Chapter 28: It’s way past time for these truths to be spelled out once and for all

 

THE CAPITALIST FREE MARKET CORRECTIONS ACT (CaFMaC)

*   *   CaFMaC Fixes [almost] Everything   *   *

NATURE

Section 94.        (of the Capitalist Free Market Corrections Act – CaFMaC)

Plain English for the Voting Citizen: 1) Daylight savings time is dead, dead and gone forever praise God hallelujah!

 

The Congressional blather version:        Daylight savings time, the greatest cause ever devised in the history of the world of fortuitous and needless inconvenience, trouble and bother to the greatest number, not to mention the deep irritation value evoked by twice-annual resetting of multiple household timepieces and vehicular clocks each with differing reset procedures and lost instructions, is hereby abolished forever in the United States and let there be dancing in the streets. It is hereby declared a felony to change or attempt to change, alter, modify or augment in any way, standard time, defined as the natural sun time ordained by divine providence and subsequently divided by humankind into twenty-four (24) logical segments originating at a prime meridian in Greenwich, England under terms of the International Conference of 1884 and the U.S. Standard Time Act of 1918. Any retailer who, pursuant to faith that manipulating the hours of evening daylight will result in customers spending more evening time mindlessly shopping and transferring wealth to the retailer, or any other person who similarly motivated by acquisition of money to the inconvenience of everybody else, is convicted of attempting by any means to restore daylight savings time in the United States shall be sentenced to one (1) year in Gambling School if such person manages to avoid stoning and survives long enough to be so deservedly convicted.

 

THE PURPOSES OF GOVERNMENT

United Nations negotiations in Paris [were] the 21^st such attempt to forge an international agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A big reason for failing to find common ground [was] American intransigence on the role of government. If nations are to succeed, the U.S. will have to give up on the idea that free markets alone can adequately address climate change and embrace a government-led plan of action.

Naomi Oreskes (in Scientific American, December 2015)

Section 95.        (of the Capitalist Free Market Corrections Act – CaFMaC)

Plain English for the Voting Citizen: 1) We observe that the loudest mouths preaching hate and loathing toward their own federal government, not to mention despising and contempt toward their state and local governments or any government at all, are incipient anarchists typically possessed of colossal ignorance of why we have governments in the first place. They should be dropped into the remotest potentially survivable wilderness on earth and bade good luck in their new life free of government. And roads. And protection from others who would harm them. And postal service. And programmed free education. And retirement protections for old age. And a basket of other good ideas put in place by responsible civic-minded good people who abstractly care about you and your children as well as themselves.

 

2) There’s no way around it, pal, you’re going to have to read this one – unless you’re a college professor who teaches classes in American government, you are not excused. Just like Martin Luther’s influential little tome, this CaFMaC Act has ninety five pieces and this is the big one – The Purposes of Government. It has more than a bit of detail – and why wouldn’t it? – governing is not a small subject. There’s a lot we all need to know about it. You cannot run a democracy unless you know what democracy is. But so many don’t, simply because they are never told and don’t even know to ask – not to mention that education policymakers, in their small wisdom, have seen fit to delete Civics from so many high schools. Civics – the old course that used to teach the fundamental understandings of what government is, why it exists, how it works. What follows is a poor substitute for a good course in Civics, but this little book is about bigger fish than that one alone.

 

Go on – get started – LEARN a few fundaments about the purposes of government.

 

The full version in Congressional pseudolanguage:            With this measure it is the intent of Congress, after the fullest debate in the history of representative government, to affirm our unquenchable belief in the ultimate net goodness of humanity, of our mutual helpfulness toward one another in our common eternal quest for higher civic and spiritual ground, and our deep belief, despite all appearances, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy, without empathy.

 

We the elected representatives of the People assembled in Congress do hereby express our belief and certainty that the changes herewith enacted in this Act are so profoundly fundamental to the common good of the nation and its future, and to the likelihood that without these fundamentally necessary changes the nation as a nation is at great risk and may not endure, that no argument or alleged state right shall stand against them. Any U.S. statute, or any section or subsection within a U.S. statute, or any state statute or local ordinance of any nature whatsoever, which may be found in contradiction to any part of this Act, is hereby declared null and void. In event of a challenge to any sentence of this Act, no other sentence of this Act shall be affected thereby. A Cooperative Representation Board (CRB) is hereby established as an arm of Congress to 1) address issues arising out of, and found to be not covered by, this Act, and to 2) advise Congress on responsive action regarding such issues, with particular priority on persistent questions about the purposes for which government exists, and 3) to promote improved public education and understanding of Amendments IX and X to the United States Constitution.

 

Congress hereby acknowledges and reaffirms that the Purposes of Government are both 1) proactive, relative to unforeseeable need, and 2) passively responsive to predictable need. Congress further acknowledges that, arising with the division into federalists and anti-federalists among those founding fathers who framed and narrowly adopted our Constitution despite their disagreements over slavery, a fundamental tension has persisted through the nation’s history to the present day between 1) federalist-minded political progressives, who seek to use the power of government to compassionately achieve, among all the people, fair economic adequacy as well as our nation’s claimed equality of political liberty for all, versus 2) anti-federalist-minded conservatives who, desirous of conserving the status quo and distrustful of the social compact and of government which expresses it, seek to starve government of sufficient funding to carry out its legislative mandates and to hobble or eliminate governmental power to regulate in the common public interest on grounds that such regulation would inhibit their own asserted liberty to pursue unequal and unlimited personal enrichment through the several devices of economic exploitation of the nation’s natural resources and of the liberty and wealth of their fellow citizens as consumers or as, in previous times, serfs or slaves.

 

These two divergent and divisive mindsets, pro-federal and anti-federal pushed to extremes by extremist mindsets, have taken many troubling forms in the American story for nearly two and a half centuries, resulting again and again in trouble where there was no trouble. Their degrading of normal positive civility has raged between two extremes. One extreme was, and remains, defiantly anti-federal states-rights mindsets, notably between 1865 and 1965, which in pursuit of untrammeled personal freedom to do anything whatsoever as they damn well please has reached such selfish extremes as denying equal political and economic liberties to other citizens on a variety of racial, gender and other bigoted pretexts. The other extreme, much weakened and declining in modern America, is radically pro-federal unionist mindsets, strongest between 1880 and 1980, which, in wholly valid union pursuit of economic wage fairness and worker safety, reached such selfish extremes as insisting on workers being paid though standing idle.

 

Ironically, these equally greedy and problematic extremes are better remembered than is the ever-present middle ground of that great majority of non-extreme, caring, cooperative Americans who, in all times, value and practice fairness. Moreover, the extremes of stark selfishness and greed remain actively with us, but they no longer balance each other. The anti-federal mindset today is resurgent and strong, and is deliberately intent on eliminating organized labor unions from American society. In this it is succeeding. Thus in the present stagnant economy when workers’ income is in long-term decline, with job security and fringe benefits also slipping away, when America’s working class employees more than ever need a strong socially-minded federal government to protect them, federalism itself is under attack from anti-federalists intent on starving the United States budget until it cannot afford to enforce the regulations that were written to protect.

 

In the present day that great middle ground of American middle class citizens too is under siege, great stress and acrimony continuing and increasing between 1) those who would eliminate most functions of government by “privatizing” them through over-lucrative contracts with private businesses allegedly but not demonstrably more efficient because driven by the profit incentive, and 2) those who would restore and expand government’s protective functions and regulatory prerogatives pursuant to protecting all people from economic exploitation and political inequality, and to solving great issues of our times such as disproportionate growth of a poor underclass and accelerating maldistributive transfer of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the extremely rich

 

[Frances Perkins:] “I realized that we had done something for this country when we started the New Deal because it started a whole generation of people then just young and pouring out of colleges and universities, it had started them on careers which were forwarding some part of the New Deal and in which they had almost without exception continued… I came to work for God, FDR and the millions of forgotten, plain, common working men.” It is a great historic irony that Frances is now virtually unknown. Factory and office occupancy codes, fire escapes and fire prevention mechanisms are her legacy. About 44 million people collect Social Security checks each month; millions receive unemployment and worker’s compensation or the minimum wage; others get to go home after an eight-hour day because of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Very few know the name of the woman responsible for their benefits.

           Kirsten Downey, quoting and commenting on Frances Perkins in The Woman Behind the New Deal

 

In certainty that such pervasive stress and acrimony, for and against federal government, self evidently have ever greatly inhibited and continue to greatly inhibit both economic adequacy and betterment as well as political equality for all United States citizens alike, Congress hereby enunciates, for the first time since ratification of our Constitution, The Purposes of Government, and this enunciation henceforth shall prevail as the law of the land. Still to this day unique among the nations of the world, the foundational purposes of the government of the United States of America are seven in number and are nowhere better expressed than in the Preamble to our Constitution as follows:

 

            We the People of the United States,  in Order to form a more perfect Union,   establish Justice,  insure domestic Tranquility,  provide for the common Defence,  promote the general Welfare,  and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,  do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.

 

Under western civilization’s longstanding and respected concept of “ the social compact,” this Preamble clearly and self evidently embraces two paramount assumptions as follows: 1) not only are the Purposes of Government passively responsive to predictable needs and proactively responsive relative to unforeseeable needs, 2) government is the ultimate power over the people who establish it, and no other power within that body politic so governed shall ever be permitted to have power equal to the government so established. This second assumption intrinsically embodies a third assumption that 3) government, on behalf of the people who establish it, has absolute power to create, abolish, and otherwise regulate and control the existence and actions of all organizational constructs as may be invented by citizens, such as, and not limited to, corporations and monopolies. No corporation or any other entity shall be deemed or permitted to have as much power as the government under which, like all of us, it exists, nor shall a corporation’s de facto power over individual citizens prevail over the power of government to protect them from political and economic injustice wrought by a corporation, person or foreign power.

 

Being thus grounded on these foundations cited in the Preamble, the Purposes of Government are, THEREFORE:

 

            1) Form a more perfect union. This first purpose reflects the Founders’ intent that the new federal Constitution would replace and supplant the preceding Articles of Confederation which were proven to be substantially imperfect and inadequate to the tasks of governing a multi-state confederation. The Articles had presumed and maintained states’ rights to the level of sovereign nations, in consequence of which it became quickly apparent that the Articles were unworkable in practice. The Founders’ intent then being achieved by ratification of the Constitution which united the states into a United States, and subsequently reaffirmed by the Civil War, this first purpose has had little further consequence in U.S. history, although even now in the twenty-first century a small but metastasizing minority of citizens who, being ideologically wedded to narrow separatist notions of sovereign statehood and holding as anathema the political concepts of “commons,” “community” and “commonwealth,” and who, in pursuit of self interest, remain as atavistically unreconciled to true American federalism as they are ardent in proselytizing for their mindset of opposition to a more perfect union and in their ceaseless efforts to persuade the most unthinking and poorly informed persons to vote contrary to their own self interest.

 

Protective Functions of Government

The next three Purposes of Government, which are passively responsive to predictable need, stress the protective functions of government by guaranteeing citizens’ security and equal protection under the law, and maintaining social order.

 

            2) Establish justice. This phrase protects citizens from unjust laws by charging government to guarantee that both laws and punishments are fair and reasonable. It is the bread and butter of civil rights defense attorneys.

              3) Insure [Ensure] domestic tranquility. This phrase protects citizens from other citizens by charging government to maintain social order and protect the weak from bullies, thieves and chaos. It is the basis for police departments, fire departments, emergency services and social workers, as well as the tradition of a National Guard.

            4) Provide for the common defense. This phrase protects citizens by charging government to counteract threats that may arise from outside the United States. It is the basis for maintaining standing military forces.

 

Accordingly, the following are examples of Purposes of Government that unarguably are passively responsive to predictable needs. These examples by no means constitute an exhaustive list of unquestionably valid passively responsive Purposes of Government, as such list will always require flexibility responsive to the exigencies of changing times, and can never be made final or complete.

 

EXAMPLES:

(2) Government Protecting Individuals from Laws that are Unjust, Unfair, Discriminatory or Unreasonable

• Establish and maintain tax-paid public courts to judge the constitutionality of laws.
• Operate tax-paid public prisons in a fair manner not based on profit incentives.
• Formulate regulations containing sufficient details to clarify and specify the meanings and applications of the broad, general language used in legislative language, and fund sufficient tax-paid public staff to meaningfully enforce those regulations.
• Sue to overturn laws that discriminate or impede classes of people from voting.

 

(3) Government Protecting Individuals from Other Persons

• Regulate and protect public water supplies from deliberate sabotage or incidental pollution by industries that produce large volumes of noxious or toxic waste.
• Establish and maintain tax-paid public police forces, and protect individuals from unreasonable and unjust police actions.
• Closely regulate and maintain strict oversight over organizational entities, such as banks, that have demonstrated a proclivity to take harmful advantage of people.
• Establish and maintain tax-paid public auditors and examiners of banks and other financial and insurance institutions that profit by dealing with individual clients or whose business dealings can affect the national financial structure, and enforce the regulations under which they operate.
• Establish and maintain tax-paid public health inspectors of farm food producers, of commercial food processors and distributors, and of groceries and restaurants, and enforce the pure food regulations under which they are permitted to operate.
• Establish and maintain tax-paid public researchers, inspectors and overseers of all pharmaceutical production and products, and enforce the regulations under which they operate.
• Establish and maintain tax-paid public guardians of the national commons, including but not limited to all public lands, national parks, wildlife, forests, minerals, waters and atmosphere, and the corporations and other entities whose operations have impact on all of these, and enforce the regulations under which they operate.
• Establish and maintain tax-paid public social workers providing protective services for dependent children and adults at risk of abuse, exploitation or neglect, and public defenders for indigent persons accused of a crime, and enforce the regulations under which they operate.
• Protect every human exhibiting a difference that is or may become the object of prejudice, bigotry and discrimination specifically including – but not limited to, since prejudicial mindsets know no boundaries – age, education, ethnicity, gender whether definable or undefinable, national origin, political inclinations, race, religion, sexual preference, stupidity, tattoos, green-purple hair, nose rings and individual differences of any other nature whatsoever. This protection does not extend to knowing treason against the United States, and may be conditional in the case of actions deliberately taken and known to be contrary to and harmful to the common interests of the nation and its citizens.

 

(4) Government Protecting Individuals from Foreign Threats

• Establish and maintain tax-paid military armed forces adequate to counter any threat of any nature and any size that may arise from abroad, and ensure that the armed forces are subordinated to civilian authority and to defense versus offense.
• Establish and maintain tax-paid public national guards in every state pursuant to the Constitutional mandate for “a well regulated militia.”

 

Proactive Functions of Government

The remaining three Purposes of Government, in decisive contrast with the first four, are proactive relative to unforeseeable need. They provide for functions where government must flexibly initiate new actions in order to promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves, in the present, and to our posterity in the future, most notably in cases where inaction by government would result in harm to U.S. citizens.

 

            5) Promote the General Welfare. This phrase, prominently featuring the action verb “promote” and the descriptive adjective “general,” charges government to initiate actions – on behalf of all, most or many citizens in the general population at large – 1) by proactively providing public services, and proactively initiating actions and projects, directed to serving what is commonly called “the public interest” and “the common public good” with reference to the entire population inclusively; and 2) by proactively making and implementing economic decisions which will be of benefit to all, most or many citizens in the entire population inclusively. In four simple words the Constitution directs the federal government to start things and to make things happen.

            6) Secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves [“now,”] as distinguished from “liberty for our posterity” inherently in the future]. This phrase charges government to proactively ensure that political freedom and economic wellbeing are practicably assured in the present moment as guaranteed rights for all citizens.

            7) Secure the blessings of liberty “for our posterity.” This future-directed phrase charges government to proactively take actions, now, designed with intent that political freedom and economic wellbeing will be reasonably assured in the future as guaranteed rights for our descendants.

 

Accordingly, the following are examples of Purposes of Government that unarguably are proactive relative to public needs which are changing, thus unforeseeable. They embrace 1) all aspects of citizens’ economic welfare, since those aspects inherently are highly changeable and do in fact change with great frequency, as well as 2) citizens’ political welfare which embraces the relatively unchanging principles of political liberty. Thereby our Constitution, equally as concerned with general economic welfare as with blessings of political liberty, firmly establishes that political liberty directly correlates with economic wellbeing and, axiomatically, that the political can never be assured unless the economic is also reasonably assured. These examples by no means constitute an exhaustive list of unquestionably valid proactive Purposes of Government, for which government should initiate actions and startups that make things happen, as such list will always require flexibility responsive to unforeseeable events and the exigencies of changing times, and can never be made final or complete.

 

EXAMPLES:

(5) Government Promoting the general welfare

• Build and maintain federal and interstate public roads and related infrastructure.
• Establish and enforce speed limits and traffic flow rules, particularly in relation to quantities of fossil fuels consumed for transportation.
• Drawing on commonwealth resources of the nation, serve as savior of last resort in response to natural disasters beyond the coping capacity of any single state or locale.
• Maintain unemployment insurance to sustain unemployed workers and their families.
• Maintain Social Security so that all may enjoy retirement free from poverty and want.
• As steward of the peoples’ tax dollars, nationalize the ever-greedy self serving health insurance industry in all its manifestations so that the substantial financial advantages of single-payer insurance, the least costly of all possible models, shall accrue to the advantage of American taxpayers so that no person will ever again be denied medical care because of inability to pay or be bankrupted by costs of treatment.
• Control the inflation of health care costs, driven by greed for profit to hospitals and individual physicians, to equal the controlled national inflation rate.
• Establish and maintain postal services, libraries, and public service facilities and services in many categories.
• Abolish the practice of contracting out, for ideological reasoning alone, governmental services which are most appropriately provided by fulltime governmental employees, and reverse all such actions taken since 1980.
• Actively promote birth control and otherwise pragmatically promote reduction of the United States population to levels sustainable in correlation with the capacity of the nation’s domestic soils and waters to produce the food required by the nation’s population with no (no) significant reliance on foreign food sources.
• Actively and pragmatically promote redistribution of the nation’s population and jobs in optimum correlation to the locations of the nation’s farmland and food supplies.
• Re-localize community economies across the nation, particularly emphasizing local governmental control over the generation of electricity where private for-profit decentralization promising lower consumer prices has in fact produced higher prices.
• Actively and pragmatically promote reduction of the populations of overpopulated foreign nations insofar as these have significant bearing, direct or indirect, on the national interests of the United States around the world.
• Ensure that the correlation between economic adequacy and political liberty are taught and understood everywhere, especially at every level in the nation’s schools.

 

(6) Government Ensuring that Political and Economic Liberty are Secure

• Maintain well staffed capacity to charter, regulate and abolish corporations, and convert them to size-limited employee-owned co-ops.
• Maintain a federal workforce fully adequate to effectively implement and maintain every Purpose of Government and the uncountable sub-functions pursuant thereto.
• Revise the tax structure to eliminate extreme inequality of wealth.
• Ensure that federal election safeguards are identical in every state and every place.
• Ensure that the correlation between economic adequacy and political liberty are taught and understood everywhere, especially at every level in the nation’s schools.

 

(7) Government Ensuring that Future Political and Economic Liberty will be Secure for Our Children and Their Descendants

• In every fiscal cycle, plan and budget with prudent consideration for both monetary and social projections not less than ten years hence.
• Strictly prohibit all privatization of governmental functions that are fundamental Purposes of Government, such as but not limited to those listed here.
• Disproportionately tax inheritance of massive unearned wealth.
• Place all basic research under federal priorities directed to the common public good.
• Prohibit every semblance of subordinating or contracting fundamental Purposes of Government to entities that exist to seek profit or surplus, especially those of international, mixed domestic-international, or indeterminate allegiance.
• Encounter entangling alliances with exceeding caution, with avoidance the default.
• Ensure that the correlation between economic adequacy and political liberty are taught and understood everywhere, especially at every level in the nation’s schools.

 

With all this progressive and beneficial work needing to be done, there is hereby appropriated, for each fiscal year of the upcoming biennium, fifteen thousandths of one percent (0.015%) of the four-trillion-dollar ($4,000,000,000,000) U.S. federal budget whereby to set aside sixty billion dollars ($60,000,000,000) to pay for one million (1,000,000) new federal jobs staffed by citizens bright enough to pass the Civil Service Exam, at an average sixty thousand dollars ($60,000) salary per position, as needed to implement the purposes of government including all new responsibilities initiated by this CaFMaC Act, as well as to fully fund those preexisting legislatively mandated functions which have been deliberately underfunded with ideologically-based intent to degrade and hobble the governing activities which the United States Government conducts on behalf of All The People.

 

As a further deep stimulus to the U.S. economy – suffering still from the 2007-08 national economic collapse perpetrated by monopolistic megacorporations and too-big-to-fail conglomerates displaying little or no allegiance to the United States of America, or to its people – these million new governmental jobs correlate to the multiplier effect of CaFMaC’s infrastructural and other New IDeal initiatives in creating a calculated ten million (10,000,000) new jobs in private industry, and in the boost of new retail sales resulting from more Americans having more living-wage money to spend, and in expanded employment in new state and local public jobs. It is the will and intent of Congress that this sixty billion dollar ($60,000,000,000) setaside shall consist of earmarked tax dollars shifted away from the many and avoidable contractor “outsourcing” expenditures and special-interest subsidies which are abolished by this act, expressly including but by no means limited to 1) payments to and/or tax reductions for corporate defense contractors and other non-governmental entities presently engaged in supporting or leading offensive military actions abroad, and 2) subsidies and tax reduction incentives to corporations and other entities engaged in any aspect whatsoever of fossil fuel extraction, transportation, refining, distribution and sales.

 

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