It is perfectly natural but profoundly disturbing to be witnessing the imperial and economic decline of America. It has happened before — 16th century Spain, Napoleon’s France, the British Empire — and it will happen again. But there is sadness about it now since America’s fall from global preeminence comes at a time not of national senility, when decline is inevitable due to an inability to change, but at a time of national maturity, where sound governance of national wealth and values are supposed to herald self-confidence and sparks of wisdom. Now with the genocidal 20th century behind us and laws of liberty such as civil and equal rights firmly woven into the fabric of our democratic environment, this is not the time for failure. Instead this is time for imaginative political wisdom to ensure a peaceful world and a debt-free home economy. We can then establish gainful employment for the majority, the protection of welfare programs for the less fortunate, the promotion of affordable healthcare for all, and the propagation of responsible and peaceful global attitudes, all of which are essential for the US to regain respected international leadership. For America, echoing George Santayana's philosophy, by knowing its past is not condemned to relive it.

Today our sense of realism is more often equated with the bankrupt androcentric wisdom that promotes the fallacy the solution to restoring global power is by living on credit other nations support while spending billions throwing our military weight around the world as we please, or more correctly, as our leaders see fit. This is categorically false as Andrew Bacevich points out in The Limits of Power. It held sway 60 years ago when, along with the USSR and Britain, it was necessary to oppose global fascism. But now the opposite is true. Historical consciousness leads us to the recognition our democratic global influence must rest upon our humanitarian impulses, which themselves depend on strong economic foundations that our present race to penury is rapidly wiping out. Any short-term benefits of expensive global saber-rattling undermines all long-term benefits of the successful practice of capitalism at home, particularly when our economy has now come to depend on others manufacturing everything for us while we pretend to be paying for it.

Here a hopelessness sets in. Where is our once confident self-assured national intellect that should be shouting from the rooftops alternative solutions? Where are the debates on these controversial issues that are the fodder of democratic freedom? They are remarkably loud in congressional silence and rarely convened over today’s corporate-controlled media outlets. But they are stridently alive over the people’s pulpit. Nevertheless while the public vigorously debates these issues with itself over the internet, sound solutions tend to be thin on the ground among our governing classes, as if deaf to common sense. So for what it is worth, here are reasoned proposals designed to arrest America’s decline by presenting a framework of solutions for steering Pax Americana into a policy we can grow to be proud of.

The Fate of the Earth

We refuse to admit it but we humans are in a perilous position. Two ways at least can bring about our extinction: blowing ourselves and pretty well everything else as well to pieces, or reducing our environment to an unsupportable desert. Either way, in the equivalent of the universe’s twinkling of an eye, we could be gone.

This recognition, the potential of self-annihilation, doesn’t come easily. For a start do we Americans have in our nuclear arsenal 5,000, 50,000, or 150,000 nuclear devices ready to unload on any unsuspecting populace we decide to annihilate? We don’t know and our leaders are not telling us. Prevailing wisdom has it America is the owner of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Assumedly this is the best defense we can buy: otherwise why keep it? But others are also proud members of the nuclear family: Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Ukraine, Egypt, South Africa, South Korea, Australia, with Iran and North Korea warming up in the wings. And it is certainly possible that 50 or so other nations have the capability to join us in this nuclear club. For as Jonathan Schell points out in The Seventh Decade, the common heritage of human thought for more than the last sixty years has “defeated every attempt to deliver the world from the danger of nuclear annihilation.” Mutually assured destruction keeps us all from dropping the bomb but it doesn’t stop anyone from building one. As Schell puts it, “to threaten seems wise, but to act is deranged.” Everyone wants to get into the act so nuclear proliferation continues. How strange it is that our safety depends on how much destructive capability each of us owns. Is America the safest since we own the most? Strange thinking in a world where a nuclear device may soon be small enough to fit in a suitcase!

So with this happy state of affairs in mind let’s move to the other potential manmade extinction event, the one that is now underway anyway.

The first law of ethology has it that “The greater the variety of species, the greater each has for survival.” And you can see why. We are all in a myriad of ways dependent upon each other: lions on springbok, elephants on acacia trees, fish on plankton, squirrels on nuts, cows on grass. We all have our survival requirements which must be continuously met. Otherwise we die out. And this has happened often enough over the 3.5 billion years of life on this planet — itself the best part of 4.7 billion years old — for it is estimated that 99% at least of all life forms are already extinct. So what chance us humans since we are so new to this earth?

Within the seeds of our behavior is the capability of creating our own extinction by destroying the diversity of life on which we, as omnivores, depend. We destroy things not by accident as other forms of life may do, but by design. We plough the fields and scatter but to do so we cut down trees the squirrels and birds need, push the big animals like lions, elephants, and even our own companions — apes, chimpanzees, and gorillas — off our arable lands into smaller and smaller habitats, even captivity in zoos or — imagine the cruelty — cages for medical research! And we fish the rivers and seas so mechanically aquatic life is disappearing to a vanishing point. All this in a few dozen years! Worse still as our numbers grow so too do the rates of extermination of natural animal and vegetable life. Being brought up in the most diverse of environments, we ignore all warnings and pillage the Earth as if it can survive us. Well it can, and it will. As different from us it has the astonishing capacity to regenerate itself. We assume to know better!

So if the nuclear holocaust doesn’t get us first we can be pretty sure the destruction of natural planet Earth will. Even now it’s warming up, whether by natural or human means we’re not sure. Nevertheless we are doing little to stop it even if it is our fault.

The Global Dilemma

America must recognize it does not stand alone. Our present political and economic crises are as much a part of the natural order of world events as evolution itself, and cannot be viewed shortsightedly as just a national issue. We must perceive ourselves for what we are, part of the global economic depression where our influence, massive though it is — approximately 25% of the world’s GNP — cannot itself be expected to turn the world’s economic malaise around no matter how well managed. As never before us ‘fatties’ sit in the same bathtub with the other slimmer nations of the world and it is over-flowing. Our combined productive capacity, analogous to the bathtub’s water, has outstripped our ability to consume it all, with the result that the goods and services of our labors are worth less than the value of labor itself. Thus we witness the world’s current depression hitting the working class disproportionately as it always does. Only by slimming down the fat can we stabilize the water level thus easing the global depression.

The trick is to do this carefully otherwise the toll of the international depression will be the fatal consequence of war. And it is this choice, one often recklessly used in the past to empty the bath water as quickly as possible which is not available to us now since, as we have seen for the first time in mankind’s history, global war may mean extinction, or as Jonathan Schell so vividly puts it, “the death of death” itself. (Echoes of Vietnam sound ominously insane with President Obama’s multi-national extension of Bush’s Middle East conflicts!) So what alternatives do we have to ensure the bathtub is emptied at a rate commensurate with the recognition of keeping the international pain and suffering of the depression to a minimum?

Not many. But two, simultaneously adopted, do come to mind. First, we must find means of keeping American labor gainfully employed, for in the long run it is far less debilitating to the fabric of our society to keep people at work than it is to have them unemployed and paid less than subsistence-level dole-outs. And secondly, we must somehow find the will to distribute the accrued wealth of our society more equitably and fairly across all strata of our society. The rich stay rich — they have the knack of doing so — but the poor must never be allowed to fall through the cracks if, for no other reason but the selfish one, in the future we would find it hard to endure the scorn of our children for having been less than civilized.

But there is a third alternative perhaps the most obvious and significant. If we are all together in the overflowing bathtub — fatties and thinies — and since we cannot step out no matter how much we would care to do so, working together to eliminate the overflow must become a collective duty. America must recognize it now: face global issues not just parochial ones.

International bickering is childish. Talk earnestly particularly with those who don’t like us: Iran, the Palestinians, North Korea, etc. Nations must be in constant debate over their willingness to spread global health. Our leaders must be in conference discussing this issue as if it were the only one worth discussing, as indeed it is. International agreements on creating the means of eradicating nuclear warheads, guaranteeing sexual and religious harmony, living beneficially with all life forms, limiting human population growth, balancing global wealth, preserving fresh water supplies, issuing laws of the sea, preventing man-made global warming — these are but a few examples — must be made and acted upon with national self-interest taking second seat. Russia, China, India must be full members of this debate since there is reliable consensus these societies have built-in cushions that make the depression created by unbridled capitalism easier for them to endure. Most importantly the West must refrain from the arrogant view that capitalism as an economic model has everything to offer mankind, and instead pick over the pearls of wisdom of other far from moribund economic systems that we can utilize to our collective advantage.

Our first national responsibility must be to face the fact we can no longer pretend we maintain a Defense Department when in reality we harbor a War Department. This realization would be the first but essential step away from the imperialistic tendencies we have cultivated since destroying the livelihood of Native Americans some two centuries ago. Only by eliminating spending on the wars we are presently engaged in, plus never again engaging in wars unless it is the legitimate will of the people, will we begin to attain a national maturity. And since our war (defense) budget has doubled since 2001, quoting Robert Gates the present Secretary of War (Defense) it is imperative this national insanity is cauterized immediately.

Well before 9/11 Osama bin Laden made it clear as a citizen of the world he was opposed only to three iniquities: Infidel troops stationed on Arab soil (America after the First Gulf War left troops stationed in Saudi Arabia), Israel’s rejection of United Nations resolution 242, and Dictators rule over the Middle East, most notably Egypt and the Saudi Royal Family’s governance of his own homeland. While the world abhors the assumed outcome of bin Laden’s wrath, America’s irrational response, to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq on the flimsiest of reasons, enflamed that region. The outcome was the direct, and later, indirect cause of the death of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis, the uprooting of thousands more over the whole region, now including Pakistan. It engendered the growth of Hamas and Hezbollah, the invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, the rise of the Taliban and militant Islam and the decay of a once proud nuclear nation we knew of as Pakistan, while sowing the seeds of our own economic chaos at home. Like a bear breaking into a honeycomb, America is now plagued by a furious hoard of stinging bees we call terrorists that see no reason to stop their onslaught since they are as mad as hell — as they see it, with good reason. Like all nations with grandiose imperialist aspirations, America has to realize it is now at a turning point. Like Rome, its weakness comes from within. Our economic might has been exposed as a chimera

To a civilized society this realization must lead to the humble recognition of humility. Our response must be the immediate pull-out of all foreign troops — American and NATO forces — from the whole of the Middle East. Implicit in this peace mandate must be the unilateral declaration the US will honor United Nations Resolution 242. Forcing Israel to return to the land it was allowed, and no more, will be the greatest gift we can grant not only to the well-being of Israel itself but, even more importantly, the well-being of the Palestinian population that has suffered so egregiously since the founding of Israel in 1948, as President Jimmy Carter makes clear in Palestine Peace not Apartheid. Then, and only then, will lasting peace in the Middle East be a real possibility.

This in itself will still not obviate the Theatre of the Absurd we adhere to, that a nuclear war is winnable. For otherwise why do we maintain the largest nuclear weapons arsenal the world has ever known, along with corresponding worldwide supersonic and underwater delivery systems. Reducing this colossal horde of terrifying weapons unilaterally will be a welcomed start to minimizing the risk of the ultimate absurdity that our human existence is extinguishable by mistake. It will also put the world on notice we are learning to respect it.

However redeemable the elimination of say 90% of our nuclear weaponry may appear in the near future to the welfare of the world, 21st century America still maintains a global empire of well over 700 recognized military bases with more than 2,500,000 US personnel serving across the planet. How many additional installations we maintain, using predominantly local forces under our command, or influence, not included on this list, is unknown. But the size of our military empire must number well over 1,000 overseas bases, far greater than the British Empire in its heyday 100 years ago, and perhaps only comparable with the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. Yet we are loathe to label ourselves ‘imperialists’ even though much of the world witnesses our imperialistic style each day. Any pretext the anti-ballistic missile shield we are building in Europe is warranted as a barrier to future Iranian nuclear rocket attack is perceived as a joke by most Europeans. Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has grown to tolerate the US presence only for the additional income it guarantees: no more, no less. It is time to come home from there too.

Firm realistic commitments to removing our global military presence and to remain behind our national borders must become the mainstay of our defense strategy. Nothing less makes moral or economic sense. America, as the greatest supplier of munitions the world has ever known, has a moral obligation to allow the world to cautiously dream of a future. If we are to live to the standards of our freedom-loving forefathers we must remember their intent best stated by Thomas Jefferson: “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” As Ron Paul states in The Revolution: A Manifesto, “the principles enshrined in the Constitution do not change. Today’s complex world cries out for the moral clarity of a noninterventionist foreign policy.”

The Seeds of Failure

Our next responsibility must be to find a way to a guaranteed — as far as is humanly possible — economic self-sufficiency and business competitiveness. Can we, for example, argue our present capitalist economic model is all that can be desired at this time of chronic economic malaise? Perhaps the thoughts of a leading socialist of the early 20th century are worthy of note at this critical hour.

“It is not until it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind’s immunity from cholera, typhus and ignorance, still less secure them the positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degradation and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provisions for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can ever provide for himself.” R, H, Tawney , Equality.

Again, in mid-century John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society warned us of the failure in our Western world of measuring economic welfare largely by productivity indices such as Gross National Product (GNP). JKG saw America spending its energy increasing national production using, for the most part, advertising and the psychological persuasiveness of emulation while largely ignoring the public sector economy by spending less time, effort and resources on the public good. This was obvious to him by, for example, the lack of universal health care. To JKG America suffered because of its tendency to stock war chests at the expense of caring for people. “The inherent tendencies will always be for public services expenditures to fall behind private production.” How prescient. “Economic priests impose upon affluent societies the myth production, or more precisely the efficiency of production, is the hallmark as well as the index of prosperity.” Purchasing power becomes the fuel of the affluent society. It wasn’t what you had in the bank that counted; it was how much you were prepared to spend.

Much has changed. However what began as economic expediency 40 years ago mushroomed into a 21st century prosperity that continued to demand growth for its own sake. Consumption continued to be the engine of affluence. Under such a purchasing pressure the world ‘flattened’ according to Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat. “The convergence of technology and events allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing”. Stuff could be made cheaper elsewhere. Thus jobs rushed off-shore with one exception: munitions and bombs. Those stayed home!

So began the need for credit for middle-income and working-class Americans to pay for their insatiable appetites. Banks saw they could prosper by making credit easy and interest income their new moneybags. The West went berserk. Absurdly consumption became 70% of the US GNP. America’s biggest-ever yearly trade deficits grew above $800 billion, the equivalent of each citizen paying $2,700 annually to unknown foreigners. Add that to the National Debt — the amount owed by the government to creditors holding US debt instruments, registering close to $12 trillion — another $40,000 per citizen. The National Debt perspective, that it is huge, growing out of control and we have nothing to back it, is indelibly clear now we are in deep recession. How did this happen?

Blame it on the New Olympians, defined by Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson , The Gods that Failed: How blind faith in markets has cost us our future, a class of global super-financiers — rich worker bees of international financial houses such as central banks centered in London and New York — whose largely unregulated activities with unbounded monetary polices over the last decade went unchallenged. Particularly their disregard for our accumulated national assets such as home-based manufacturing, skilled and unskilled manual labor, trade unions, healthcare benefits, company pensions, minimum wage commitments — all that got in the way of company profits. In the process the New Olympians cashed-in on peddling bonds, stocks, shares, and other financial instruments. But now “it is all coming home to roost,” quoting the not-so-foolish Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Suddenly, like all dominant economic theories we have chosen to ignore when the going’s good, Corporatism — economic control in the hands of the wealthy few — is in failure mode. The lid began coming off Pandora’s Box starting around August 2007, stalling the efforts of the US Federal Reserve Board (the Fed) to put it back on again.

Backing these New Olympians were unchecked ruling ideas of economic manipulation that constituted globalization — the first one-world economy — resulting in speculative recklessness and corporate excess. Blind faith in their abilities held governments in sway. Major legislation was passed on an almost daily basis backing the New Olympians activities. Witness just one example, the US Congress’s huge bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in September 2008 — government-sponsored enterprises backing 50% of all Americans’ mortgages — enacted with little dissent, putting the US tax payer in hock to the tune of another $1 trillion.

With the lid opening wider we saw the dramatic collapse of the US housing market due to the New Olympians’ penchant for making money off sub-prime loans. Then, and this was very clever, getting those very same loans off their hands by repackaging them into new, tradable, debt-based financial instruments — e.g. CDOs: Credit Default Obligations, SIVs: Structured Investment Vehicles — and selling them to global customers largely unaware what they were in for. Then Wal-Martyrization took over. Blue-collar workers lost their means of livelihood but retraining programs put them back to work. The fact these were low-paid service sector jobs — replacing high-skilled manufacturing ones now long-since neglected — often with zero benefits, marginal occupations at best, didn’t worry the New Olympians. National unemployment levels remained low to begin with. Liberalizing credit for the lower middle class and the poor became one of their more adventurous ways of making a good living. Unfortunately sub-prime mortgaging began the meltdown and is now completing the asset-stripping of what is left of our national valuables.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes was prescient with his classic remark some 60 years ago, “When the wealth generation of a nation is dependent on the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill done!”

The Way Back

The only way to comprehend the potential of a national future is by grasping the nature and structure of today’s global economy because we are in it lock, stock and barrel.

Bryan Gould does an excellent job in his The Democracy Sham. Gould defines the global economy as “A world economic order in which capital, trade, production, information, and technology flow to and from the destinations determined by market forces without regard to the barriers erected by national or regional governments, policies and jurisdictions.” Gould goes on to emphasize, “Even this fails to capture the essential element of the contemporary global economy — it is the freedom it confers on international capital to roam the world, seeking the conditions most favorable to its interests and recognizing little obligation to pay regard to the requirements of elected governments and the populations whose interests they represent.”

Whether we like it or not, and we may not, is this to be our future?

How big is this daily turnover across the world’s foreign exchange? Estimated to be $18 billion in the 1970s, according to Gould it was close to $1.9 trillion in its heyday, mid-2007. Not surprisingly young educated Western middle-class men and women flocked to careers in the digital age of “financial management.” The glory days of hands-on analog engineering and the technological revolution of the 20th century were well past. Expanding the affluent society, fueled 30 years ago by our own production efficiency, was still our goal. But the America we know today doesn’t make much any more. We have left manufacturing to others who the roaming global economy has fortuitously found are prepared to work for less to make more stuff for us. Meanwhile working-class Americans are left to manage the pennies, the Bob Cratchit’s to the New Olympian’s Scrooges.

Pointers for constructive home-based economic reinvigoration are easy to articulate. Gould does this superbly: “the subordination of finance to more equitable oversight, personal and social security for all, accountability to self and others, the undesirability of a semi-detached super-rich class, strengthening and protection of an independent middle class, social stability as opposed to share-holder value, and liberty of the person.” But is our republic up to the job? Is democracy working to the benefit of all? There is little evidence that we the people are in control. There appears to be an oligarchy out there with more control than meets the eye.

America needs an entirely fresh perspective, new ways to counter the failures of both our imperialism and corporatism. These exist if we have the guts to recognize them and act to take back what we were granted. Remember Thomas Paine who said right at the beginning of America: “Those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation must bear the fatigue of supporting it.”

Regaining our Confidence

Is there is a silver lining to all this? After all, before the advent of our latest economic tailspin, we were better off, weren’t we?

Generally that was true. Both production and output have risen steadily since the end of the Second World War. More goods and a greater variety are available at not unreasonable prices. Technology has created electronic gadgetry far and away exceeding even Dick Tracy’s imagination. Malls and stores are full of an expanding array of new and exciting “things.” In general, both income and purchasing power of the average American has risen too, although at a far slower rate than is generally realized. But the trouble, according to Gould, is that “the amount of labor required to produce that small increase in real income has gone up at a faster rate than the rate of increase in income” — the world bathtub scenario again? American families are working longer hours at lower hourly rates to keep up their purchasing abilities. Primarily it is women who are making up this difference, either working for the first time, having to work longer hours or, worse still, being the sole family provider. Sadly this is true for the poorest 20% of our population, trampled on and largely discarded by our rush to riches.

Some argue — David Simon for one, the mind behind the HBO series The Wire — that the 21st-century city-state is incredibly bureaucratic in which, for example, a legal pursuit of an unenforceable prohibition (the war on drugs) has created a great absurdity. To Simon, The Wire is about “the very simple idea that, in this postmodern world of ours, human beings — all of us — are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more”. This is the triumph of capitalism? “Whether you’re a corner boy in West Baltimore, or a cop who knows his beat, or an Eastern European brought here for sex, your life is worth less. It’s the triumph of capitalism over human value. This country has embraced the idea that this is a viable domestic policy. It is. It’s viable for the few. But I don’t live in Westwood, L.A., or on the Upper West Side of New York. I live in Baltimore.” (The Atlantic Jan/Feb 2008.)

The rich get richer. In 2000, the richest 1% had 63 times the average after-tax income as this total underprivileged bottom 20%. This meant this top 1% controlled one-third of the wealth of the entire country! According to Gould, in 1980 the CEOs of the major corporations were paid 44 times as much as average workers. In 2003, this had risen to a staggering 254 times!

Corporatism doesn’t work because by concentrating on money stability only, important productive resources are put out of commission — witness the meltdown of Manufacturing America. While our rulers concentrate on the narrow advantage of stable money supply and money management, markets, skills, internal and external production systems, manufacturing knowledge, and many technologies are lost. Local productive flexibility and ingenuity become the losers. We rely on others we neither know nor know whether they know, or care, about us. Today’s US automobile industry is a good example as it goes into bankruptcy. And if there is a swing, perceived or not, in another direction — back to a Keynesian approach perhaps which involves government controls even in basic form — you can bet your boots the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch will be using their media clout to stifle any intervention into what they perceive to be their private domain. That’s what Corporatism is: unelected bodies with an internal hierarchy created solely for the purpose of exerting control over economic life. And if we are going there — it seems daily we are getting closer and closer — who’s to say we can ever crawl back again?

There is a denigration of trust among today’s levels of society, a widening gulf between the super rich and everyone else. Meanwhile an immense credit crunch looms that is likely to swallow many of us. Yet politicians and business bigwigs ignore us, the people. We know what to do. Yet obviously today’s economic wizards haven’t a clue. Half advocate one way while the other proclaims the opposite. Economic theory is fairyland stuff and it is frightening. When the stakes in the Keynesian casino are as high as they are now, when the threat of economic catastrophe rests on the daily review of the Dow Jones Averages (just as in 1929), and when the chances of continuation are this dismal, we the people need to be blowing our trumpets very loud and very clearly.

One theory, political or economic, can never work for all of us all the time. We hardly understand the vicissitudes of human behavior well enough to even begin to comprehend a perfect economic model, or for that matter, a perfect political world. But we do know variety is the spice of life and flexibility the spirit of common sense. Just so differing economic models may be more applicable in one country, another model in another. Getting economics or politics right all the time is way past our collective judgment and may always be so. But what we do know is the more open we are in our national and regional debates — as opposed to governance by fiat by unknowns in unknown boardrooms or, heaven forbid, Washington think-tanks — and the more flexible we are in making judgments collectively, the more likely we are to hit on the right one. Since we do not know a better way of conducting the people’s business than always asking them “what should we be doing now,” as openly, as clearly, and as often as possible — in other words fully functioning democracies, each with their own flavor, all pitting wits and skills on improving the lot of the community they were designed for, and certainly not for the owner of the local castle — what other method is there? Thus we have a choice: an open, spirited, flexible democracy or the continuation of today’s national sclerosis, the pretense of democracy, bought as it is by money from big pockets. Washington is a bought town. How much more comforting the people’s business conducted in the open instead of the anxiety of hanging on tenterhooks, realizing today is the madness of corporate-controlled mayhem?

The powers that be right now are deadly afraid of the Nation State, the “self identifying political community that has the expectation of exercising the power of self government,” echoing Gould. For if the use of our money, our voice, and our vote remains the prerogative only of the very few, the most powerful and the most influential, we are in for anarchy just as surely as history has always shown we have been before. It is sheer nonsense to assume that any section of society knows better than the majority, however favored that group sees itself to be. If there is to be hope for an improved future, it must include democratizing our present out-of-control oligarchial economic behavior, and it must happen soon. Let us study the sclerosis.

The Way Things Are

There has been a serious hardening of the fundamental structure of government in the Land of the Free. It is the monopolization of Congress by big money, what Robert G. Kaiser in So Damn Much Money calls the “Corroded Culture.” It pervades the halls of power in Washington.

When JKG worried about the national consequences of the creation — by the power of persuasion — of an affluent America 60 years ago, he never imagined this force would morph into a national addiction for consumption fueled by credit/debt manipulated by New Olympian money-lenders of Corporatism. Nor could he have foreseen this consumption frenzy — now rated at 70% of GNP — would metastasize into a world dominated by an oligarchy with tentacles that also control the will of our Republic. All it takes is the realization in American electoral politics “the most persuasive incentive today is fear — the fear of defeat,” quoting Kaiser. And since the technologies necessary to stay elected exist, but are expensive, control is easy. Big money wins every time. Staying in Congress means “don’t rock the boat” and we’ll keep you there. The result is the quality of statesmanship declines and the peoples’ business doesn’t get done. “The country” over the first years of this new century has “faced staggering challenges: how to pay for the retirement of the baby boom generation, how to provide healthcare to American citizens, how to cope with the largest influx of immigrants in American history, how to protect America from terrorists, how to preserve American prosperity in a complex global economy, how to save the earth. For years these challenges all shared one peculiarity: the politicians in Washington avoided or ignored every one of them.”

Even now when a new and popular president has come to power how much oversight do we, the people, have over his decision to use more of our national debt — potentially doubling it — to shore up banking institutions “too big to fail”? Not much. But when we think we do Congress inevitably listens not to us, ignores the public outcry for restraint, does as it is told and votes for Big Money. Then it curls up in a corner while the Federal Reserve Bank (a private bank owned by guess who?) and the Treasury (a public institute in the hands of guess what, unelected officials!) plow the dollars we don’t own (China does) into the mouths of the ‘haves’ while the ‘have-nots’ suffer the consequences of a depression about to rival the immensity of the 1930s.

Once again solutions are obvious: term limits (a two-term maximum for senators, four for congressmen?): campaign finance reform ($100 maximum donation per person, $0 from any organization?); the abolition of earmarks and lobbying, and each Senators and Congressmen accountable to the public good not private interests. The key: breaking their addiction to money so that election to office is less a road to riches and more an avenue to respect and rectitude.

Raising the National Revenues

Of all the issues that are conveniently swept under the national carpet, it is that of taxation that vexes the most. It isn’t that we are not discussing where the government’s revenues are to go — it seems that Congress has little else on its mind — but it is more that we view as sacrosanct rules of taxation, fiddling with them on the whims of whatever special interest group holds sway at any time. But the self-evident unfairness of the taxation system holds that the major burden is carried by those whose power is the least influential in changing the laws. The richer you are or the cleverer your tax attorney, the less percentage-share of the tax debt you are liable to pay. And the patent absurdity of the tax code is that all of us accept taxation now as an annual game, individually seeking out as many acceptable, but often shady, means of avoiding the burden as we possibly can.

This is not wrong but it is damned silly. The trouble is that we are so imbued with this nonsense and so accustomed to its ritual that we tend to ignore its inequity, assuming it to be an irresistible force, like death, we are powerless to alter. But are we? Indeed, isn’t it essential to change for no other reason than that our apparent youthful decline is centered largely on our inability to raise the wealth necessary to engine national prosperity, and that if we don’t answer this one, we might as well forget the rest?

Up for debate must be the proposal of a flat-percentage tax rate on income. Irrespective of who or what you are, whether a public or private corporation, institution or individual, whether a profit or non-profit organization, charity or church, irrespective of marital status or profligacy of parenthood, all income would be taxed at a given and equal percentage rate. No exceptions, no deductions, no incentives, no shelters, no loopholes, no special interests, tax lawyers, CPAs, arguments, or excuses, just a flat tax rate on all income.

The astonishing simplicity of this idea is the reason it is so dubiously greeted. But once it sinks in against the howls of protestation of all the parasites profiting from today’s prehensile taxing systems, it is so sound, like the irrepressible beauty of the truth of a mathematical proof, that its appeal is irresistible. For not only is it manifestly fair, in that all of us share equally in the tax burden, but it is also the “middle-class rebellion” that the majority of us disproportionate-tax-paying middle class are seeking. In addition, it perpetuates the concept of “graduating taxation” in that the more you earn, the greater the dollar tax amount you have to pay even though you pay at the same percentage rate as someone less well-off.

Another aspect of this Flat Tax proposal is to use it to begin paying off the National Debt. For example by taxing at the same annual flat-percentage rate all government revenues from taxation, this residual would be earmarked annually for paying down the budget deficit inherited from our present debt-ridden system. True, this would be an added burden for all taxpayers. But the national debt cannot be ignored. Since we don’t think twice of putting families in the street via foreclosure on their homes, the least we can do as a nation is to be fiscally responsible for our children’s future. We have at least to begin to pay down the national debt. And the sooner we do the sooner it will diminish. As time goes by — quite some time of course — the flat-percentage rate can be lowered to one commensurate with a rate sufficient only to cover annual government outlay. Budget deficits would then be outlawed and changes in the flat taxation rate made necessary only after periods of, say, a congressional house term, and then only with the approval of two-thirds of the Senate. The result: a lawfully guaranteed fiscal responsibility that historically governments — Democrat or Republican — have seen fit to totally ignore as if they had the right to pass the buck to each new generation. Wouldn’t this be a crowning achievement of a civilized country?

National Sick Care Reform

Let us not kid ourselves anymore. America does not offer healthcare as it purports to do but hugely expensive systems to support the care of the largely unnecessary sick.

Healthcare should be all about teaching society how to be well. By far the best method of achieving healthcare success is by correct nutrition. Remaining well is largely a question of ingesting the right stuff. Instead, fast-food franchises; low-fat products; MSG (in all its disguised names); sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, and sucralose; hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils; irradiated and genetically modified food; factory-farmed animal products; and most packaged foods are anathema to good health. Obesity, today’s booming civilized-human malfunction, is not an accident of nature but a predictable outcome of the food industry’s ability to make money out of turning us on to engineered cheap, adulterated food. (JKG’s recognition of the power of advertising once again?) Coupled with the tendency for unnecessary care and over-treatment — doctors prescribing far too much medicine to the tune of an estimated annual $500 billion “that does nothing to improve our health” according to Shannon Brownlee — nationally we are growing fatter, sicker and poorer. (Hard to imagine but traces of our massive pharmaceutical intake are now commonly occurring in our drinking water supply!) Unconscionably we pass on our fascination with unhealthy eating habits to the rest of the world now becoming equally cluttered with McDonald’s and KFC, to the detriment of their “growing” societies and nationalized sick-care systems. The other ingredient of being well of course is exercise, a habit our society is grossly neglecting.

It is this lack of consideration we have for being healthy that is so demonstrably out of step with our national purported caring character. Worse still whatever quality there is in our sick-caring system is set by the patient’s income. In contrast to any other developed nation, we lack a national health policy whose minimum qualification ensures at least adequate treatment for all, irrespective of economic standing. Socialized medical plans — no matter how abhorrent to American individualists who see them wrong only because they adversely affect their pocket books — guarantee that no one will ever have to forfeit their material lives for being ill. That egalitarian healthcare concept satisfies the humanitarian tenets that state care for the patient is paramount, whereas America’s states a contrary view: only if you can afford it can you get it.

It is imperative that alternatives be sought to replace our current unedifying sick-care programs, where self-serving interests — pharmaceutical profiteering, malpractice insurance absurdities, multiple-payer inefficiencies, privileged professional associations and poor quality hospital care (To Err is Human: Institute of Medicine , 2000) — hold too great a sway. Instead of equal and just primary care for all, we have spawned sick-care industries that today view patients as consumers not people, caring more for the curing of illness and less for the prevention of it, excellent though many of those services are for some in our society. Rectifying, demanding, a quantum jump in our collective thinking, we will have moved inestimably closer to that national civility demanded by our national intellect.

Living Off the Interest Not the Capital

We are blatantly self-destructive. It takes very little to recognize that any society which contemplates expansiveness in a finite environment will sooner or later run up against natural limitations. There is just not enough land, water and air to use at the rate we are using ours, unless we find time for recovery. And the one thing we have so little of in our race to riches is time. Among the many values environmental science has taught us in the last few years is that the dynamic quality of interaction of ecosystems — that is, the natural order of events and creatures in their regular habitats — creates stability. The greater the variety of these ecosystems, the greater the chance each has for survival. Only by direct intervention do these ecosystems get destroyed.

Man (Monsanto?) the great destroyer is the least integrated of all species in any ecosystem. Man makes a point of working outside them. He creates his own environment in which to live and work, hardly caring for — even ignoring — the quality of the biosphere. Pollution and environmental destruction is the natural order for him. It is a synthetic world in which we live, com­fortable right now, stimulating perhaps, even challenging, yet doomed unless a sense of harmony with nature is renewed.

As Jonathan Schell eloquently put it in The Fate of the Earth, “We need to remember that as individuals or as a species have we created ourselves. We need to remember too that our swollen power is not a power to create but only a power to destroy.” Thus, in the end for our own survival, we are forced to respect the Earth. This is nothing but the full realization of the ecological principle, according to which the Earth’s environment is seen not merely as a surrounding element in which it is more or less pleasant to live, but the only foundation of human life. Progress, in the guise of industrial as well as suburban expansiveness, rules. The waste from that progress be it nuclear, chemical, or mechanical, is deposited in the most convenient and least expensive manner. Business must be the greatest protected of the Earth: now the most shameful? This demands of our government that it act as our society's regulatory body. Indeed, one of the primary functions of a responsible government must be to renew that harmony with nature since we can never expect, nor is it the function of, private enterprise to be self-regulatory. The question is, how best to do it?

We must have an environmental policy securely locked in our collective psyche. This demands environmental education as a fixed facet of our schooling curricula, as a continuous exhortation of our peers and above all, firmly entrenched in our corporate enterprises. It means development of a far stricter code of environmental ethics than we have today; bound by laws that make the punishment fit the crime. It means a national energy policy designed for ensuring energy self-sufficiency. And finally a developed sense of the reality that our land is an agricultural heritage, not to be exploited by short-term interests, but to be carefully cultivated and nurtured so that it may continue its fecundity for us and all future generations. No better example can be cited than agricultural conservation — living off the interest and not the capital of our land. To clarify: the necessity of living within our agricultural means.

The Roadmap to Redemption

Nobel prizes for economics are a farce. Okay for physics, chemistry, literature and peace, all worthy realities. But economics is a game of chance predicting differing outcomes, none of which are certain. America is in debt to the tune of $12 trillion, plus or minus a few billion. Spending more of what we don’t have means increasing this debt, adding to the horrendous burden we are carrying into the future. True, to stem the home-mortgage market we can restrict foreclosures, re-design mortgages and reduce interest rates. But what we must do is exactly the opposite of what we are doing: force the banks to take the hit. Owning bank shares is the gamble the rich took on. Now is the time to not only ignore the ruling oligarchy but force it into owning its problems. It is time to let banks and big business suffer the consequences of bankruptcy not bailouts. Besides, like mushrooms, banks have a habit of sprouting up overnight.

That is only the beginning of our transformation to economic stability and national common sense. Government’s clarion call has been: “Let’s spend our way out of this mess.” The American people’s call has been exactly the opposite, not because we have less cash in our pockets but because we see the writing on the wall. We are not fools. Americans are showing a willingness to save. Advertising and political coercion work when credit makes it easier and everyone’s keeping up with the Joneses. But when times get tough we soon stop that nonsense. People seek jobs. Bankers have been the cause of lost jobs. We see their remuneration packages as repugnant. We may not be hanging them from lampposts yet, as was Mussolini in 1945, but they had better watch their step. We the people hold them responsible for creating the truth of unsound money at our expense. It’s now time to listen to the counsel of sounder voices.

Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, with over 32 years of experience in Congress between them, are as different politically as chalk and cheese yet together present mutually advantageous mechanisms to get us out of this recession. Both stood for President in 2008’s primary elections — Ron as a Republican and Dennis as a Democrat. Both were ostracized by the political establishment and the press for their obdurate stance against the flow: Ron on constitutional integrity, Dennis on American socialism. Since both the political establishment and the press — basically the same thing — are scared of anything other than the continuation of their status quo, we heard mainly the idiotic squabbles of lesser folk. Ron’s and Dennis’s viewpoints were drowned in the cacophony of inanities. The world may be going to hell in a handbasket, but change for the good scares the hell out of the fat cats who, whether we admit it or not, are very much in charge.

There are two axioms both men hold to be absolute: America must live within its means and, as Americans, we must hold the common good of the people as sacrosanct. Bearing those in mind, these must be the policies of the next administration:

1. To accept the consequences of not being the world’s slayer of dragons any longer — it not only does not work, it is perniciously too costly to remain the world’s most notorious imperialist. To come home not only from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan immediately, but also from the other 130-odd countries around the world forced to host our troops.

2. To use the savings from this international pullback to cut debt on the one hand and gain the respect of the world on the other. Ron estimates a $1 trillion savings. This, at best, may only cover the accumulated costs of Bush’s fraudulent conflicts. It may do little to cover the national debt but it heralds the start towards a future of paying our way.

3. To rein in the military-industrial complex by designing a professional army to defend the United States, not to police the world. To defend ourselves at home, not build B2 bombers that cost $1.2 billion apiece to bomb whomever we choose abroad.

4. To curb inflation by guaranteeing that we balance the federal budget each year as a matter of common sense, not law. To accomplish this we must accept additional taxation. Since it has been the rich, both personally and corporately who have gained the most from the largesse of the New Barbarian era, the burden of this increased taxation will rest on their shoulders.

5. To begin the payback on the national debt as the most appropriate means of ensuring sound money and a sane monetary policy for future generations. This will be a long-haul but mandatory national policy paid for by increased taxation of corporations. Since two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, there’s enough gravy here to maintain a continuous drawdown of that debt for years to come.

6. To tax people equitably. Up for debate must be the proposal of a flat-percentage tax rate on all personal and corporate income. Just imagine the joy of final year debt payoff and the resulting long-term lower taxation.

Dennis Kucinich may not whole-heartedly agree on these targeted-tax solutions but they do reflect his stance on protection for the underdog. And once we are paying our way who knows, perhaps we can eventually eliminate both the Federal Reserve and the IRS, as Ron Paul’s libertarianism advocates.

7. To institute a comprehensive social welfare network that would include, as a matter of immediate necessity, national single-payer healthcare covering all Americans and to include a range of natural, preventive choices. And how is this to be funded? By recycling profits from private clinics and hospitals and by higher levels of taxation for the rich which, of course, includes in no small measure most healthcare practitioners.

8. To organize a massive internal reconstruction of our national infrastructure: transit systems, bridges, dams, solid waste disposal systems, roads, drinking water, wastewater, hazardous waste, navigable waterways, all graded D by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2007. Crowded schools, traffic-choked roads are our way of life. It’s time to take care of ourselves instead of meddling in the affairs of the Middle East. Besides, the skills lost by American workers will now be regained, basically paying for this national reconstruction, as Franklin Roosevelt proved in the 1930s.

And the rewards? A fabulous national future and a shining beacon of hope for the world.

As Jacob Bronowski demonstrated, “Man is an animal who delights in and enjoys the pursuit of his own skills.” If the driving force of our capitalist system precludes the use of skilled labor, their frustrations could turn on the rich like an angry dog on a scary master. In the distance we would hear the voices of Tawney and Galbraith telling us “We told you so!”

The Quality of Renewal is Not Strained

It is hard to visualize a turning point, a way out of America’s decline. But we don’t have a choice. We need to come up with a radical new view quickly. Now that we see our very existence growing more tentative every day, it’s time to make the paradigm shift to a far healthier future. The trouble is how?

Let me be presumptuous and offer a compelling possibility. This is made easier since it is likely to be backed by the mandate of the majority willing to present, given the option, alternative behaviors, and flex its moral strength to make it obviously the way to go. I’m thinking now of a worldwide revolution engendered by the moral majority of the world’s people — women!

Think of what might happen if instead of the discussion being dominated by the male view from the bridge, as it always has, we listen to the unbridled views offered by the likes of, for example, Vandana Shiva, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Angela Merkel, Michelle Bachelet, Tarja Halonen, Maud Barlow, Mary McAleese, Portia Simpson-Miller, Vaira Vike-Friberga, Marghanita Lasky, Helen Clark, Rutthy Taubb, and hundreds of other women from all over the world’s leading bureaucracies, institutions, universities, businesses, and families, whose voices have rarely been heard and never in concert, and whose views have never been acknowledged let alone solicited.

Over half the world’s population has not yet had the chance to even be recognized as intelligent others much less listened to. And when male domination is our history, and it is in every sense his story, there is no way in our state of nuclear thunder and mind-boggling stupidity that we can survive the onslaught of continuing male hypocrisy when it surrounds the three universal conundrums: nuclear war, economic soundness and environmental health. To be as obviously out of kilter as we are, nationally and internationally, is absurd particularly when the alternative voice — intuitively compassionate, less belligerent, naturally more consensual, tuned into the rhythm of human creativity, and free to formulate a future not driven by male passion — is out there ready to roll. Wow, wouldn’t that be interesting?

“Man, know thyself,” was the foundation of Greek thought 2,500 years ago. Since then we men have been found wanting. The making of the modern world is less about building bombs and destroying the life forms on which we all depend, and far more about men and women living together for as long as it takes, in harmony with all forms of life on this beautiful planet, together using the brilliant resources of both halves of our brains. Whether or not we have the political will, we now have an intelligent way to free ourselves from the yoke of Dominant Man and the threat of blowing it all big-time.

The End is Just the Beginning

The American experiment is essentially over. It was successful in that it proved the point that those sagacious men 200+ years ago presented to the world: people of widely different creeds, races and backgrounds can live together in harmony, preserving their libertarian rights to be free-thinking, free-wheeling human beings, while at the same time forming a cohesive society with its own unique heart and developing traditions. We can be proud of the phenomenon that allows a Mormon community in Salt Lake City to sing their way to the glory of their God at Christmas time, at the same time as a black Baptist choir swings its way in Alabama, a different beat but nonetheless their beat. In that sense, the experiment was an astonishing success.

In another, it is proving a failure. This dream of “a unique society where God has put together all nationalities, races and interests of the globe for one purpose, to show the rest of the world how to live,” quoting Libor Brom Where is Your America, should not entertain the morally corrupting notion that in consequence America, by being “the leader of the free world,” is authorized, possibly by the deity, to intervene, openly or covertly, in the internal affairs of other countries anywhere in the world. Rather the opposite. For others are asking: “What leader? Who appointed America the leader of the world?” More pointedly: “What free world?”

It looks very much that we nationally are off the tracks. Our overwhelming requirement for individual consumption is the driving force of our penury. Right now, the ending of this first decade of the 21st century, America is deep in recession. A depression equal to if not greater than the 1930s could be the result of this absurd illusion our quest for affluence is the panacea for a perfect world. JKG warned us that this blight is the serious crack in the fundamental structure of this Land of the Free. So what is our passport to future prosperity?

The only future we have that makes common sense is to first eviscerate our passion for war by leaving the world to fend for itself. Secondly, create once again sound money by stabilizing the dollar. If this means going back to the gold standard ($100 = 1 oz of gold?) so be it. And thirdly, concentrate our concern for the welfare of the people not the rich oligarchy ruling the roost. We need to drown the cacophony of supplicants at the feet of economist nabobs who advocate getting out of the hole by bailing out banks. These are reckless policies. Relying on spending our future wealth now, they further the creation of unsound money while disregarding the wishes of the people.

The arrogance of youth must be replaced with the maturity of adulthood, so that one day we can afford to luxuriate in the wisdom of age. The naïveté of the ordained belief in the absolute correctness of our system must not lead us to the absurd idea of forcing it on others. Let them come to us, to seek our advice and ask our friendship (both of which will always be there in our new-found soul) while we continue to keep the enormously creative and productive pot boiling at home. This is not isolationism because, by living our maturity, we shall be turning our self-centered vision of “responsibility” for the world — an action for which one always bears the ultimate consequences — into a self-effacing respect for others. And since the future lies with those who seek a destiny whose concern for life and human rights transcends everything else, America shall then become a power to be reckoned with.

 

 

References

1. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power 2008(ISBN 0-8050-8815-6)
2. Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade 2007 (ISBN 0-805-08129-1)
3. Jimmy Carter, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid 2006 (ISBN 0-7432-8502-6)Ron Paul, The Revolution: A Manifesto 2008 (ISBN 0-446-053751-3)
4. R. H. Tawney, Equality pp.134-5 1931 (ISBN 0-043-23014-8)
5. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society 1958 (ISBN 0-395-92500-2)
6. Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat 2005-7(ISBN 0-374-29288-4)
7. Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson, The Gods That Failed 2008 (ISBN 1-84792-030-6)
8. Bryan Gould, The Democracy Sham 2006 (ISBN 9-781-87733-350-7)
9. David Simon, The Wire (HBO) The Atlantic Jan/Feb 2008.Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money 2008 (ISBN 0-307-26654-0)
10. Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated Bloomsbury 2007 (ISBN 1-58234-580-2)
11. Institute of Medicine, To Err is Human 2000 (ISBN 0-309-06837-6)
12. Jonathon Schell,The Fate of the Earth 1982 (ISBN 0-394-52559-0)
13. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 1974 (ISBN 0-316-109339)
14. Libor Broom, Where is your America? IMPRIMIS, Hillsdale, Michigan, Vol 11, No. 8., Aug.1982

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