoat of Big Government in general.  Intolerance, racism, and ideological stubbornness seem to play a part in these reactionary attitudes.

Astonishing ironies have resulted from this emotional hijacking of the American people and the radical rightward tilt of the Republican Party.  Hard-line conservatives have grown increasingly opposed to abortion, even in the case of rape, incest, or a risk to the life of a pregnant woman.  They loudly and piously proclaim that they are “pro-life”.  But at the same time they champion causes that are distinctly contrary to the true sanctity of life, and to the real cause of liberty, and to a better quality of life for those alive at this moment in time. 

Such partisans tend to support the death penalty, oppose universal healthcare, obstruct sensible laws to limit access to semi-automatic assault weapons, and be willing to eliminate many programs that help people lead healthier and more secure lives.  They are even against sensible protections of the environment, pollution prevention laws, and reasonable ways of dealing with climate change, which threatens a large proportion of all species of life on Earth.

When such “pro-life” people claim they believe in the sanctity of life, they ignore the fact that, if life were to be honestly regarded as sacred, any policies that contribute to the degradation of people who are already alive, like mothers and children, would be abhorrent.

“Respect for life has to include respect for how that life is lived, enhanced and protected -- not only at the moment of conception but afterward, in the course of that life.” 

                                                                           --- Thomas L. Friedman, Why I am Pro-Life

Mainstream politics in the twenty-first century has become, to a large degree, a “sham battle” between people who take opposing sides on hot button social issues.  This is an internecine conflict that distracts people from dealing with more serious problems.  Surely we have far greater concerns to quarrel over than hot button social issues!

Our great strength lies in unity, not in being divided, so we should act to prevent Big Money from subverting our democracy and oppressing the citizenry and dividing us asunder with the shrewd machinations of Machiavellian operatives.

“O ye that love mankind!  Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!”

          --- Thomas Paine, urging Americans to action to end British tyranny

I feel strongly that an honest and truly moral pro-life stance is the only sensible and honorable one to espouse.  Understand this clearly.  Morality is the vital glue of society.  It is concerned with the judgment of what is “good” and “bad” in human character and action, and it consists of those things that are considered essential to the health and security of a social group.  

Today, intense conflicts of opinions and religious dogmas are being exploited to drive people apart.  The fact of the matter, however, is that boldly fair-minded and cooperative efforts are needed to build a more just society and give a higher priority to the greater good.  This represents the ultimate moral good.

    “Politics have no relation to morals.”

                                                         --- Niccolo Machiavelli

We should give greater heed not only to considerations of the quality of life for people alive today, but also for the quality of life that our actions today imply for our descendents.

Unfortunately, a better quality of life for more than 300 million Americans is being sacrificed to the conceits and entitled attitudes of the 2% of Americans who have an annual income greater than $250,000, and to the 7% of Americans who have a net worth that exceeds $1 million.  The security of more than 300 million Americans is being sacrificed to the enthusiasm of millionaires and billionaires to be allowed to pay low tax rates on the highest levels of their incomes.

Fervent embraces of economic ideologies that promote the maximizing of profits are contrary to a true pro-life position when they involve narrow, unethical gambits that allow the costs of health-harming toxic wastes, and of air and water pollution, to be foisted upon society.  On a more far-reaching scale -- one seriously affecting future generations -- it is contrary to a true pro-life position to allow the wasteful depletion of life-enabling resources, and widespread damages to ecosystems, and uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere that disrupt normal weather patterns and contribute to droughts, floods, and more extreme storms and wildfires.

Almost every form of life on Earth is threatened by our failure to support initiatives that would help protect the environment, prevent pollution, and deal sensibly with climate change.  An arrogant lack of respect for all non-human forms of life on Earth is not a pro-life approach to policy-making.  Those who favor the overturning of the Endangered Species Act are not acting in a true pro-life way, and neither are those who want to encourage the exploitation of public lands and eliminate protections of wilderness areas.

 “He who takes nature for his guide, is not easily beaten out of his argument …”

                                                                                                                       --- Thomas Paine

Choosing to staunchly oppose freely available contraceptives, including emergency "morning-after pills”, at the direct expense of women’s prerogatives to prevent pregnancy, is to be rudely unempathetic, misogynistic, paternalistic, and mindlessly unconcerned with the true quality of life.  With more than 7 billion people on Earth, church dogmas that say we must be fruitful and multiply no longer add up.  Opposition to family planning choices is simply not an honestly life-affirming attitude.

There are more than 40 million abortions in the world every year.  If zealots who say they are “pro-life” honestly want to reduce this number, it could be done easily by promoting the use of contraceptives and the morning-after pill and other birth control methods, and by making family planning options freely available to women and men worldwide.  “Pro-life” people, come to your senses!  Not only would such initiatives prevent millions of abortions every year, they could prevent millions of cases of sexually-transmitted diseases, and thereby eliminate an untold amount of suffering. 

Anyone opposed to abortion should be strongly supportive of free access to birth control.  Up to two-thirds of all abortions in the United States could be prevented by such a policy.  Researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine offered free birth control to more than 9,000 mostly low-income women and teenagers, and found out that the number of accidental pregnancies in the group fell between 60% and 80% below the national average.  Receiving free birth control made teens just one-sixth as likely to get pregnant.  Since this group is particularly susceptible to becoming pregnant unintentionally, no-cost birth control is a key to reducing both unintended pregnancies and abortions.

The United Nations explicitly described family planning as a “universal human right” for the first time in 2012.  With this declaration, the U.N. effectively made the case that legal, cultural and financial barriers to accessing contraception and other family planning measures are an infringement of women’s rights.  The time has come today for the Catholic Church and other religious establishments to acknowledge this right to women everywhere.

“Conservatives” tend to champion expansive rights of personhood for a fertilized egg, no matter how conception occurs, at the expense of a woman’s right to self-determination.  Such attitudes are conspicuously contrary to respect for the lives of women.  It is preposterous to posit that life begins at conception and to then ignore the needs of mothers and children once a child is born.

Another odd position adopted by many pro-life folks is the opposition to sensible laws that require background checks for all gun purchases and restrictions on the availability of assault weapons and multiple-bullet clips.  Staunch support of easy access to semi-automatic guns is not a fair-minded pro-life stance.  We should fairly consider the contentious issue of gun ownership responsibilities from a pro-life perspective that honors the most likely better quality of life for those living in our increasingly divided societies.  Unity, not acrimonious division, is a key to mutual security.

In the tragic wake of the rifle assault on school children in Newtown, Connecticut, it is more clear than ever, to those who do not adhere to the orthodoxy of a radical misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, that sensible gun laws and regulations must be enacted to make our society safer. 

When we wage wars of aggression, we commit the supreme international crime, according to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg after World War II.  This naturally implies that preemptive warfare and high levels of spending on armaments are wrong-headed priorities that distinctly differ from honest and fair pro-life attitudes. 

Open-minded, generous “good neighbor” attitudes that reinforce the Golden Rule ethic of reciprocity and mutual security for peoples in all countries are much truer pro-life stances than ethnocentric supremacism or domineering, uncompromising attitudes that rationalize military aggression.  True pro-life stances would regard preemptive warfare and repressive military occupations of other nations as supremely unethical, and they would avoid “military Keynesian” policies that facilitate unethical profit maximizing by war services corporations and other entities in the military-industrial complex.

Reflections on More Hot Button Issues

A vocal minority of Americans staunchly supports the death penalty.  In light of many cases where innocent people have been exonerated by DNA evidence after many years in prison, this issue should be examined more closely.  It certainly is not a pro-life stance to support the death penalty.  It is likewise not a pro-life attitude to oppose a good universal healthcare plan and far-reaching reforms of our medical insurance system, because such opposition results in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths every year.

Also, it seems clear that religious zealotry has caused great grief in the world.  Islamic religious fanatics have provoked an extremely expensive military retaliation in the form of a crusade against terrorism that has cost trillions of dollars and countless thousands of lives since the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. 

American religious evangelicals have helped stoke reactionary opposition to Islam, as well as to secular progressivism.  Dark passions have been exploited to divide and conquer.  Shrewd political operatives have scapegoated people like liberals and gays to advance an unrelated underlying agenda of undermining universal healthcare and environmentalism and the collective bargaining power of workers.  These initiatives have been pursued to gain power and control, and to increase political influence and corporate profits.

Some evangelical religious fanatics in U.S. churches are nearly as odious as the bombers who target innocent victims like the 9/11 hijackers and the shameful Tsarnaev brothers, the “losers” who killed or injured hundreds of people with two bombs at the Boston marathon.

The International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri is an impassioned evangelical institution that preaches hate of lesbian women and gay men in the guise of love of Jesus and obedience to the authority of God.  Huh?  Wow!  Who knew that God hates, when so many spiritual leaders have preached that God is love?

The documentary film God Loves Uganda provides a startling insight into conservative evangelical fanaticism in U.S. churches.  Leaders of the International House of Prayer are on a mission to get a law passed in Uganda against homosexuals that would condemn gay people to death.  When American citizens contribute to the demonization of people in other countries by exporting anti-gay ideologies and our hot button culture war to other nations, we are acting with pathetic resolve that harms other people.

When the “good news’ of the Word of God is used to try to get laws enacted to kill gay people in poor male-dominated African societies, this “kill the homosexuals” ideology is disgusting to billions of people worldwide, probably even more so than the idea of men having sex with each other is disgusting to these narrow-minded, highly prejudiced, self-righteous religious zealots.  How could these brainwashed faithful folks have discovered words in the Bible that condemn homosexuals and miss the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill?”

No mention whatsoever of homosexuals is made in the New Testament.  Jesus does not say anything about the subject.  Jesus does say however, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”   When Jesus spoke to a crowd about a woman who has committed adultery, which the Old Testament says is a sin that should be punished by death by stoning, Jesus supposedly wisely said in John 8:7,

   "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

Women are still being stoned to death in some cultures for adultery.  This is horribly wrong.

The history of Uganda since its madman dictator Idi Amin was deposed in 1979 is a sad story.  In the power vacuum that followed Idi Amin’s flight into exile, Uganda was exceptionally vulnerable to the indoctrination of its people by fervent missionaries.  Recognizing this, the International House of Prayer committed itself to a crusade against gay people, apparently hoping to inflame religious passions enough that they will be able to advance their abstinence-only, anti-contraception, anti-family-planning, anti-abortion ideologies. 

This East African country tellingly has a very high poverty rate and its people have the youngest median age of any country on Earth -- 15 years old.  In contrast, the median age in the U.S. is 37 years old.  In a sense, American religious evangelicals are trying to exploit young Africans to advance a narrow ideological agenda.

Mike Bickle, the founder of the International House of Prayer, has proclaimed that Jews who refuse to convert to Christianity will be pursued by “hunters” sent by God.  He preaches that Jews “can expect to be thrown into prison camps and death camps.”  Bickle says that "the most famous heaven-sent hunter in recent history is a man named Adolf Hitler".  Bickle has claimed that Jews collectively are "under the discipline of God because of … perversion and sin."  

Like the fanatics revealed in the documentary film Jesus Camp, such religious evangelicals are perverting positive spiritual impulses into narrowly prejudiced and dangerously discriminatory indoctrination that interferes in the affairs of people in other nations and disrupts hopes of fair-mindedness, Golden Rule ethics, human rights and peaceful coexistence.

Ted Haggard was the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals from 2003 until 2006.  In a great surprise, Haggard was forced to resign in disgrace when it was revealed he had engaged in a homosexual relationship.  The irony is that Haggard had been an outspoken opponent of gay rights and gay marriage.  Why is it that some of the most vocal opponents of gay rights turn out to be closet homosexuals repressing their own true propensities?

The Gospel According to Thomas provides a provocative perspective:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.  If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Rodney King was a black man who became nationally known after a videotape revealed his being beaten with excessive force by Los Angeles police officers.  A trial ensued, and the police officers involved were acquitted.  Terrible riots immediately followed in which more than 50 people were killed.  Rodney King was aghast, and famously asked, more or less, “Can’t we all just get along?”

I believe we could easily all get along much better, and the key is to create greater social equality, a fairer justice system, and a more definite commitment to human rights and dignity for all.

An Aside on Scapegoating

A “scapegoat theory of intergroup conflict” provides an explanation for the correlation between times of relative economic despair and increases in prejudice and violence toward “out groups”.  This theory may help to explain the genocidal Holocaust slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II.  Jews were scapegoated to an extent for the German humiliation of being defeated in World War I and subsequently being required to pay heavy reparations that caused a period of hyperinflation during the 1920s.  The cost of a loaf of bread went from 1 Deutsche Mark in 1918 to 10 Marks in 1920 to 10,000 Marks at the end of 1922 to one trillion Marks by 1924.

Likewise, hostility toward gay people and the blaming and scapegoating of them are attitudes that are unwarranted, and seem to be unconscious psychological defense mechanisms like projection or displacement that are assumed by those who fan the flames of prejudice.  Sadly enough, reactionary groups of people are often well-funded.  They tend to be vehement in their ideologies, and they also seem to be deficient in the fairness of their comprehension and understanding.  To create dynamic, healthy and fair societies, it would be best to eschew narrow dogmatism.

I am a believer in the relative greater virtue and social good of progressive ideas compared to conservative ideas.  Follow this line of thought closely.

One of the core understandings expressed in these writings is that religious fundamentalism is a great danger in the world today because of its conflict-engendering nature.  The huge costs related to terrorism and a military war against terrorism in the world make it clear that it would be better for everyone if moderate voices and more fair-minded policies prevailed in world affairs today.  One of the founding principles of our great nation was the idea of the freedom of religion, and Golden Rule ethics naturally imply that no one should be able to force his or her beliefs on others.

Contemplate how radically different the views are of people who believe in orthodox religious ideas as compared to more enlightened worldviews.  Orthodox Christians tend to believe that the highest virtue is obedience to ecclesiastical authority.  More enlightened folks believe that insightful personal understanding and wise right action are higher virtues.  Orthodox Christians think a being they call Satan is the source of all evil, while more enlightened folks believe that ignorance, selfishness and intolerance of others is the cause of most unnecessary suffering.  Orthodox Christians believe that the Bible is literal and historical, while more enlightened people see this ‘Holy Book’ as a mythical story that provides guidance through parables and poetic metaphor as well as commandments.  Orthodox Christians believe that Eve was the first woman on Earth, and that she is the cause of original sin, and that humanity is contaminated by sin.  More enlightened believers see Eve as a seeker of knowledge who was the first saint, and that humanity is a spark of the divine.  Orthodox believers see blessings and grace as arising from sacraments handed down by religious authorities.  Those who are more enlightened see blessings and grace as arising from inner awakening and self-knowledge.  Orthodox believers tend to see Jesus as the Son of God and savior of mankind, while more enlightened perspectives regard Jesus as an archetype and teacher that dwells within each person.  Those who cling to orthodox views think salvation can come only through faith, while more enlightened people see salvation as coming from illuminated understandings.

Imagine how distinct a contrast these worldviews are, and how different a society would be that adheres to expansive enlightened views, compared to societies that hew to narrow dogmas.

“Be in Harmony.  Live in Peace.  If you are out of balance, take inspiration from

   manifestations of your true inner nature.  Those who have ears let them hear.”

                                                                                       --- The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Cries for Secession

In the wake of the national elections, some people had a tantrum and declared they want to secede from the Union.  Most of the people afflicted with this secession fervor ironically live in “red states” that receive, on average, much more in benefits from the federal government than they pay in taxes.  The balance is the opposite in “blue states.”  If people in relatively poor states like Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia were allowed to secede, Dana Milbank asserts that this Confederacy of Takers would face serious fiscal problems, and the remaining Union of the Makers would be financially better off.  “Would-be rebels from the red states should keep in mind during the coming budget battle,” Milbank asserts, “that those who are most ardent about cutting government spending tend to come from parts of the country that most rely on it.”

Perhaps we should actually have let these States secede, and see if they become paragons of economic, social and environmental health -- or, more likely, unmitigated disasters!  Let them take their anti-environmentalism, unfair social policies, inequities, enthusiasm for the death penalty and harsh justice, and try to manage their republic according to their narrow ideologies without the net benefits they currently receive from the federal government.  It is likely that circumstances would prove that, in the coming years, they would discover it is a delusion to think that fundamentalist doctrines are better than fairer understandings and a better balance of national priorities.

A political cartoon in the newspaper in November 2012 showed an angry white man who wore a SECESSION T-shirt and toted a gun pointing to a barbed-wire border crossing.  There a sign read:  NOW ENTERIN’ ANGRYWHITEMENISTAN.  The disheveled guy in the cartoon is singing the virtues of this new confederacy, telling a skeptical Uncle Sam, “It’s full up of freedom-lovers just like me, and it’s gonna be paradise.”  No civil war is necessary over this issue!

Politics Now

“The election is over.  The story is not.”  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan tried to sell the American people an amped-up version of the policies of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  These policies would have been decidedly 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 were regressive, because they were designed to give rich people a bigger slice of the economic pie and simultaneously slash spending on a wide variety of programs that benefit Americans who are less financially secure. 

The Romney/Ryan economic plans just did 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, coupled with efforts to undermine collective bargaining rights of workers.  One outcome was 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 a much faster rate when Republicans were in the White House than when Democrats held the office. 

Republicans have tried to portray themselves as fiscally conservative.  Really?  They sure did not act as fiscal conservatives when they supported George W. Bush’s tax cuts financed by trillions of dollars of borrowed money.  They were NOT fiscally conservative when they voted for the Prescription Drug Act of 2003, which greatly benefitted Big Pharmaceutical companies and has added another trillion dollars to the national debt.  Surely they were not fiscally conservative when they consistently supported debt-financed wars and poorly-controlled military spending. 

As mentioned in the Introduction to Common Sense Revival, total spending by the federal government has increased faster during Republican administrations than it has during Democratic administrations.  Attempts to deceive the American people into thinking that Republicans are actually fiscal conservatives make them appear distinctly dishonest! 

 “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

Other central features of Ronald Reagan’s ideological revolution were the elimination of regulations and the undermining of employee’s power to collectively organize and bargain.  By making extensive efforts to eliminate regulations on corporations, banks, hedge funds, and other Wall Street entities, Reagan’s ideological campaign contributed to a costly Savings and Loan crisis in the late 1980s, and to a much more costly credit crisis and recession that began in late 2008.  These “laissez-faire” policies contributed to the creation of economic bubbles and wreaked havoc on the economy.  They also caused a widespread spike in unemployment and home foreclosures.  Enormous bailouts have been necessitated as a result, and the Federal Reserve and central banks worldwide have been forced to desperately inject liquidity into the banking systems.  One of the unintended consequences of such policies is that people in the United States are suffering the worst levels of poverty since 1965. 

“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 so brazenly proposed 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 corrupted and obedient to the demands of the top 2% of income earners that politicians from both political parties pay far too much attention to 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 came 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 much of any sacrifices or concede any of their outrageous privileges or domineering influence.

Since our Congressional, Executive 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 marketing, advertising budgets, propaganda and the ideological assertions of corporate interests and right-wing front groups. 

Project Censored, a media research organization, tracks the news published in independent journals and newsletters and then compiles an annual list of 25 news stories of social significance that major national news media have overlooked, ignored, under-reported, misreported, or self-censored.  Project Censored publishes an annual list of the 25 most important censored news stories, and every year this includes stories that reinforce and expand on the understandings herein.  I recommend the new documentary film Project Censored, The Movie: Ending the Reign of Junk Food News, because it provides compelling perspectives into the true nature of the problems we face today.

Curiously, evangelical voters and those who adhere to Tea Party dogmas have been duped into supporting the narrow Republican agenda.  How?  Through deceptive arguments, divisive tactics, effective uses of framing and fears, hyped-up extreme partisanship, arrogantly uncompromising stances, the promotion of narrow ideological doctrines, distorting spin in the corporate-controlled mainstream media, and exploitation of dissatisfaction with continued high unemployment rates. 

Confident and overly simplistic proclamations by Republican politicians have been designed to fool the majority of Americans into accepting trickle-down deceptions and on-your-own-economic plans.  Mitt Romney pretended in the weeks before the election that he is primarily concerned about the middle class, but his plans had the same goal as George W. Bush’s:  to enrich millionaires and billionaires at the expense of everyone else.  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s plans would almost certainly, if enacted, have created much worse disparities of fairness in our country. 

Just after the election, Mitt Romney told top donors that President Obama had won the contest by giving gifts to women, blacks, Hispanics and young people.  He disingenuously failed to mention the much larger multi-trillion dollar gifts that the Republican Party has given to rich people by radically reducing taxes on the highest levels of income in the past 30 years.

We would do well to remember that government “gifts” given to anyone today are coming at the expense of people in future generations.   To be more socially irresponsible, we need better fiscal discipline and a reformed political system so that we pursue fairer and wiser and more long-term oriented priorities. 

Republicans have been trying to convince people for decades 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.  This truth is downright tautological.

“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 the narrowly self-serving goals of the rich.  This plan is cynically contrary to the greater good.  It is pathetic that such economic efforts have been accompanied by a tendency for the Republican Party to 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 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 really fair-minded solutions to our national and global problems.  This is true common sense!

The Republican quest for ideological purity has caused the 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 seemed to have been 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 some politicians who ran for the U.S. Senate had a chance of winning when they advocated misogynistic policies like the official plank in the Republican platform that opposes all abortions without any exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, or a risk to the life of the pregnant woman.  Paul Ryan staunchly supported this plank, as did “legitimate rape” Missourian Todd Akin and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, who stated that when a woman becomes pregnant during rape, "it is something that God intended." Mourdock went on to state that the government should prohibit a woman from getting an abortion who had gotten pregnant by a rapist.  Obscene!

In many countries, the idea of religious freedom is corrupted in patriarchal cultures, and men are assumed to have a God-given right to restrict the freedoms and rights of women.  The most important aspect of the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is the freedom from religion -- i.e., the freedom from the unreasonable dictates of religious authorities. 

The attitudes of Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, and dourly pious Richard Mourdock towards the healthcare of women 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!

Everyone should be guaranteed the freedom to believe whatever religious stories they fancy, even ones that have been interpreted to mean that the Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, in the face of scientific certainty that our home planet has been orbiting the Sun for billions of years.  When people’s beliefs contradict scientific understandings in ways that are consequentially harmful, however, these beliefs cannot be allowed to have determining sway in our politics and our national policy-making.  For instance, the belief that human actions are benign and acceptable when they result in billions of tons of greenhouse gases being spewed into the atmosphere every year is to have blind faith in an erroneous, harm-causing lack of accurate comprehension.  Since such a belief has far-reaching costs, it cannot be allowed to prevent us from instituting fair-minded precautionary measures that would mitigate associated risks.

It is noteworthy that two primary camps existed amongst our Founding Fathers:  those who advocated Jeffersonian ideals and those who advocated Hamiltonian ideals.  Jeffersonians believed in democratic fairness and equality of opportunity, and they gave priority to plain folk and debtors.  They believed that effective rules should be established to protect the people from abuses of power by aristocratic elites and those who demand special perks and privileges.  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 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 to women and immigrants!”

Perhaps we need a good therapist to reconcile these dysfunctional relationships!

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 roughly 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 our 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.

Mitt Romney’s proposal to slash the top marginal tax rates from 35% to 25% would have significantly reduced government tax revenues by an estimated $5 trillion over the next 10 years.  He also said that he wanted to increase spending on the military by an additional $2 trillion above what the Pentagon wants.  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 claimed that he would balance the budget by tweaking the tax code and cutting spending, but the devil sure would have been in the details.  He would not have had a chance in hell of winning the election if he had spelled out the deep cuts that would be required to achieve these goals, because these cuts would have made life significantly more challenging for the vast majority of Americans.

Mitt Romney had honed his debating skills to a sharp point, but he seemed 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 he endorsed radical positions against women’s rights, immigrants, government employees, students, people’s power, gay people, and environmental protections. 

Then he flip-flopped again, betraying his promises to right-wing conservatives, and pretended that he cares about 100% of the American people.  He shifted his positions on contraception for women, and gave lip service to fair-mindedness in general.  But voters had a hard time forgetting that behind closed doors, at a $50,000 per plate fundraiser, he had basically said he doesn’t give a damn about 47% of Americans who are inconsequential to him -- or worse --because they do not earn much money.

Fortunately, the American people rejected Romney’s bid for the presidency.  With conservatives dominating the House of Representatives, and a close balance in the Senate, if Romney had become president, he would likely have rubber stamped a whole host of laws that would help corporations make bigger profits but harm workers, women, minorities, gay people, immigrants, and poor people, while intensifying assaults on the environment.

Congressional Republicans basically want the American people to double down on trickle-down economics.  This gamble would be a significant hardship 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.

The November 6th electoral rebuke to Republican politicians has caused a civil war of conflict within the Party over its backward-looking policies, especially on immigration issues, and it is a good thing that they have been sent back to the drawing board to come up with fairer and more honest plans!  I strongly advocate that they become more fair-minded!

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 severe debt crisis and widespread economic disruptions in the future.

The Anti-Democratic Development of Increasing Corporate Power

Mitt Romney represented government of business interests, by corporations and corrupt politicians, for rich people.  One of the most far-reaching and negative aspects of his plans was his proposal to pander more rashly to corporate interests.  He declared in 2011:  “Corporations are people, my friend.”  Oh, really?  If giant multinational corporations are people, then exactly what kind of people are they?

Corporate entities all-too-often fit the profile of “psychopathic” people, if judged by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.  They show a reckless disregard for the safety of others, a callous unconcern for the feelings of workers and consumers, an incapacity to experience guilt, and an eagerness to deceive people through persuasive marketing and cost-externalizing gambits oriented toward making bigger profits by socializing costs.  Frequently, corporations also demonstrate 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 the documentary film The Corporation. 

It is compelling to consider the fact that corporations often act in ways that resemble the behaviors of psychopathic individuals.  The inescapable conclusion is that we must prevent corporations from being accorded all the 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 has helped “conservative” politicians realize their arrogant plans to wield far too much power over the American people and our political system.  This is a persuasive reason for having rejected the attempt by deceitful Republican politicians to gain power.

During his career, Mitt Romney routinely exploited the jerry-rigged provisions of the capitalist system to make enormous profits by using no-value-added “vulture capitalist” scams and tax evasion swindles.  He acted in cold-hearted ways that were shrewdly calculating and ruthless in his hedge fund dealings and debt-leveraging gambits.  He subsequently has tried 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 appear to have been overwhelmingly motivated by selfish personal advantages, not by fair-mindedness.  By covering up the details of his tax returns, hiding the details of his fiscal plans, and slickly concealing his true plans if he were to have gained power, he gave people pause to doubt his honesty.  We could not afford to have gambled that a good Mitt would show up in the White House rather than the conniving, exploitive, aggressively self-interested, and inequality-championing 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 when he claimed to have sought out the information in those binders full of women.  Since he is such a champion of corporate profiteering, he prefers 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 most crucial segment of society.  Yay, Moms!

Consider the Far-Reaching Influence of the Supreme Court

Another crucial issue that makes it wise to have rejected the bid for the presidency and the control of the U.S. Senate by conservatives 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 conservatives were able 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 further reduce the fair representation of the people.  It would also have allowed 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 have been a sad day for the world if voters had chosen 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, was so close to being bamboozled into actually electing more of the people who are selling these swindles. 

Let us now demand that Democrats begin to chart a much bolder and more responsible course to a fairer future.  Let’s also demand that all of our representatives join together to formulate fairer, wiser, more moderate, more honorable, and more long-term-oriented policies that are consistent with the greater good.

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.  Congress had created a Supercommittee to solve this impasse, but it abjectly failed by November 2011.  This failure to reach a sensible compromise resulted in the creation of a risk-laden “fiscal cliff”, in which federal spending is scheduled to be slashed across the board on January 1, 2013. 

As this professedly 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, while 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 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 enabling wrong-headed national policies.

It’s Three AM, It’s Me Again

During the build-up to the election, as by happenstance Boz Scaggs crooned to me in my imagination, this thought came to mind:  The Republican Party 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.  While the primary purpose of this corporate-friendly elite involves money, conservative leaders strive to placate the right-wing fringe to keep their coalition together, so they act in ways that are often amoral, anti-egalitarian, staunchly patriarchal, Strict Father domineering, anti-environmental, and unempathetic.

The Republican Party has adopted a transparently false populism and a “hard-times swindle” strategy to try to gain more power.  They have propagated a simplistic and deeply deceptive narrative, and mounted an ideological obstruction-oriented agenda that was designed to make President Obama fail.  In the process, they drastically undermined the health and well-being of our country.  In this gambit to gain power, they have used the persuasive power of Fox News and right-wing radio and TV personalities -- the “conservative entertainment complex” -- as well as billionaire-financed front groups and conservative think tanks and other Machiavellian operatives like Karl Rove and Dick Armey.

It would have been disastrous for our country to trust these folks and their heartless, anti-democratic, anti-science, anti-evolution, cynically shortsighted manipulations.  Their goals are too narrow, matching their cultivated suspicions and dogmatic worldviews, and their vaulting ambitions are dangerously despotic.

We live in times where political opinions are profoundly affected by simplistic sound bites, short attention spans, bumper sticker sentiments, and gotcha politics.  Selfish and unempathetic attitudes by wealthy conservatives compound this situation.  These opinions and attitudes are distinctly contrary to the need for cooperative efforts to mitigate tensions between people.  We surely need a better balanced approach to healing the discord between competing interests, and 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, nuance, 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 a record number of about 46 million Americans live at or 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 country with the largest per capita rate of people in prison in the whole world.  Another related fact is that gun sales are at a record high, and gun ownership and gun violence in the U.S. far exceeds that of any other country on earth.

Also, almost 50 million Americans have no medical insurance, so many of them use emergency rooms for medical adversities instead of having preventative healthcare checkups.  This results in the cost of treatments being foisted upon others 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 shown.  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 we could design much fairer societies, and that we need to start NOW!

To paraphrase a story that 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 humanity’s ethical search for common ground.

“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.  The social cohesion of more harmonious societal relationships is a positive force, as Joseph Stiglitz makes clear in The Price of Inequality.  It must necessarily involve striking a better balance between guarantees of personal liberties, a better modicum of safety for all, 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.  This perspective would represent 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!  It contains some valuable understandings about the many ways that sensible feminism and the fair-minded empowerment of women and the feminine sensibilities of every person could advance greater good causes in the world.

The time has come today for us to collectively stand up, step forward, and revolutionarily make our human societies fairer, healthier, safer, more just, and more sustainable.

     Truly,

          Dr. Tiffany B. Twain