Stock photo ID:589124042 

INTRO

The famed checks and balances our Constitutional founders so carefully framed to protect our democratic republic from competing interests and public dissention have clearly proven inadequate to prevent the founders’ greatest fear—that a “democratic mob” would muster the votes to elect a despot who ignores the Constitution. Our Constitution is, after all, just a collection of rules carefully designed with intent to hold a nation together. You either revere and honor those rules…or you don’t, and constantly try to get around them. Checks and balances at their best are inherently negative because they pit competing interests “against” each other—that is, everybody, in self interest, can stop everybody else from wrongdoing. But only if everybody follows the rules. At its best, this assumes wrongdoing and ignores “right doing.”

This article describes right-doing ways to safeguard both the Constitutional structure of our republic and the process of our democracy. It does so by precluding the negative motivations that activate checks and balances in the first place. In historical context, it spotlights the difference between highly-interrelated politics and economics—an important distinction rarely noticed or mentioned in the USA. By augmenting negative checks and balances with positive systemic modifications, it eliminates the very possibility of economic extremes that generate the bitter political divisiveness we’re experiencing today. Additional safeguards include the further positive influence of civic and community values to be taught henceforward from kindergarten through young adulthood.

 

THE DETAILS

Do you know, or know of, anyone who truly does not know what government is for?

Our United States government has always had three broad purposes, succinctly laid out in the Preamble—our Constitution’s “introduction.” They’re described in seven important phrases that really should be more widely taught—and known—than they are. The first purpose states our grand national ideal: “…to form a more perfect union…”:  government should be forever trying to become better (less imperfect) than it is.  Given that our government is us—We the people—there has always been ample room for betterment. We, the people, need to become “great.”

Its second great purpose guarantees protection. The Preamble’s next three phrases relate to threats from which we all, sooner or later, will need government to protect us: “…2) establish Justice, 3) insure domestic Tranquility, and 4) provide for the common defence.” These purposes respond to the very predictable needs for government to protect us from unjust laws (Jim Crow; “separate but equal”), from people and organizations that would upset tranquility by exploiting or harming us (Enron; Mafia; Klan; Bernie Madoff), and from threats arising outside the USA (WW II; drug cartels; North Korea).

Government’s third great purpose guarantees political and economic freedom. Acknowledging that citizens cannot be politically free unless they also have sufficient economic freedom, the Preamble’s last three phrases state that government exists to promote economic adequacy as well as political liberty. These needs, though un-predictable, are certain to arise, and government is responsible, on its own initiative, to proactive help people acquire them: “…5) promote the general Welfare, and 6) secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves 7) and our Posterity.

“General welfare” addresses economic adequacy. For example, today’s citizen lacking enough income for food, clothing, shelter, medicine and dependable transportation is likely to find it burdensome or impossible to go register, then vote in every election. “Blessings of liberty” concerns political rights (a prime example being the freedom to vote, which faces some peoples’ never-ending attempts to prevent others from voting). Given that government exists to guarantee “economic adequacy” and “political liberty” to every one of us now, and to our descendants later, the paramount importance of these two freedoms will shortly be examined in greater depth.

In brief then, our government—which directly or indirectly involves all of Us the People—exists to protect us from harm and exploitation, to help us all achieve economic adequacy and political liberty, and to achieve more perfect union—i.e., to work together to become better people in the great unified nation that we could be. That’s it, along with a few natural incidentals of governmental duty in all ages, such as highways, mail service and our vast public lands. All remaining words in this article are preparation for its last four paragraphs—no peeking ahead.

 

Nothing manmade is ever perfect but, by and large over two hundred fifty years, our self-governance has done a pretty fair job at the three protections and at ensuring political liberty for most of us. We’ve done a much poorer job of ensuring—or even trying to ensure—economic adequacy for anybody. Poverty and economic wrongs have always received far less attention than political wrongs. Outrage is instant if someone interferes with someone else’s “rights”—any kind of rights—but where’s the outrage over endless, stultifying poverty? The poor are in fact often blamed for being poor—by non-poor Americans who simply can’t see why those poor people don’t just get busy and work themselves up out of it. Well, here’s why:  though many Americans have been mired in moderate to abject poverty throughout the nation’s history, only twice in all that time have we made deliberate governmental attempts to ensure that we all have economic adequacy by reducing the gross inequalities that rob us of it. The first attempt was called The New Deal, the other was called The Great Society.

These attempts to actually make America great took place between 1933 (the first New Deal programs) and 1981 when the Reagan Administration began abolishing the New Deal’s gains. The most beneficial effects were felt only between 1946 and 1980—a mere thirty-four years in all U.S. history that saw widespread increasing prosperity, declining poverty, and unprecedented growth of the middle class. I call them The Significant Interlude, because they represent the only pause, ever, in the nation’s otherwise unbroken record of economic boom/bust cycles, market crashes, recessions, depressions, and hard times. Efforts to un-do the Interlude’s unprecedented economic gains have never ceased since Reagan took office. Many of those un-doers—usually wealthy or conservative or both—themselves benefit from New Deal/Great Society programs, especially Social security. Why are so many people, including quite a few conservative and poor, so opinionated that government should not help folks who clearly need some help?

 

The historical record is exceedingly clear for all to see: about half of all U.S. citizens favor “more perfect union” while the other half oppose it. For many years I’ve noticed how this odd 50/50 divide (it’s actually about 49/49, with 2% never sure of anything) applies to a great many things in American history— such as recent elections where candidates with the highest popular vote nevertheless lost in the Electoral College. In each person, the manner of expression depends on whether that person chooses to help others or to be self serving. The helpfully-inclined tend to favor, act, and vote for whatever is best for the community, for the people as a whole. Call them communitarians. In stark contrast, the self servers have been making trouble where there was no trouble since America was just a coastal string of British colonies. Personal values seem always to be involved, and in all times and most cases the lust to acquire economic wealth has been a prime motivator.

For two and a half centuries—1619 (Jamestown) to 1865 (Appomattox)—the self servers pushed to the limit the rich employer’s favorite miserly way to cut costs:  chinch on employees’ wages. In this case they became filthy rich by paying no wages at all to slaves whom they held in brutal oppression even while fomenting a revolution to rid themselves of fairly mild British oppression. Into our founding Constitution they codified a self-serving requirement that escaped slaves must be returned to their “owners”;  it remains shamefully there to this day: Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3. The slaveholding self servers also opposed suffrage for women and their modern descendants openly still do. Their positions reflect their values: if these modern self servers could take the vote away from women and restore slavery, many would.

Self servers started the bloody Civil War, then denied losing it while violently beating down Reconstruction. War-weary Federal troops, tired of trying to keep peace amid constant strife, were sent home by a self-serving president who let the troublemakers have their way. And sure enough, they quickly enacted Jim Crow laws, set up share cropping as a profitable substitute for slavery, and sustained the violent Ku Klux Klan from 1865 to the present day. They went on to bully profitable railroads through Native Americans’ ancestral territories across the continent, then ruthlessly built vast corporate empires, exploited workers, bribed politicians, and amassed such enormous wealth they came to be called “robber barons.” Their massive monopolies and corporate manipulations supercharged stock market frenzy through the Roaring Twenties until the 1929 Wall Street crash brought the nation to its knees in a decade of depression so severe the nation nearly collapsed. Many of them continued profiting even as thousands of Americans died from malnutrition and, where there were no breadlines, starvation. You could say the self servers have so often had their way because we help-others have so seldom lifted a hand to stop them.

 

The second worldwide war came and changed everything, especially our economy. The Significant Interlude—those thirty-four uniquely dynamic, humanitarian years 1946 to1980—was the only time in U.S. history when self servers took a back seat to the economic adequacy and political liberty our Constitution calls for. While communitarians ruled, poverty fell and the middle class surged. Many Americans prospered, after generations in poverty, for the first time.

Then came Reagan, and the self servers have been scheming to eliminate New Deal benefits ever since. They gave us “trickle-down theory”:  if you make the rich richer, some of their great wealth might dribble down to the rest of us. Wow. They abolished, one by one, New Deal laws and regulations that had prevented self serving financiers from exploiting capitalism to take advantage of everybody else. They caused the dot.com bubble, the real estate crash of 2007-08, and imbalance whereby the top 10% of richest Americans hold over two-thirds of the nation’s total wealth while the bottom 50% together hold less than three percent. And through a dozen devices including buyouts, mergers and hostile takeovers, they’ve built up a few mega-giant corporations designed to eliminate all meaningful competition, control our economy and everything else from Congress on down. They’re especially big on staples everybody must have to stay alive, like food and housing.

At its most degenerate, all this extremist wrongness descends into white nationalism—sedition, conspiracy, treason—and promotes the extreme opposite of more perfect union. Staunch individualists, the self servers don’t believe in helping others or serving community. Consistently in all circumstances and all times in U.S. history the self servers have opposed more perfect union, and in all cases without exception their choices and actions reflect economic motivations. Except for The Significant Interlude, the rest of us, the other-helpers, let them get by with it.

 

Virtually all histories speak of the American revolution as motivated by desire for “freedom” from the “tyranny” of George III, and from taxation “without representation” in Parliament. But “freedom, tyranny and representation” are political words. They fail to convey a sense of the economic motives that equally drove our revolution—such as the constant irritation over high retail prices colonists must pay for household essentials of daily living. On balance, politics and economics are equal forces in our lives—but in most ordinary discussions the words used are all political, and the important economic nuances are neither mentioned nor their absence noticed. But do notice: economics is what happens;  politics as how people behave while making it happen. Most Americans sorely need expanded perspective of what’s really going on with economics and politics. To be well understood it needs to be stared at and pondered, so…

Go fetch a pencil and the largest blank paper you can find (at least 8-12 x 11). Turn the page into an X-Y graph as follows. Along its left vertical edge, write the words “Leftist: Total control by government.” Along the right vertical edge, write the words “Rightist: Total control by corporations.” These are the economic parameter boundaries for the graph’s horizontal axis. Now, centered on the bottom edge, write the word “TYRANNY.” Centered on the top edge, write “FREEDOM.” These are the political parameter boundaries for the graph’s vertical axis.

Next draw a large triangle as follows:  1) Beginning at the paper’s bottom-left corner, draw a line up to the center at the top of the page; 2) from there draw back down to the bottom-right corner; and 3) from there back to your starting point at the bottom-left corner. Blacken these three lines so the triangle visibly stands out. This is the combined economic-political context.

We now can assign economic/political models within the four parameters. At the triangle’s bottom-left corner write the word “COMMUNISM.” At its bottom-right corner write the words “END CAPITALISM.” Halfway up the triangle’s left leg write “SOCIALISM” across the line. Halfway up the triangle’s right leg write “REGULATED CAPITALISM” across the line. Now up at the apex—where the triangle’s lines converge at the top—write “THIRD OPTIONS.” Now stare at it a while.

With this explanatory perspective before you, consider capitalism, communism and socialism, which dominate the graph’s entire bottom half. Communism obviously—visibly—is a far-left “economic” system grounded far down in “political” tyranny. It could have been higher up toward greater freedom, but that has never happened. Its designers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were of the opinion that governments could solve all problems—because it was the only human institution with enough power to do so. They didn’t plan tyranny, they were trying to make things better, but they couldn’t anticipate self serving Bolsheviks, Lenin and Stalin. It didn’t help that their core idea of equal sharing is so foreign to about half of humanity who naturally incline to self serving. Communism has always quickly led to gunfire and tyranny.

Then there’s “End Capitalism” down in the far-right corner, also tyrannous just like communism. People who like this option opine that only corporations can solve all problems, because… well, they’re not sure why, they just don’t like government because it interferes with corporations doing as they damn well please. They don’t plan tyranny, but that’s where corporate control leads because corporations’ god is profit, not people. That’s the fully matured version of capitalism, not our present version.

The capitalism we have today is what’s left of New Deal “regulated” capitalism installed by the Roosevelt Administration in the 1930s. But we no longer have that original New Deal. The political self servers have opposed it from the beginning, and eighty-five years later they’ve pushed capitalism down closer toward that tyrannous model in the bottom-right corner. That’s the problem we face today:  to stop far-right voters from dehumanizing our nation’s economic system down toward political tyranny. We face dire need to push our economics decisively back upwards toward freedom—and stop letting them have their way.

You will of course have noticed that Socialism and Regulated Capitalism are equally closer up toward freedom, and equally farther away from the far-left and far-right extremes. Consider “socialism.” Many Americans, being under-informed, think “communism and socialism” are the same thing, but, as our mostly-socialist European allies would tell them, that’s just ignorance. Socialism and communism, both “leftist,” are two very different economic systems. Socialism and Regulated Capitalism, both much nearer the center, means they’re much more like each other—and much less like the far-left and far-right extremes. Socialism and regulated capitalism can both be fairly good at sharing the wealth—however, not good enough that either of them has ever eliminated poverty. You didn’t think it possible to eliminate poverty? Well, read on.

 

Look at that mysterious THIRD OPTIONS economy up at the top, way up where we find true, full freedom. It’s as far away as it’s possible to get from low-down tyranny, and centered far from the trouble-making leftist and rightist extremes. At this level there is no poverty, no gross inequality, and excellent free enterprise and political liberty. THIRD OPTIONS are at the true center, where they’re free to borrow whatever they find good from both 1) right (capitalism) and 2) left (socialism)…and 3) they can also use other good ideas not featured in either capitalism or socialism—that’s why they’re THIRD options.

Third-option advocates like to use Maslow’s famous Hierarchy, because it categorizes human needs in a way that economic re-designers can respond to. For starters, good common-sense ideas worth keeping would be “price-restraining competition” from the right, and “adequate universal food-clothing-shelter” from the left. Plus there’s no limit on using other good ideas that have never yet been tried. For that we’ll adopt the Roosevelt Administration’s motto: Try something—if it works keep it, if it doesn’t work try something else—but get the problem fixed!

THIRD OPTIONS are not limited to good old ideas. We are free to build our own brand new economic system—say, something that makes sure everybody has at least “enough,” yet doesn’t unduly impede hard chargers who would like to earn some extra profit for themselves and have the entrepreneurial energy to do it. Way up there at total political freedom, we’re completely free to engage “new ideas not ever used” by either leftists or rightists—completely new THIRD OPTIONS, maybe even from left field. A brand new, different kind of economic system that, say:

• eliminates poverty—totally, completely, nobody is “poor” anymore, all have adequacy…
• …but allows a reasonable measure of self-earned personal economic surplus in the space above the minimum of guaranteed adequacy that eliminates poverty…
• …and makes it impossible for extreme economic inequality to ever arise again…
• …while maintaining absolutely equal political freedom for all.

In view of unregulated capitalism’s many anti-social economic harms and the increasingly un-civil political wrongnesses that nowadays attend them, following is the perspective I think essential at this late hour if we are to can capitalism and replace it with a fair and just new economic system that can keep us—ALL of us—securely well fed, clothed and housed while avoiding environmental and societal mayhem by mid-century or so. This new system must be rid of economic insults. Among other things, it must prevent monopolies, ensure real competition, control corporations, and build in incentives to ensure every American citizen has economic adequacy as well as political freedom. Here’s how, at long last, we can stop letting the self serving troublemakers have their way…if we muster the moxie and the will.

 

THIRD OPTIONS

Economic Rights

1-3:  Adequate* income to buy all life essentials:  food, clothing, and fully-equipped shelter;

4-6:  plus adequate* income for the practical needs of health care, reliable transportation, and insurance required by law (e.g., liability insurance prerequisite for vehicle licensure);

(*Adequate means a living wage, whereby federal law requires every employer or other payor to pay income sufficient to purchase all six life essentials and practical needs. “Living wage” displaces the concept of “minimum wage” which only guarantees poverty and shall be abolished forever Amen);

 

7:  These economic rights shall apply throughout every individual’s childhood, working adulthood (with fair provision for those disabled for ordinary work to contribute in whatever productive manner they can reasonably manage), and socially secure retirement;

 

8:  Like social security for our retired—who are our past—a new economic right shall extend help to America’s youth who are our future. The new program shall help young adults prepare to enter their employed decades of productive contributions to the nation, by helping them through that period when they are most likely to be impoverished and in need of meaningful preparation for mature passage into adulthood. For this purpose a Life Opportunity Voucher (LOV) shall be earmarked at birth for every child born in the USA.  LOVs shall reside in an interest-earning Young Adult Opportunity Trust Fund (YAOTF) funded by universal payroll taxes, supplemented as necessary by taxes on accumulated wealth and by ad hoc family and private donations.

Upon high school graduation or reaching age eighteen, whichever comes later, every American youth shall enter three-year enlistment in a Service To America Corps (or optional military enlistment).  Upon completion, the LOV may be redeemed (up to age 25) to purchase the recipient’s choice of 1) a first-time equipped farm, or 2) a trade school education plus entrepreneurial business startup, or 3) a 4-year college education. Under federal law, no farm, college, university or trade school may be priced at more than 85% of the LOV’s tax-funded portion, but may be less. For youths electing to complete a full military career, the LOV redemption amount upon military retirement shall be doubled and paid out without condition.

Economic structures

Prohibitive and proactive social responsibilities that only government has the power and motive to assume by governmental initiative, legislation and regulation will include, but not be limited to, new third-option economic system design options as for example:

• To prohibit natural monopolies (fixed rails, pipelines, wire grids, etc) from their historic failure to act in the public interest, legislation shall require public ownership of all natural monopolies under federal, state or local governance, as appropriate to each case, and will codify exacting regulations to ensure their operations fully serve the public interest at all times. To preclude all monopolies’ natural inclination to sloth and obsolescence, Monthly Required Suggestion-&-Reward Programs shall be maintained in these monopolies.
• Federal government shall prohibit the existence of any other (unnatural) monopoly whatsoever regardless whether it be contrived or evolved as corporate monopoly or quasi-monopolistic gigantism, or by any other device or scheme.

 

• Federal government shall enact into law an absolute mandate that any commercial entity of any nature whatsoever which exceeds, or grows to exceed, five percent (5%) of the United States marketplace for anything it sells, shall be subdivided into either 1) new Employee-Owned Co-ops and/or 2) Small Entrepreneurships, by voted choice of the employees affected by the change. Each of the resulting subdivisions shall represent less than five percent of market, and any subdivision that re-grows to five percent shall be subdivided again. This absolute mandate shall be known as The Five Percent Rule, and regarded as the Five Percent Solution that prevented capitalism from eating the world.
• Federal government may prohibit activity, product or sale by any commercial entity of any nature that is not consistent with the public interest, including consumption of natural resources or where bona fide public demand—notably for natural resource-consuming merchandise irrelevant to the basic Economic Rights and needs—is absent.

 

• Federal government will enact major incentives for citizens to form new Small Business Entrepreneurships, absolutely free to innovate and subject to minimal regulation other than the five percent rule, to serve local/regional public needs for the basic Economic Rights. Ownership will be small, direct and limited; stock issuance and stockholders will be strictly prohibited. Profits may be extracted however the ownership pleases.
• Federal government will enact equally attractive incentives to form new small, well regulated Worker-Owned Cooperatives dedicated to serving local/regional public needs for the basic Economic Rights. Free to innovate and to compete with the small Entrepreneurships and with each other, all income exceeding costs will be defined as “surplus.” Earned surpluses will be retained for 1) investment back into the co-op and 2) periodic equal bonuses for all employee-owners. All major business decisions will be decided by vote with every employee-owner at every rank having one equal vote.

 

• The public interest will be constantly monitored and publicized by a National Interest Advisory Council (NIAC). Members of the NIAC will consist of representatives from non-profit organizations which have existed organizationally in the United States for not less than ten years and are demonstrably dedicated to public service, the public interest, the common good, and to conservation of nature and the nation’s natural resources. Examples of such organizations include and are not limited to the Union of Concerned Scientists, The Interfaith Alliance, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, The American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Separation of Church and State, Citizens for Science in the Public Interest, the Red Cross, The Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society, National Center for Science Education, America’s Great Waters Coalition, Environmental Defense Fund, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation, Blue Planet, The Women’s History Alliance, and comparable public interest organizations. NIAC members shall have exclusive authority over admissions of new members, expulsions for cause, and formulation of each year’s NIAC agenda. Congress will review the NIAC charter after each national census.

 

• Federal government shall strictly prohibit foreign ownership of any commercial entity doing retail business in the United States, on grounds that any slightest measure or mix of foreign ownership fails to ensure dedication to the United States public interest.
• Federal government shall enact and strictly enforce legislation prohibiting the possibility of extreme imbalance in who holds and commands the nation’s immense wealth and who might thereby gain disproportionate control over the civil dynamics in our democracy-based nation. Accommodating the reasonable proposition that personal industry will always enrich some citizens more than others, a reasonable limit between the highest and lowest permissible incomes shall be enforced through graduated taxation in the public interest. The Internal Revenue Service shall ever be fully funded equal to its assignments.

 

• To counter the ongoing demise of democracy-essential public information in consequence of the growth of digital/social media, federal government shall enact and strictly enforce legislation requiring establishment and maintenance of non-profit newspapers, and prohibiting smartphone use by children and teens, in every U.S. city and community. The legislation shall establish a Democracy Commission to recommend, within six months, legislation for subordinating all digital/social media to the best interests of the United States as a nation seeking to become a more perfect union.
• Federal government shall ensure that retail prices remain affordable by 1) taking concrete steps to increase genuine merchant competition that restrains prices naturally, 2) by prohibiting commercial businesses’ constant efforts to dominate markets by eliminating competitors who would compete, and 3) by constraining their constant urge to increase prices and profits that causes inflation at every level of the economic supply chain.

 

• Federal government will at all times ensure that a useful, reasonably meaningful job is made available for every working-age U.S. citizen who is able, in any measure, to work. An Innovative Job Creation Program shall elicit a never-ending stream of creative ideas such as (for example): A new permanent Nationwide Salvage Enterprise (NSE) employing: 1) Salvagers, adept at retrieving the millions of useful items people throw out with their garbage every day (endless variety, including furniture and working appliances, often unused new items still in the box); 2) Tinkers, adept at repairing more millions of thrown-away items needing only minor fixes for restoration to full utility; and Thrifters, to retail these items to low-income and thrifty citizens at very low prices representing breakeven with NSE salaries and operating costs, featuring this motto with the NSE logo:

May you repair what is broken, that which is imperfect adore;

May you be blessed with enough—and, tasting life fully, no more.

 

• Federal government shall enact laws mandating governmental ownership of all projects and enterprises that lack natural private business incentives, such as national power grid modernization, exceedingly affordable housing, extremely affordable small electric trucks and cars with unlimited range and fast battery recharging…and comparable enterprises.
• Federal government shall enact laws mandating that in any conflict where AI (automated intelligence) and robotics may eliminate human jobs without ensuring other employment and income, human employment shall always be prioritized over AI and robotics Amen.

 

Life Values

Federal government shall initiate a constitutional amendment concerning education in all schools, public and private, that receive as much as one dollar ($1) of public tax dollars, or that use publicly-funded roads in order to operate, requiring that in every school year, from first grade through four-year college, requiring that:  a course titled “Values” shall be taught in concert with and as first priority within a Civics curriculum created and maintained by the National Interest Advisory Council (NIAC) encompassing not less than these component teachings appropriately graduated for each grade level:

• The concept of adequacy;
• The concept of shared community;
• Responsibility, democracy and freedom;
• Economics as motive and politics as method;
• The concepts of cooperation and ethical competition;
• The interrelationship of economic rights and political rights;
• Comparative religions, their historical origins and doctrinal evolution;
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the conscious choice of personal values; and
• Civics and the purposes of government as specified in our Constitution’s Preamble.

 

In addition to the Civic Values curriculum, the NIAC shall biennially review, and report on as it finds relevant, existing grade-appropriate elementary and secondary curricula to ensure adequate teaching of, in priority order: 2) reading, writing, basic arithmetic, 3) history, 4) arts performance and appreciation, 5) home economics, household budgeting, shopping and food preparation, 6) science, higher maths and beneficial technology, 7) psychology and social studies, 8) diet, exercise and health, plus… [items 9-11 to be determined] …oh, and by the way, 12) sports.

*          *          *

“We have it in our power,” said Thomas Paine, “to begin the world over again.” Agreeing with Paine, I long to see our nation, if not indeed our world, guarantee both political freedom and economic adequacy to every citizen, thereby fulfilling our governmental duties to protect, support, and help us all become better citizens in pursuit of more perfect unity. I find these governmental purposes to be consistent with the values described by thousands of people who undergo near-death experiences and report what they learned, and were told, while they were “out,” the most significant being:  help others, attain knowledge, love others as unconditionally as God loves you. With so very many people citing the same few spiritual values over and over again, every time in their own unique words, I am convinced they are reporting truth. In my mind that truth translates to how we should behave, especially in governing ourselves.

But alas we are rampantly misgoverning ourselves in gross and multiple ways. We tolerate insane inequality and maldistribution of vast national wealth that is far more than adequate to make everyone economically secure for life. We permit children to grow up valuing selfishness over the common good of our human communities, ensuring future misgovernance.

Though anxiety grows, most people still don’t fully grasp that global overheating caused by our ongoing use of fossil fuels is committing humanity to a future in which most and probably all major Earth systems—oceans, atmosphere, fields and forests—will be irreversibly deranged. It’s already too late to prevent several massive changes—e.g., all glaciers and the great polar ice caps are melting faster than expected, meaning the rising oceans are probably going to drown every coastal city on Earh. Only the tiny percent of people who regularly read science news are aware of the drastic changes coming upon us and our progeny through the remainder of this century—and for two centuries following. There will be much suffering we could mitigate if we had the moxie to end—and reverse—the carbon pollution NOW. But, observing present social trends, there obviously is little hope that we will elect better leaders—good enough, soon enough—who might implement the requisite deep changes to our economic customs.

God bless America. God shed his grace on thee, and we are wasting it. It is my considered and well informed opinion that unless the innovative concepts here listed or something very like them—all of them—are seriously implemented in the near future, there is little to no chance that democracy in America or indeed U.S. nationhood will withstand the onslaught of combined environmental and ideological extremes still rising, still worsening, among us. Only our government is powerful enough to make the needed changes happen. So, do you know, or know of, anyone who truly does not yet understand what government is for?