Principal Reasons a Bill of Rights for Future Generations is Needed

                                                               An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                                             November 11, 2011

The main driving force behind increasing inequalities and intergenerational inequities in our society is the unwarranted influence of wealthy people and corporations that enable them to dominate our national policy-making.  Wealthy people and the organizations that facilitate their abuses of power are also the principal driving forces behind wasteful consumerism, opposition to needed political reforms, and the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ degradation of the environment.  Our national priorities are skewed by these forces, which help deprive workers of rights and allow our national infrastructure to deteriorate and our military to overreach and too-big-to-fail corporations to be bailed out.

Wealthy people and large corporations are abusing the power of their Big Money to secure for themselves the lowest tax rates since the Roaring Twenties.  They are doing this at the same time that the U.S. government is incurring the largest budget deficits in world history.  To reverse these dual trends, an overarching commitment is needed to a Bill of Rights for Future Generations.

People who are enjoying really good fortune in their lives should not begrudge those people who are experiencing severe economic insecurities a little security.  This is an essential, empathetic, and deeply human assessment.  It is a perspective so basic that it predates the development of the philosophy of ethics and reaches back to the impulses which led to religious beliefs and morality and social cohesion in human clan groups.

People who are enjoying really good financial fortune should not be allowed to pay ever-lower tax rates on their incomes, capital gains, dividends, and inheritances.  A more steeply-graduated tax structure is the only good source for financing things like a basic affordable social safety net and universal healthcare and environmental protections and other incentives to create a more functional, fair, and sane society. 

The following exploration of the principal reasons for a Bill of Rights for Future Generations provides a clearer understanding of this transcendent issue.

Prelude

The original Bill of Rights in the United States consisted of the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  About 18 months after the Constitution was adopted in September 1787, these amendments were introduced in Congress.  They outlined personal and collective rights of liberty and justice which were constitutionally guaranteed to the American people.  This Bill of Rights was designed to establish legal assurances to the people that basic principles of human freedoms would be fairly protected -- and that the power of the federal government would be clearly limited.

Today, 222 years later, different forms of power abuse are undermining the freedoms of the American people.  Now, instead of colonial exploitation, monarchial rule and despotic governance, wealthy people and large corporations are the entities which are abusing the domineering power of their influence.  They are exploiting people in nations worldwide and contributing substantially to an ominously unsustainable deterioration in natural ecosystems. 

Global developments are making it clear that a new variety of protections must be adopted to best ensure public confidence in the way we are being governed.  These protections need to be designed to assure young people and those in future generations that our collective undertakings are truly dedicated to farsighted, responsible and ecologically sane ends which are sufficiently beneficial to society as a whole.

A Bill of Rights for Future Generations is needed, as proposed in the Earth Manifesto, to provide overarching guidance to accomplish these greater good goals.  In short, this new Bill of Rights is required because of increasingly extreme disparities in economic insecurity, social inequalities, and political representation between the wealthiest 1% of Americans and all others.  This trend is not only eroding democratic fairness, and reducing social cohesion, and creating greater risk of social instability and insurrection, but it is also diminishing the prospects of our descendents for a prosperous future.

Citizens United against the Citizens United Ruling by the Supreme Court

Robert Reich weighs in about “the perfect storm that threatens American democracy:  an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top;  a record amount of secret money, drowning our democracy;  and a public becoming increasingly angry and cynical about a government that raising its taxes, reducing its services, and unable to get it back to work.  We’re losing our democracy to a different system.  It’s called plutocracy.”

Plutocracy is rule by the rich, with political power controlled by the wealthy.  The respectable journalist Bill Moyers warns us about the dangers of allowing our democracy to be dominated by Big Money.  “Plutocracy and democracy don’t mix,” says Moyers. 

Corporations are the basic vehicle by which wealthy people mold public opinion and influence elections and gain the preponderance of Big Bucks and benefits of our capitalist economy for themselves.  Corporate lawyers have managed, over the years, to get a doctrine of “corporate personhood” established.  This doctrine subverts the Bill of Rights by giving corporations the rights to enjoy the legal status and protections which were meant for real human beings.  These supposed “corporate personhood” rights allow big businesses to evade the responsibilities of good citizenship by using their deep pockets to radically influence elections, corrupt our politics and profit by exploiting people, depleting resources, and degrading the environment.

The abuse of corporate power is a root cause of many of the daunting challenges that face humanity.  Our nation’s decision-making has been allowed to be controlled and contorted by this narrowly self-interested segment of society.  This trend is proving to be harshly contrary to the interests of the people. 

The Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court in January 2010 was patently political and legally grotesque, according to an assessment by Robert Reich.  This ruling has allowed the influence of Big Money to become further entrenched in our political system.  It has enshrined profits as more important than people, and subverted hopes of achieving greater good goals. 

Ever since John Roberts and Samuel Alito were appointed to the Supreme Court, the five member “conservative” majority on the Court has consistently sided with corporate interests against the people in its rulings.  In Congress, Republicans have been obstructing all legislation that would give fairer representation to the people.  As a result, a Constitutional amendment is needed that would reduce the overriding influence that corporations have in our political system.  Such an Amendment would reverse the Supreme Court’s narrow anti-democratic interpretation of our Constitution as evidenced by the Citizens United ruling.  The time is NOW to act to return power to the people!

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

                                                                               --- Victor Hugo

Imagine the positive impact that could result if millions of American citizens joined the “We the People” Campaign and signed this powerful pledge:

Declaration of Independence    

    From Corporate Power

I pledge my support for America’s founding principle of government of, by, and for the People.  I believe that a corporation is not a person, money is not speech, and corporate money should not be allowed in our country’s elections.

I pledge to work with other grassroots Americans for reforms that will free today’s politics from the dominating power of what Thomas Jefferson called “the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations.”

To-Do List

I strongly believe in the concept that we must “pay forward” some good deeds to improve the prospects for our descendents.  To best accomplish this eminently fair idea, we should honestly redesign our economic systems.  As the brilliantly sensible businessman and author Paul Hawken wrote in The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability:

“We must design a system … where doing good is like falling off a log, where the natural, everyday acts of work and life accumulate into a better world as a matter of course, not a matter of conscious altruism.” 

The fairest and most effective way to accomplish this, and to change people’s behaviors, is by creating powerful motivations in the form of attractive incentives and deterring disincentives.  Let’s demand that these incentives be well designed -- and sooner rather than later!

An Aside on Saving Ourselves by Saving the Planet

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. once pointed out the false dichotomy “between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other.”  He noted ruefully that we treat the planet as if it were “a business in liquidation” by striving to convert natural resources to cash as quickly as possible.  “Environmental injury is deficit spending”, he said.  “It’s a way of loading the cost of our generation’s prosperity onto the backs of our children.”

Multinational corporations are amoral by design.  They drive shortsighted strategies on behalf of investors who want higher returns, using three main methods:

(1) They exploit and deplete resources as if there will be no tomorrow; 

(2) They privatize profits while socializing some of their production costs, such as those related to workers and the environment, by externalizing these costs onto the general public and future generations;  and,

(3) They abuse their political power to get the federal government to stimulate the consumer economy through deficit spending, and to allow big businesses to minimize the taxes they pay, and they evade sensible regulations and insist on being bailed out when their gambles fail.

One need not be an accountant to know that it is crazy to profligately squander assets instead of investing in earning a sustainable stream of income to finance operations and make profits.  Many corporate gambits are unethical;  especially those of private equity firms and “corporate raiders” who buy undervalued companies to liquidate their assets and lay off their employees in order to make big short-term profits.  The resulting harm is a socially-unacceptable aspect of what Naomi Klein writes about in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

It seems apparent to me that, not only are we collectively able to afford to include the costs of reasonable environmental protections in the prices of all products and services, we cannot afford not to do so.  Otherwise we will continue to sacrifice the material and ecological foundations of our well-being to goals which are disturbingly shortsighted.

A Call for a Visionary and Yet Practical Strategic Initiative

Since the primary reason we need a Bill of Rights for Future Generations is to prevent the on-going subversion of our democracy by Big Money, a bold new and truly transcendent Strategic Initiative must be formulated.  Consider this closely.  Professor George Lakoff defines a strategic initiative as “a plan in which a change in one carefully chosen issue area has automatic effects over many, many, many other issue areas.” 

For instance, an initiative to give tax cuts to the wealthy is more than just a scheme to reward the moneyed class.  It is really a plan that is a “double con” gambit to give more money and greater power to the rich, who in turn give our representatives large campaign contributions, and then the recipients of this political largess reward such legalized bribery with additional benefits to the privileged and further regressive laws that eliminate public services and prevent more progressive taxation.

When tax breaks are financed by borrowing money from people in the future, it is an extremely unfair form of intergenerational exploitation.  By exacerbating already fiscally irresponsible levels of deficit spending, and by ensuring egregious trillion dollar annual increases in the national debt, tax cuts are being used to paralyze our nation’s ability to finance greater-good investments in public education and community well-being and social programs and environmental protections.  Regressive tax cuts are thus Strategic Initiatives that are negative for the vast majority of Americans.

Anti-tax, anti-government conservatives love retrogressive gimmicks like this because they claim to want to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”  They seem to completely ignore the fact that tax cuts have consistently led to larger federal budget deficits, NOT to less government spending.  This was particularly true during the years that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were in the White House, and now during the tenure of Barack Obama.

Another kind of Strategic Initiative, this one a positive progressive one, was enacted in 1973:  the Endangered Species Act.  This law was passed to protect critically imperiled species of life from extinction “as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation.”  This Act has had the collateral benefit of preventing a certain amount of shortsighted damage to the overall ecological health of our providential environment.  It has also had a wide variety of largely beneficial impacts on protections of habitats and ecosystems.  Developers and giant multinational corporations do not like this kind of strategic initiative, but it does generally serve to advance the greater good in the long run. 

The purpose of the Endangered Species Act, it turns out, is not only to save threatened species from habitat destruction and other harm, but also to save ourselves, since our fates are linked in this interconnected and interdependent world.  As Garrett Hardin wrote in 1968 in his influential article, The Tragedy of the Commons, “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.”

Hear these words now.  Here is one obvious and truly transcendent Strategic Initiative that must be implemented.  Almost everyone is in denial not to recognize it and support it.  This is the ultimate Strategic Initiative, and the fairest one possible.  It involves making a national commitment to new assurance in a Bill of Rights for Future Generations.  This agreement would be an overarching declaration that all people in the future have an unalienable right to live on a planet where vitally important ecosystem services have not been severely compromised, and resources have not been depleted wastefully, and wildlife habitats have not been irreparably harmed, and pollution and toxic wastes are reasonably controlled.

This Bill of Rights for Future Generations would also commit us to a goal of leaving a legacy to future generations of societies which are financially sound, and ones that are not subject to extreme austerity measures or heightened risks of hyper-inflation or national bankruptcy.  It would create a guiding context in which all national policies would take into account their likely impact on our children and grandchildren and their descendents.  It would provide a flexible and strong framework within which we would see the importance of preventing or mitigating many of the extraordinarily shortsighted and unfair activities and expediencies that have become such definitive hallmarks of our dysfunctional economic and political systems.  And it would include uncommon measures designed to create mutual security that would ensure that our nation coexists peacefully with people in other countries.  And it would support movements worldwide that honor personal liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of religion or irreligion, and economic and political fairness.

     “The time is always right to do what’s right.”

                                                           --- Martin Luther King, Jr.

A specific proposal for the content of a Bill of Rights for Future Generations is published on the Earth Manifesto website.  It has seven primary unimpeachable objectives:

  Article 1.  Sustainable Resource Use.

  Article 2.  Pollution Control and Mitigation.

  Article 3.  Prevention of Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.

  Article 4.  Stabilization of the National Debt.

  Article 5.  Peaceful Coexistence.

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

  Article 7.  Social and Environmental and Intergenerational Justice

Once a Bill of Rights for Future Generations like this is developed and ratified by Congress, and indeed by nations worldwide, it would help focus our efforts on making our countries better places, and on preventing hyper-partisan politics from enabling short-term-oriented political and economic expediencies that treacherously and myopically undermine the prospects of people in future generations. 

People should have “unalienable rights” to have a fair modicum of opportunity to enjoy their lives with guaranteed personal liberties and hope for prosperity and security and perhaps even a lusty pursuit of happiness.  But let’s heed the words of the Dalai Lama and psychologists and deep ecologists, and hold these understandings with us during our daily trespasses.  We surely have a collective need for the counsel of scholars and spiritual leaders to understand What Really Matters and other important stuff. 

Our national Pledge of Allegiance promises liberty and justice to all Americans.  Yet most of our national policies ignore fair treatment of our descendents.  In recognition of this glaring oversight, this new Bill of Rights for Future Generations will honor the greater good that is represented by a concern for the impacts of our actions today upon all of our heirs. 

Additional detailed guidance for smarter ways forward can be found in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto, specifically in Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues, and in One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies, and in the Progressive Agenda for a More Sane Humanity.

Weigh In, Mark Twain

The honorable rascal Mark Twain lambasted the extremes of economic inequality during the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.  He described the prevailing unjust conditions “the Great Barbeque".  At the time, there was a deceptive appearance of prosperity because ‘robber barons’ and wealthy industrialists and financiers were indulging in record extravaganzas of conspicuous consumption.  Rich people dominated American society and politics, and they corruptly used the power of their money to put economic and political policies in place that allowed them to amass great fortunes.  They were able to gain most of the benefits of the economy for themselves because federal income taxes had not yet become a permanent fixture of the U.S. tax system until an amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1913. 

Industrialists made enormous profits in those times without being required to share the bounty of their often ill-gotten gains with society at large.  Working conditions were dangerous, worker security was almost unknown, environmental protections were practically non-existent, and urbanization trends created very serious social problems.

The strife between capital and labor has been one of the biggest stories ever since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  This conflict led to the ideas asserted in the Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 (“Workers of the World, Unite!”).  This strife was the principal driving force behind the unionization era from the late nineteenth century through 1980.  Unions and collective bargaining gave workers the power to share in some of the benefits derived from their productivity, and this movement helped to create a healthy, growing and socially-desirable middle class. 

The social ills associated with unbridled prerogatives of those with capital eventually sparked a far-reaching reform movement in reaction.  Known as the Progressive Era, this period of reform to the prevailing system of laissez-faire industrialization lasted from the 1880s to the 1920s.  In response to the serious problems associated with industrialization, the supporters of the Progressive movement advocated a wide range of economic, political, and social reforms to improve working conditions and to reduce unfair competition and corruption.

One of the most important reforms was designed to reduce monopoly interests by busting up large corporate ‘trusts’ like railroad conglomerates and big oil companies.  More than 130 giant corporations were ‘busted’ into smaller companies to thwart the corrupting power and monopoly practices of businesses that had come to dominate various industries.  At the same time, a number of vitally important government regulatory agencies were established. 

Decades later, during the Great Depression, the failings of capitalism became more starkly clear.  Massive unrest resulted from the nation’s most severe economic recession, which came abruptly in the footsteps of the Roaring Twenties with its jazz era and flappers and Art Deco designs and lavish consumerism and low taxes on the wealthy and stimulated growth of a speculative bubble in real estate and stocks.  The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ushered in this disastrous economic depression.  Eventually, the political elite was forced to allow policies to be implemented that created a social safety net and made society fairer in many ways.  These policies helped build a larger middle class, and the concentration of income and wealth became less extreme for the following half century. 

The gap between rich people and poor people has been widening dramatically since 1980, largely due to regressive changes in tax policies put in place by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.  Another “great barbecue” is going on today, and it’s sure not all that “great” for the majority of Americans!  The disparities of wealth between rich people and poor people today have grown to be nearly as large as they were during the Gilded Age.  The top 10% of people in California, for instance, saw their incomes increase more than 40% from 1987 to 2008, while the top 1% earned 80% more, and the bottom 60% of people experienced a net decrease in their incomes of more than 10%.

The super-rich are using the power of their money to pervert our democracy into a plutocratic feast from which the majority of Americans are being excluded.  Workers are being squeezed, and the costs for basic necessities like healthcare, education, food, energy, utilities, and water are skyrocketing.  There are almost 14 million unemployed Americans out of a workforce of about 150 million people.  Home foreclosures are at an extremely high level.  A record number of homeowners are financially “underwater” due to bubble economic policies which have trapped them into negative equity positions in their homes.  Tax revenue declines, together with the costs of wars and entitlements for senior citizens, are the biggest contributing factors to record budget deficits.  In the face of this reality, few politicians are courageous enough to make fair-minded difficult choices, and to honestly tackle these extreme imbalances.

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

                                                                                                           --- Martin Luther King Jr.

It is high time that we cooperated together to achieve fair-minded goals, and to redesign our system so that it works better for everyone.  Sacrifices are going to have to be shared by all.  Highly compensated people and the wealthy and investors must contribute the most because they receive the lion’s share of the income and the perks and privileges in our society.

Instead of admitting the truth of this characterization, “conservatives” in Congress are trying to slash spending on public education, infrastructure investments, environmental protections, public broadcasting, family planning, and programs that help children and poor people.  These opportunistic politicians are striving to reduce regulations on banks and other corporations, and to further weaken the power of workers by eliminating collective bargaining rights.  Public workers in Wisconsin and Ohio attest to these facts.

Corporate industry groups and lobbyists are fighting tooth and nail to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from protecting clean air, clean water and a stable climate.  This attempt to undermine the greater good is being spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which differs markedly from local chambers of commerce because it is financed by giant corporations.  More than 50% of the budget for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce comes from just 16 giant companies. 

All of these problems are radically exacerbated by regressive changes in taxation that have reduced government revenues by cutting taxes on high incomes, capital gains, and inheritances to the lowest level in more than 80 years.  Simultaneously, the share of the national budget that corporations have been required to pay has been reduced by 60% since 1960.  Sixty percent less, in just 50 years!

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, less than 11% of total federal revenues were collected through the corporate tax between 2000 and 2009, in contrast to almost 30% of revenues collected through the corporate tax in the 1950s.  The shift in taxation from corporations and wealthy people to working people, and to all people in future generations by means of deficit financing, is the result of an outrageous systemic corruption that is distinctly irresponsible to society and the common people.

This development comes at a time when corporate profits in the United States are the largest ever in history.  This is an obscenely unfair state of affairs.  The interests of our children and all of our descendents in future generations are being sacrificed to give ever-larger benefits to the Few.  The lives of tens of millions of Americans are being figuratively burned to a crisp in this “disaster capitalist” barbecue.  The U.S. today is clearly engaged in a race to the bottom that benefits the few on top at the expense of the vast majority of Americans.  This sustained headlong rush to pander to those who already have the most perks and power is characterized by wrongheaded assaults on worker pay and benefits, and on environment protections.  The results are a social and ecological disaster to the people in our diminished democracy.

Historical Perspective

The famous pamphleteer Thomas Paine published a carefully considered and passionately expressed treatise in January 1776 titled Common Sense.  In this revolutionary publication, Paine adduced the reasons why a nation subject to colonial mercantile exploitation and taxation without fair representation and other forms of tyranny should throw off the yoke of the despotic government of British King George III.  Thomas Paine published his ideas anonymously because their content was treasonous at the time, from the perspective of the British.

Our Founders soon thereafter declared independence from the oppressive rule of the British Empire.  They embraced the radically progressive principles of the Age of Enlightenment on July 4, 1776 in the Declaration of Independence.  Hear their words anew:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

These words in the Declaration of Independence were followed by a fascinating list of the particulars that so seriously provoked the liberty-loving American colonists.  Today, we are experiencing a new but similarly oppressive form of tyranny.  This new kind of power abuse is being perpetrated by a small minority of Americans who have an outsized amount of money and power and influence.  Many of them are amongst the richest 1% of the people who own 42% of the nation’s wealth.  An even longer list of specific wrongs can be adduced today which are being foisted on our society by these Few who control our economic and political systems.

These challenges are discussed at length in the Earth Manifesto, which is the Common Sense manifesto of modern times.

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands -- whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective -- may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

                                                                          --- James Madison, Federalist Paper 47

The Big Picture and the Bottom Line

Thoughts cascade through my consciousness like flurries of snowflakes falling from a fulsome sky.  Often, when my thoughts are not focused on the follies and absurdities of human behaviors and activities here in the second decade of the twenty-first century, they observe thusly:  “Yay for good fortune!  We live in a bountiful world, and rich experiences are widely available.  Yay for rich experiences!”

Unfortunately, these experiences, along with the leisure time and material goods and personal health that can make them more easily accessible and enjoyable, are being greedily and jealously hoarded by those who feel entitled to abuse their power to gain as much of a monopoly on these things as they can.  Unempathetic attitudes like this are often ruthlessly mean-spirited in their practical impacts.  They definitely cause undue hardships and stress and anger and frustration in the world.  These attitudes carry the foolhardy risk that eventually they may stoke serious enough social strife that a revolutionary zeal will arise which would be particularly dangerous for the privileged.  The reactionary Tea Party and populist Occupy movements are the beginning of this destabilizing unrest.

It is for a very good reason that the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution asserts that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”  One of the primary purposes of fair government should be to help ensure that all people are accorded “certain unalienable rights”.  Fairness is the cornerstone of democracy.  A wide variety of interests naturally want to grab bigger shares of the extensive benefits of economic policies for themselves rather than accepting a fairer distribution of them to the majority of people.  To fairly balance this aspect of our natures with overarching social and moral goals, we need to cultivate empathetic understanding and enact smarter national policies.

     “In God We Trust;  All Others Pay Cash.”

Empathy is at the center of human values.  True morality is grounded in empathy.  Morality is found more in empathy than in reason, and much more fundamentally in empathy than in religion.  Linguist George Lakoff points out that the neural circuitry of our brains is wired for perceiving the emotions that others are feeling.  This is the biological basis for empathy.  Empathy is of great value in social groups because it allows us to connect with others, both people and animals, and to a wider appreciation of the world.  The natural companion of empathy is responsibility for helping others rather than exploiting them or harming them.

It would be advantageous, in the aggregate, if we redesigned our societies to ensure that the potential for positive experiences and economic security are shared more fairly, and to make certain that we also ‘pay forward’ a fair legacy to future generations.  What would the character of this fairer legacy be?  For one, we should not wantonly deplete natural resources.  Secondly, we should not overly degrade natural ecosystems.  We should act to prevent the extinction of other species of life rather than continuing to rapaciously destroy habitats and disrupt climate patterns with uncontrolled emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  We should insist that our societies be governed more fairly, and effectively, and in a reasonably frugal manner. 

We should strive to see that our state and federal governments, and governments worldwide, allow a maximum of personal freedoms for all people while at the same time ensuring that prosperity is more fairly shared.  Young people and future generations should be assured that their prospects will not be overwhelmingly compromised by short-term-oriented expediencies which pander to those with the most power and influence and money. 

While we are at it, we should create a Department of Peace that has a mission to help foster international peace.  A Cabinet-level Secretary of Peace should be appointed to demonstrate a new national commitment to the causes of conflict-resolution and international cooperation and peaceful coexistence with other peoples.  These commitments would help us achieve a truer national security. 

Commitments to fair guiding principles are needed to ensure that big-picture goals are attained which advance the longer-term greater good.  A Bill of Rights for Future Generations would help provide our societies with this overarching guidance.  Fairer societies are healthier societies, in a physical sense as well as in psychological and spiritual senses.  This is one reason our principal national goal should be to make our societies fairer. 

Instead of helping accomplish these greater good goals, the people who dominate our politics cling passionately to their ideologies, and they work tirelessly to make our societies ever-more UNFAIR to the vast majority of people.  They do this to get bigger benefits for themselves and their benefactors and financiers.  Our economic and political systems are primarily oriented to allowing such corrupt dealings, so radical reforms are required.  We must reduce the overbearing influence of corporations and rich people on our legislatures and the Executive Branch and federal courts.

 “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”

                                                                                                                    --- Albert Einstein

Enormous obstacles confront us in this quest for Golden Rule fairness, and for intergenerational fairness.  At the top of the list of these obstacles is the obstruction of progress and reforms by established interests that are powerfully vested in maintaining the status quo.  These words are focused on the overarching importance of reasonable rights for future generations as well as greater social justice for the 99% of Americans.

A Perspective of Martin Luther King, Jr.

   ”Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

                                                                                                      --- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Point taken, Dr. King, with heartfelt appreciation to you and your philosophic soul mates for such sentiments!  I don’t want to quibble, but the arc of history is, in the long run, toward one of completely terminal catastrophe for every individual living thing.  In the interim, during our individual times alive, it behooves us to enjoy life as much as possible.  We are best advised to weight our involvements toward meaningful connections and fair-mindedness.  But meanwhile, we should never forget to honor our overarching responsibility to play a fair role in leaving our descendents a planet that is not too severely compromised.

Economies of Scale

It is stunning to realize that there were less than 3 million colonists in America in 1776.  Many of them were sufficiently outraged at what they regarded as British oppression to risk their lives and fortunes to gain national independence.  Today there are about 310 million people in the United States, and the glaring extent to which the ruling class is depriving the majority of these people of fair dealings is arguably even more extreme than was the case during British colonial days.  This essay analyzes the nature of this economic exploitation and it explores modern issues that involve even more far-reaching inequities.

Our revolutionary leaders were courageous and bold men with great ideals, for the most part.  After throwing off the yoke of British oppression, they united to create a new kind of federal government that was designed to prevent future despotism.  They wrote a Constitution that brilliantly set forth the purposes and method of organization of the federal government.  We can be proud that our Constitution is the oldest written constitution still in use by any nation in the world today, other perhaps than the tiny Republic of San Marino within Italy.

Our leaders created a clever system to balance power between the Executive and Legislative and Judicial branches within the federal government, and between the Federal Government and the various States.  Every system, unfortunately, can be gamed and hijacked and held hostage for the advantage of shrewdly unprincipled people. 

In the past 30 years, a new form of domineering and divisive economic exploitation has gained ascendancy.  The new despots in charge have built a political coalition of rich people, social conservatives, and religious fundamentalists to achieve rigid, domineering and self-serving goals.  These unprincipled privileged people use misleading propaganda and the unfair influence of Big Money in our political system to create a new variety of oppressive imperialism that jerry-rigs the economy of the nation and the world to benefit an extremely small proportion of the populace at the expense of the Many. 

This despotism gains many perks at the direct expense of people in future generations, so it is an epic form of treachery.  It is extraordinarily inegalitarian, sensationally unfair, and immorally unjust.  It is a form of warfare against the greater good.  In many ways, it is an assault against economic stability and responsibly balanced budgets and intelligent investments and social fairness and peaceful coexistence and ecologically-sane precautionary principles. 

This new tyranny adversely affects the vast majority of Americans alive today, and billions of people worldwide.  This makes it a far more odious form of treachery than the British tyranny of 1776 which adversely affected just 3 million colonists.  This new system of tyranny is being perpetrated not by a King, but by a small cabal of rich and powerful people who control the economy by legally bribing politicians and getting corporate shills appointed to the nation’s federal courts and the Supreme Court. 

Fairness: A Golden Rule Necessity

My feminine sensibilities have been upset by the glaring growth of economic inequalities in the past 30 years in the United States.  The fervor of my outrage has been stoked by the fact that the policies which have helped create this state of affairs are unnecessarily unfair.  The ideals of our Founders are being betrayed by the ruling class in our country in order for wealthy people to get more and more of the benefits produced in our capitalist economic system.  My maternal and humanistic intuitions are offended not just at this betrayal of ideals, but at this very real betrayal of the interests of young people and future generations. 

The wealth gap between older and younger Americans has widened sharply in recent years,  according to a new analysis released by the Pew Research Center.  People over the age of 65 have seen their net worths increase on average by 42% between 1984 and 2009, while those younger than 35 have seen their net worth fall by 68%, and those in the 35-to-44 age group have seen their net worths decline by 44%.  The policies which have enabled this trend are a form of intergenerational warfare that distracts people from the class warfare waged by the richest 1% against the other 99%.

Such widening economic inequity represents a pathetic misallocation of our national resources to old people instead of investing in younger people.  If we could extrapolate this trend and measure the gap between the relative prospects of people alive today and those of all people to be born in the next few generations, I suspect that we would find a similar but even more startlingly extreme trend of growing inequity.  This is another principal reason that we need a Bill of Right for Future Generations!

Betrayals of the interests of young people and those in future generations, and the hardships that result from them, have been facilitated by the corrupting influence of Big Money in our elections and in the halls of Congress.  The corporate-controlled media is partially responsible for this situation because it has served as a propaganda organ for greedy interests and the extreme right.  Big Media has given these special interests the ability to unfairly influence our national political debate by manipulatively engineering consent and using misinformation and deceptive spin to mold public opinion. 

Trends toward the increasing concentration of the media in recent decades have resulted in more than 80% of all radio stations, television stations, cable networks, and newspapers being owned by a very small number of massive corporations.  With this status, it is not surprising that our democracy is careening off the rails!

Since the two primary purposes of the U.S. Constitution were to create a national framework for democratic fairness and to prevent the usurpation of power by either a despotic few or by the federal government, it is bizarre that we find ourselves in the year 2011 with the most unfair distribution of wealth in more than 80 years.  Rich people have collectively abused the power that comes with great wealth by getting politicians to give them the lowest tax rates since 1928 on income and capital gains and dividends and inheritances. 

Furthermore, the privileged class has in a very real sense managed to steal more than $13 trillion from future generations in the past 30 years through the fiscally irresponsible expediency of deficit spending.  Really?  The confirmation of this contention is found in national debt statistics.  In January 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office, the national debt was less than $1 trillion.  In November 2011, it is well over $14 trillion, an increase of more than $13 trillion.  (To see the spiraling costs of this debt, and the even more rapidly increasing level of unfunded government liabilities, Google “National Debt Clock”.)

If a law had been passed in 1980 that required a balanced federal budget, thereby prohibiting this $13 trillion increase in the national debt, it would have been necessary to control government spending more rigorously AND to keep marginal tax rates on the highest incomes at higher rates.  Instead, these rates were slashed from 70% to 35% by Ronald Reagan in 1981.  As a result, we have insidiously mortgaged the future to give this windfall to rich people today. 

To begin to correct this rash intergenerational transfer of wealth, and to prevent the inequities that accompany it, a bold course of action must be undertaken.  We must reform our tax structure to once again make it more steeply graduated.  Robert Reich recommends revising the income tax rates from 35% to 70% on all incomes in excess of $1 million per year. 

Stentorian voices can be heard muttering indistinctly from the heavens.  Thunderbolts strike trees which smolder in consequence.  The wealthiest 1% of people are outraged by ideas like this.  Nonetheless, it is an integral conclusion of these observations that we simply must create a fairer system of taxation.  It is not at all true that there are no good ways to reduce budget deficits.  It is simply that widespread conflicts of interest exist, and hardly anyone is willing to compromise in a fair-minded manner.  Issues are complex, but there are excellent ways to fix these problems. 

A detailed and eminently fair proposal on how to restructure our tax system can be found in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto.  See Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues.

Note that, to be successful in changing our tax structure to make it fairer to the vast majority of Americans, new legislation must be put into effect to change the status quo by reforming the “multi-trillion dollar influence racket” of our national political system. 

A good first step to accomplish this goal would be to enact a well-designed Fair Elections Now Act.  Stunningly, at a public campaign financing cost of about $5 billion dollars in the 2012 national elections, we could save hundreds of billions of dollars per year in taxpayer funds squandered on corporate welfare, corrupt deals, military misappropriations, no-bid contracts, misguided earmarks, banking excesses, bailouts, and tax cuts to rich people.  This would be the best return on investment for the vast majority of taxpayers that they will ever see in their lives – and this, just from such a simple change!

Simple, that is, except for one menacing obstacle:  plutocrats.

People of the World, Unite!  We cannot afford to let our societies fall apart, particularly when the remedy which is most easily affordable would affect people to whom the burden would be the least cumbersome.  This simple remedy is avowedly completely “politically impossible”.  But the one certainty in the universe is that things change;  and big changes come about when they become needed in an urgent enough way.  This time is rapidly approaching in the United States, as we watch it arriving in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and Yemen and Bahrain and Syria.

Let us demand that our representatives take into account fairness toward future generations in all the public policy decisions they make.  All economic and political equations must factor in long-term impacts on people and the natural world.  These are the basic ideas behind my advocating that we make an overarching commitment to people in the future by ratifying a Bill of Rights for Future Generations.  Let us make a bold determination to do this!

Observations Concerning the Extension of the Regressive Bush Tax Cuts

The need for a Bill of Rights for Future Generations became startlingly clearer in light of the tax “compromise” that President Obama and Mitch McConnell came up with in December 2010.   This compromise extended the regressive Bush Tax Cuts for two more years at a cost of an estimated $858 billion.  The entire cost of this overly-generous deal is being borrowed, adding to nearly $15 trillion national debt. 

A disproportionately large portion of the $858 billion will benefit the 1% of Americans who have the highest incomes and largest net worths.  This profligate generosity is absurd in light of the fact adduced above that the United States today has the lowest rates of taxes on income and capital gains and inheritances for multi-millionaires since 1928. 

Such borrowing is a gimmicky and very shortsighted expediency that allows us to irresponsibly avoid making the difficult choices and trade-offs that a balanced budget would necessitate.  It is an undisciplined and cowardly course of action, and because of its essential intergenerational treachery, it is a dastardly form of tyranny.  We simply must stop mortgaging the future to give benefits to rich people today!

Make no mistake about it.  This state of affairs is absurd precisely because of our overwhelming national need for investments in better education, research and development, social well-being, physical infrastructure, and environmental protections.  We also have a compelling international need for investments in peace and climate disruption mitigation and environmental justice.

How can we let inequalities in income and wealth become the most extreme they have been since the Roaring Twenties, and yet allow rich people to pay the lowest tax rates in generations?  How can we let our national infrastructure crumble around us merely to ensure that those who are already wealthy get richer?  Mark Twain would have unleashed a cynically sardonic salvo of invective at such a frankly foolish lack of due consideration for the greater good. 

    “Something is fishy here.  It looks like an Inside Job!”

                                                                              --- Twain

It is a wrong-headed priority to allow the perpetuation of regressive changes in taxation that are being preserved here.  And it is a misguided national policy to be so undisciplined as to facilitate the on-going risky fiscal expediency of deficit spending at record levels. 

We must honestly face the difficult decisions that need to be made.  The best footing upon which to make tough choices is to understand problems from the largest possible perspective, and to be guided by fair-minded principles.

“Government must give priority to the needs of ordinary citizens, workers, consumers, students, children, the elderly, the ill, the vulnerable and the underdog, and not to the needs of those already sufficiently powerful and affluent to afford their own lobbyists.”

                                                                                       --- Theodore Sorensen (1928 – 2010)

What’s It All About, Alfie?

“I’m going to level with you.  I’ll tell it to you straight.  We are facing far-reaching challenges.  We don’t need a one-party plan;  we need an inclusive plan.  We need plain brown wrapper ideas, not fancy, complicated, gimmicky ones.  We need to avoid evasion and obfuscation.  We don’t need polarization and partisanship;  we need collaboration and cooperation for the larger good.”

       --- California Governor Jerry Brown, to the L.A. Chamber of Commerce (paraphrased) 

It is a corruption of the purposes of government to facilitate ever-increasing extremes of inequality in our societies today.  The United States has the biggest income inequality of all nations in the developed world.  Is this civilized?  Over the past 30 years, the disparity between rich people and poor people in the U.S. has increased at a rate in excess of that found in most other nations of the world.  Why is this trend toward the increasing concentration of wealth taking place? 

Many factors contribute to income inequality, as discussed in books like Professor Larry Bartels’ Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.  A significant reason for this anti-egalitarian trend is to be found in public policies which determine taxes as well as the amount of spending on education and public health and programs that contribute to a social security safety net.  Republicans strongly oppose policies that would reduce income inequality.  Professor Bartels concludes that “economic inequality is, in substantial part, a political phenomenon.”  Thanks a lot, guys!

Passionate ideological arguments are made in opposition to policies that “redistribute wealth”.  Conservatives tend to dismiss egalitarian efforts to increase equality by labeling them as being “socialism”, as if they are some sort of abstract but distinctively threatening force.  Liberals point out that without fairer public policies, the real redistribution of wealth is one that concentrates wealth upwards.  “Trickle-down” economics has resulted in the gushing up of wealth into the hands of a small minority of the Few.  This outcome is enabled by a suspiciously unfair “choreography of American politics” in which inequality is stoked to feed into political polarization, and polarization in turn creates policies that further increase inequality.  Ouch!

“Redistributive policies” are discussed in the book Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches.  Increasing inequality means that most people are becoming less financially secure.  This increase in insecurity, in turn, creates economic instability.  The greater good of society is strongly correlated with fairer policy-making and fiscally-sound planning, not with initiatives that encourage economic booms and busts and the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the Few. 

Having a lot of money buys variety as well as freedom from economic insecurity.  When wealth is concentrated in a society, it tends to concentrate not just money but the keys to variety and freedom and financial security.  A sufficient excess of money also buys power, and power gives those who wield it with aggressive ruthlessness, like billionaires David and Charles Koch and the Sciafe family and the Coors family, an ever-greater concentration of wealth at the expense of all others.  The tragedy is that to accomplish their achievements and make more money, they resort to curbing worker rights and externalizing some of the costs of their business activities onto society.

The Constitution and laws that govern us should rightly treat each person fairly.  The people who have the most power and influence in our country must be firmly steered toward dealing fairly with others.  At a time when the challenges of governing human affairs is pregnant with overarching global implications, those who have the most influence and the most money must be responsibly required to contribute according to their capabilities. 

Those who benefit the most from the way our society is structured should be required to contribute commensurately with their wealth to the maintenance of our national infrastructure and the costs of making sure that our systems are sustainable.  These people must not be allowed to abuse their influence to gain an ever-greater proportion of the benefits of our economy.  They must be prevented from grabbing expanded prerogatives to exploit the political system for narrow advantages, particularly now when the need to invest in healthy and sustainable courses of action for the greater good is growing so imperatively clear.

A National Addiction About to Hit the Wall

The United States is addicted to deficit spending like a junkie to heroin.  The withdrawal symptoms associated with going “cold turkey” would be really ugly, so the chances of us reducing our federal budget deficits to less than $1 trillion per year anytime soon are slim, despite the vociferous proclamations of the Tea Party and the sober warnings of fiscal conservatives and the dawning common sense realizations of the American public. 

Who are the pushers who have helped enable this dangerous addiction?  FOLLOW THE MONEY!  In general, it has been lobbyists and apologists for rich people, and ideologues, and right-wing think tanks, and those who distort the truth.  A comprehensive list would be very long, and it would include the costly efforts of the Obama Administration to stimulate the economy during the 2008 recession and its aftermath. 

The Bush Administration would be prominent amongst those responsible.  It admonished and later fired its economic advisor Larry Lindsey for indicating during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in September 2002 that the war could cost up to $200 billion.  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called this estimate “baloney”.  It is now estimated, of course, that the eventual cost of this war will exceed $3 trillion. 

Other facilitators of deficit spending are supply-side proponents of laissez-faire capitalism and “trickle-down” propagandists who claim that tax cuts for rich people would increase total tax revenues, rather than what really happens:  the stability of the system is put at risk, and revenues generally decrease. 

Congress is also culpable for spending wantonly and for having allowed a pay-as-you-go law to expire in 2002.  This misguided action has helped facilitate a rapid increase in deficits since then.  Republican efforts to sell the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003 to legislators featured a deliberate and scandalous underestimation of the cost of this new entitlement program in order to get it enacted.  Drug company profits have increased substantially since then, while federal budget deficits have increased.

Economic stimulus and huge bailouts by the government have been necessitated by the credit emergency of the Great Recession, and this has dramatically worsened the debt problem.  The list goes on and on and on.

The political and propaganda battle associated with the beginnings of a movement to wean ourselves from this dangerous addiction are already intense.  The unintended consequences of our undisciplined and weak-willed inability to responsibly manage our affairs will have far-reaching detrimental impacts on people in the future.  This issue is explored in depth in the Earth Manifesto essay Existence, Economics, and Ecological Intelligence.  But let me make one thing perfectly clear here:  we are deceiving ourselves to think we can fight trillion dollar wars without paying for them.  We are also being stupid to continue to let rich people pay historically low tax rates, financed by borrowing money, without expecting extremely high costs to be incurred.

These costs will likely be found not merely in slower future economic growth and an eventual spike in inflation.  It is much more likely to come in the form of a severe economic shock that will profoundly affect the lives of most Americans and our standard of living and our well-being.  The people of Greece and Iceland and Portugal and Spain and Britain are already paying the piper for similarly fiscal foolish enormous amounts of debt financing.  We would be wise to seriously reform our econopolitical system before our addiction reduces us to similar levels of desperation and austerity measures and social unrest.

Town councils and mayors in local communities, and city and county supervisors, and state officials and governors are all dealing with the daunting challenges posed by shortfalls in their budgets.  These financial challenges have been made worse by declining property values and the credit crisis and the recession.  Then there are high costs of needed investments in repairs and maintenance of the nation’s infrastructure.  And look here!  Inadequately funded liabilities loom for government commitments to employee retiree healthcare and pension plans. 

All of these challenges are complicated by the growing strength of anti-tax sentiments among taxpayers, particularly by those who have been required in the past to pay a larger share of the tax burden and who could most easily afford to do so today.  These interests do not have to pay more, predictably, because the representatives that they have bought with their political contributions have given them benefits by the truck load.

Observations on Horse Trading and Hostage Taking

Rich people refuse to allow our representatives to give benefits to anyone without getting even larger perks for themselves, and they have the power to secure these advantages.  The only way, for instance, that President Clinton was able to increase the minimum wage in 1996 from $4.25 per hour to $5.15 was by coupling the law with a variety of big tax breaks for banks and the wealthy.  Bill Moyers noted a bit cynically that: “In Washington D.C., you can’t even give working people a modest raise without giving big contributors a windfall.”

Conservatives today say, “You want to extend unemployment benefits for a whole year for millions of people adversely impacted by the credit crisis and the economic downturn?  No way!  That would cost too much.  Not on your life!  Deficits are evil.  We’re against them.  Well … unless, of course, you are willing to come up with $100 billion for business tax breaks and $200 billion for lower taxes on insiders and the wealthiest 1% of Americans.  Say, I think we have a “bipartisan deal” in the making here!  “This is the best deal you’re going to get, trust us on that!”

Florida Republican Representative said that the December 2010 compromise represented “a bipartisan moment of clarity.”  Clarity?  I think clarity would include concern for, and insight into, the unintended consequences of this action on future budgets and future generations!

Misguided generosity to the wealthy has been made starkly more extreme by the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.  These initiatives reduced taxes in a significantly regressive way to primarily benefit rich people and big corporations.  As a result, the fortunes of wealthy people have gotten much bigger while the fortunes of almost all other Americans have declined.  The “Big Lie” of “trickle-down theory” has been exposed, for very little has trickled down to the vast majority of Americans in the past 30 years of stagnating wages and high rates of inflation in living costs.  This is a dramatic contrast to the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, before the “Reagan Revolution”, because in that earlier and fairer period, workers saw their average earnings increase by 75%.

Economic fundamentalists and billionaires and conservatives and right-wing think tanks have been pushing the story since 1980 that big government is the source of all our national problems.  But an honest understanding reveals that an even bigger problem is the selfish abuse of power by the superrich and the privileged class at the top.  These people have rejected fairly-shared prosperity in order to get expanded prerogatives.  The time has come today for the privileged class to be held accountable for this domineering despotism!  The time has come to hold the top 1% responsible for agreeing to help make our societies a little fairer and a bit more egalitarian.

“There are really two Americas, one for the grifter class, and one for everybody else.  In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the federal government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin.  In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that financial companies … use as a tool for making money.”

      --- Matt Taibbi, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Examining Some Important Lessons of History

The legendary historians Will and Ariel Durant spent decades of their lives studying thousands of years of the history of civilization and writing the eleven-volume Story of Civilization on world history.  Then they distilled down the insights they had gained from this extensive study into a momentous and brilliantly concise book, The Lessons of History.  One lesson they discovered is that there is a natural tendency in human societies for wealth to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of small groups of privileged people, and that this trend occasionally reaches a critical point where either sensible legislative redistributions of wealth must be enacted (like progressive tax reforms), or else increased conflict and occasionally even violent revolutions take place that generally destroy wealth rather than redistribute it.

Today, We the People are finally getting really frustrated and angry at the domination of our economic and political system by selfishly greedy controlling rich people.  The Occupy movement is an expression of this anger.  It would be smart for the 1%, and better for the national security of all, if the rich were to responsibly act like wise rulers who compromise “while the getting is good” and act with greater fairness and show better stewardship of our societies and reflect more concern for investments in the greater good.  They should agree now to higher marginal tax rates to help finance the good causes that need to be addressed.

Let these observations be a shot fired across the bow of our privileged-class-dominated ship of state.  Stand and Deliver!  Mark Twain was once accosted with these words by a gang of robbers who held up the stagecoach in which he was riding one cold night as they were en route to Virginia City, Nevada.  Let us collectively demand that the 1% “Stand and Deliver”.  Let us also all collectively make committed efforts to create fairer societies and more equality in education and better job opportunities and universal healthcare.  Let us demand initiatives that will give fairer representation to the 99% of people, making justice more equal for all.  And let us find ways to mitigate the exploitation of people in the future by today’s frenzy of the Few to gain more money and possessions and power.

Since governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, We the People must withhold our consent from the corrupt state of the status quo.  We arguably need First Amendment remedies to national problems:  Speak out for the greater good!  People of all political persuasions should at least support fairer policies. 

Moving Forward for the Greater Good

Hope springs eternal, and well it should.  Life can be filled with marvelous experiences, and the world is an extraordinary place with much beauty and existence-affirming potentialities.  Hope springs eternal because each of us individually, and all of us collectively, figuratively stand in every moment at a juncture in the woods where two paths diverge.  We are faced with a choice of traveling one way or the other, and thus we make choices that can make all the difference.  As poet Robert Frost noted in The Road Not Taken (paraphrased):  “Knowing how it is that way leads on to way, I doubt if we shall ever come back here.”

Come, come, whoever you are

Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving, it doesn’t matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Ours is the portal of hope.

Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.

Come, yet again, come, come.

                                               --- The poet Rumi

Now is the time for us to make the best choices for the greater good.  This is a matter of right understanding and sensible direction and optimal conduct.  Social and environmental justice are matters that should transcend politics, partisanship and propaganda.  Greater fairness and the Golden Rule are not some God-dispensed grace or mere utopian ideal, nor do they rely on belief in any deity, nor are they some sort of socialistic dogma.

The Golden Rule actually has roots that grew long before holy books were written.  Its tenet of “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” is one born of empathy and the evolutionarily adaptive need for social cohesion.  It is an insight of reason and of an innate sense of empathetic fairness.  Treating others fairly is a kind of social intelligence, of aesthetics, and even of fundamentally hygienic propriety of action.

John Fowles analyzed the motives for our failure to do good in Chapter 5 of his thought-provoking book The Aristos.  He noted that people fail to enact good despite the fact that “almost every great thinker, every great saint, every great artist has advocated, personified and celebrated -- or at least implied -- the nobility and excellence of the good act as the basis of the just society.”  Fowles concluded that there is a functional quality of doing good that is a kind of right action characterized by what he describes as fundamental acts of hygiene rather than shallower motives of gaining recompense or pleasure or self-esteem for good actions.  He essentially asserts that we should collectively take actions against injustice and inequality in our societies as a matter of functional right-doing and the public health and the greater good, and not just merely as a means for getting personal rewards.

“Over the last two hundred years there has been a great improvement in personal and public hygiene and cleanliness;  and this was largely brought about by persuading people that the results of being dirty and apathetic in the face of disease were not acts of God, but preventable acts of nature;  not the sheer misery in things, but the controllable mechanisms of life.  We have had the first, the physical, phase of the hygienic revolution;  it is time we went to the barricades for the second, the mental.  Not doing good when you usefully could is not immoral;  it is going about with excrement on the hands.”

                                                                                               --- John Fowles, The Aristos

Yuck!  That metaphor is disgusting!  But, then again, so is the set of unethical behaviors and unfair attitudes that it refers to.  Let us seek to understand this observation in practical terms.  It is a basic aspect of the human condition that we are NOT all created equal.  Each of us is born with different individual abilities and circumstances.  This lottery at birth is a ticket, for better or worse, to material and emotional and spiritual rewards, or adversities, later in life. 

A Disclaimer

Generalizations involve sometimes grotesque degrees of mischaracterization.  There are many generous and wonderful rich people.  As with any group, it is almost always a small number of the members of the group who can give the entire group a negative image.  The billionaires David and Charles Koch, for instance, act with far more zealously self-interested ruthlessness and they demonstrate dramatically more greed and anti-worker, anti-environmental attitudes than other billionaires like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or Michael Bloomberg or George Soros.

Words like ‘greedy’ and ‘mean-spirited’ may sneak into these Earth Manifesto observations in the passion of the moment, but let me make one thing perfectly clear.  These words are not meant as personal insults or mere hyperbole.  When the power affiliated with Big Money is abused to radically skew benefits to special interest groups, and to create public policies that are contrary to the interests of the vast majority of Americans, passionate expostulation might be an effective means of motivating people to support significant reforms. 

The bottom-line understanding, to be redundantly clear, is that Big Money wields unconscionably unfair influence in the decision-making and policy-formulating of our country.  Wealthy people have understandably abused their influence to insidiously undermine our democracy.  This influence is having consequences that are environmentally and socially disastrous.  As a result of the ruthless and regressive ratcheting up of the recklessly domineering power of Big Money, marginal tax rates on the highest levels of incomes have been reduced to the lowest level in generations. 

In the process, wealthy people have managed to get policies put into place that have achieved three highly undesirable things:

 (1) They have engineered the theft of more than $13 trillion from the American public and future generations, as explained earlier; 

 (2) They have insidiously squeezed workers, and then squeezed them some more, again and again, and again, in order to radically increase income inequality and disparities in wealth and the economic insecurity of the overwhelming majority of Americans;  and,

 (3) They have wreaked reprehensible harm to the environment, and torpedoed initiatives that would have protected the public from the ramifications of these acts.

There are definitely deep structural problems and wasteful programs and unfair influence by a wide range of constituencies.  Bigger dynamics are also at play.  Giant multinational corporations are moving jobs abroad to take advantage of cheap labor overseas.  At home, technological innovations and ruthless management actions are eliminating jobs to increase profits.  The power of anti-tax and anti-government fervor is growing. 

Some people are clearly more fair-minded and generous in nature and magnanimous in spirit than other people.  Those who abuse the power of their influence may just be doing what almost every self-interested person would do if they had the same power:  strive to get more advantages and perks for themselves.  It is apparently beyond our collective capabilities, within the context of the current economic and political systems, to limit the influence of these various constituencies, and to thus create greater fairness. 

So, the best course of action is to require those who make out like bandits, by whatever means they succeed in this, to contribute a bigger percentage of the higher levels of their earnings, on a more steeply graduated scale, to the financing of our societies.

People that make more than $1 million per year achieve this great monetary success in a wide variety of ways.  The people who do this include corporate executives, bankers, hedge fund managers, developers, investors, speculators, inheritors of vast fortunes, Hollywood stars, and those who have impressive skills in professional football and baseball and golf and NASCAR racing and other sports.  Bravo for their success! 

But, so sorry!  The top 2% of income earners and wealthy people must be required to take a breather for a while and stop pressing for ever-increasing advantages in their relentless crusade to gain more and more money and wrest more and more power for themselves from the system, at the expense of all others who have less power and influence.  It may be self-righteous, self-interested radical extremists like the billionaire Koch brothers who spearhead efforts to get taxes reduced for those who earn high incomes, but all people who earn more than $1 million in any given year are big beneficiaries of those efforts.  So all of them should be required, willingly or not, to contribute more to the well-being of our societies.

The Fairness Doctrine in the Media

Look.  Listen for the truth underlying these words.  Media matters.  Big Media is in cahoots with those who scheme to help entrench the unfair status quo.  About 85% of all television stations and radio stations are owned by fewer than a dozen giant corporations.  Efforts are being made in Congress by Republicans in 2011 to eviscerate the counterbalance which public broadcasting provides to the dominant spin of giant multinational corporations. 

These cynical politicians are seemingly doing this to undermine people’s understanding of true causes and effects of public policies.  Divisive spin and mindless entertainment and unbalanced reporting and biased ‘arguing heads’ are preferred over fair-minded reporting by outlets like Fox News.  They appear to want a conforming electorate rather than a free flow of fair-minded ideas.  Perhaps they want broadcasting to be used principally to disseminate propaganda, rather than to responsibly provide more accurate and meaningful information. 

A free press is critically important to an honest understanding of issues.  It is thus crucial to the fairness and vitality of democratic governance by the people and their representatives.  One primary reason that debate in our nation has become so sharply partisan, so intensely contested, and so filled with antagonism is that mainstream news has become biased, unbalanced and sensationalistic. 

John Fowles once observed that a marked atrophy of the civic sense in ordinary people is strongly correlated to “an asphyxiating smog of opinions foisted on them by society.”  He wrote these words long before partisanship became as extremely polarized as it has become in the past few decades.  Today, the smog of opinions and propaganda and marketing that envelops us has only gotten denser and more intense.

These developments in the media are correlated to the termination of the Fairness Doctrine in the media.  The Fairness Doctrine was a policy of the Federal Communications Commission from 1949 to 1987.  It required radio and television stations to present controversial issues that are important to the public, and to do so in a manner that is honest and equitable and balanced. 

Ronald Reagan used an Executive Order to abolish the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.  This ending of fairness-oriented broadcast rules has had the negative effect of reducing open and free debate, and of suppressing a balance of diversity in viewpoints expressed.  Reagan’s order had the effect of giving more influence to conservatives on talk radio shows.  It also helped enable the rise of Fox News, which has become a media arm of corporate interests and the Republican Party.  This, in turn, has furthered extreme views like those opposed to fair reforms of our financial system and our healthcare system, and to sentiments supporting an affordable social safety net.

Without the Fairness Doctrine, scientific understandings have been undermined and we have made completely inadequate attempts to address far-reaching environmental problems like that of climate disruption.  Big Money has been allowed too much influence to use the airwaves and ballot initiative processes to further narrow goals.  The lack of a fairness doctrine has contributed not only to unbalanced and deceptive reporting, but also to dishonest journalism, and to an overly-heavy influence of Big Money on reporting related to controversial issues.  This distorts people’s thinking, causing millions of people to support wrong-headed ideas and regressive, retrogressive, wrong-way-Charlie reforms to our out-of-whack economic and political systems.

A more diverse media ownership is needed in addition to a free press.  Today’s ownership of various broadcasting outlets is already too dominated by big corporations.  Publically-supported broadcasting is needed to provide a counterbalance to the corporate slant of the news and its propaganda and shallow entertainment aspects.  An increase in minority ownership of broadcast and print outlets would also help ensure that the news is more honestly and fairly portrayed. 

Republicans have tried for decades to cut funding for public broadcasting television (PBS) and radio (NPR).  The simple fact of the matter is that viewers and listeners trust the news on public broadcasting services more than the news and content that is provided by stations like Fox News.  Public broadcasting also provides substantially better public affairs programming.

Congress attempted to cut $430 million from public broadcasting in early 2011.  This would have had the negative effect of disproportionately impacting small communities and rural TV and radio stations, because these outlets rely on the services provided by public broadcasting for much larger percentages of their budgets than stations in urban areas.  By bankrupting rural news outlets, a further undesirable concentration in the media would result.

The trend in recent years toward the increasing concentration and consolidation of the media in large corporate outlets threatens unbiased reporting and the diversity of opinions.  We are being distracted from focusing on important issues by sensationalistic reporting and opinion slants and narrow entertainment values of corporate broadcasters.  Public broadcasting is also important because without it, there would be fewer entities that would explore local issues or focus on important public interest problems. 

   “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own!”

                                                                                        --- Wes ‘Scoop’ Nisker

An old Chinese curse goes, “May you live in interesting times.”  For better or for worse, we sure do live in interesting times!  A sense of curiosity about the real nature of our times is a positive quality, so let us explore the true nature of this reality.  Let us assess the preponderance of the evidence to see if it suggests any even relative truths.  Let’s develop expansive worldviews!

Are You Joshing Me?

A famous scandal in the 1880’s involved a counterfeiting operation in which 1883 Liberty Head “V” nickels, which inadvertently had not included the word “cents” on them, were gold-plated and passed off as five-dollar gold pieces.  A deaf mute named Josh Tatum was one of the principal perpetrators of this scam.  He was apprehended and prosecuted for the fraud, but since he never said they were $5 gold pieces but merely used them to make small purchases and then accepted excess change for the transactions, he was found “not guilty” of the most serious charges against him.  This episode was the source of the saying, “You’re not joshing me, are you?”

Josh Tatum had been gilding the nickels to give them a false appearance of being $5 gold pieces.  It is not too big a stretch to say that a Gilded Age is an age that is given a tawdry patina of prosperity by those in power, even though it is an age of desperate conditions for millions of people.  It is reprehensible for those with vast fortunes to turn their backs on society by obstructing fair-minded reforms during such inegalitarian times.  It is wrong for the 1% of Americans who have 42% of all the wealth in our nation to refuse to pay a larger share for military costs and environmental protections and the costs of dealing with social ills that are associated with such unbalanced economic and political systems.  Such attitudes of wealthy people are objectionable because they are a form of harsh “tough luck” hubris, of anti-social avarice, of socially sociopathic selfishness, and of a lack of basic responsibility.

Politicians play a perverse game when they favor those with Big Money.  This is the modern day expression of the strife between capital and labor.  By allowing the nation’s wealth to be increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, power and influence are given to those whose goal is to undermine the middle class and disenfranchise the vast majority of Americans.  A litany of new ills is being foisted upon Americans and future generations in order to ensure that the greedy super-rich gain more and more and more of the benefits of the economy for themselves.

The destitution of the masses in America is being engineered by aggressive industrialists like the billionaires David and Charles Koch.  These powerful partisans are in cahoots with amoral profit-obsessed corporations, and bought-and-paid-for politicians, as well as the 5-4 majority of corporate apologists on the Supreme Court. 

This narrow majority includes John Roberts and Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia and -- mum’s the word! -- Clarence Thomas!  They seem to hold the opinion that the people are mere rabble in the shadows of the wealthiest Americans who these Justices treat as the most deserving people, the noble rich, the first-class citizens, the cream of society -- the robber barons of the twenty-first century.  While the rich are paying the lowest tax rates in generations, due largely to political pandering by “conservatives”, the need is unprecedented for investments in more socially-just policies, for better and more affordable public education, and for environmental protections, clean water, renewable energy, and a stable climate.  Perhaps it would be inconvenient for the super-rich to be deprived of the power to dominate our politics, but the time has come that we simply must create fairer laws and fairer interpretations of these laws.

The American people are being treated as second-class citizens, as subservient to moneyed interests and to socially irresponsible giant corporations.  Our freedom, our well-being, our democracy, the ecosystems of the Earth, and the prospects of all those yet to be born are being sacrificed on the ideological altar of a hypothetical superiority of the prerogatives of capital over labor, and of moneyed interests over workers and the people. 

For these reasons, we need political reform NOW.  We should be working together to create a Golden Age of peace and fairly-shared prosperity.  A true Golden Age would be characterized by social justice and enlightened support for maximizing personal freedoms and human potentials.  A real Golden Age would be a responsible age of ecological intelligence, humanism and overarching commitments to the long-term greater good.  It would not be gilded with false appearances, but would focus on fair-mindedness and true justice and peaceful coexistence.   It would involve a revival of broad-minded learning and artistic and intellectual accomplishments and enthusiasm for humanistic achievements.

Instead of moving in this laudable direction, an increasingly unfair nation is being created which features obscenely-growing disparities between the rich Few and hundreds of millions of others who suffer from insidiously-growing financial insecurity.  This is a Golden Age for the super-rich, but it is an age in which opportunities and financial well-being are far too unequal and unfair.  Change must come!

Anti-Union Developments

The notably strident developments in Wisconsin in February and March 2011 are illuminating.  Collective bargaining rights to organize give more power to workers to negotiate wages and benefits and improved working conditions.  More power often results in abuses of power, and sure enough, some unions are involved in serious issues like pension spiking and teacher tenure inequities and unfunded liabilities for retirees and other challenges related to compensation for public employees.  Pension reform is, in fact, becoming urgently necessary. 

But there should be no doubt about the fact that the real bulwark of power in our capitalist economic system lies with capital, not with labor.  The most outrageous abuses of power are consequently being perpetuated by bankers and corporations and rich people, NOT by workers.  One result is that union participation in the private sector has been eviscerated, declining from a peak of 36% in 1945, and more than 25% of all workers between 1945 and 1975, to less than 10% of all workers today. 

Intense discord in Wisconsin has taken place over the right of public employees to use collective bargaining.  Curiously, the budget for the state of Wisconsin was on track to record a surplus until the newly-elected Republican Governor Scott Walker signed two new business tax breaks into effect, reducing overall tax revenues and creating a fiscal crisis.  Having helped create a budget deficit, the Governor then used it as a justification to advance his agenda of cutting the compensation of public employees and busting unions and crushing the rights of workers to organize.  Having supported tax cuts for billionaires, he now wants to cut salaries for teachers and slash funds for public education, while giving well-to-do people vouchers for private schools.

Scott Walker was scammed by a telephone caller who misidentified himself as one of Walker’s biggest financial supporters, the arch-conservative billionaire David Koch.  Walker declared that this is a defining moment in history similar to the time in 1981 when his anti-union hero Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers.  Ian Murphy, the liberal editor of the Buffalo Beast website, made this prank call to Governor Walker in the midst of the acrimonious conflict in Wisconsin over the right of public employees to use collective bargaining. 

David Koch was one of the biggest contributors to Governor Walker’s election campaign, so the Governor talked on the phone to the impersonator in a very chummy tone for 20 minutes.  He made some embarrassingly candid remarks to the man he thought was his patron.  Walker stated that he would continue to refuse to negotiate or compromise.  He even indicated that he had thought about planting troublemakers in crowds of protestors. 

Governor Walker referred to State Senator Tim Cullen as the “only reasonable” Democrat, “but he’s not one of us”.  Not, in other words, a member of the corporate rich people’s club who thinks they know exactly what’s right for public policy.  Tim Cullen is one of the fourteen Democratic members of the state senate who fled the state for several weeks to prevent the Republican majority from railroading through anti-union legislation.

Workers in the private sector have had their benefits frozen or reduced to a much greater extent than public sector employees.  They have been subjected to stagnating wages, longer working hours, significant increases in healthcare costs, and heightened job and retirement insecurity.  Millions of them have been laid-off.  A primary reason that employees in the private sector have been subjected to such adverse developments is that unions in the private sector have been crushed by the power of giant corporations in the past 30 years. 

Ohio is another state where Republicans tried to drastically limit the bargaining abilities of unionized public workers like firefighters, police officers and teachers.  In the November 8, 2011 election, voters handily rejected a law passed by the Republican establishment that would have curtailed collective bargaining rights.

The widespread unrest that is affecting authoritarian regimes in the Arab world proves that when nations do not address the causes of deep discontent, they become more vulnerable to political chaos.  Many nations are beset by outrage because they have failed to address high rates of unemployment, extreme social disparities of class and privilege, a lack of fair economic opportunities, spiking food and energy costs, a lack of fair representation, and corruption in the government that enables these injustices. 

These destabilizing developments provide Americans with a stark lesson as to the inadvisability of failing to address our own high unemployment and healthcare injustices and high costs for food and energy and housing.  This is a cautionary tale to those who oppose fair-minded reforms and fairness of opportunity and collective bargaining rights for working people. 

Valuing Social and Environmental Justice

The desire for respect and approval is one of the defining yearnings in human relationships.  One of the central convictions of my personal worldview is that a society must cultivate a reasonable modicum of fairness and social justice in order to be healthy and adequately harmonious and safe and peaceful. 

People tend to have longer individual lifespans in societies that are more fair and egalitarian in their healthcare systems, and in their opportunities, and in their system of legal justice and in their telling degree of inequality.  This makes it wise to embrace progressive policies that are focused on Golden Rule fairness, for such policies are the best ways to ensure that the greater good is achieved.  Such policies are a means to institutionalize greater justice and respect for individuals.

The famous writer and philosopher Ayn Rand maintained a perspective that was passionately contrary to this one.  She felt that titans of industry deserve all the money and power they get.  She thus contended that societies should allow such individuals an unalloyed freedom to gain and enjoy the fruits of their accomplishments.  Her ideals of individualism and rational self-interest and materialistic gains and hard work were stridently opposed to what she regarded as ‘collectivist’ notions. 

Actually, I am not intimately familiar with the whole scope of Ayn Rand’s intellectual philosophies.  But I do know that they have been powerfully influential with people like Alan Greenspan who was the Federal Reserve regulator who was opposed to regulation.  Rand’s convictions seem a bit strange because they regard laissez-faire capitalism and defiant individualism as the only moral system.  She felt that the economy should be organized in ways that minimize government rules.  She believed that rationality and free will and logic and productivity and property rights and the narrow self-interest of individuals are paramount. 

The merits of Ayn Rand’s worldviews are undermined by the nefarious effects of extreme inequalities that are created in capitalist systems, and by the overriding absurdities that are involved in systemic schemes which allow profits to be privatized while costs are socialized, foisting costs on everyone and jeopardizing the prospects of future generations.  Because of distorting effects of political power and influence, governments give more money in “welfare to the rich” than they do in welfare for the poor.

Ayn Rand’s belief in the virtue of selfishness and her unremitting hostility to taxation and the state are simply absurd in light of the exigencies that face humanity today.  I believe that the political sentiments found in the Earth Manifesto are more sensible and hopeful for a propitious future.  The “social contract” requires every individual to be more responsible to the societies in which they live.  We simply must create effective incentives to ensure that a proper incentive structure is actualized.

Glaring unfairness in the economic system of the United States was documented in the 1963 report from the Commission on the Status of Women, which was empanelled by President John F. Kennedy.  This report provided a cogent understanding of how systemic injustices and inequalities triumph over intellectual ideals like those which Ayn Rand held dear.

Making our economic and political systems fairer for the vast majority of people is the best plan from the standpoint of the whole of society.  The greatest good for the greatest number of people over the longest period of time should be our national goal.  This means that instead of implementing public policies that continuously increase the disparity in income and wealth between older people and younger people, and between rich people and poor people, we should act to ensure that this gap is actually narrowed. 

Greater fairness is the cornerstone of a healthy democratic republic, NOT more unfairness.  Public policies must be changed to ensure that the benefits of economic activities are fairer to the vast majority of workers, as well as to the countless number of our descendents who will follow us.

To Have or Not to Have, That Is the Question:  Gimmickry or Wise Priorities?

Federal and state budgets should express the properly-weighed priorities of the collective values of the people.  Fatefully, they do not.  Budgetary decisions are perversely distorted by the undesirable and excessive influence of the wealthy.  Deficit spending makes this misguided tendency worse by allowing selfish, materialistic, and anti-empathetic values to dominate.  The protectors of the established order are intransigent, and public officials often are recalcitrant in opposing reforms because they are part of this order.  Some of the privileged are cold and arrogant in their greed, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, as if their hearts had been hardened by long winters of traditionalism and socially reactionary opposition to fairer attitudes.

Gimmickry dominates our public decision-making and budgeting.  We seek easy answers and half-baked solutions and shortsighted expediencies.  We live in a short-attention span, simplistic-sound-bite addicted, bumper-sticker-sentiment society in which the average person Twitters more frequently than they write a heartfelt letter or read a good book. 

Donald Rumsfeld once wrote a ‘snowflake’ memo to himself in which he noted that “bumper sticker statements” should be used to rally public support for unpopular wars.  I assert that we need deeper and wiser understandings of issues, not merely myopic bumper sticker sentiments!

We could do much better.  Let us start by radically simplifying our laws, and making them fairer!

“I do not feel obligated to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”

                                                                                   --- Galileo Galilei

An Aside on Peaceful Revolution

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was a revolutionary call to arms.  The Earth Manifesto is a contrasting call to revolutionary social change through peaceful activism.  Some of the greatest philosophers and activists that the world has ever seen have been proponents of non-violence and commitments to making positive change in their societies.  Think of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.  These are true heroes of humanity.  Most religious traditions preach non-violence, but many religious establishments nonetheless often hypocritically join with oppressive governments to effectively oppose fair-minded and salubrious changes in social policies. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. once wrote:

“Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and not concerned about the city government that damns the soul, the economic conditions that corrupt the soul, the slum conditions, the social evils that cripple the soul, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood.”    

The changes we need are bigger than economic and political ones.  The global challenges that face humanity today require extensive changes in the habits and behaviors of all people.  It is clear that human drives and propensities do not change much over time, for they are basic aspects of human nature.  But our habits and behaviors are quite malleable and can be easily influenced by incentives.  One need go no further for proof of this contention than to a local retail clothing shop with a big red 50% Sale sign in the window to see how eagerly consumers respond.

Nick Cooney points out in the Introduction to his book, Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us about Spreading Social Change:  “If we want to change society, the only way we can do so is by changing the attitudes and behaviors of human beings.”  As indicated previously, the fairest and most effective way to change people’s behaviors is by creating powerful motivations for them to change in the form of attractive incentives and deterring disincentives.  “Let’s design these incentives well, and do it soon!”

Sarah Palin writes in her book America by Heart that there is a “shameful tendency on the left not simply to declare their opponents wrong, but to declare them evil.”  People “on the left” convincingly point out that this tendency is usually most characteristic of people who believe in Manichean worldviews of absolute good and absolute evil.  Curiously, Sarah, it is people on the far right who seem to have the strongest tendencies to cling stubbornly to self-righteous dogmas and simplistic black-and-white interpretations of issues.  It is people on the far right who cling to worldviews that regard their in-group as good while others are condemned as evil. 

These folks fall into the trap of “seeing one’s own sins in others”.  They criticize others with tendencies of which they themselves are guilty.  This seems to be true principally of religious fundamentalists, and of people on the extreme right in general.  Such skewed perceptions are a form of misunderstanding with deep psychological underpinnings, springing, perhaps, from a lack of self awareness and feelings of paranoia and persecution and anger and insecurity.  Repressed desires may even be involved.  But whatever their source, such attitudes reflect a sprawling kind of hypocrisy.  I’ll have to read Idiot America to see if it provides any clues to why people act the way they do.  Ha!

   “Sarah Palin: Excellent argument for separation of church and brain.” 

                                                                                        --- Denis Leary (Ho, Ho, Ho!)

In the parlance of the religious, we need to inspect the logs in our own eyes before attending to the splinters in the eyes of others.  The ideas in the Earth Manifesto have been scrubbed to make them more scrupulously fair;  this is an on-going challenge of objectivity, with perhaps only moderate success on my part.  I hope others will strive for similar sensibilities!

A Prelude to Calls for Action

One of the precautionary principles of intelligent action would be to implement the best option for an uncertain future:  that is, one which leaves the most options open.  It is highly incautious to choose courses of action that foreclose many other potentially good options!

New austerity measures are on the way in the United States as a result of low taxes on those who can afford to pay them and correlated record levels of deficit spending.  We are not yet as desperate as the people in Greece or Ireland, but we are surely headed in that direction.  And these austerity measures may well prove to be extremely shortsighted.  Nearly half of the police force and about one-third of the firefighters of Camden, New Jersey were laid-off in January 2011 to balance the budget.  While many people may begrudge the high pay and benefits of public servants and first responders, there must be a better way to balance our institutions than by endangering the citizenry!  (How about sensible pension reform?)

Listen.  The issue of the skyrocketing U.S. national debt in the past few years is made even more risky by the fact that the percentage this debt represents, relative to the Gross Domestic Product, has been radically increasing.  In 1980, federal debt was about 35% of GDP;  this ratio is now over 90% of GDP.  Current estimates suggest this percentage will increase to 100% within the next year or so.  It is risky, indeed crazy, to put policies in place that allow this to happen!

It is downright stupid to borrow money from future generations to squander it on short-term oriented expediencies.  Even assuming that we will never pay back any of the principal borrowed, the obligation for interest costs on all borrowed money adds up to more than 100% of the amount borrowed every 18 years, over and over again, indefinitely.  This assumes a very low long-term average of just 4% interest cost on federal debt.  From this perspective, it is even more foolish to incur enormous amounts of deficit spending for non-productive purposes, and it is really a bizarre “plan” to allow the rich to get us to borrow money to give them low tax rates!

Mark Twain once satirically stated: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.” Woe is us! Our representatives lie to us about their principles, and betray our interests once they are in office.  They allow our national priorities to be profoundly perverted by our pay-to-play political system and the excessive power of the military-industrial-banking-Congressional-corporate media complex.

Overarching principles are required.  New guidance for sensible national priorities is needed.  Yep! --- We need tax policies that are more progressive, and a commitment to a far-reaching Bill of Rights for Future Generations!

“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?”  Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?”  And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?”  But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?”  And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but it must be done because Conscience tells him it is right.”

         --- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another Voice Heard

Jesus must have been really riled at rich people, for he told a young rich man that he should help the poor.  He supposedly said that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”  Today’s cavalier attitudes of the wealthy, combined with the domineering influence of powerful giant corporations and their amoral and narrowly-focused purposes, make our society even more ruthless and unempathetic and uncompassionate.  Our societies reek of mindless self-serving mean-spiritedness and plenty of criminal negligence of the greater good. 

Politics sure does create exceedingly odd bedfellows!  When Bible-thumping social conservatives throw in with the wealthiest Americans, something strange is going on.  Absurdity reigns when conservatives are against conservation, and when religious fundamentalists join those who stand staunchly against initiatives that embody Golden Rule fairness.  Absurdity is ascendant when people deny that human activities are disrupting Earth’s climate, and they thus stand resolutely in opposition to scientific understandings and precautionary ecological principles.  It is not at all acceptable for our representatives in Congress to give lip service to fiscal responsibility while enacting policies that are directly contrary to balanced budgets.

I once watched the film What Would Jesus Buy.  It brings home the point that consumerism is a rather insane approach to meaningful and healthy living.  Thanks, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Choir for your over-the-top entertainment and poignant insights!  Check out the Earth Manifesto’s Profound Psychological Perspectives and Prescriptions for Trying Times to find cogent perspectives concerning the motives that drive mindlessly compulsive buying and high levels of consumer credit debt and other such materialistic foibles.

It is precisely because human nature does not change, and because selfish avarice is widespread, that we must re-design our economic and political systems to fairly prevent corporations and the wealthy from exploiting everyone else.  We can no longer allow big corporations to externalize costs onto society, and we can no longer afford to let investors gain big profits through ploys that are illegitimate and damaging at the expense of the greater good.

The number of unethical scams that are being perpetrated upon the nation, and the world, at any given moment is beyond counting, and beyond knowing.  In addition to corporate abuses of power, there are Ponzi schemes, embezzlements, investment scams, mortgage frauds, insider trading, monopoly-pricing practices, price fixing, cheating on Medicare billings, contractor over-charging, pyramid schemes, money laundering, tax evasion scams, thefts by con artists, pension spiking by some retiring public employees, fatal Black Widow intrigues, phony philanthropy, counterfeiting, war services overcharging, and many other fraudulent and unethical activities. 

American Greed, a CNBC program narrated by Stacy Keach which is currently in its fifth season, profiles the dark side of American profiteering as reflected in a wide variety of scams that are being perpetrated upon the public.  The program is entitled “The Scams, the Schemes, the Broken Dreams: Some People Will Do Anything for Money.”  They sure will, and do!

But make no mistake about it.  The harm caused by these numerous egregious instances of greed pale in comparison to the corrupt practices by giant corporations that involve tax evasion and the externalizing of costs onto society of pollution and environmental degradation and resource depletion and worker well-being.  ‘Small-potatoes’ crime is also far overshadowed by banking shenanigans and systemic frauds that cost trillions of dollars in bailouts and manipulations in the markets for unregulated derivatives, and by even more insidious intergenerational inequities like the deficit-financing of wars and social programs and the underfunding of overly-generous entitlements and the assessment of historically low taxes on those with high incomes. 

The inflation of the real estate bubble and its subsequent collapse, together with the entire mortgage-backed securities debacle and the resulting credit crisis and severe recession, is merely one of the most blatant and harmful of these scams.  It was, sadly -- because it could and should have been prevented -- an Inside Job. 

Another Interesting Perspective from John Fowles

In The Aristos, John Fowles opines that the “alarming growth of both national and individual selfishness” has been a consequence of a growing awareness that each of us has only one life to live, and that death will definitively be the end for every individual, and that dying will involve a complete termination of our consciousness as well as of our bodies. 

Some people fervently contend that selfishness is good in many respects.  They enthusiastically reassure us that this is surely true, despite significant numbers of instances in which this cliché is blatantly and ridiculously untrue.

Every tick-tock of the clock brings each of us closer to our final moment alive.  All of us have an indeterminate length of time to live, and at the moment that each of us individually expires, the world will then be inhabited by every person still alive, and all other animate member of species of life that have survived extinction until that date.  It is highly probable, but certainly not certain, to assume that none of us will be the last ones of our species to survive on Earth.  In any case, it is our responsibility to help ensure that the legacy we leave will be a propitious one, and not one that seriously diminishes the prospects of our descendents to be able to lead a good life.

In some senses, each of us has an earlier expiration date than our deaths.  We will all no doubt get to the point where, like the brilliant Voltaire in his old age, we will be content to appreciate tending our gardens.  In the mean time, a little positive social activism, anyone?

Money Rules

Our political system stinks.  Big Money completely controls and dominates and dictates our national policies.  It is a system of lobbyist influence and institutional bribery.  Too-Big-to-Fail Banks.  Big Oil.  Big Pharma.  Big Coal.  The Military-Industrial complex war machine.  Sprawling Homeland Security.  A multi-trillion dollar “war on terror”.  A multitude of intelligence agencies secretly abusing power.  The National Rifle Association and private assault weapons.  A hyper-costly war on drugs.  Prison guards’ unions.  Corruption in Washington, D.C.  Etc., etc.!

This system is costing us far too much, and in too many ways.  Mark Twain once cynically stated, “We have the best government money can buy.”  Today, we have government that is way too wasteful and inefficient, and we are paying an enormous premium for the privilege.  Two of our primary social institutions -- corporations and governments -- have created an unacceptably unfair and unholy alliance, an alliance that encourages an “ethical rot” in Washington D.C.

Our political system is broken primarily because Congress really has become a multi-trillion-dollar influence racket.  Private Big Money has broken it.  Our economy is also rather broken, and it is requiring incomprehensibly big amounts of public big money and borrowings to fix it.  We should get the public big money from those who have private Big Money, rather than from their victims in the economic collapse, i.e. working stiffs and ordinary taxpayers and future generations.  Once again, it seems obvious that we must stop blatantly saddling people in the future with enormous debt and interest expense obligations just to let rich people pay historically low tax rates.

The December 2010 tax compromise between President Obama and Mitch McConnell is a form of tyranny that is extremely unfair to people in the future because it constitutes an unacceptably irresponsible exploitation of those who will follow us.  Since it is a compromise that compromises the well-being of our heirs by borrowing an estimate $858 billion, it is a radical political expediency fraught with myopic shortsightedness.  This tyranny apparently arises because of self-centeredness and undisciplined greed.  It is a form of power abuse that is reprehensibly anti-democratic. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt once pointed out the pathetic nature of such gambits.  He stated:  “The malefactors of great wealth have concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor, and other people’s lives.”  For rich people, this is just a game about money and control and power and ego and protected privilege and indulgent dominion.  But it is a game that extensively and adversely affects the lives of millions of honest hard-working Americans.

Bill Moyers asserts that there is “a widespread recognition that unaccountable authority and cutthroat capitalism will not produce a fair and just society.”  He concludes that it is time to fight the good fight and “to make the crooked ways straight …”

  “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

                                                         --- The Greek historian Plutarch, in the first century B.C.

As the Year 2011 Progresses, Absurdities Escalate

Investors in 2010 began seriously celebrating the rebounding success of giant corporations in being able to make bigger profits.  The severe recession has once again crimped the power of workers to gain wage and benefits increases.  This is improving the corporate bottom line and the fortunes of CEOs and rich investors at the expense of millions of laid-off workers and to the detriment of tens of millions of people who are still employed but have diminished purchasing and bargaining power. 

The Texan commentator and author Jim Hightower points out another facet of this triumph by multinational corporations.  He writes in Playing with Economic Dynamite:  “America's corporate elite have learned that they can prosper by deliberately holding the workaday majority in a new normal of job insecurity.”

“No one at the top wants to admit it,” he continues, “but big business has quietly been imposing a structural transformation on our economy, shifting from a workforce of permanent employees to one in which most jobs are temporary, scarce, low-paid, without benefits and with no upward mobility.  Of the 1.2 million jobs created by the private sector last year (in 2010), for example, 26% were temporary positions, and in November, temporary jobs soared to 80% of that month's total.  What's happening here is not merely a matter of a few million folks being momentarily down on their luck, but of an intentional dismantling of America's middle-class structure.”

Another serious change in America has been a dramatic increase in CEO compensation.  In 1965, CEOs at the biggest U.S. corporations made 24 times more than the typical worker.  By 2007, these CEOs made 275 times more, according to the Economic Policy Institute.  In 1970, the top 1% of Americans received 8% of the total national income;  by 2007, they received 23% of it. 

Furthermore, IRS data reveals that the top 1% of Americans collectively earn more than the bottom 50%.  These facts are the details of an increasingly unfair income gap that make it even more egregious to have regressive tax breaks given to principally benefit wealthy people.  Predictably, the disparity in people’s net worths in the U.S. is even more extreme than the income gap.

It seems obvious to me that taxes should be restructured so that they are graduated more steeply.  This would serve as a counterbalance to the rapid growth in the concentration of wealth and the accompanying inequities that affect the vast majority of Americans.  In radical contrast, because money is equivalent to power in our corrupt influence-peddling political system, our tax system has been made significantly more regressive since 1980.  Those who benefit most from the ruthlessness and social irresponsibility and unfairness of our economic system once again become the ones who are most easily able to game our political system so that it gives them more advantages.  Simultaneously, our system gives ever-lower priority to workers, the young, the unemployed, the vulnerable, the powerless, the health of the environment, and the prospects of future generations.

Our econopolitical system thus drives our nation and the world further along the path toward less equity and more strife.  This outcome is not merely unsustainable and unenlightened, it is a severe violation of democratic principles and it is a harsh violation of the true values of an honest, sensible and just republic which is supposed to fairly represent all of the people.  Indeed, in its widespread and far-reaching inimical impacts, our system is a veritably fraudulent crime against humanity.

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

                                                                                               Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

Not only do we need fairer political representation and fairer tax policies, we need more steeply graduated estate taxes, once in every generation, to redress the inequities that are caused by giving rich people most of the benefits of tax evasion schemes which national deficit spending cumulatively represents. 

By taxing the estates of the richest 1% of people who have enough assets at the time of their deaths to owe any estate taxes at all, we could help ensure that the biggest beneficiaries of capitalism’s benefits will also be the ones who help finance more of the investments and social costs inherent in civilized societies.  As it currently stands, we are allowing too many of the escalating costs for national security and healthcare and prisons and protections of the environment to be foisted upon today’s “wage slaves” and all those in future generations!

The Vision of Our Nation’s Founders

Let’s go back and see if our present day actions are in any way in accord with the intentions of our Founders.  Let’s see, the Founders designed the Constitution to create government by fair rules of law to protect American citizens from abuses of power.  Hmmmm.  The Founders also went to great lengths in the Constitution to make sure that States and local communities had enough power to prevent the federal government from abusing its power.  Hmmmm ...

The Founders were strongly opposed to infringements on personal rights, or any kind of unfair treatment of anyone, or religious interference in any way, or foreign military adventurism.  They promised to promote the general Welfare.  They surely would be aghast to see the extent to which rich people are being favored in our nation, and how staunchly these people and their representatives are rejecting fairly-shared prosperity. 

The Founders would be shocked – shocked! -- to see how poorly we have safeguarded their carefully designed balance-of-powers system.  They could only be dismayed to see that our federal government and federal courts are now primarily dedicated to the welfare of rich people and the State and the political class that runs it.

A class war is going on here, folks, and ordinary people are losing it.  This epic clash has been taking place for centuries between the moneyed class and workers and indeed all other Americans and people in the future.  But this internecine warfare has intensified since 1980, and it is high time that We the People negotiated a fairer deal.  It is time that we negotiated a truce between the strife-torn opposing sides.

Our system betrays us when, as Mary Elizabeth Lease once observed, it “clothes rascals in robes, and honesty in rags.  The Parties lie to us and the political leaders mislead us.” 

“Regressive changes in taxation tend to concentrate wealth and to increase the disparities in net income, after taxes, between the Few and the Many.  Increasing inequality makes everyone in society less safe.  People in the middle class and the poor become less secure economically because their struggle is made more difficult to pay for safe housing and adequate healthcare and good nutrition.  The rich become less secure because a heightened impetus develops in society toward criminal activity, and more money needs to be expended on police and prisons to enforce this inegalitarian state, and on wars to distract people from their lack of fair opportunities and from the daunting existential dilemmas associated with this gamed system.”

                                      Existence, Economics, and Ecological Intelligence, the Earth Manifesto

How has our noble Constitutionally-brilliant system gotten so screwed up? 

The Supreme Court’s Ruling in the Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission Case

Eighty-nine-year-old Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was one of the four Justices who disagreed with the Supreme Court’s 1/21/10 decision to allow unlimited corporate and union spending in our elections.  He read his dissent aloud to give additional emphasis to his words, saying that the decision “rejected the common sense of the American people, who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”

Jim Hightower in the February 2011 issue of The Hightower LOWDOWN writes scathingly about the corporate bent of the Supreme Court today.  He indicates that, with the narrow 5-4 majority of “conservatives” on the Supreme Court, the judicial body “has become openly and aggressively political, deliberately rigging the scales of justice to enthrone big corporations – the least democratic force in our society – over the rest of us.”  Hightower adduces decision after decision in which the current Supreme Court has rendered rulings that have “enhanced the power of corporations at the direct expense of workers, consumers, local communities, our air and water, voters, the elderly, and … well, anyone and everyone who stands up in court to resist the rise of corporate hegemony in America.”

Hightower further opines: “The Supreme Court’s corporate bloc has evolved into the most dangerous branch of the federal government, routinely using its arbitrary power to undermine the people’s democratic authority over our country’s economy, environment, and political process.”  …  “By stomping on traditional principles of conservative jurisprudence, jettisoning clear Court precedents, perverting constitutional and statutory language, ignoring logic, distorting legislative intent, and simply making up laws, these Supremes have delivered a rash of sweeping victories to the corporate class.”

Hightower concludes that Chief Justice John Roberts “is doing major structural damage to America’s unifying sense of fairness and justice.  We can’t allow him to keep hiding behind the judicial robe while he mugs us and our democratic ideals.  He should be impeached.”  I guess we don’t have to ask Jim Hightower how he really feels!

Then, in the October 2011 issue of his Lowdown, Jim Hightower adduces a menu of action that could help achieve “big democratic results.”  One of these actions he recommends would be to impeach Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas for their “blatant disregard of basic ethics” and their undisclosed conflicts of interests such as their involvements with the billionaire Koch brothers while they were deciding the Citizens United ruling. 

Bob Edgar, President and CEO of the nonpartisan, nonprofit advocacy organization Common Cause has written a public letter to Chief Justice John Roberts suggesting that Supreme Court Justices should formally commit themselves to the Code of Conduct for federal judges, which applies to all other federal judges.  Why is it that Supreme Court Justices do not strictly abide by such common sense ethical rules to help ensure their integrity and impartiality, and to prevent glaring conflicts of interest?

The Need for Campaign Finance Reform

The rich get an astonishing “return on investment” for their political contributions.  They gain hundreds of billions of dollars in special deals for mere millions in contributions to politicians.

This is why Fair Elections legislation should be passed that mandates public financing of election campaigns.  This is a matter of common sense.  I repeat that, at a public cost of $5 billion dollars of campaign financing in the 2012 national elections, we could save hundreds of billions of dollars a year in taxpayer funds that are being squandered on corporate welfare, no-bid contracts, banking excesses, bailouts, corrupt deals, military misappropriations, yada, yada, yada. 

“So the multitudes go on faithfully voting (well at least half of them do), knowing that the savior on the ballot likely will turn out to be one more pretender, making only nominal changes to a system that is costly and inefficient but thrives by rewarding the very people who have gamed it.”        

                                --- Bill Moyers

A Clarion Call for Sensible Tax Reform

The rich have gotten increasingly better off since Ronald Reagan slashed the marginal tax rate on the highest levels of income from 70% to 35%, while the poor have gotten increasingly desperate, and middle class people have been devastated by inegalitarian and deregulatory policies.  One can only conclude that we should increase the marginal rates on highest earners again, and make our tax system significantly more steeply graduated – i.e., more progressive.  If rich people don’t like it, I guess they can take their pro-war-slogan advice from the Vietnam War era, and “Love it, or leave it!”

I call for true tax reform to improve fairness, make taxes more progressive, raise more revenue, finance needed infrastructure investments, boost U.S. competitiveness, protect the health of Earth’s ecosystems, and allow us to undertake energy modernization projects and move toward independence from dirty fossil fuels and make a simultaneous transition to a greener and more sustainable economy.

Let’s act honestly to improve and strengthen our democratic republic for a change.  In addition to establishing a Bill of Rights for Future Generations, we simply must enact a fairer and more sensible system of taxation.  As mentioned earlier, the specific details of my proposal can be found in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto.  See Radically Simple Ways to Make America Fairer, and to Fix Both Social Security and Health Care So We Can Move On to Address Much Bigger Issues.

“American Exceptionalism” --- Yay! for Us!!

This leads to another cogent insight.  A new era must begin that embraces a new narrative of American Exceptionalism that is based on social justice and healthy communities and respectful dialogue and peaceful coexistence and ‘soft power’ and ecological intelligence and responsible fiscal propriety.  This new form of Exceptionalism should explicitly renounce the old “shining light on the hill” variety of American Exceptionalism that was based so fixedly on the hubris-filled ‘hard power’ of the military-industrial-banking-Congressional complex.  This complex is dominated by Wall Street shysters and crony capitalists and people with empire-building aspirations and corrupt politicians who all seem to have retrogressive, war-engendering, prerogative-defending, deficit-spending ways.

“There are more important priorities than preserving low tax rates for rich people, and larger strategic concerns than Iraq or even Afghanistan, and more compelling national purposes than rote attacks on government or a fear of new immigrants, or Islam, or our diversity as a nation.  And we will all be in this effort together only if all of our citizens know they will have an opportunity to share in a resurgent America’s success.”

“For Obama, political renewal requires a bold and persistent campaign for national renewal.  This would challenge his political opponents.  But more importantly, it would challenge all of us.”

                            --- E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post Writers Group

The American people assuredly did not give Congress a mandate in the elections of November 2010 to pursue policies that are more unfair or more regressive, or that are more inegalitarian, fiscally irresponsible, repressive, reactionary, or militaristic than the status quo. 

We are in uncharted territory here, folks.  Shall we mindlessly and rashly proceed in obedience to established interests?  Shall we embrace business as usual, or should we cautiously move forward with a bit more common sense and intelligence and smart planning?  Or, should we have moxie and boldly demand a radically progressive transformation?!

Common Sense Patriotism

In her 2010 book America by Heart, Sarah Palin criticizes Big Government for many ills.  She accuses Hollywood of “reflexive anti-Americanism”.  She says “America doesn’t go to war for big business or for oil or for the sake of imperial conquest.”  She asserts that we get into wars only to defend our freedom. 

This opinion is simplistic and quite naïve.  It is a slogan, not a deeply-considered understanding.  The motives for war are deeply entwined with profit motives and power and control and the “unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex”, as President Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961.  Numerous untruths have been used to involve our nation in wars over the years.  This fact was starkly revealed in the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War and many other documents and historical disclosures. 

War is the ultimate expression of unfair competition.  It is a continuation of politics by other means.  And politics is a continuation of economics by other means.  Political corruption is more than just some kind of clever game.  It is a form of cheating that directly harms fairness to millions of Americans.  In our economy today, political corruption has joined with unethical and unfair methods of competing to make our societies and civilizations, and almost all life on Earth, less healthy and less secure. 

Check out the deeper perspectives which are explored in Reflections on War in Part Three of the Earth Manifesto (paraphrased):  

“The causes of wars and conflicts throughout history are clear.  Rulers fight for control and power and competitive advantage and profiteering and their nation’s ascendancy.  They fight for nationalistic pride and ideological supremacy.  The underlying struggle is primarily about acquiring or defending territory, or getting access to energy or other natural resources or foreign markets or cheap labor.  We also get into wars, in part, so that bankers and the defense industry and myriad contractors and war suppliers and investors in these companies can make big profits.  Investors and shareholders seem to love growth in revenues and profits over all other values, and they wield enormous influence in our corporate-dominated capitalist society.”

It is far from anti-American to make these observations.  True patriotism consists of questioning and opposing abuses of power, not accepting them without question.  As our American literary hero Mark Twain once said:

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

    or officeholders.” 

Patriotism is not an unthinking obedience to the politicians in power.  In truth, patriotism in America should be an honest commitment to the principles and ideals that this country really represents.  This includes the primary concerns of our Founding Fathers:  fairness, freedom, justice, human rights, limited government intrusiveness, honesty, and fair representation of the best interests of the American people and future generations. 

Rebounding Conundrums

True ideas and understandings have the potential power to upset the established order, so they are a threat to rulers of every persuasion.  This is one reason why authority figures try to repress them.  The people in Tunisia and Egypt and other Arab nations that have been ruled for so long by dictators would attest to the truth of this statement here in early 2011 as their countries are in agitated turmoil. 

John Steinbeck some made witty and entertaining and ironic and thought-provoking observations about black cormorants and subversives in Cabo San Lucas in his Log from the Sea of Cortez.  Read all about them in Tall Tales, Provocative Parables, Luminous Clarity and Evocative Truths: A Modern Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Nuances and ambiguity beyond our clear comprehension affect every situation and opinion.  In light of this fact, a new tone and character of civility is needed in our societies.  We must accord respect to others, even when we do not agree with their opinions. 

The former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once explained the nature of uncertainty during a press briefing when he confoundingly told the American public that in our dealings with Iraq there are “known knowns”, “known unknowns”, and “unknown unknowns.” 

It was an intriguing philosophic ramble.  Let me apply this analysis to the radically profligate levels of government deficit spending in the past few decades.  Known knowns of past debt-financing frenzies in world history include the fact that they heighten risks of hyper-inflation, increase propensities of destabilizing debt defaults, create more pressure to diminish the value of a nation’s currency, and make potential and economic and social turmoil more likely.

There are overlapping unknown knowns in the extremely complex concatenation of causes and effects set in motion by fiscally irresponsible deficit spending.  These include poorly prioritized cuts in spending on essential investments, more urgent needs to impose severe austerity measures on the common people, increases in the stimulated depletion of resources, and accelerated damages to the ecological commons.

The unknown unknowns?  Who knows?!  We cannot accurately predict what the outcomes will be of our rash experiment in undisciplined increases in government spending and simultaneous historically low taxes on the wealthy.  We do not know for sure, as we collectively grope in the dark for a safe and sensible way forward, the best direction in which to proceed.  But we should not ignore the convincing preponderance of the evidence and the most likely probabilities.  And we should courageously admit that adamant denials of possibilities do not diminish their probabilities of occurrence, despite what appears to be popular opinion to the contrary.  Alert, climate disruption and global warming deniers!  Unintended consequences occur -- gasp! -- even though they are not intended!

Another Unnecessary War

An outrageous political “climate war” has been taking place in recent years.  Trillions of dollars and the well-being of billions of people and the fate of millions of species of life on Earth are at stake in this conflict over whether or not to start limiting emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  Powerful vested interests oppose initiatives that would help preserve the habitability of planet Earth by limiting such emissions, and they have managed to sow doubt by denying the problem and delaying efforts to solve it.

The evidence for climate disruptions, nonetheless, grows increasingly ominous.  The year 2010 was tied with 2005 for being the warmest year in all of recorded history.  It was also the wettest year, according to a January 12, 2011 announcement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  All of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1998.  These trends in climate change were accompanied by catastrophic extreme weather events throughout the world, including record high temperatures in 19 nations and devastating floods in many places like Pakistan and Australia and Brazil and Sri Lanka.  There were also record cold snaps in many places as the overall planetary warming caused the jet stream to shift and create more extreme El Nino and La Nina weather patterns to emanate from the Pacific Ocean.

“This is no longer something that’s theory or conjecture or something that comes out of computer models,” explained Dr. Richard Somerville, a Nobel-prize winning scientist who led the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on climate science in 2007.  “We’re observing the climate changing.  It’s real.  It’s happening.  It’s scientific fact.”

Scientists are routinely measuring these increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  The Scripps Institution of Oceanography has maintained a Research Lab high up on the top of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa since 1958.  In that time, the concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from less that 320 parts per million to more than 390 parts per million.  Within the next century, this concentration is expected to increase to between 540 ppm and 970 ppm.  Changes of this magnitude would almost certainly be environmentally catastrophic.

The aggregate activities of human beings are causing this insidiously destabilizing effect on global weather patterns.  The main mechanisms of this impact are the spewing of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year while at the same time the “lungs of the planet” are being assaulted by people and corporations chopping down vast tracts of tropical forests. 

This political “climate war” is a side skirmish in an ominous development in which billionaires like Charles and David Koch and unethical politicians and giant corporations are stubbornly continuing to abuse their power by striving to discredit scientific understandings about the dangerous effects of our industrial activities.  Vested interests powerfully oppose carbon taxes.  They abuse their power to achieve a wrongheaded goal of getting taxpayers to give them billions of dollars each year to subsidize their depletion of critically important fossil fuel resources.  This allows them to continue to make enormous profits at the expense of the victims of air pollution and climate-disruption disasters and all people in future generations.

It seems obvious that we should be collectively acting more responsibly by adhering to sensible precautionary principles and reducing wasteful and polluting uses of fossil fuels.  It would be a smart idea to boldly move toward achieving independence from our risky addiction to fossil fuels.  We should honestly do these things instead of allowing power-abusing vested interests to hijack our policy-making by buying our representatives and dishonestly casting doubt on the probable severity of the impacts of our activities.  CEOs and giant corporations and investors are all complicit in this intrigue to the extent that their influence facilitates the externalizing of the costs of climate disruption onto those who are adversely affected.

The most effective way to correct this problem would be to create a powerful incentive to use fossil fuels more efficiently and to discourage wasteful usages of oil and coal and natural gas, and to simultaneously stimulate a necessary transition to a greener and more renewable mix of energy sources.

One extremely simple plan would be to implement a national carbon tax.  This tax would increase in measured increments every year.  Production processes and consumer demand would shift as a consequence, in beneficial directions since it would make fossil fuels more expensive to use in wasteful ways.  This idea is better than a cap-and-trade scheme which has been proposed to reduce carbon emissions.  Cap-and-trade plans are far too complicated and bureaucratic and vulnerable to cheating, and they are not likely to be adequately effective.  We should heed the simple insight of Thomas Paine, expressed in Common Sense, that “the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” 

We clearly need a cleaner energy future.  Unfortunately, lobbyists for Big Oil and Big Coal and their facilitators in the Republican Party have captured the majority of seats in the House of Representatives, and there is a diminished chance that they will act to reduce the quantities of greenhouse gas emissions that are being spewing into the atmosphere.  This aspect of business as usual is completely crazy!

Nonetheless, a solution to this overarching challenge needs to be found.  The political will to find it begins with comprehensive understandings of the true nature and scope of the problem.  One of the aspirations driving the creation of the Earth Manifesto is the hope that clearly-stated ideas will sway the debate toward effective and intelligent solutions.

A Wee Catastrophe

Uncertainties affect us at many levels.  On an individual level, we often have a difficult time figuring out our goals or coming to grips with a wide range of perplexities that concern us in deeply personal ways.  This is one reason pundits caution people: “Be careful what you wish for!”

On a collective level, we all have a hard time determining what the best courses of action are for society.  The best way to understand something is arguably in a way that corresponds most accurately and credibly with reality.

There is some merit in almost every way of seeing things.  Good arguments can be made on opposing sides of practically every issue.  Deciding on the best course of action is thus quite complicated.  People with conflicting interests passionately assert that their particular point of view is the right and proper and best one.  But we are all in a kind of “Bet Situation”.  Just by living in society, we are inextricably involved in the game.  Each of us essentially places our bets, either through our actions or by our inaction.  It is incumbent upon us to bet on which probabilities are the most likely. 

  “Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.”

                                                                   --- Heinrich Heine

Albert Einstein called our perceptions that we are separate from the whole of the world “a kind of optical delusion of consciousness”.  We are in fact intimately interconnected and inextricably interdependent.  To solve the daunting problems facing us, we must see reality as accurately as possible and we must strive to gain greater knowledge of it rather than to embrace myth or custom or stubborn ideology or doctrine or an untoward defense of the status quo.

   “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is

      shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” 

                                                                     --- Albert Einstein

Human beings are having transformative impacts on planet Earth through the combination of industrialization and consumerism and rapid growth in human numbers.  The state of our planet today is brilliantly portrayed through the extraordinary aerial photography of Yann Arthus-Bertrand in his beautiful large-format book Earth from Above.  The text that accompanies Earth from Above contains incisive and vitally important ecological insights.  Check it out, or watch the compelling 90-minute film project Home which Yann Arthus-Bertrand produced based on this book.  It can be viewed online.  It is a must-see!

There is no doubt that a growing series of urgent crises are confronting people worldwide today.  The crises confronting us -- environmental degradation, pollution, overpopulation, worldwide economic and political disorder, growing inequities and injustices -- are partially a consequence of widespread conflicts of interest and illusion and misunderstanding.

“Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.”

                                                         --- David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980

Let us not be apathetic.  Let us not despair.  In fact, let’s be cheerful and chipper!  Bravo for positivity and hope!  Bravo for honesty and fair-mindedness!  But let us simultaneously be seriously determined to radically reform our political system and do things like making our tax system fairer and improving our healthcare system.  Let us not get lost in divisive arguments about partisan conflicts.  Let us instead focus on overarching goals.  And let’s collaborate together to find fair ways to achieve these goals!

I repeat the quote from Albert Einstein adduced earlier, near the beginning of this essay:

    “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”

A Digression on “Personhood”

The state of Mississippi tried on November 8, 2011 to amend the state constitution to redefine the term “person” to include “every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.”  It seems to me like a real overstretch to give some cloned cells more rights than real live women! 

Religious fundamentalists want to give tiny embryonic clumps of undifferentiated tissue the full rights of “personhood”, and by doing so, to radically reduce the reproductive rights and prerogatives of women.  Such claims of personhood encroach on the rights of women in order to give rights to fertilized eggs.  Such personhood rights at conception would prevent women from using forms of contraception like IUD’s as well as in-vitro fertilization procedures, and abortions would be outlawed.  This initiative embraces a bizarre value judgment.

This anti-contraception, anti-abortion initiative was designed to protect the union of a sperm and an egg, and to eventually overturn the Roe vs. Wade right of women to choose to terminate a pregnancy even in its early stages and regardless of how the woman became pregnant.  Such a law would deprive women of the right to determine their own destinies, even in cases of rape or incest or ectopic pregnancies which threaten the life of a woman.  Efforts like this to redefine personhood would have limited people’s abilities to plan their families, and they would have made the population crisis far worse.  They would also have exacerbated many associated social and environmental challenges.

I strongly support a much more significant rights issue for the future of all humanity.  Let’s act to give fundamental rights to every fetus yet to be conceived in every future generation.  Let’s amend the U.S. Constitution to give them rights to live on a planet with healthy ecosystems and unpolluted waters and skies, and resources that are not exhausted, and a sustainable economy that runs on renewable energy, and fairer institutions, and a stable climate.  Let’s commit to a Bill of Rights for Future Generations!

That’s All, Folks!

I strongly believe that there is hope for the future.  But to really make our society better and our communities healthier, we must deliberately choose to change our system to empower the American people and to reduce the influence of those with entrenched power from abusing our systems for their own narrow benefit.  My common sense intuition tells me the best approach to making our societies better would be to adopt a greater amount of fiscal conservatism, and to simultaneously make sure that our economic and political systems are as fair as possible to the common people.  And we should do this while maintaining a “live-and-let-live” attitude with regard to hot-button social issues.  We can do this!

The constitutional framework of our democracy is entirely sufficient to allow the people to once again make our country one that is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  We simply need to assert our Constitutionally guaranteed rights and reform our political system by reducing the dominating influence of Big Money in all policies formulated by Congress.  It must also be admitted that, in turn, we must assure our heirs a modicum of rights, so that our legacy to them will be a fair and reasonable one.

I will wager that if we wisely restructure our societies to make them fairer, more egalitarian, more sustainable and more ecologically healthy, the Dow Jones Average will be at least twice as high in 20 years than it will be if we continue to buy the “trickle-down” Big Lie and let rich people have an ever-more extreme monopoly on the benefits of worker productivity, and allow the extreme concentration of wealth to continue to increase, and enable corporations to continue to indulge with impunity in business-as-usual activities by squandering resources and ravaging the planet and externalizing costs onto society and undermining the vital ecological underpinnings of our well-being.  Here is a monetary gauge that coincides with a moral one which tells us we should be courageous in “fighting the good fight!”

I urge our leaders to act boldly for the American people.  I urge them to stop being such blatantly sycophantic lackeys to wealthy people and giant corporations!  To paraphrase Thomas Paine in Common Sense, “The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.  Now is the seed-time of union and honor and faith.  Now is the time for courage and truly fair problem-solving.  To betray the common good today would be like engraving a rude name with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak;  the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity will read the ignominy of the material injury in full grown characters.”

   Truly,

       Dr. Tiffany B. Twain

         Founder, the Earth Manifesto

            www.EarthManifesto.com             

                Contact at SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com

I pledge Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, theoretically indivisible, that promises reasonable assurances of Liberty and Justice for all.

         The Earth Manifesto:  Saving the World through Sensible Ideas!

                          Transformation through Illumination!!

Afterward

Dilma Rousseff was sworn in as the first female president of Brazil on January 1, 2011.  She took the helm of Latin America’s largest nation from her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose accomplishments are extraordinary.  He left office with an 87% approval rating.  His economic programs led a nation which was on the brink of loan defaults in 2002 to fiscal stability and the ability to repay loans from the International Monetary Fund.  The social programs he put in place helped pull 20 million people out of poverty.  Unemployment in Brazil is at a record low.  The Brazilian currency has more than doubled against the U.S. dollar. 

Contrast this to the economic and social fiasco of the past decade in the United States, where poverty is the highest it has been in 50 years and unemployment is at a relatively high level.  Our national debt is unprecedented in magnitude in all of world history.  Our leaders are given abysmal approval ratings.  Our currency is weak, and likely to get weaker because the Federal Reserve has its money printing presses on a desperately rash binge.  Our political system is a mess.  Economic inequality has been increasing for decades.  And the United States ranks 72nd in the world in female legislative representation, which is well behind many other nations in this crucial aspect of healthy democracies.

Other Compelling Perspectives

Inequality is the cause of much that is wrong with the world.  Author John Fowles observed in his provocative book, The Aristos, that human beings are not, and will never be, born equal.  But we are all born with what should be equal human rights.  The lottery of birth gives those with good health and fortunate circumstances and intelligence and attractiveness and other favorable characteristics distinctive advantages in the fierce competition for wealth and security and well-being and privilege and power in our societies.  Those who gain the most privileges in this competition inherit serious social responsibilities.  To evade these responsibilities is morally and ethically wrong.

One responsibility of having wealth is an obligation to contribute to helping improve our societies, and NOT to turn a blind eye to this responsibility.  Wealthy and powerful people must go along with a sensible national plan to ensure a modicum of fair justice is established for all citizens, rather than helping themselves to an ever-increasing amount of advantages while causing millions of others to feel economically less secure.

The Many envy the Few, and the Few are jealously protective of their advantages against the Many.  The zealousness of the Few is particularly dramatic in the realm of wealth.  The richest 1% of Americans own more than 40% of the wealth in our nation, and their tax rates have been reduced dramatically at the same time that the fiscal soundness of our country has declined.  The richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 155,000,000 combined.  The 25% of all Americans who are on the bottom have a net worth of zero or less.  That is a lot of people with extreme economic insecurity!

Michael Lind, a policy director for the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation, argues that the American rich act as if they no longer need the rest of America.  They earn their fortunes to an ever increasing extent with overseas labor, and sell to overseas consumers, and they often rely on immigrant laborers in their homes and many businesses.

"Do the Rich Need the Rest of America?”  The answer to this question “is as stark as it is ominous”:  Many rich people don’t think they do.  They form their own financial culture that increasingly separates them from the fate of everyone else, so “it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people.”  (My emphasis added.)

You would think the rich might care, if not from empathy, then from understanding history.  Ultimately, gross inequality and the political corruption that enables it can be fatal to civilization.  In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Pulitzer Prize-winning professor Jared Diamond writes about how, throughout history, governing elites tend to isolate and delude themselves until it is too late.  Diamond warns that societies contain built-in blueprints for failure when their elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their decisions and separate themselves from the common life of the people.

Diamond reminds us that the changes people inflict on their environment have been one of the main factors in the decline of earlier societies.  As one example, he cites the Mayan natives on the Yucatan peninsula who suffered as their forests disappeared and their soil eroded and their water supply deteriorated and chronic warfare exhausted dwindling resources.  The Mayan kings could see their forests vanishing and their hills eroding, yet they continued to extract wealth from commoners and remain well-fed while everyone else was slowly starving.  They were able to insulate themselves from the rest of society, but they realized too late that they could not reverse the deterioration of their environment.  They thus became casualties of their own privilege, and their civilization collapsed.

In an even larger perspective, human beings have an anthropocentric view of the universe in which we humans are the Few, and all of the rest of life constitute the Many.  In this larger context, our obligations are even greater.  Humanity cannot merely have a ruthless and uncaring dominion over everything on Earth.  We must honestly embrace a responsible stewardship and respect for the foundations of our well-being, and for the health and diversity of the ecosystems upon which we depend.

We could do better, far better, with the will to accomplish this goal.  A peaceful revolution is called for.  The privileged classes stand in our way.  Shall we unite to fight this good fight, or meekly continue to let the tyranny of Big Money dominate our national policies?

I know what I think.  How about you?

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“Persons failing to find a motive in this narrative will be confounded;  persons unable to find a moral in it will be exposed;  and persons attempting to find a plot in it will be inscrutably perplexed.”                                                      

                                  --- BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR