The Common Good, Properly Understood

                                                                An Earth Manifesto publication by Dr. Tiffany B. Twain  

                                                                                                                         March 7, 2010

The common good is a concept that is taking on a vastly increased importance as the population of human beings has grown over the years.  Back in the hardscrabble days of hunting and gathering, before the discovery of agriculture and animal husbandry, small clans of nomadic peoples lived in the most providential niches on Earth, and their impact on the natural world in their struggle for survival was relatively slight.  Today human civilizations have become much more widespread and dominant and destructive across the planet.

Our human population is about to reach SEVEN BILLION within the next two years, and our proliferating needs are rapidly depleting mineral resources and decimating wildlife populations and overexploiting fisheries and causing widespread habitat destruction.  Humanity is causing significant erosion of topsoil, and we are clear-cutting vast tracts of forests and polluting waterways and destroying wetlands and generating enormous quantities of wastes and toxins.  We are even altering the composition of the atmosphere and causing changes in weather patterns and the global climate.  We are thus upsetting the vital natural balance of ecosystems on Planet Earth.

We are confronted today with the growing realization that the survival and well-being of our species is becoming increasingly threatened by these developments.  Our best hope for future generations is that we will find ways to mitigate the most severe impacts of our activities.  Competition for diminishing resources is intensifying, and the dog-eat-dog nature of our being, which has contributed to our evolutionary success, is now becoming a serious liability.  The wiser collaborative aspects of our human natures are consequently becoming ever more vitally important to our quality of life.

Our understanding of common good goals, and of the best means to collectively achieve them, is becoming ever more important to our survival.  This essay is written to explore these issues and to cast the light of sanity and common sense on better ways forward.

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

                                                                                           --- Wes ‘Scoop’ Nisker

Perspective on What Constitutes the Common Good

President Theodore Roosevelt was one of the greatest conservationist leaders in American history.  He created the US Forest Service in 1905 with an agency mission of sustaining the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.  The first Director of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, defined conservation as being “the greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time”. 

This concept is also an excellent definition of what constitutes the common good.  The principal things that characterize the common good are safe communities, a productive economy, good quality public schools, indefinitely sustainable activities, protected clean fresh water sources, unpolluted air, healthy habitats, balanced ecosystems, a stable climate, reasonable safeguards to assure biological diversity, protected parks and open spaces, well-managed public transportation systems, a clean and secure energy system, investments in urban renewal, measures that ensure fairness of opportunity and a strong middle class, fair access to healthcare, an affordable social safety net, equal political representation for all citizens, sensible regulation, democratic self-determination, strong commitments to collective security and peacebuilding, fair trade, openness in government, a free press, and guaranteed freedom of speech and other civil liberties as spelled out in the American Bill of Rights.

In contrast, there are many things that are contrary to our general well-being and the common good, like allowing water pollution, air pollution, uncontrolled carbon emissions into the atmosphere, environmental damages, wasteful energy policies, suburban sprawl, the stimulated depletion of resources, and “tragedy of the commons” assaults on the ecological commons.  Many other aspects of human behaviors and institutions are contrary to common good goals, including abusive monopolies, fraudulent activities, incompetent cronyism, severe inequities, no-bid government contracts, unfair employment practices, unaffordable education and healthcare, various forms of discrimination, conditions that stimulate social unrest, boom-and-bust economic policies, harm-engendering special perks and privileges for narrow constituencies, unlimited lobbying power by corporations, harsh punishments for victimless crimes, expansive government secrecy and ruthless injustice and aggression in war.

People could, and should, create fairer societies that are in a much better harmony with the common good and with core principles of human dignity and individual liberty and equal representation and fair treatment under the law.  The common good is much broader than the narrow corporate good, because the latter is focused on just two goals -- bigger profits and limited liabilities.  This essay examines these topics in detail.

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

                                                                      --- Timothy E. Wirth, United Nations Foundation

Invisible Hands of Self-Interest

The famous economist Adam Smith contended that, in a free market, ‘the invisible hand’ of individuals pursuing their own self-interest serves to promote the good of the whole of society.  Adam Smith believed that the welfare of the entire community would generally be improved by private interests and self-motivated behaviors.  But he seems not to have foreseen the extent to which the social and environmental ills of industrialization would be made worse by unbridled greed and abuses of power that are inherent in human nature and capitalist systems.  Adam Smith apparently did not imagine the degree to which the majority of people would be manipulated by the corrupting influence of Big Money and powerful vested interests and insidiously persuasive marketing campaigns.  And he did not recognize the great risks the economy would encounter, and the potential for systemic collapse and economic depression, due to the narrow short-term orientation of business goals.  It has become clear that when groups like bankers and investors and home owners rationally ignore the risks of “low-probability, high impact events”, financial meltdowns can occur like the one we have been experiencing for the past two years.

Economic fundamentalists and corporate-sponsored think tanks have used the metaphor of an invisible hand to conceal the actual hands that ‘game the system’ to exploit workers and resources and to maximize profits over all other values.  Thus, the corporations and the politicians that wield the most powerful influence in our system often contribute to heightened systemic risks.  They also are significantly responsible for increases in social inequities and harsh injustices, and lamentably even to reckless military aggression, all at the expense of the common good. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s strategy on the international stage was “to walk softly, but carry a big stick”.  This approach is much more consistent with common good goals and the desire of our Founders to avoid foreign entanglements than today’s pursuit of an interventionist foreign policy and a militaristic dominion that uses the U.S. Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to implement a strategy of entangling foreign occupations that allows our armed forces and even armed drones to act as judge, jury and executioner in operations that are prone to cause severe injustices and anger-provoking casualties amongst innocent civilians.

How should we rightly understand self-interest?  Ah, here’s the catch!  Self-interest is one of the most powerful of human motivations, but self-interest is NOT identical to our own individual selfish interests.  In the end, self-interest is necessarily linked to the common good.  What exactly is right and proper with regard to self-interest and the public good?  What is best for humanity as a whole?  This essay grapples with questions such as these, and provides some good answers.

The Ecology of Macro-Economic Theory

Macroeconomic theory provides the largest scale and biggest picture perspective of how we should rightly understand economic activities in terms of self-interest and the common good.  There are essentially two ideas of macroeconomics.  One is that societies should be structured to maximize production and consumption and the creation of wealth.  This theory posits that prosperity will result from such policies, and that this prosperity will trickle down to the masses and will allow the environmental harmfulness of business activities to be mitigated and the injustices associated with industrial capitalism to be alleviated.  A contrasting and more comprehensive idea is that we should place emphasis on behaviors and decision-making which create a broader prosperity that is in harmony with the sustainable ecological health of human communities and natural ecosystems.  This latter idea posits that only by nurturing and protecting and restoring the soundness of natural systems will a more salubrious and widely beneficial well-being be developed which will be most advantageous for the majority in the long run.  This seems to be the only probable route to a sustainable future.

It is simple, really -- in a complex kind of way.  There are overarching considerations to all of our individual and national and global problems.  Ultimately, the only sensible and ethical and moral courses of action are those that are consistent with the long-term common good, including the interests of future generations. 

  “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; 

       we now know that it is bad economics.”        --- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Morality, in its origins, consists of those things that are essential to the health and preservation of a social group.  Moral right action should therefore be a function of sociology:  what is right for society depends on the well-being of the majority AND of future generations.  Right action should not merely be a function of economic expediency or of political ideology, or of stimulated fears and theological dogma, or of religious orthodoxy.  What is right and proper is what is best in the long run.  It is not right to neglect the interests of future generations by pandering principally to greedy and shortsighted interests today.

If we irresponsibly choose to live like there will be no tomorrow, the tomorrow that our children and theirs will inhabit will be one that is far less salubrious than it should be.

Praying for Ascendancy and Victory

“If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a

     curse upon a neighbor at the same time.”     --- Mark Twain, The War Prayer

Barack Obama noted in his Inaugural Address that “a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”  A broadly-based prosperity is much more in accord with the common good, and with the ideals of our Founders, than a narrowly-focused one.  It is a sad tragedy for the majority of Americans that the dominant ideology of the Reagan and Bush years rationalized a greater disparity of wealth in the world and a new Gilded Age of unfairness.  It is high time that we redesign our system to ensure that trickle-down economics is replaced by bottom-up prosperity, and that our government and tax system is simplified and made more fair and progressive.

Contemporary conservatives say that laissez-faire governance and lower taxes and free markets and smaller government are the best ways to achieve general prosperity.  They tend to advocate tax breaks targeted toward taxpayers who have high incomes and high net worths.  They claim that tax breaks are the best strategy to stimulate the economy and ramp up investment and create jobs and wealth.  ‘Trust us!’, they say, claiming that such policies will “trickle down” to benefit everyone.  Such people are essentially trying to make superior economic and moral justifications for greed and selfishness. 

Others see empathy-based moral values that champion individual responsibility as well as social responsibility as being more important than conservative ideas which leave out the latter half of the equation.  These people understand the compelling need for protecting the common wealth and assuring ecological sanity and striving for peaceful coexistence.  They recognize the need for restructuring our societies to ensure societal fairness and economic justice.  They see that the tax system should be more steeply graduated, i.e. fairer and more progressive.  They believe the government should be managed frugally and with much greater efficiency.  They know that the government needs to have more integrity to earn the trust of Americans, so they advocate that it play a stronger, smarter, more sensible role in regulating markets and in preventing corporate corruption.  They also understand that we should find ways to prevent government waste and institutionalized bribery and corporate fraud.  Many also see the greater social good of fairer wages for workers, so they support rights of workers to organize to obtain more of the benefits of increases in productivity and a fairer shake in the hard-fought struggle between capital and labor.

The Proper Role of Government in Our Lives

The institutions that principally determine our national course are corporations and government entities.  Our economic system is flexible and resilient largely due to the initiative of private enterprise and small businesses and the processes of ‘creative destruction’ that allow poorly run companies to go bankrupt.  But the economy has gotten so complex that without effective Federal Reserve monetary policies and spending by the federal government, economic recessions could slide into severe depressions.  Government bureaucracies, on the other hand, tend to be inflexible and wasteful and vulnerable to exploitation by corporate interests and large public employee unions.   

History shows that too little regulation of business, particularly of banks and large corporations, leads to unfair dealings and corrupt practices and an externalizing of costs upon society.  These things can cause significant environmental and social harm.  The current economic hard times show that inadequate regulation and supervision of the economy can contribute to an increase in debt leveraging and overly risky speculation and economic bubbles.  And if the government allows businesses to dominate the economy, there are inevitably undesirable increases in inequities and social injustices.

It is also clear that governments have the propensity to become highly bureaucratic and wasteful and fiscally irresponsible and swaddled in absurd levels of red tape.  The federal government has indulged in unprecedented amounts of deficit spending and pork barrel spending for the past decade.  It favors vested interests and gives ridiculously generous amounts of corporate welfare to companies that oppose innovative new industries. 

The need for fundamental reform is abundantly clear.  Instead, the only thing Congress appears capable of delivering is timid tinkering, or even worse, legislation that is wrong-headed and unfair and favorable only to the interests that already have the most power in our dysfunctional political system.

We do not have lean government and well-regulated businesses in the U.S. principally because CEOs and large corporations have outsized influence in our national politics.  They make sure that their laissez-faire ideological arguments are respected and regulations are minimized.  As a result, businesses are subjected to less effective rules than needed, and they pay lower corporate taxes.  The result is that our public policies are too narrowly focused and too short-term oriented.  This is almost always contrary to the common good.

The Supreme Court Sides with Corporate Dominance of our Nation

Republican appointees to the Supreme Court like John Roberts and Samuel Alito have come together to make conservative rulings on a variety of issues which are downright regressive.  The latest example of this is the January 21, 2010 ruling, by a narrow 5-to-4 margin, that overturned campaign finance laws that restricted corporate spending in elections.  The High Court thus “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," according to the dissenting Justices. 

Congress should correct this daunting challenge to the common good by enacting proposed legislation that would make our government more responsive to the people, in the form of the ‘Fair Elections Now Act’.  If the people of the United States are to have a fair voice in this nation, we must find a way to govern corporations better so that their already powerful influence does not make institutional bribery even more pervasive, especially in light of this Supreme Court decision that effectively allows corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence election outcomes.

The time has come today for us to cooperate together to establish the best goals for the greater good.  Our leaders must work to ensure that these goals are sensibly formulated.  While powerful forces shortsightedly oppose the greater good, our ideals as a nation offer positive guidance.  Let us again hearken back to the ideals of our Founders.

Thomas Paine, writing in Common Sense in 1776, called government “a necessary evil.”  He argued that government should be constituted principally for the public good, and NOT for “despotic” ends.  He believed that true security for citizens is the proper purpose of government, and that policies should be designed to ensure security at the least expense and for the greatest benefit.  His idea of the optimum form of government was one which was modeled after a principle of nature:  “that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” 

Wow – How far we have come from that concept!  Congress, take note!!  Your popularity is at practically record lows for quite good reasons. 

Complexity arguably dominates our Congressional policy-making today for a simple reason:  the more complex a law is designed to be, the more fine print there is in the law and thus the more hidden lobbyist provisions it can contain to advance the narrow goals of vested interests.  This complexity almost always comes at the public expense.

Thomas Paine envisioned an American nation with a fair and representative democracy that guaranteed citizens a maximum of individual liberties.  He asserted that such a form of government would be best suited to “embracing and confederating” all the various competing interests throughout a nation.  It is arguably of the utmost importance that our society is fair and just and peaceful, and that there are effective mechanisms in place to guarantee that our collective activities and usages of resources are indefinitely sustainable.  To achieve these goals, we need a proper balance between the extremes of anarchic freedom and centralized control. 

What really should the proper role of government be in our lives?  Ronald Reagan declared in his first Inaugural Address:  “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem;  government is the problem.”  With this, Reagan set forth on a concerted effort to cut taxes for the rich, increase military spending, reduce regulations, embrace laissez-faire capitalism, suppress dissent, and weaken the power and prerogatives of working people.  In contrast, Barack Obama stated in his Inaugural Address:  “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works for the majority of people.”  Surely we need a federal government that is less bureaucratic and less profligate and more thrifty where it should be, and smarter in its operations and spending and investing of taxpayer dollars.

A significant development has been taking place in the past century that requires better understanding.  The size of the U.S. government has increased dramatically, as measured by federal spending as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  Such spending was less than 10% in all the years before 1918, then it spiked to more than 29% to finance the first World War in 1919.  Government spending averaged about 12% through the 1920’s, and then 20% through the Great Depression.  It spiked to more than 50% in 1945 during World War II, and then it averaged 27% in the 1950’s, 30% in the 1960’s, 32% in the 1970’s, 35% in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and 37% in the last decade.  This increasing trend has culminated in 2009, with the financial crisis and recession, with government spending being more than 46% of GDP, according to data at www.usgovernmentspending.com.

The question this raises is whether such growth in the size of government is a good thing or a bad thing for the greater good.  Conservative think tanks adduce an extensive list of reasons that big government is bad, and these reasons are, on the whole, somewhat convincing.  But other nations like those in Scandinavia have a higher average quality of living compared to that of people in the United States, and their governments levy higher taxes and spend relatively more money than ours to provide their citizens with universal healthcare, better retirement programs, inexpensive college education, paid sick leave, more generous vacations, good child care and more affordable housing.

The growth in the size of U.S. government spending and the national debt seems like an undesirable state of affairs.  It is a considerable risk to run enormous budget deficits and have so much government spending and debt, and to support such large military expenditures year after year after year.  We face the serious dilemma today that if we take drastic steps to balance the budget at this point in the economic cycle, it could cause another recession and higher unemployment.  This is the lesson of 1937-1938, when cuts in government spending and a tightening of the money supply torpedoed a nascent economic recovery.  Seemingly responsible moves could thus cause a contraction in the economy and even higher joblessness.

Advocates of privatization point out that government ownership or control of resources gives political considerations greater clout than economic considerations in determining how resources are allocated.  This is probably true in our democracy.  Privatization is NOT, however, the panacea for all social ills, because it also creates severe problems.  Instead of advancing positive and salubrious goals like lower costs, greater efficiency, better management and the improvement of society, the outcome of privatization is often a spike in costly no-bid contracting and excessive fees, price gouging, inadequate monitoring, increased fraud, more unfair cronyism, and less accountability.  The privatization of the functions of government and concomitant deregulation can create rich new opportunities for corporations to swindle taxpayers.  These are NOT good things!

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants

         it back the minute it begins to rain.”                                 --- Mark Twain

Better Ideas and Better Plans for a Better Future

We need better management and proper priorities and smart, fair governance.  Instead, we have too much red tape and dysfunctional regulation and bureaucratic inefficiencies, on the one hand, and too little good supervision and oversight and effective regulation, on the other hand.  We have too much incompetence and corruption and influence peddling.

Regulatory agencies often fail to act in the public interest due to “regulatory capture”.  This term refers to the process by which powerful vested interests and their lobbyists succeed in getting their interests advanced instead of the interests of the public.  When regulatory capture occurs, dominant businesses and industries use their insider political power and financial resources to “capture” favors rather than allowing the agencies to fulfill the regulatory purposes for which they were created.  Regulatory capture operates in ways similar to the Tragedy of the Commons phenomenon in which individuals or groups with high-stakes interests in regulatory decisions or policy outcomes focus their energies and resources to gain the outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, who each have only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, are much less influential.  When focused resources devoted to particular policies successfully capture influence with agencies whose purpose is to regulate them, it almost always results in activities that are harmful to the greater good, as can be seen by the failure of regulatory agencies to prevent the financial meltdown of 2008-2009.

These facts lead to the inescapable conclusion that our economic and political system must be seriously reformed so that corporations and government are better managed in ways that are consistent with the greater good.

Thomas Paine noted that freedom can be dangerous in the hands of the poor, due to ignorance, just as it can be dangerous in the hands of the rich, due to excessive influence.  This is why he advocated public education to overcome ignorance, and a representative democracy that is strong and smart enough to prevent political corruption. 

Both liberty and equality are important to the common good.  To the extent that these two ideals conflict, we should wisely change our systems to establish the fairest balance between them for the maximum number of people.  Liberties should be protected by assuring open societies and the freedom of speech and religion, and by establishing laws that guarantee a maximum amount of economic self-determination and individual rights.  And equality should be guaranteed especially with regard to equal opportunity and equal representation for every individual and equal treatment under the law.  Efforts by retrogressive leaders to bring about greater inequality are anathema to a democratic society, and they should be opposed and reversed.

We must embrace broader perspectives.  Economists, when they are being cautious and honest, point out that it is unwise and improvident to borrow so heavily from future generations.  They know that it is folly to embrace gambits that are too short-term oriented, because such courses of action are likely to leave a disastrous legacy for our descendents by depleting resources and damaging ecosystems and increasing economic inequities and weakening the value of our currency and heightening the risks of national bankruptcy and exacerbating conflicts and contributing to social and economic instability.

Environmentalists and ecological philosophers warn that, in all assessments of the courses of action that should be taken by businesses and governments, we must take into account long-term impacts and strive to minimize the costs that are externalized by businesses onto society.  Environmentalists also provide us a provocative understanding about the damaging phenomenon known as the tragedy of the commons.  They give us cautionary tales regarding the devastating impacts of activities like the clear-cutting of forests and the depletion of fisheries, and they warn us of the potential costs of global-warming-induced climate change and the risks associated with recklessly wasteful uses of fossil fuels and fresh water and other resources.  They also tell us about the overweening need for a transformation in our societies to make them indefinitely sustainable, and they remind us about the risks of failing to courageously address the implications of continued uncontrolled population growth.

Religious fundamentalists also weigh in on the common good, as they understand it.  They vehemently proclaim that they have the absolute truth about what is right and wrong, and what is good and evil, and what is best for us sinners.  They derive their truths from a variety of ancient ‘holy books’, in which the alleged words of their own particular God are interpreted by their religious leaders in ways that are often curiously self-serving, doctrinaire, inflexible, narrow-minded, domineering, discriminatory and engendering of conflict between peoples.  Established churches must become less socially reactionary and more of a force for good in our societies.  They should cooperate together with statesmen and diplomats to make sure that they do not become forces that contribute to discrimination, conflict, war, genocide, terrorism or ecological calamity.  They must stop opposing family planning and contraception programs, because many of the biggest challenges that face humanity are exacerbated by too many people using limited resources and contributing to ecological overshoot of the carrying capacity of the Earth for our demanding species.

Strategic Initiatives

     “To do good is my religion.”     --- Thomas Paine

George Lakoff writes about strategic initiatives in his thought-provoking book, Don’t Think of an Elephant.  Such initiatives are plans that have broad impacts across many issues.  For instance, tax cutting is a plan embraced by conservatives that accomplishes a wide range of objectives that they hold dear, like enriching wealthy supporters and restricting social program spending options and reducing the flexibility of government to supervise corporations or invest fairly and wisely in their societies. 

An example of a contrasting liberal ‘strategic initiative’ is the Endangered Species Act, which protects species, helps defend public lands from unwise exploitation, forces companies to mitigate the environmental harms that they cause, and makes it more necessary to plan ahead wisely with a long-term sustainable orientation.  Progressive taxes are another example, for they not only raise money to finance needed government functions, but they do so in a way that is equal and fair at every level of income.

George Lakoff writes about our traditional American progressive values and principles and progressive policy directions and discrete policies.  One cannot help but feel that Broad Prosperity, Effective Government, Mutual Responsibility and a Stronger America would be better to achieve than the narrower Conservative ideals of Strong Defense, ‘Free’ Markets, Lower Taxes, Smaller Government and ‘Strict Father’ Family Values.

The effect of tax breaks targeted to the already wealthy, for instance, is to increase disparities of wealth.  This makes our societies less egalitarian, and actually physically less healthy, and therefore less secure in a profound sense.  Contrasting policies that increase equality have positive implications for the overall physical and psychological health of a nation’s people.  This was proved to be true by the impacts of measures implemented in Japan after World War II.  When the United States occupied Japan after the Japanese surrendered in 1945, many of the Allied Occupation staffers who worked under General Douglas MacArthur were policy veterans of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ program.  At the time, Japan was a deeply unequal society, and the Americans worked to transform it into a more equal one by using the so-called “three D’s” of economic equality:  demilitarization, democratization of the political process, and decentralization of wealth and power. 

These reforms made people in Japanese society more equal, and the population became much healthier as a result.  The average life span of a person in Japan was less than 45 years before World War II, and then an amazing increase in life expectancy occurred because of the public policies put into effect to increase the equality of Japanese society.  In only 40 years, by 1979, the people of Japan had achieved the greatest longevity of any nation in the world -- over 80 years on average, at the time!  

The United States, meanwhile, has chosen since 1980 to pursue policies that are ever-more anti-egalitarian.  A significant increase in inequality in American society is revealed by trends toward greater disparities in earnings and wealth between the rich and all others.  The “conservative” policies that helped create this state of affairs have led to Americans being ranked behind 29 other nations in the world in life expectancy today.  Woe is us!  Our sadly unfair healthcare system is disturbingly wrong-headed, as are such things as fiscally irresponsible policies that weaken the dollar, and deregulation policies that create risky economic bubbles, and military policies that antagonize people around the world while increasing inequities between peoples.  We should implement initiatives that are more egalitarian (domestic 3 D’s!) to create greater fairness in our health care system, as well as in opportunity and education and legal justice and taxation and required military service. 

The health insurance industry consists of corporations so possessed with making bigger profits every year that they rapidly increase insurance premiums at the same time that they deny coverage to millions of people and aggressively evade providing insurance to people who have ‘pre-existing condition’ health problems.  These strategies may be good for profits, but they are bad for people!

The exposure of the faults and weaknesses of ideological doctrines make it clear that we must be more flexible in adapting to reality.  Flexibility will allow us to ensure more propitious outcomes.  Reckless consumerism, lavishly wasteful resource usages, bubble economics, trickle-down unfairness, speculative excesses, ideological shortsightedness, ruthlessly exploitive disaster capitalism, a lack of sensible regulation and oversight, and antagonism to sensible family planning programs are all facets of an overarching self-centered doctrinal worldview that denies vital understandings about ecological well-being and sustainable resource uses and moderation and prudence and smart pragmatism.

Barack Obama’s ideals are consistent with those of our American Founders.  He has made significant efforts to create a form of post-partisan political pragmatism that would result in more positive conditions for our nation and world.  Millions of people have hoped from the day he was elected that he would succeed in fostering truly farsighted and even transcendent change.  A review of Obama’s first year in office reveals the astonishing hurdles to fundamental reforms and rapid positive change in our political system, but this in no way diminishes the growing need!

The Long View of Historical Change

Our Founders made a courageous commitment to creating a nation based on ideals of individual liberty, equality, social justice, fair representation and limited government.  They did this to “promote the general Welfare”, as stated in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution.  We have been trying to live up to these ideals ever since. 

Many progressive milestones have been enacted to achieve these ideals, and to reduce the gap between America’s ideals and reality.  Salient examples of this progress are the vital Bill of Rights ratified in 1791;  the legal freeing of black slaves in 1865;  the granting to women of the right to vote in 1920;  the various worker protections established during the 20^th century;  the New Deal that included a Social Security system created in the 1930s;  and the consumer rights, investor rights and civil rights which were strengthened in the 1960s, along with vital environmental protections set forth in such laws as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Wilderness Act of 1964. 

This progress has been difficult to achieve, and America has at times slid backwards, especially during times of war.  For instance, habeas corpus rights were denied during the Civil War;  dissent was suppressed during World War I;  Americans of Japanese ancestry were deprived of their rights and property and freedom when they were interned in remote camps during World War II;  illegal surveillance was done on anti-war groups during the Vietnam War;  and numerous incursions have been made against civil liberties and privacy and other fundamental citizen rights in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.  This is another good reason for citizens to demand that their government resort to war ONLY when all other alternatives have been completely exhausted, and to have a defensive strategy, not an aggressively offensive one.

The trajectory of American political history, in any case, has been toward a fuller realization of our Founding ideals.  This includes a clearer recognition of the overarching importance of fairness doctrines and the common good.  The original thirteen colonies, in a Big Bang of revolutionary zeal, declared independence from Great Britain in 1776 and joined together to form the United States of America.  Our Founders recognized with a visceral immediacy the extreme undesirability of abuses of power and taxation without fair representation, because of their experience with the tyranny of the British Empire, so they established a government with a strong system of checks and balances that was limited by a democratic constitution and rules of law and a great Bill of Rights.  They were suspicious of big government and big businesses and infringements on personal freedoms and entangling alliances and anything that would subvert the will of the people.

Today, another revolutionary transformation is required to ensure that we continue our historical progress toward reforms that make our societies better, and to make our nation’s policies more consonant with the bigger-picture greater good.  We simply must realize a new relationship between all of humanity and the web of life that includes and sustains us. 

This new relationship must include a fairer and smarter balance between common good goals and (1) the goals of consumers, who want good values at low prices, (2) the goals of investors, who want to get high investment returns, regardless of the harm this may cause to society and the environment, (3) the goals of government employees, who often are more concerned with getting greater benefits for themselves rather than fairly serving the public, and (4) the impulse of corporations, which want to maximize profits by getting subsidies and tax reductions and the privilege to externalize worker healthcare costs and environmental pollution costs and resource depletion costs upon society.

This new relationship can probably not be achieved in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision which overturned campaign finance limitations on corporations and unions.  The only way to accomplish this now is for President Obama and Congress to boldly formulate intelligent rules this year that ensure that the people retain fair representation in their government.

Common Sense and Precautionary Principles

Humanity has been making enormous gambles, rather than acting with precautionary sensibility.  We have created a severe housing and financial crisis;  we have stimulated debt leverage and risk-taking;  we have hyped up wars and religious conflicts;  we continue our unmitigated exploitation and depletion and damage of planetary ecosystems, even though we ultimately completely depend on them;  and we allow religious fundamentalists and social conservatives to influence our societies in opposition of sensible family planning measures and the education and empowerment of women.

Our best strategy would be to follow a more honest and reasonable approach that is focused on actions and behaviors that are consistent with shared prosperity and the common good.  This is the “no regrets” idea which is the basis for the precautionary principle, as enunciated in Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.  This principle states: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

A Precautionary Principle of Ecological Propriety should be embraced in all of our legislative considerations.  Such a principle would ensure that we “pay forward” deeds that are propitious to our heirs rather than leaving them a legacy of depleted resources, debt, pollution, injustice and war.  To the extent that our actions damage the environment and are clearly not sustainable, new methods must be developed to guarantee the vitality of the environment and protect the future prospects of life on Earth.  We simply cannot continue to plunder the planet without regard for the consequences of our actions. 

We should also establish a Precautionary Social Principle that enshrines a fair and bipartisan concern for the common good as the highest value.  Barack Obama was right when he noted that “a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.”  An ethical earthquake is needed to shake up our entrenched, wasteful and inequitable priorities, and to emasculate unjust partisanship and shortsighted dogmatic doctrine and deceptive propaganda. 

A national Precautionary Principle of reproductive responsibility should be embraced.  Nadya Suleman represents a metaphor for human irresponsibility;  she is the woman who had six children that she could not afford to support, and nonetheless she had artificial fertility procedures that resulted in the birth of octuplets -- another 8 children! -- on January 26, 2009.  Food stamp mama!  Just as Nadya has been stupid and selfish, and her fertility doctors have been outrageously irresponsible, we collectively are being foolish not to admit that we cannot afford to continue policies that encourage rapid population growth. 

The quality of life for our children, NOT the number of them we can spawn, must become the most important consideration.  From this standpoint, the opposition of conservatives to family planning programs must be overcome and rejected.  Public family planning programs prevented 2 million unwanted pregnancies and 800,000 abortions last year, according to a study by the respected Guttmacher Institute, and this saved billions of dollars in taxpayer money. 

Another Precautionary Principle should be embraced in the arenas of economics and finance.  Sensible systems and adequate regulations should be maintained to prevent fraud and economic bubbles and destabilizing national debt and unsustainable schemes.  The ‘Ponzi scheme’ perpetrated by Bernard Madoff, which essentially “robbed Peter to pay Paul”, cost thousands of people their life savings.  And a far larger Ponzi-type scheme continues unabated;  it is an insidiously inter-generational one -- the Social Security system.  Current workers pay taxes from their earnings to the government for Social Security.  These funds are immediately transferred to people who have reached the age of retirement.  As more and more people retire, the number of people collecting Social Security funds increases, and the burden on current workers becomes more oppressive.  Eventually the system will be bankrupt unless it is seriously restructured and made more financially sound.  Without a growing population of working younger people and immigrants, the Social Security scheme will fall apart as currently structured.  It is like a Ponzi scheme rather than a sound retirement plan because money from today’s workers is given to retirees and none of it saved for future obligations.  The federal government, in fact, borrows every cent and more of the last few years of Social Security “surpluses”, and then it commingles the money with its general funds and squanders it on the exigencies and excesses of the moment. 

The Promise of More Fairly Shared Prosperity

From the end of World War II until 1973, worker productivity rose 104% and median family income rose by about the same amount.  From 1973 through 2007, however, the productivity of workers increased 82% while median family income increased only 22%.  To create a fairer system in which prosperity is more broadly based and more broadly shared, we need to implement policies that reconnect productivity and the real growth in wages.  This can be done by strengthening labor laws and unions, by tying management as well as worker incentives to performance, and by expanding education and job training.

The famous Studs Terkel was a working class hero who died on November 2, 2008 at the age of 96.  Studs was a journalist who stood up against the Establishment in defending the rights of workers and the common good.  He always seemed to be a step ahead of everyone else, opposing fascism and McCarthyism in his early years.  At a time when the mainstream media was largely enthralled by the propaganda of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ in 1986, he neatly sized up the era: “The only thing trickling down from the top is meanness.”

In April 2006, Terkel received a Lifetime Achievement award from the workers’ advocacy organization, American Rights at Work.  After accepting the award, Terkel said:  “What brings workers together can be a belief, a hope of improving the climate and community at work -- the spaces where so many of us spend so much of our lives.  Respect on the job, and a voice at the workplace, shouldn't be something Americans have to work overtime to achieve.”  Yes!  Finding ways to give working people more reward and greater respect and more influence at work would be a great contribution to the common good.

Hurrah for the late Studs Terkel!  Asked if he was optimistic about the future, Terkel was cautious, but he did say that “you’ve gotta have hope.  Hope dies last.”

A Progressive ‘Slippery Slope Strategic Initiative’ for the Greater Good

Think about the scope and nature of our human activities, and how exhaustively and rapidly we are depleting natural resources such as forests and fossil fuels.  Consider also the enormous wealth transfer from the United States to oil producing nations, and the cost of fighting wars in the Middle East to protect our access to imported oil supplies.  And think about the billions of tons of greenhouse gases we are spewing into the atmosphere each year and the related phenomena of deforestation and global warming, all of which contribute to growing environmental uncertainties and mass extinctions of species and the depletion of biological diversity on our wonderful home planet.  Here are some of the most serious and far-reaching challenges that humankind has ever faced, and it is simply astonishing that ALL of these existentially daunting obstacles could be effectively addressed with the same sane policy prescription:  by committing to making significant investments in a new Apollo-like program to develop renewable energy alternatives and more efficient resource usages and better ways to conserve fossil fuels. 

A bold strategic initiative like this would not only contribute to the solution of the problems adduced above, but it would create jobs, improve public health, mitigate anthropogenic climate changes, and potentially help developing countries with new decentralized technologies for their energy needs.  By reducing existing subsidies to fossil fuel and nuclear industries to increasing investments in new energy regimes, there would be a desirable slippery slope movement away from our dependence on polluting non-renewable resources.

Nonetheless, powerful resistance exists to such courses of action.  This is ironic because a sensible restructuring of our economies is clearly called for, one that would make our human activities sustainable over the coming decades and centuries.  Partisan bickering and ideological struggles and selfish vested interests tend to hijack our priorities and cause us to fail to solve overarching problems like these. 

Everyone across the entire political spectrum from very conservative to very liberal must come together to form a broad consensus as to the optimal courses of action for the general good.  Then we must support good plans to achieve these courses of action, including bold incentives and disincentives that motivate people to act in appropriate ways.  This is one way to ensure that we move along a pragmatic and more propitious path that will lead to greater well-being in the long term. 

The Motto of Boy Scout and Girl Scout organizations is “Be Prepared”.  All people can best prepare themselves to deal with challenges and struggles and emergencies by knowing the right thing to do at the right moment, and then doing it.  The moment has come for us all to support smarter priorities!

Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Obliviousness

The December 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change summit was one of the most remarkable international meetings of leaders in human history.  The summit highlighted the facts of global warming and the failures since the 1997 Kyoto Accords to rein in the production of greenhouse gas emissions.  The summit unfortunately failed to produce strong steps to avert future climate disasters, principally because powerful short-term-oriented vested interests were effective in blocking farsighted reforms.  The summit also made it clear that a minority of people obtusely deny the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence that reveals global warming IS occurring, AND that it is caused in large part by human activities which include the burning of fossil fuels and the cutting of vast tracts of forests and the maintenance of large herds of methane-gas-producing cattle.

A reasonable amount of money should be included in all prices of products and services to fund mitigations of climate change impacts.  Rational individuals and societies should be willing to pay this cost as a kind of insurance policy against potential damages.  Suppose, for instance, that there is a 10% probability that climate change will cost $10 trillion within 100 years, plus an untold amount of human suffering associated with increased probabilities of widespread flooding of islands and coastal areas and water supply disruptions due to the rapid melting of glaciers and failures of regional food production due to more frequent storms and droughts.  Should we not be required to pay an additional 25 cents per gallon, or a dollar, for gasoline, or some such similar measure, to finance preventative and remedial measures like reforestation and conservation and efficiency of energy usages and investments in renewable alternatives to fossil fuels? 

It is a distinct ‘tragedy of the commons’ that individuals and vested interests are so strongly opposed to paying a reasonable and affordable on-going price to prevent such contingencies.  This is a matter of political will.  We could dramatically alter our current propensities by using wisely-targeted incentives and disincentives to achieve propitious goals.  Such methods have been proven to be extremely effective in modifying collective demands and behaviors.  They are the fairest way to affect people’s actions in desirable directions.  Precisely-targeted incentives and disincentives can be designed that would be very effective in altering our collective course of detrimental actions and making them more ecologically benign and sustainable.  This is generally preferable to alternatives like burdensome laws and regulations, because they are fairer mechanisms in influencing the choices people make.

Climate Change Deniers

The psychological underpinnings of those who deny that human beings are contributing to global warming and climate change are ‘curious and curiouser’.  So what, they say, if the human race is spewing tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year?  So what if this has caused the concentration of carbon-dioxide to steadily increase from 280ppm to more than 390ppm in a geological instant?  So what if this trend is almost certain to result in 500ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere within a century?  Gee, say the skeptics, it’s still real cold in Chicago in the winter, and a little warming would be quite welcome!  So what if we happen to flood 200 million people out of coastal areas worldwide and in Bangladesh and all those remote islands in the next 100 years?  These ‘deniers’ cling to narrow ideologies propagated by vested interests that say we simply can’t afford to alter our habits and shift incentives from dirty fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources.  They even seem to deny that renewable energy sources are a better plan than increasing our dependence on oil from the Middle East, where we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on wars every year to protect our access to other nations’ resources.  Climate change deniers often seem to think that liberals and the majority of scientists are too radical because they advocate that we take precautionary steps.  I believe that we must seek the truth, and follow it where it leads!

Record snowfalls paralyzed Washington D.C. in mid February 2010 when severe winter storms hit much of the East Coast.  Climate change deniers were practically apoplectic with jubilant derision about this apparent refutation of the fact that the planet has been on a warming trend for decades.  Sean Hannity on Fox News, for instance, took advantage of the snowfalls to declare that these weather events “seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global-warming theories.”  Amazing!  Even junior high school students know that scientists have been warning for decades that the warming of the atmosphere will cause more extreme weather events of all kinds, including more severe floods and droughts and hurricanes and yes, snowstorms.  Weather and climate are different things, guys, and as pundit Clarence Page put it, “we owe it to our offspring” to know the difference.

Deniers not only seem to reject the precautionary principle, but they also seem to be zealously willing to gamble that the current trends will not result in the double-glazing warming of our home planet in the coming generations.  These skeptics hold this risk-taking conviction principally so that human beings will not be collectively required to invest responsibly in an inconvenient effort to begin the inevitably necessary weaning of our civilization from our addiction to the burning of limited supplies of non-renewable resources of fossil fuels.  Most of these deniers, like Sarah Palin, admit that changes in weather patterns have been taking place in recent decades, but they dispute whether increasing evidence of record-unusual storms and melting glaciers and heat waves and droughts are actually related to human activities.  Maybe it’s just sunspots, they say.

These same people tend to be the ones on the radical right who rashly support American military occupations of Middle Eastern nations.  They are often the same ones who have bought the propaganda that says these wars are unrelated to our aggressive economic efforts to assure our access to global supplies of oil.  It is a sad fact that most of the remaining reserves of oil on Earth are increasingly concentrated in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and other Persian Gulf countries as fossil fuel resources are rapidly depleted in other countries. 

The United States has already burned more than 200 billion barrels of oil from its own domestic reserves.  Less than 25 billion barrels of proven reserves remain.  This makes the need for imported oil very strong, and it increases the arrogant temptation for Americans to use military means to assure our access to oil supplies.  In international matters, we must always remember that our greatness as a nation should be measured by our free, fair and peaceful trade with other nations, not by our coercive military might.

What happened to our faith in the free market and fair competition and cooperative problem-solving and peaceful coexistence and respect for the sovereignty of people in other countries?  Are we really to believe that we are involved in preemptive warfare against imminent threats to our national security, or is our military aggression merely a front for our supremacist hubris and desperate resource needs?  Should all nations not agree that every nation without exception must honestly and fairly compete for declining reserves of fossil fuels and other natural resources?

Climate change deniers are not necessarily stupid people, but they sure are easily convinced by corporate spin that has the goal of allowing pollution and climate change costs to be foisted onto society and the environment.  Smart people sometimes figuratively have poor peripheral vision, or are most comfortable when they wear blinders.  It may be convenient for them to cherry-pick facts and distort accurate understandings in favor of narrower points of view, but the time has come for us to seek the most propitious perspectives for the long-term common good rather than short-term advantages.

It is easy to be cynical about people who deny the risks of global warming gas emissions and climate change.  It seems preposterous that they can be so strongly opposed to economic initiatives that would require every product and service to include a small assessment to prevent future climate catastrophes.  Such a form of insurance is needed to ensure that we do not unleash harmful impacts on people in future generations.  Should we not be responsible for doing something to definitively ensure that our home planet remains habitable?

Why Are Common Good Values So Often Subverted?

Vested interests fight ferociously to gain and maintain perks and privileges and other advantages for themselves.  Our system unfortunately panders to everything but the common good.  Workers, investors, consumers, home owners, retirees, rich people and poor people all want the most they can get from the government for themselves.  Our political system is dominated to a grotesque extent by insider groups -- rich people, corporations, bankers, CEO’s, Wall Street ‘masters of the universe’, retirees, unions, religious establishments and such.  As a result, the Few manage to get things their way, while the Many are betrayed by big corporations and our government.  Those with the most influence win this serious game, and those who have no power effectively have little voice, and they consequently lose.

  “Men of aim must always rule the aimless.  Yet there will always be singing birds.”

                                                                                                 --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Expediencies, to the great detriment of our society, are often triumphant.  The most detrimental expediency in the long run is our sacrifice of the foundations of a good quality of life for future generations because of our unwillingness to live within our means today.  We borrow outrageous sums of money from everyone in the future instead of courageously finding ways to balance spending with revenues.  The Federal Reserve insidiously inflates the currency by printing more money to finance this debt, and this erodes the value of people’s earnings and savings.

In addition, we use up natural resources as fast as humanly possible;  and we degrade fresh water resources, pollute the environment, dump obscene amounts of toxic wastes into the environment, and even alter the composition of the atmosphere with billions of tons of carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions every year.  These activities damage habitats and ecosystems and drive untold numbers of species of life to extinction and effectively reduce the vitality of biodiversity.  We also obstruct initiatives for social justice, and let the status quo prevail even in the face of foolish absurdities like banking deregulation, bubble economic policies, speculative debt leveraging, outrageous healthcare inequities, the profligate expansion of the federal government, and amoral profiteering by the military-industrial complex and health insurance corporations and Big Pharma and Big Oil.

And we let proponents of hard-nosed military action harm hopes of multilateralism and reasonable diplomacy and peaceful coexistence and the proper prioritizing of our focus on important remedial actions.  We also allow an increasing domination of the media by giant corporations, effectively allowing our democracy to be undermined by corporations and charlatans and exploiters and ideologues and partisan politicians. 

Deconstructing Social Darwinism

Ironies abound in our crazy world.  Who, for instance, would have imagined that the “conservative” political Party would work so steadfastly to undermine precautionary ecological principles?  Who would have been able to guess that political conservatives would be the main ones who would recklessly advocate and facilitate deregulation and bubble economics and fiscally imprudent deficit spending from 2000 to 2008?  Who would have thought that conservatives would thus be the main groups responsible for causing one of the most serious global economic crises in history?  Who would have anticipated that Republican rule would have led to bigger government, and consequently to an urgent need for even BIGGER government and more government interventions to bail out giant corporations and more government spending to create jobs and stimulate the economy to get it out of its destabilized state and dangerous doldrums? 

Who, for that matter, would have thought that social conservatives would reject Charles Darwin’s scientific understandings of biological evolution while at the same time finding such a mesmerizing merit in theories of Social Darwinism that justify ruthless policies that are opposed to the principles and ideals of our Founders? 

Social Darwinism is a theory of the evolution of society that rationalizes the deepening of class inequalities and the intensification of the exploitation of resources and workers and even military imperialism.  The theory of Social Darwinism was first formulated by the philosopher Herbert Spencer during the inegalitarian Gilded Age of the so-called ‘robber barons’ in the late 1800s.  Social Darwinism posits that in all societies there is a struggle for existence that is driven by fierce competition and survival of the fittest, and that this overrides the needs for ethical fairness in the social compact between citizens. 

By embracing such a simplistic theory of societies, Social Darwinists seek to undermine constraints such as social justice and equality and democracy.  They portray sink-or-swim capitalist gambits as being necessary and inevitable, instead of recognizing how vitally important it is to establish a fairer social compact.  This ideology has been used as a pathetic justification of policies that are opposed to the egalitarian principles of our Founding Fathers.  It does so by promoting profit-making and aggression and a regressive kind of “progress” over the general welfare and all other values. 

The fact that accidents, diseases, bankruptcy and other adversities can afflict anyone at any time strongly suggests that the best system a society can establish is one that provides fair opportunities for every person to improve their circumstances, while also creating a social safety net for all that is affordable in total.  A good society should also establish effective incentives and disincentives to guide entrepreneurs and businesses and to allow them to operate successfully and in ways consistent with the common good.

In actual fact, Social Darwinism appeals to capitalists and the wealthy elite because it gives a deterministic and seemingly superior moral justification to the gambits of capital in its long-fought struggle against fairness to workers.  Social Darwinism is used as an ideological argument to persuade the populace of the desirability of laissez-faire policies and reduced supervision of corporations by the federal government.  This ideology is set forth in conjunction with traditional methods that are used by capitalists to suppress the prerogatives of labor, which include the repression of labor organizing, corrupt practices, reprehensible political manipulation, the coercion of workers, the oppression of minorities and lower classes, and even outright violence.

We’ve had quite enough of Wall Street financial elites and corporate CEOs who game our economic system to gain outlandish blessings for themselves at the expense of the stability of the system and the greater good.  The costs of allowing this state of affairs are proving to be extremely high.  It is becoming starkly apparent in today’s economic crisis that weak economic and financial conditions can create negative feedback loops that reinforce themselves and threaten to spiral into even greater problems of debt and national bankruptcy risks and resource depletion and ecological harm and wars.

Economic turmoil is a risky state of affairs.  High unemployment, spiking levels of national debt, plunging home values, de-leveraging, volatile equities markets, and the sustained non-productive cost of wars-without-end are all converging to cause far greater threats to our national security and well-being than is caused by terrorism.  It would be far more propitious to insure a sound economy with moderate consumption and rising asset values and a balanced level of risk-taking and regulated debt leveraging than to stimulate boom-and-bust ‘bubble economics’ with lavishly wasteful consumerism, unsustainable usages of resources, volatile asset values, unregulated risk-taking, and high levels of leveraging.

There are many who would disagree with these ideas.  Take the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, for instance.  In her novel Atlas Shrugged, she undertakes a monumental assault on what she sees as collectivist ideas.  She creates a towering paean to individualism and rational self-interest and creativity and personal freedom, and harshly portrays forces like government and organized labor that fight against the presumed deserving triumph of industrialists and selfish motives and capitalism.  Let us debate ideas like these, and create a new approach that incorporates our best understandings in light of the common good in the long term!

Parenthetically, Ayn Rand pronounced her first name to rhyme with “mine”.  This little known fact is curiously appropriate because her philosophy was staunchly oriented around self-interest and egoism.  Mine, mine, mine, Ayn!

In the context of these deliberations, let us seek the truth and implications of the late Senator Teddy Kennedy’s remarks when he said:

“If by a liberal, they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind;  someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions;  someone who cares about the welfare of the people, their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties;  someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicion that grips us, if that is what they mean by a liberal, I am proud to be a liberal.”                

                                                                    --- Senator Edward M. Kennedy, 1932 – 2009

A Compelling Case for Better Ways of Achieving Peace

Mark Twain wrote these words in his Notebook in 1895:

“We easily perceive that the peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart -- and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.  But we are so stupid that we can’t see that we thus plainly admit that no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.”

One of the subtexts of all Earth Manifesto writings is explored as a major theme in Dee Dee Myers book Why Women Should Rule the World.  Dee Dee Myers was the White House press secretary for President Clinton from the beginning of 1993 until the end of 1994.  She notes that women have stronger biological and cultural propensities to seek a win/win consensus than men do, so in nations where women are educated and empowered, democracy is strengthened and those nations tend to be characterized by greater cooperation and to have fairer and more practical priorities.  Women in power tend to favor spending on health and nutrition and education, and to be less inclined to commit excessive amounts of money to the military. 

Myers writes that history reveals that the more a nation spends on its military, the more likely it is to get involved in wars.  She concludes from this fact that it is probable that policies that emphasize the fair education and empowerment of women provide a strong impetus for more peace and fewer wars.  See A Peaceable Proposition: The Golden Rule ‘Greening’ of U.S. Foreign Policy in Part One of the Earth Manifesto, and Reflections on War in Part Three for deeper introspection into important ideas about to war and peace.

Politics Makes Odd Bedfellows!

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

         then gets elected and proves it.”       --- Political satirist and writer P.J. O’Rourke

Politics certainly creates some odd alliances.  Republicans, supposedly the party of small government, have frequently embraced the ideological and practical goals of corporate power and vested interest privilege.  They have been the most ardent supporters of a big and interventionist military.  The Republican Party has affiliated itself with anti-choice religious fundamentalists who oppose women’s rights to determine their own destinies when it comes to privacy and choosing contraceptives to prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases.  And conservative Republican politicians indulge in red-button-social-issue politicking when they almost unanimously align themselves with government intrusiveness in women’s lives, as can be seen by their opposition to allowing woman the last resort option of having an abortion even when she has been indignantly and violently raped.

Why Are Our Public Decision-Making Processes So Messed Up?

Mark Twain once observed:

 “In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case

            gotten at second-hand, and without examination."   

It is becoming increasingly important for us to honestly examine our beliefs and the things we are told by our leaders, and to make better public policy decisions in light of these better understandings.  We should base our decisions on the broadest range of relevant facts and information, and on more clearly established priorities.  Unfortunately, our public decision-making is powerfully affected by biases and ideologies and selfishness, in addition to the undue influence of narrow vested interests.

Recently, researchers have reportedly found that there is an apparently genetic component to the way we see and feel the world.  In a study done of people in Lincoln, Nebraska, a surprisingly strong correlation was found between the degree a person is susceptible to sudden noises or scary images and how strongly they hold political opinions.  It turns out that conservatives tended to be much more easily frightened than liberals.  Thus, there may actually be a basic biological component of political beliefs. 

This research, reported in the September 19, 2008 issue of the prestigious journal Science, is titled “Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits”.  The researchers found a strong correlation between political views and unconscious reactions to immediate threats.  The subjects had been tested for strongly-felt attitudes related to issues like foreign aid, military spending, gun control, the death penalty, the Iraq war, warrantless searches, the Patriot Act, the torture of political prisoners, women’s rights, premarital sex, school prayer, gay marriage, and immigration policies. 

The researchers explored the so-called ’Startle Reflex’.  People were found to react either strongly or more calmly to a sudden threat.  Watch out!  Those who had the most significant physical reaction to the stimuli had conservative attitudes towards political issues;  those who had calmer responses had liberal attitudes toward these issues. 

So people not only have rational reasons for philosophical differences on issues and deeply ingrained socially-conditioned biases, but also even biological predispositions that affect what they believe.  Recognizing this, it becomes even more important for us to communicate better, debate more honestly, and be more willing to compromise on finding the best ideas for public policies.  It is vital that we reduce the institutionalized bribery in our political system so that it is not so dysfunctionally dominated by vested interest lobbyists.  But we also need to find ways to facilitate constructive public debate so that we can find the fairest and most sensible compromise between all competing interests.  To do so, we must keep in mind the greater good, as it is most reasonably assessed in light of the long-term best interests of society as a whole.  A focus on long-term goals is sometimes even a good way to make better things happen in the short run.

How can we diffuse the hyper-partisanship that gives public support to ideological arguments that affect our public policy making?  A preposterous ‘birther’ controversy has been fomented by the extreme ‘conservative’ fringe against Barack Obama, questioning his citizenship, despite definitive proofs of it.  And global warming deniers abound.  These facts make it clear how difficult it will be to overcome deep biases and suspicions and radical anti-environmentalism and racism in our society.  By having constructive debate in our communities and working together, and by marginalizing extremists, we can move forward together toward a somewhat rosier future.

Opportunities and Obstacles

A French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States for 9 months in 1831.  After his return he wrote the renowned book, Democracy in America, in which he provided insightful observations about our nation and its society, politics, economy and people.  One idea he introduced was “self-interest rightly understood”.  This vital concept is valuable in the world today because of the seriously adverse consequences that are being suffered due to misguided understandings of what actually constitutes true self-interest and the common good.  Ultimately, our prosperity must be consistent with basic human and American values, and with an adequately protected environment and renewable resource usages and a sustainable economy -- AND with a stable number of people on Earth, rather than a rapidly increasing number.

Proponents of particular special interests focus intently on their specific goals, so they are well organized to assert their power to pressure politicians for special perks and privileges and benefits.  Common good interests, being less immediate and somewhat less tangible, generally do not have proponents that are as strongly committed, so priorities in our political system that are socially beneficial do not receive the attention and support that they should.  This facilitates foolish and tragic assaults on the commons, as well as the rapid depletion of resources and the unethical exploitation of government ineptitude, corruption and profligacy.

People who believe in economic fundamentalism, and others like those who formulate policies in right-wing think tanks, tend to cloak their arguments in ideology and spurious convictions about why courses of action are supposedly most desirable for the nation that happen to serve their own selfish interests and those of narrow elites that support them.  Trickle-down theories of tax cuts targeted toward rich people, for instance, and ‘supply-side’ economic doctrines, and rationalizations for wars are all examples of narrow-minded and often dangerous perspectives of such people.  Such ideologies facilitate greed, selfishness, shortsighted politics, partisan intransigence and wrong-headed ideological certitudes, all of which detrimentally affect our world.

It is sensational how effectively the inertial forces of the status quo are subverting “change you can believe in”.  Wall Street bankers have grabbed enormous bailouts and prevented meaningful reform of the banking system;  we have been unable to reduce military budgets or remove our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan;  we have been unable to make our system of taxation more progressive;  deficit spending is becoming ever more riskily unbalanced;  and the hope for serious healthcare reform is being eroded, even though many millions of people are being made less secure by obscenely escalating costs.  Health insurance profits are at record levels and coverage of people has been reduced because of treatment denials and ‘pre-existing conditions’ exclusions and premium hikes. 

The need to get Big Money out of the driver’s seat of our political system is becoming clearer every day!  And the challenges to this goal have been dramatically ratcheted up by the narrow majority of conservatives on the Supreme Court and their ruling that corporations can spend unlimited amounts on influencing elections.  “Free speech” for Americans has just been dealt a blow in favor of ‘paid speech’ by big corporations.  We must reform our system, and boldly, and soon!

Context and Perspective

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us …”

                                                                          --- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

These opening lines by the famous British author Charles Dickens launch his tale of London and Paris during a period of severe economic and social turmoil in England and France in the latter half of the eighteenth Century.  Taxes and war-engendered national debt were oppressive in France at that time.  This period, during the reign of King Louis XVI (from 1774 to 1792), was characterized by popular discontent and political unrest which culminated in the violent upheaval of the people against the oppressive aristocracy in the French Revolution of 1789.  Dickens concluded the opening paragraph of The Tale of Two Cities, quoted above, by noting that “… in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Similar outrage against tyranny and neglect of the common good had contributed to the American Revolutionary War against British colonialism from 1775 to 1783.  At a bleak point early in that war, Thomas Paine, an English emigrant to the American colonies who had become a passionate advocate for American independence from Britain, noted in a pamphlet titled The American Crisis:  “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Today we are living in another era that is extremely traumatized by economic, political and social turmoil.  Once again it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times, and our souls are being figuratively tried.  Unemployment is widespread;  the state of the economy is disturbing;  and violent conflicts continue around the world.  Economic activity has been in a serious recession, and many banks are still in dire financial straits.  Credit and loans are difficult to obtain for individuals and businesses alike.  Real estate and equities markets have had significant slumps and tentative recoveries.  Poverty and hunger and strife haunt societies worldwide. 

The crisis today involves impacts that are more intricately intertwined and global in scope than ever before.  As the environmental side-effects of agricultural and industrial activities grow more complex and more damaging every year, human activities cause increasingly ominous changes in the basic ecological and climatic conditions on planet Earth.  All of these conditions together are contributing to dramatic social and geopolitical challenges and transformations around the globe. 

The current economic crisis provides us with a “dangerous opportunity” to honestly reform our political and economic systems and to invest in a more positive future.  In theory, this crisis should make it necessary to alter the absurd aspects of our partisan politics.  As the playwright Tony Kushner once wrote: “There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible social change in short periods of time.  People and the world they're living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or the bad, or some mixture of the two.” 

We should not allow this serious crisis to go to waste!  Let us take advantage of the opportunity afforded to transform our societies in ways that are best for the common good in the long run.  We should be more honest with ourselves.  Let’s embrace a new “Great Awakening”, a free thinking one that is attuned to accurate understandings and reality and common sense and prudence – AND to fairness toward future generations.  This modern Great Awakening must be far-seeing and ecologically smart, in contrast to historical episodes of “awakenings” that were bizarrely obedient to blind faith in religious myths and adherence to ideological certitudes and fundamentalist interpretations of ancient “holy scriptures”. 

Let us acknowledge that there is a strong connection between the unprecedented rapid growth in the number of human beings on Earth and all of the overarching problems that face humanity and life, such as human-caused climate change, fresh water shortages, deforestation, habitat destruction, resource depletion, ocean acidification, poverty, wars, injustice, corruption, inter-generational conflicts, and terrorism.  Let us accept greater responsibility for the future well-being of our species, including environmental responsibility and fiscal responsibility and social responsibility and reproductive responsibility. 

Like a kaleidoscope being transforming from one configuration to another, the relative equilibrium of our societies is being shattered by the current economic crisis.  In this unsettled interregnum, we have the great opportunity to create a more sustainable and sensible future.  We must find better ways to prevent powerful vested interests from hijacking our societies, as they have done during other crises.  Naomi Klein writes about this tendency in her valuable book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  During a crisis, we are more vulnerable to increased injustices and fraudulent forms of profiteering, as well as to the imposition of severe social austerity programs and even totalitarian forms of government.  For this reason, we must choose to use periods of radical upheaval like this to implement positive changes and real reforms, and not just to yield to reactive and manipulative forces. 

During times of unrest and upheaval, whether personal or societal, it behooves us to learn the larger lessons, to embrace positive priorities, and to make “the growth choice, not the fear choice”.  In this way, we take good advantage of adversity, and improve our lives and our future prospects.  As our nation takes desperate measures to contain the economic contagion caused by the bursting of the engineered real estate and equities bubbles, we must honestly evaluate what has taken place, and why.  This essay addresses these understandings.  We must also “think outside the box” for optimal solutions.  In addition to the thoughts explored herein, I highly recommend a review of the specific ideas contained in Part Four of the Earth Manifesto’s One Dozen Big Initiatives to Positively Transform Our Societies, and in the Progressive Agenda for a More Sane Humanity.

New Directions:  Progressive, Not Regressive

Vested interests that support the status quo are extraordinarily powerful.  They are generally strongly opposed to changes that benefit the common good.  But Americans have voted for “change we can believe in”, and it is time to seriously begin to make the fundamental changes that need to be made in our government and business world.  By cooperating together, great goals can be achieved.  We must unite to agree on what these goals should be, and on how best to accomplish them.  Then, we must commit our societies to acting in ways that are consistent with these goals to achieve them.

We should begin to make the federal government leaner and thriftier, and stimulate the powerful engine of small businesses to create jobs and drive us out of the current economic morass.  We should help finance micro-loans to people, rather than giving trillions of dollars in bailouts to mega-banks.  We should make health care a right for all citizens, and apply effective cost controls and relieve businesses of their current role in administering healthcare plans for their employees.  And we should act with greater respect for the sovereignty of other nations on the international stage, seeking win-win solutions and acting as good neighbors rather than reckless dominators. 

We should dramatically restructure government subsidies and incentives to reward activities consistent with the common good, and to discourage those that are contrary to the common good.  We should make our societies fairer by making our graduated income tax system more progressive, with higher marginal rates on higher income earners.  We should embrace a ‘green revolution’ in several ways.  We should decrease sales taxes on high mileage vehicles, and increase them on SUV’s and vehicles that get poor mileage.  We should revise property taxes, graduating them so that they are lower for small energy efficient homes and higher for homes larger than 2,500 square feet.  We should invest in greening the construction of homes and businesses.  We should boldly act to break free from our dependence on imported oil and polluting fossil fuels.  We should finance these energy initiatives by increasing gasoline taxes and by putting a reasonable cost on carbon dioxide emissions, and we should begin to solve the national security threats posed by global warming and climate change and the related extinctions of species and depletion of biological diversity. 

We should enact a Bill of Rights for Future Generations, as was advocated by the great ecologist, researcher, explorer, and filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau.  We should use this Bill of Rights as an overarching guide to help us in determining how to live our lives without harming the prospects of our descendents.  We should, in summary, strive to make this a better world with brighter prospects and greater cause for hope, rather than a more unfair world with ever-worsening challenges and ultimately unsustainable courses of action.

But we are not doing the right things.  We have not faced the need to reduce wasteful military spending, or to cut misguided subsidies for the oil, coal and nuclear industries.  We have slid backwards instead of altering our political system to reduce the institutional bribery and narrowly-focused lobbying by large corporations.  We have not reformed our politics to make opposition parties constructive and to discourage extreme and obtuse partisanship.  We have not slowed the rapid inflation in health care costs.  We have not seriously tried to reduce economic inequities.  Both Republicans and Democrats have indulged in the expediency of deficit spending, radically ramping up the national debt and abandoning the goal of operating within the sensible constraints of balanced federal budgets.  We can make the changes needed, but only with fair-mindedness and bold action.  NOW is the time to start!

Partingtonian Propensities of the Explanatory Mind

It seems to me that we have all collectively denied the proverbial elephant in the room:  that the majority of taxpayers cannot afford to pay more to invest in stimulating the economy and bailing out banks and other giant corporations, and that governments at both the federal and state level are practically bankrupt at the moment, and that we have already borrowed far too much money from future generations.  These facts make it clear that there is really only one good source of funds to be invested in our nation and our planet -- and that is profitable businesses and wealthy people.  Successful businesses and rich people must be required to contribute more to the greater good.  This should be done on a progressive scale that is more steeply graduated as higher levels of income are earned.

It is in the best interests of everyone to tap into the enormous source of funds of those who can afford it.  Our current courses of action are becoming ever more clearly detrimental and dysfunctional, so the need is distinct for us to create plans that directly address the significantly negative impacts that are taking place because of wrong-headed priorities and externalized costs and government collaboration with exploitive vested interests.  We could probably even design some creative plan that makes it profitable in the long-term for successful businesses and rich people to contribute to the greater good today, because they will ultimately benefit from economic recovery and the health of our society. 

At the same time that the current economic and ecological crises envelop our nation and the world, innovations in communications like television and the Internet are having a profound influence on us.  These forms of media give people extensive knowledge about trends and circumstances and causes and the interrelatedness of economic activities and social outcomes.  They also make us more aware of inequities and injustices.  As a result, it is becoming increasingly important for people everywhere to have clearer and more comprehensive understandings of what constitutes the common good, and not to fall hook, line and sinker for all the partisan spin that pervades the airwaves.  And it is vital that people become more aware of the whole --- AND to show greater consideration for it.

Good Cause for Hope:  The Positive Potentials for the Presidency of Barack Obama

People want to have hope.  They want to hope that their leaders will be honest and care about the common good.  They hope for a government that protects them and invests in them, not a government that rips them off and abandons them in favor of a privileged few.  They hope their own interests will be represented, and not just the interests of bankers and CEOs and the 2% of Americans who own 50% of the wealth in the country. 

We live in a society with seemingly short attention spans where sound bites and bumper sticker sentiments and distorted simplistic talking points are used.  Fuller understandings of complex issues would be far more propitious.  The time has come today for smarter ways of seeing things, and Barack Obama seems to be well-suited to show us the way.

Think about the competing mega-interests in every civilization.  It is desirable from the standpoint of the whole of society to have high quality and affordable education, low unemployment, adequately protected workers and young people, universal healthcare, a reasonable modicum of retirement security, a sustainable use of resources, and a stable and healthy environment.  In contrast, from the narrow point of view of businesses, where profits are the primary priority, it is desirable to have higher unemployment and thus lower wages and lower health care costs and lower retirement costs for workers.  Perhaps this is why, as statistics show, there is a higher rate of joblessness during Republican administrations than during Democratic ones.  Republicans are heavily oriented toward business interests, so they tend to be more adamantly opposed to government initiatives that advance common good goals and the rights and prerogatives of workers. 

Statistics show that stock market returns have generally been higher under Democratic administrations than Republican ones.  This is surprising, because the enactment of business-friendly polices would seem to be most likely to create greater profits and therefore higher investor returns.  Perhaps this proves that policies designed to maximize benefits for a small segment of citizens actually turns out, ironically, to be worse for society as a whole than policies which emphasize a greater modicum of fairness to the middle class and the working class.

Conservative talk radio and right-wing think tanks confuse people into believing the spin that essentially holds that regressive policies are better than progressive ones.  It is amazing that radical right propagandists managed to create fear and distrust of tax-and-spend policies, but once they gained power they implemented far more fiscally irresponsible policies of borrowing heavily to finance high-end tax cuts and significant increases in spending.  They have convinced many Americans that stock market averages do better under Republican administrations than Democrat ones (the opposite is historically true), and that job creation is better under Republicans than Democrats (again the opposite is true). 

Facts and distortions of facts are used manipulatively by partisans of every stripe.  We arguably need to understand the greater ‘truth’ of the matter to achieve propitious outcomes, and the truth is that the policies of the radical right have seriously harmed our nation in the years from 2001 to 2009.  I believe that it is probable that Barack Obama will do a better job in the next few years for American workers and the middle class and the poor, and for investors, consumers, and the environment, as well as for people in other countries and other life forms with whom we share this planet. 

Let us all hope that Barack Obama SUCCEEDS, not that he fails like the obstructionist naysayers of the radical right “hope”.  What treachery!  First, this crowd contributes intentionally and inadvertently to the engineering of an economic disaster through fiscally irresponsible tax cutting targeted towards rich people, combined with rash increases in government spending.  When they dominated Congress, they passed devious laws like the new Prescription Drug entitlement that was designed to enhance profits for giant drug companies.  They also irresponsibly embraced ‘trickle-down economics’, championed the deregulation of banks, and helped to inflate speculative bubbles in real estate and financial derivatives.  Then, now, in the throes of the ensuing economic emergency, they stubbornly refuse to go along with any necessary remedial measures. 

Like an old scratched record album, they claim over and over and over again, in a tired refrain, that the only way to solve any problem is to enact more tax cuts.  In the small print, these tax cuts are always designed to primarily benefit corporations and wealthy people.

The radical right often denies scientific understandings, so they no doubt give little credence to the incisive insight of Albert Einstein, who defined INSANITY as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” 

Should We Be Radically Cutting the Size of Government?

Most Republicans still march to the beat of discredited voices that say we must shrink the size of government until it can be figuratively drowned in the bathtub.  Their actions have ironically resulted in the necessity of numerous federal government actions like the nationalizing of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and bailing out the giant insurer AIG and the auto industry and numerous banks.  The financial crisis also made it all but mandatory that the government increase already high levels of deficit spending to prevent the economy from sliding into a depression.  And yet, like the obstinate Republicans in the California legislature, they still strive to obstruct solutions and perpetuate policies that got us into these problems.

Good God, politics!  The widespread adversity and suffering associated with the failure of Barack Obama’s initiatives could be catastrophic.  The deep hole dug for our nation by irresponsible neoconservatives is proving to be extremely difficult to get ourselves out of, but the failure to prevent a serious worsening of the economy would be quite risky for America and the world.

To Bailout or Not to Bailout, That is the Question

Some say that we should let businesses go into bankruptcy when they fail.  Others say that when they are too big to fail, we must bail them out to prevent economic disaster.  Very good arguments can be made on both sides of this question.  Bankruptcy proceedings allow corporations to reorganize in such a way that costs are reduced and workers as well as CEOs and management and suppliers and lenders are forced to compromise to save the institution.  If successful, such reorganizations allow a business to survive and recover and emerge from bankruptcy as a healthier and more competitive entity.  On the other hand, when the government bails businesses out, it allows the persistence of excesses, inefficiencies, waste, egregious CEO and management bonuses, and wages and benefits for workers that may not be justified by profits earned.  Such bailouts are generally done at the expense of taxpayers and future generations, so they are distinctly unfair.  The danger of NOT committing to bailouts of banks and mortgage giants like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurers like AIG, is that such failure to act could lead to a worsening ripple effect of financial and economic meltdown. 

We arguably should set up our economy in such ways that giant corporations are never allowed to conglomerate to such a size that they become too big to fail.  Trust-busting was a powerful movement during the Progressive Era a century ago, when three U.S. Presidents -- William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft -- acted to break up powerful monopolies that exerted too much power.  Let’s again break up big businesses when they grow too powerful, and act to give small businesses greater support. 

Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”, recently said, “I want to be very, very clear: too big to fail is one of the biggest problems we face in this country, and we must take action to eliminate too big too fail.”  Let’s do this, Congress, and not just talk about it!

We should also once again implement sensible regulation of banks by reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act that kept depository banking separate from investment banking.  And we should create laws that supervise new financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities and derivatives like credit default swaps.  See the essay Existence, Ecological Intelligence and Economic Doctrines for further insight into economic issues.

Confidence in a Fairer and More Propitious Economy

President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his first inaugural address during the depths of the Great Depression in January 1933.  In that speech, he asserted his firm belief that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.  Good call, Mr. Roosevelt!  In a market economy, it is fundamentally important to have CONFIDENCE in the system to assure available credit and free trade and reasonable security and good prospects for the creation of both jobs and wealth.  Market participants must trust in the legal tender of money and in the adequate availability of credit;  they must believe that unfettered supply and demand mechanisms work;  and they must feel assured that the marketplace will be managed well by state and federal governments to ensure free exchange while simultaneously protecting people against fraud, misinformation, monopoly abuses, dangerous products, unsafe workplaces, unfair labor and trade practices, and environmental damages.

Of course, we need to have confidence in sound policies and institutions, and not in having delusions about failed policies and corrupt institutions.  Overconfidence contributed to every Ponzi scheme in history, so surely we need to have confidence in good ideas, not failed ones.  Confidence in a system that is inevitably unsustainable may be beneficial to the perpetuation of the corrupt system for a little while longer, but ultimately we need confidence in a different way of doing things, one that IS sustainable.  A solid foundation is needed for a lasting structure, not shoddy construction and smoke-and-mirrors and house-of-cards construction techniques.

Confident Attitudes vs. Confidence Tricks

There is an unfortunate tendency for special interests and ideologues and government operatives to employ “confidence tricks” to exploit advantages for making gains at the expense of the public.  This is very different from the psychological confidence we need, so it is no wonder that such scams inspire fear.  Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz writes about the government banking bailout, saying that the Bush Administration “talked about confidence building, but what it delivered was actually a confidence trick.  If the administration had really wanted to restore confidence in the financial system, it would have begun by addressing the underlying problems -- the flawed incentive structures and the inadequate regulatory system.” 

The repeal in 1999 of the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act was foolish, as was the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in the year 2000, because these deregulatory initiatives allowed all manner of banking and mortgage securities shenanigans that helped cause this dangerous and damaging crisis.  Reform this!  (Yes, we can!!)

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are  

    putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”                        --- Mark Twain

It is no surprise, perhaps, that the Governmental Accounting Office reported on 12/2/08 that the Treasury Department was implementing the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan without adequate oversight or transparency or accountability to the American taxpayers.  This is one more piece of stark proof that grave damage can be done by leaders who are dishonest or ideologically narrow-minded or intellectually incurious or overly influenced by corporate lobbying.  The right wing in politics, in particular, has shown how strongly selfish and obstructionist and retributive and authoritarian its motives can be. 

Almost no one predicted back in January 2000 how seriously detrimental Republican rule would be for Americans and others in the world -- not in terms of economic outcomes, or in terms of negative social impacts, or of environmental harm, or of the hopes for peaceful coexistence in our relations with other nations.  When the stock market hit its bottom in early 2009, gloom and doom attitudes of investors coincided with people’s fear and angst about the economic prospects we face.  Now, nearly a year later, the Obama Administration has managed to stabilize the banking system, but very high rates of unemployment still make life difficult for many millions of people. 

Conservatives today expect the worst from more liberal leadership, now that the tables have been turned on their hyper-partisan Bush reign, and now that more liberal leaders are in power.  This is understandable;  it’s politics, after all.  But it is also intensely ironic that Republicans now impede almost every Democratic initiative.  The need is growing for us to embrace smart, effective and progressive leadership and initiatives.

We must fundamentally reform our political system, and give more power to the people by finding ways to reduce the domination of our politics by narrowly-focused corporations and unions, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s recent wrong-headed corporate “free speech” ruling.  We must also recognize when individually rational decisions are leading to collectively irrational ones in our capitalist economic system, and accordingly formulate ‘rainy day’ plans to circumvent systemic failures.  And knowing our natures and natural propensities better, we must strive to live healthier lives with saner priorities, and to embrace worldviews that are broader, more honest and more spiritually honorable.  If we cannot live with greater ‘voluntary simplicity’, we should at least “live large” in ways that moderate our depletionary demands on Earth’s resources and reduce our harmful impacts on our home planet’s ecosystems.

Observations in the Age of Reason: Fulfilling Our Needs without Destroying the Earth

In conclusion, we must rethink what is right and proper.  We must reassess what is best for society as a whole.  Reason and common sense and wisdom must guide us.  There will always be differences of opinions as well as extensive uncertainties, but we must seek guidance from the wisest leaders and philosophers amongst us, and from the lessons of history. 

Two maxims carved in stone in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece offered profound advice: “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess”.  These are principles that are important for us as individuals;  and they are even more important for us collectively.  A better understanding of ourselves and of human nature helps to guide us in designing our public policies and our laws and our social institutions.  It is valuable to clearly recognize our needs and our wants, our virtues and our vices, our strengths and our weaknesses, our motives, our consumer psychology, our emotional insecurities and compensatory behaviors, our susceptibility to greed and speculative excesses, our drives to manipulate and control others, our compulsions to be right, our tendencies toward either ‘Tough Love’ or compassionate generosity, and our practically innate propensities toward either conservative strictness or liberal permissiveness. 

  “It’s not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient.”

                                                                                                                 --- Josh Billings

Everyone has basic wants and needs, as summarized by the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow in his “hierarchy of needs” pyramid.  Our basic needs are physiological;  we need oxygen to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, and clothing and shelter.  Beyond these basic needs, we have the desire for the security of these needs.  We also have outer-directed impulses to belong, to be accepted, to be liked and to be respected.  We yearn to gain status, to feel competent, and to have a good sense of self-esteem.  Above these needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are inner-directed needs, like the desire to learn, to explore, to satisfy creative impulses, to appreciate aesthetics and to actualize the drives of one’s inner self.  At the top of this pyramid, according to Maslow, are drives to transcend selfishness and to help others.

The maxim at Delphi, “Nothing in Excess,” has a corollary:  BALANCE is desirable in all things.  Balance is needed between individualism and social responsibility, between national security and citizen liberties, between thriftiness and generous spending, between materialistic consumerism and sustainable consumption, and between too much regulation and inadequate regulation.  Businesses, being short-term-oriented, need to be subject to sensible regulation and oversight, and there must be a better balance between laissez-faire activities and accountability.  Government must be managed in ways that are more effective and more fiscally sound in order to prevent devastating boom-and-bust economic cycles and increasing extremes of economic injustices. 

Wouldn’t it have been better, in retrospect, if our leaders had not espoused an ideology that opposes such enlightened understandings?  Wouldn’t it be better if we embraced more holistic understandings of the greater good in order to make our societies healthier and fairer and saner?  Such guidance could help unify us and heal our societies of the deep divisions that naturally occur between competing and conflicting interests. 

Finally, another right understanding of the common good is that it should include conditions in which individuals are encouraged to flourish and their potentialities are fostered, rather than being repressed.  There is much to do, and we must get started!

A new year, and a new decade, is now upon us.  2010 -- it sounds rather futuristic!  The start of a new year is always a good time for reflection and assessment, and maybe even a resolution or two.  A new year provides us with a rich opportunity to acknowledge the passage of another part of our lives, and it gives us a chance to step back, to assess, to acknowledge and appreciate, and to honor the positive things in our lives.  I have spent New Years’ Day many times on a fork of the Mississippi River near its source, and the clear flowing water of the river in its infinite continuity has always been conducive to seeing valuable lessons in life.  Things like these:  It is what it is.  Go with the flow.  Make the best of whatever comes your way.  Be nimble and maintain a sense of balance.  Smile.  Laugh.  Live and let live.  Breathe deep, and let go.  Appreciate the beauty of life and nature.  Accept the ephemerality of all things.  Time flows continuously past.  It is good to cultivate equanimity in the face of adversities, and humbleness in the arms of success.  Let the river figuratively run through you!  Whatever …

Much remains to be done to re-focus our public policies on common good goals.  To create a society that has less stress, less humiliation, less conflict and fewer inequities, fairer policies must be implemented, and ones that are affordable and sustainable.  We must have more progressive tax policies and fairer opportunities and better education and more affordable health care and a more just legal system.  And we must make a greater commitment to peaceful coexistence.  The sun has never shined on a cause of greater worth, as Tomas Paine would have said!

We have it in our power to figuratively begin the world over again.  This is our rendezvous with destiny here in 2010.  Let’s do it right! 

Remember the words of Dr. Seuss in his great 1971 tale, The Lorax:

"But now," says the Once-ler,
"Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.

UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not."

Thanks for your consideration of these ideas!    

        Truly,

           Dr. Tiffany B. Twain     

                 Hannibal, Missouri     

                      SaveTruffulaTrees@hotmail.com