Severe wealth disparity in America is apparent. The bottom 50% of Americans control only 3% of its wealth while the top 10% control 69% (38 times more wealth). By comparison, in 1989 the top 10% controlled only 7 times as much as the bottom half. Today’s wealth gap has not been seen since the Great Depression.

America has always had oligarchic tendencies. Our Constitution made it clear that governing America belonged to white male landowners. Since then, we have made great strides toward reaching the ideals of freedom and equality expressed in Constitutional Amendments and other writings of our founders. Noticeably since 1980, however, the power and influence of wealthy people and corporations have increased until we are no longer living in a democracy but an oligarchy.

The influence of this great and growing wealth can be traced to the heart of all that ails America.

Climate Change

Today 57 companies emit 80% of greenhouse gases. The top 10% alone emit almost half (48%). The fossil fuel industry has known about climate change since at least the 1970s. As the scientific community began clamoring about global warming and then climate change, the coal, oil, and gas industries began spending vast amounts of money on mis/disinformation denying their existence to continue raking in short-term profits.

Destruction of the Environment

The lives that we live, that were sold to us, have been provided by rich people and corporations that destroy the environment intentionally for more profit. As a result of their actions there are 1,340 Super Fund sites in America (land uninhabitable from decades of so much toxic pollution, they must be cleaned up). These one-time industrial sites were abandoned when extracting profit was no longer possible. The polluting companies were legally structured in such a way that those who created and ran them could not be held financially responsible. Their founders and managers moved on to other profitable ventures without paying a cent toward cleanup. An additional 500+ active industrial sites in the U.S. currently emit so much pollution as to require monitoring. We, the American taxpayers, bear the costs of both cleanup and monitoring.

More than 25% of all children, minorities, households living below the poverty line, and people with less than a high school education live within 3 miles of one of these sites. Each of these groups has shorter life spans and worse health outcomes than the average American.

In U.S. alone more than 100,000 people die annually from air pollution. If a dictator killed 100,000 of its citizens every year, it would be called mass murder.

Poverty

Continuing poverty is a policy choice by rich corporations and the wealthy. Those at the top of the income and wealth pyramid have consistently, successfully lobbied lawmakers to stop increases in the minimum wage, reduce or eliminate the social safety net, break up monopolistic business practices, and minimize regulations affecting them.

As a result, more than 50% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. More than 11 million children live below the poverty line in the richest country in the world. Medicaid, SNAP, and other safety net programs for the most vulnerable are being cut. Housing costs are at an all-time high. The minimum wage has not increased since 2009^, while the cost of living has risen by 50% (Restaurant wait staff can still be paid less than $3.00/hour). Additionally, there are 6.9 million Americans working as independent contractors (think Uber/Lyft and delivery drivers). For them there is no minimum wage and no safety net. When there is simply not enough to make ends meet, Americans get a second or third job and/or turn to payday loans/credit cards cheerfully provided at loan shark rates with exorbitant service fees furthering their indenture to a system rigged against them.

Food insecurity is rampant and housing obscenely costly for those at the bottom. This is kept in place by virtual monopolies in housing, food production, and delivery that allow their managers to raise directly or shrinkflate consumer prices at will to squeeze every possible penny out of their ‘customers.’

The outcome of these investments is evident. It enforces continuation and maintenance of a workforce that will do any job, at any wage, under any conditions with little or no pushback, thereby promulgating increased profit margins.

Political Division

Our wealth gap has transformed politics in America. The wealthy are no longer the ‘deep state’ massaging and influencing legislation that affects their interests. They can and do now openly buy Congresspeople, Senators, Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, and whole elections to ensure their insatiable need for more is baked into legislation that absolves them of all financial or moral responsibility. Ah, homo sapiens: the only species for whom too much is never enough.

The corrupting influence of money also drives America’s culture wars. Moneyed interests ensure we, the people, are sufficiently at each other’s throats over cultural differences to realize we are being robbed blind, murdered on the streets, or in our sleep by their actions while they further rig the system to keep us from noticing our sentence of life in prison without parole.

These are but 4 of the most pressing problems in America. The rest of our difficulties also spring from the root of wealth disparity. If we do not change our trajectory, America will soon be only feudal lords and peasants. Long live the Patriarchy!

We Must Lead

We must lead the world, as we did in the 20th century, toward a better more just civilization by solving this enormous puzzle. If our democracy is to be revived, we must achieve a more equitable wealth gap. This will require bold drastic action. We must take our would-be overlords in hand by reducing their income, regulating their actions for the common good, reclaiming the wealth stolen from us, reeducating our populace, and rewriting the Rich$peak narrative that dominates our culture.

Raise your lighted torches, pick up your pitchforks and prepare for the fight of your lives.

 

The current regime cannot last forever. When it ends, there will be much to do. If you want to help work on the policies that we will need for our future democracy, contact Project 2029, a citizen led initiative developing policies for transparent, accountable government. They need organizers, volunteer management, marketing people and more. Or you can support them with donations.

Help me continue to resist by dressing the part: Blue Wave Activist Wear

Rich$peak: any written, spoken, or visual representation that promotes the financial, moral, or political agenda of the rich whose only interest is continuing to increase their wealth without interference from government, religion, competitors, or civilization by controlling the political and social narrative that describes how we live.

Rich$peak is so pervasive and insidious that it goes nearly unnoticed in our everyday lives. We see and hear it every day. It’s on billboards and in newscasts. It is everywhere you look and in everything you hear and read. It dominates propaganda we are especially familiar with: Advertising. It is so powerful that it deserves its own Wikipedia page.

Rich$peak

Take a familiar phrase from the Middle Ages in Europe, “The Divine Right of Kings”. That single phrase put everyone in a country on notice. The ‘king,’ by ‘divine right,’ owned everything and everyone in the ‘kingdom’. The king was the law of the land. He could take your land, your possessions (only men had possessions), your wife (another possession), your children (yet another possession), or your life without consequence. That phrase was the underlying structure for the social order. Everyone knew it. Everyone believed it. Everyone followed it. “The Divine Right of Kings“ is a perfect example of Rich$peak.

In ancient China the emperor had “The Mandate of Heaven” to underpin the social order there. Roman Emperors, Sumerian Kings. and Egyptian Pharaohs (as far back as 3100 B.C.E) all had Rich$peak dogma that justified theft, murder, and all manner of outlandish behavior designed specifically to bolster their power and allow then to do whatever they pleased.

The Rich$peak of their lives and deeds has been rhapsodized in books, plays, cinema, TV, and computer games. These tales have literally been carved into stone. Since the beginning of recorded history, we have been indoctrinated to believe that the rich own and run everything. All of it is propaganda known as Rich$peak.

America the beautiful – our narrative

America is the richest, most powerful country in the world. It is the land of freedom and equality, the land of opportunity. In America anyone can succeed and become rich. The possibilities are endless. 

Free enterprise. Capitalism. It is what makes our economy tick. Accordingly, we take care of the job creators—the rich. Our government provides subsidies and tax cuts to the rich, so our economy continues to work for everyone. To keep inflation low by controlling interest rates, it is necessary that 3% to 4% of Americans continue to be unemployed. Fossil fuels are the driving energy necessary to continue our economic growth. 

The economic success that allows anyone to become rich means keeping labor costs and other expenses as low as possible. Providing paid vacations, weekends off, and sick time severely cuts into each business’ profit margin.  

We are grateful we have jobs and are willing to work overtime gratis to support the company’s needs. We willingly take a certain amount of abuse as a part of the job including calls or texts outside work hours because ‘it must be important’. If we are lucky enough to work from home, it is on our computer, in our house at our expense. Software on our computers to keep track of keystrokes is a must to make sure we are working. To keep American business competitive, we subsidize the lowest paid wage workers with tax dollars (in the form of welfare). We assemble the furniture we buy and check ourselves out at the places we shop. 

The American rich, in return, are incredibly generous. They build museums, libraries, incredible institutions of higher learning, and create foundations to cure disease and help Third World countries. 

We keep federal, state, and local governments to a minimum (except for our military and police that keep American interests safe at home and around the world). At home, however, the government has allowed crime to become rampant by making the legal system too soft. Punishment works!  So, we budget for more police, bigger private prisons, and stronger sentencing to cut down on theft, property crimes, murder, and keeping unwanted degenerates out of our country. 

 Military and police budgets excepted; we have a government spending problem. Just look at our annual deficit! No one could possibly run a household in this way. If we spend beyond our budget, the National Debt will destroy the economy. 

Severe cuts are needed in spending and services if our economy is to thrive. Besides, what does the government do that actually works. Our education system is failing the poor and disadvantaged among us. Our government funded safety net is useless. Everyone knows providing support for the poor disincentives them from working. Then they become dependent on handouts. 

We tell everyone, including ourselves, this story. It is used to motivate and drive America onward. 

The Truth about America

Except for the first sentence, not a single word of the above narrative is the truth.  It is the virus speaking, the Rich$peak virus. America is the land of the golden rule: They who have the gold make the rules. We have a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

Using wealth stolen from their lowest paid employees, from unpaid taxes, and excessive profits gouged from the poorest among us, they name museums, libraries, colleges/universities, and foundations while buying politicians and elections to reinforce their Rich$peak narrative.

The wholly owned Republican Party constantly cries about freedom from excessive regulations, not regulations that apply directly to you and me but, those that allow the rich to do whatever they want to ‘create wealth’ regardless of how many people are in poverty, without jobs, forced to choose between medication and food, or die from preventable accidents and pollutants. Citizens dying is only a problem if we notice who is responsible—the rich.

We are constantly exhorted to clean up our mess by recycling their waste while they create and release 48% all the greenhouse gases causing the climate change making earth uninhabitable.

By keeping the minimum wage low while providing a meagre safety net, the rich get a willing and pliable workforce and reduce their operating expenses. It forces workers to take any job, at any wage, on any schedule. Keeping more than 10% of American citizens living in poverty is a conscious choice by the rich… because it makes them richer.

They further increase their wealth by not paying taxes with the added monetary feature of poor public education, inadequate governmental safety net, and unenforceable safety and pollution regulations. Government efforts do not fail because of incompetence but because of conscious financial strangulation.

The highly infectious Rich$peak has become so pervasive that it threatens to kill democracy in America. If left unchecked, the disease will allow the climate fever affecting the entire planet to spiral out of control leading to the extinction of homo sapiens.

The Cure

Rich$peak is a chronic condition. As long as there are rich people, relentless in their pursuit of more, more, more, we will be infected with new and different forms of Rich$peak.

If there is any hope of returning to a truly healthy way of life and an economy that works for all, we must make the effort to recognize Rich$peak in all its forms and cry ‘FOUL’, ‘Untrue’, ‘You Lie.’ Then replace Rich$peak with a new narrative that tells the story of the America we want, the America we need if we are to survive.

We must, if necessary, brow beat those we elect to represent us into truly work to meet our needs. To change the narrative in this election year, we must elect Democrats up and down the ballot.

Yes, our Democrat representation in congress is a very imperfect lot. Once we ferret out those minions of the wealthy, the Republicans, then we can exact true representation from the Democrats.

 

I recently saw the movie “Amsterdam.” It is a fictionalization of actual events in the 1930’s. It is about a time we came perilously close to replacing FDR with a dictator. The ordinary Americans and a retired general who stymied the plot were disgraced and forgotten. None of the guilty parties were prosecuted. I had never heard this story. It is a well-produced film. I highly recommend it. 

Most of America seems oblivious to how close we have recently come to losing our democracy, how close we still are. The Lincoln Project was one of the first to declare that our democracy was in danger. In the final campaign days of this year, President Biden and some prominent Democrats joined the chorus.  

In the last election, most election deniers running for reelection won while a large majority of similar challenger candidates lost. The exceptions were one governorship, five seats in the Senate and nine in the House. Most of those wins were for empty seats in Republican states/districts or where Republican incumbents lost in the primary. In battle ground states ‘Big Lie’ candidates were mercilessly routed. The ongoing plot to subvert our election process received a serious blow this November but continues, focusing efforts on Election 2024. 

Nationwide 168 election deniers will enter elected office in January. Until none of them any longer hold office, our fragile democracy is in danger of ending. What is the fitting punishment for those who knowingly denied proven election results for their own political or personal gain? 

To the extent that any/all can be proven guilty for related illegal acts, they should be banned from involvement in local, state, or federal politics for life. They may not run for or hold any elected or appointed office from dog catcher to President of the United States. Further, they should be banned from employment or volunteer positions government/politics adjacent, i.e., lobbying, consulting, news anchor/correspondent, all campaign activities, book deals, aired interviews about politics, etc. This behavior will continue unless we… 

Let the punishment fit the crime. 

The January 6^th Committee has presented sufficient evidence to convince me that, at the very least, our last president should face a grand jury, be indicted, and prosecuted for his hand in the insurrection and our present situation. The committee is going to refer Donald Trump for criminal prosecution to the Department of Justice on Monday, December 19, 2022. His recent call for the nullification of parts of the Constitution to overturn the results of the 2020 election should be enough for us to understand where he stands on America and democracy. If not fully prosecuted, whether convicted or not, our democracy is a sham and we, glaringly, do not live in a country based on laws. Obviously, some people are above the law. 

What would be the fitting punishment for someone who is willing to destroy our entire system of government in pursuit of power and financial gain? Many have expressed their desire to see Mr. Trump put behind bars. I think prison is too easy a sentence in these circumstances, 

Do you remember reading a short story by Edward Everett Hale called “The Man Without A Country?” It is the story of Philip Nolan who, while being tried for treason, wished to never see this country again. His wish was granted. This sounds like a more fitting punishment for what Donald J. Trump has done. 

“Is that even possible?” you may ask. First, Mr. Trump would have to be stripped of his citizenship. Once stripped, he can be banished. If convicted, all his U.S. assets should be dissolved. He should never be allowed to own property or cross into America, even for a visit, for the rest of his natural life.  

Let the punishment fit the crime. 

Thanksgiving will be here in a couple of days. Most of us will spend time with friends and/or family feasting together. While we thank our lucky stars for who loves us, where we live, what we have, how much we know, we really need to thank the most important people in America. 

A well-deserved thanks goes to my fellow Democrats, Independents, and others who cast their ballots in this election. We voted for women’s rights, gun control, climate action and democracy itself. We ignored the inflation chewing on our wallets. Our democracy continues to work because we voted. 

Historically speaking the Trumpublican Party should have a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives and a slim one in the Senate. Let the spurious impeachment hearings and trials begin! Bang that gavel Kevin! I am thankful that did not happen.  

Instead, Republicans performed more poorly than the results reveal. They did not ‘win’ a majority in the House. Redistricting favored Republicans with more than enough new districts to ‘take back the House.’ (12 more new districts than the Democrats). Republicans will hold so tiny a majority it will require unanimous Republican support to pass anything. The Senate remains under Democratic control. The MAGAGs (pronounced ‘ma gags’) convinced no one that they were the better choice. For that, I give thanks. 

We also owe a big thank you to the January 6^th Committee for exposing the ‘stolen election’ myth for what it was – a con to steal an election by claiming it was stolen by the other side. The con included a real-life insurrection! The committee had a hand in causing losses for election denying candidates from coast to coast. I give a special thanks to Liz Cheney for heroic actions beyond the call of duty. 

Thanks to the efforts of so many ordinary people our democracy continues…  

Happy Thanksgiving. 

More than two million migrants have arrived at our southern border since January.

No matter how you feel about sending migrants unannounced to places governed by Democrats, it is becoming clear that the migrant situation is truly a crisis. It is also clear that the Biden administration’s efforts have had negligible effect. Meanwhile, the unannounced dissemination of migrants by bus and plane continues…  

Irregardless of the need for help at their borders, Governors Abbot, Ducey, and DeSantis, crowing about ‘owning the libs,’ is simply the behavior of old-fashioned bullies. Remember when the GOP began calling Joe Biden “Brandon,” meant as a slur? Thirty seconds after the Democrats embraced the “Brandon” meme, the rhetoric went away. That same tactic will work here. It is an effective way to deal with bullies. 

How do we ‘embrace’ this situation?

Request a busload of immigrants today! How could those three Republican governors refuse that request from Democratic mayors and governors across this country? To refuse would put them in the position of being the bad guys even among their own ranks. Not to be outdone, wouldn’t Republican mayors/governors participate?  

What are the benefits?

Besides tamping down the rhetoric, the benefits to this approach are enormous. A multitude of small groups of migrants will get vetted, processed, and, if qualified, into housing more quickly by spreading the process out across the country. Won’t this reduce stress on our single point of entry for the Immigration Service and lighten the load for our Border Patrol Agents? 

Once processed, these newly legal immigrants will need work. If you have not noticed, there is a labor shortage in America. What if they fill many of those jobs? Isn’t the labor shortage part of the problem with our supply chain? If we lessen the pressure on the supply chain, won’t that move us toward reducing inflation? 

By requesting migrants, the two warring factions will be forced to talk with each other. That would be great, right? Who knows what is possible if we start talking with, rather than at, one another? Immigration reform has been on the America’s legislative agenda for decades. By communicating and cooperating surely there is a workable compromise. 

The most important reason to do this

The most important reason to do this, however, is because it is the right thing to do. Isn’t this the humanitarian thing to do? Isn’t this what Democrats say they stand for? Ask yourself: Why should border states bear the entire brunt of the current migration deluge?  

Don’t we all chip in on things none of us can individually afford like roads, bridges, and schools? If each city and state carries some of the weight of this migratory influx, we can bear this load and ease this crisis. 

The goat eating my shirt  

When I was 6 or 7, my school class took a field trip to a farm. One of the sights on the farm was a pen with several goats meandering about and eating grass. I walked over to the fence to get a better look. They were cool looking animals. One of the goats meandered over to the fence eating grass. He, turns out it was a young Billy goat, continued to munch on grass along the fence until he got to me. This Billy goat sniffed around a bit at my hands grasping the wire fence and then, began chewing on my plaid shirttail sticking through the fence. In the blink of an eye, he had enough of my shirt in his mouth that I was pinned to the fence. I, of course, screamed in terror. Two teachers ran to the rescue. I peed my pants and the farmer laughed.  

What does this have to do with our current economic inflation?   

It is an allegory of sorts. In this story I represent the unsuspecting public. My shirt represents basic necessities. ‘We the People’ are, figuratively, peeing our pants over losing our shirts. The goat, representing inflation, cannot tell the difference between his grass and my shirt. The goat eats everything in sight regardless of who it belongs to.  

Economics is the study of scarcity. When there is more demand for goods and services than the market can supply, prices go up – hence the inflation goat. How did this happen? Whose fault is it that we have our faces pinned to the fence while we soil ourselves?  

Is this inflation caused by the government?  

If you listen to Republican politicians, Joe Biden and the Democrats created this mess with their reckless spending? If reckless governmental spending is the cause, what about the previous administration. During the time of the pandemic under Trump, I received two stimulus checks and exceedingly generous unemployment benefits even though I am self-employed. They gave away billions to businesses to keep them afloat. That is a lot of spending. Please note here that ‘reckless’ in the Official Buckley Republican Dictionary is defined as a “type of behavior associated only with Democrats.”  

If Joe and the Dems or Donnie and the Reps made this happen, then why is inflation global? The goat is eating all the kid’s shirts not just ours. Not only is the inflation global, but that goat is eating everyone else’s shirt about as much as it is ours. Neither Principal Joe, my social studies teacher, nor Mr. Donnie, who teaches Darwinian, Machiavellian Neoliberal Capitalism, can separate us from the goat. The school treasurer, Mr. Jerome Powell, has been successful in the past shooing away the goat by cutting off credit at the school store for all but the ones who do not need it. This succeeds in taking shirts away from all but the rich. Therefore, the goat has nothing to eat and dies of starvation. I know what you are going to say. How farfetched is that? Pretty draconian just to get rid of a goat? Does President Joe Biden and Fed Chair Jerome Powell really know what do about the goat? Would we have fared better under Trump, even with Powell’s help?   

If the teachers in this allegory do not appear to be responsible, what about us, the students?   

We have been cooped up in the house for the last two years. Even I got tired of sitting in front of the computer/TV, not allowed to go outside and play. Information abounded and vaccines were available in record time. We stayed home and hunkered down knowing this might take a while. Because we spent less, extra unemployment funds allowed millions of Americans time to evaluate their work situation and decide to try something else. That extra unemployment showed many other Americans they could afford to retire. After the interminable COVID bus ride, we jumped off the bus and ran for the fence. We started spending, resupplying depleted necessities, eating at restaurants, attending events, being social. Spending on goods and services ramped up abruptly. What did everyone think was going to happen? Who could blame us?  

Who is left to be responsible for the shirt eating goat? The farmer, Mr. Big Business?   

Our government supported big business with lots of taxpayer money to keep people employed and make sure there were enough supplies to keep us going during the pandemic.   

There is not a person alive who was an adult in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918. No one knows firsthand about living through a pandemic. Mr. Big had no more idea about what would work best than did governments or citizens/consumers. Typically, as a recession ends, consumer spending gradually returns to pre-recession levels, stimulating the economy. Jobs and production trail slightly behind until the economy returns to normal. So, when the COVID recession began, big corporations and businesses did what they would do for any recession, what they did for the last recession.  

This recession, however, was different. When consumer spending unexpectedly exploded, suppliers, with millions fewer workers available, found themselves unable to meet the challenge. Delta Airlines, for example, cancelled 100 flights today. They simply do not have enough pilots, flight attendants, and baggage handlers. Can we blame big business for not being prepared for this completely new situation?  

Is there no one to blame for the massive inflation we are experiencing?  

If you think about the goat story one more time, you will remember that the farmer laughed, like many big corporations bragging to their boards and shareholders about how much money they were making by gouging us consumers. What is their incentive to catch up with the supply side of the equation? Gouging consumers works, adding to their already record profits. The wholesale price of crude oil has continued to decline since April while gasoline prices have gone up because Big Oil refuses to increase production unless they are bribed with even more oil and gas leases on public lands.  

Where does that leave us?  

Government did what they thought best to blunt the effect of a pandemic to save lives, keep people from starving, and avoid letting the economy fall off a cliff. Consumers mostly complied with the program by staying in, spending less, and conserving more. Business did what they knew how to do for a recession. By doing what we all thought would get us through these troubled times inflation came, inevitably. That inflation was grossly exacerbated by capitalistic greed and hubris. It will subside only when supply catches up with demand. If economists look at this closely, they may discover how to prevent this in the future.   

Election 2022  

At present there are about 4 months until the next election. Inflation is likely to continue and be on our minds as we vote. When a bill to curb price gouging came up for a vote in the House of Representatives, every Republican voted against it. In the Senate, it could not get a vote because of Republican opposition. They do not want price gouging to end… until after the election. Their plan is to combat inflation by raising taxes on everyone but the rich.   

Inflation is not the only thing on the ballot in November. We will be voting on whether democracy will continue in America, whether we can reduce gun violence, whether we take necessary action to combat climate change, and whether women can make health decisions about their own bodies. All these things may, forever, be out of reach if Republicans take control of either house. Choose wisely.  

Put a BlueWave2022 magnet on your car.  

Our collective success is killing us.   

We, homo sapiens, may be evolutionarily the most successful species on earth. Dr. Paul Erlich warned us in “The Population Bomb” in 1970 with predictions of famine and starvation. That spawned “The Green Revolution” to increase crop yields and avert the disaster. The Green Revolution, in turn, manufactured its own plight. Those miraculous techniques that made more food available required more water and fertilizer. Today, aquafers in several places have become critically low while fertilizer run-off is polluting our surface supply of clean water. Now we are again facing famine and starvation exacerbated by lack of drinking water.  

There are 7.9 billion human life forms on earth. The United Nations projects that global population with reach 10.9 billion by 2100 with a growth rate close to zero. Let me help you understand the enormity of the problem. By the end of this century our populace will have increased the equivalent of another China… and India combined. All those individuals requiring food, clothing, and shelter.   

Today’s human residents use necessary resources faster than they can be recycled. Everything on this planet gets recycled. Recycled living things supply the energy that keeps the lights on, literally. Burning our ancestors is at the heart of the climate crisis wreaking havoc in all parts of the globe. This is the direct result of our collective success.  

One of the many traits bestowed upon us by evolution and accounting for our success is our intellectual capacity. We, more than any other species, have a knack and drive to solve problems. The inherent dilemmas in our evolutionary triumph can be remedied.  Throngs of scientists are already finding positive ways forward.  We can slow population growth to 0 and below. We can blunt and eventually end Climate Change.  

Between humankind and solutions to our self-made disasters, stands our individual success.  

The allocation of resources is the wall separating us and continued existence. According to Forbes Annual List there are 2153 billionaires with a total net wealth of $8.7T as in trillion dollars. That’s more wealth than more than half of earth’s population. It is not how much they have, but what they do with it.   

There are more billionaires in America than any other country in the world. If we are not an Oligarchy, we are Oligarchy adjacent. All these rich people and corporations pay lobbyists millions of dollars annually to influence tax legislation and make enormous contributions to Congressional and Senate candidates to that end. They have lobbied for and gotten subsidies, tax loopholes, and tax credits (the IRS sends you money even if you paid no taxes), sucking money out of the U.S. Treasury desperately needed to assuage our present quandaries.  

Their success is apparent. The IRS does not have the budget to enforce tax law and has been co-opted into only investigating poor and middle-class tax cheats, not the rich ones.  Public school budgets have been squeezed to make “School Choice” popular with voters to subsidize private education for rich children. The EPA can no longer enforce standards that keep major polluters from spewing toxins into our air and water. When they do enforce the rules, the fine is no more than chump change to them. At the heart of all this wealth, the Financial Industry has made it, once again, possible for the wealthy to drive the economy off a cliff in the name of greed (think 2008). They get bailed out, no one goes to jail while ordinary Americans lose their homes and credit ratings. When greed gets the rich in over their heads, they declare bankruptcy and shelter their assets from seizure while college graduates are not allowed the same relief from student debt.  

The wealthy have kept the minimum wage below poverty level and conducted a successful propaganda campaign to vilify the poor as lazy, as welfare cheats. They lobby to privatize Social Security and Medicare to get a slice of that tax revenue pie.  They are against paid vacations, paid sick leave, and childcare for their employees. They want to keep us poor, uneducated, and overwhelmed so we cannot fight back. Starting in 1980 with President Reagan, they began and continued a campaign to break unions’ power to protect workers. The 40-hour work week and time-and-one-half for overtime vanished. They were replaced with the Gig Economy where it is every person for themselves and no safety net. The rich and large corporations refuse to pay for bridges, roads, police, fire protection, or schools but expect first class protection from crime, prompt fire mitigation, smooth transportation, and first-class education at our expense.  To quote Robert Reich: It is welfare for the rich and capitalism for the poor.  

Right now, American corporations are exacerbating inflation by jacking up prices and bragging to their shareholders about it. The Wall Street casino has bid up the price of oil sending gasoline prices through the roof.  Very specifically, Charles Koch, a member of the 2153, is lobbying the Supreme Court of the United States to keep the EPA from regulating emissions from power plants so he can continue to make more money than he can possibly spend. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media refuse to initiate steps to take megaphones away from hate filled users. They do so for no other reason than greed. All those disparate voices have a Constitutional right to say whatever they want. A global megaphone is not among those rights. Rich corporations spend millions of dollars on lobbyists, on bribing politicians, on massive ad campaigns, on buying elections and influencing dictators to increase their wealth by further dividing us.  

The deluge of money into politics has corrupted every level of government and finally produced a political party promoting fascism and the end of democracy. The first shots of the coming civil war were fired on January 6 to preserve a wannabe dictator’s power.   

America is not the only country inflicted with this disease. Oligarchy is endemic with increasing infections everywhere in the world. Those increasingly greedy global oligarchs behave even worse than ours. Think Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, and 14 other armed conflicts around the world. Oligarchs (governmental or criminal) are killing citizens who refuse to pliably comply. I am sure you have seen the waves immigrants from Africa into Europe and the throngs of people at our southern border. Those are citizens leaving home because they refuse to obey and refuse to wait at home for death.  

Oligarchs are responsible for the monstrous war in Eastern Europe. One of the reasons Ukrainians continue to keep the Russian army at bay is because Putin and his cronies have been stealing from Russia’s military budget and buying cheap inadequate military equipment. Think 40-mile stalled convoy.   

Behind every dictator or strongman ruler are people of great wealth that keep them in power. Many autocrats are oligarchs themselves: Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsonaro, Assad, bin Salman, and Kim, to name a few. They murder and imprison those who disagree with them while robbing their countries blind.   

The International Monetary Fund is institutional oligarchy. Their stated mission is “working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.” But those lofty goals were meaningless in the Greek economic crisis a few years ago. The IMF made, as a condition of lending Greece money, that they cut their social safety net and benefits, including pensions, rather than raise and collect taxes on the rich. The IMF is pursuing the identical strategy in Argentina today requiring cuts to their safety net but not increased revenue by taxing the rich.  

Another institutional oligarchy is the World Economic Conference. The rich and powerful meet every four years in Davos, Switzerland to shape global, regional, and industrial agendas. They meet, ostensibly, to decide what to do about us peasants without paying any taxes or affecting their bottom lines, while convincing us they should continue to be in charge…  of everything.  

There will always be predators willing to take undue advantage of people and situations, willing to let people starve or die so they can thrive, willing to murder to improve their bottom line. There is no irradicating this disease, a far more pervasive and deadlier disease than Covid-19.  

The ELE or Extinction Level Event  

If left to the oligarchs, the Climate Crisis will continue unabated until we extinct ourselves. They think their money will save them from the dissolution of civilization through extreme climate events and rising sea levels, that it will preserve them when Putin or someone else, ends our Climate Crisis with a nuclear winter exclamation point!   

Unchecked, in the presence of an oligarch made, maintained, and exacerbated Climate Crisis, the disease of oligarchy is fatal… for all of us… everywhere. 

Thoughts too short to make up a whole diary.

Getting Everyone Vaccinated

The polls still clearly show there is a large percentage of people who do not wish to get vaccinated for COVID, large enough to keep us from reaching herd immunity.  This allows the virus to continue circulating and mutating until it figures out how to beat the vaccine.

What can we do about that?  Funny you should ask.  Civilization has all the tools it needs to push us into herd immunity.  It is called social pressure, the kind that formed civilization in the first place.

545,000 people have died so far.  If we get to the end of May and there are still so many vaccine scofflaws that herd immunity cannot be reached, then, do not patronize any business whose employees and owner are not fully vaccinated.  Business owners, do not continue to employ anyone who refuses to be vaccinated.  Light up Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok with these marching orders.

Individuals will still have the right to NOT get vaccinated.  They also have the right to go out of business or be permanently unemployable.  The choice is theirs.  In parenting, this is called tough love.

Voter ID

The new Covid Relief Bill is supported by more than 70% of Americans.  To my surprise, an equal portion of us supports Voter ID laws.  More Republicans favor Voter ID than Democrats, of course.  What a great opportunity to be bipartisan.  Craft a bill requiring Voter ID provided at no cost to voters.  Also include provisions to address automatic voter registration, vote by mail, campaign financing, gerrymandering, election security, ethics for federal officeholders, etc.  

Wait!  Aren’t all those additional provisions already in the For the People Act?  They are indeed!  Why not just amend the act with a completely funded Voter ID provision.  How many Republicans do you suppose will vote for it then?

Thanking Trump for Operation Warp Speed

Fox News has been ablaze with calls for President Biden to publicly thank Trump for Operation Warp Speed.  Trump should be thanked…  as many times and in the same manner as he thanked President Obama. One “Thank you” for one “Thank you”.

For example, Trump thanked Obama for a smooth transition.  President Biden did likewise with Trump.  Trump thanked Obama for leaving 142 judgeships unfilled.  In return Biden could thank Trump for not overthrowing the government of the United States.  He should only get one ‘thank you’ for each time he thanked Obama.  No more, no less.  Verification required.

I bet Jen Psaki would love to offer this up at her next press conference.

Seriously Thanking Trump

If our democracy survives the next four years without a hot Civil War and we are not stupid enough to reelect that would-be dictator (or someone like him), we will owe Donald Trump a great deal of thanks.  After all, he is the one who turned over the boulder that has publicly revealed all the corruption, decay, racism, and seething rage beneath America’s polished surface.

Without him as a catalyst would we ever have faced all those ugly things publicly, together, and decided to do something about it?  Just think about how much further we could kick that can down the road while looking the other way.  Perhaps, far enough to end America as we know it forever.

The Filibuster

There are not enough votes in the Senate to do away with the filibuster entirely.  Joe Manchin (D-WV), who is against ditching the filibuster, wants to revert the procedure to actually having to talk against bringing a bill to a vote until you stop or drop.  I personally don’t think that will fix anything because it will still take 60 votes to produce cloture (cut off debate on the bill).  Karen Tumult has a better idea, in her Op-ed “Want to fix the filibuster? All it takes is guts” (Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, 3/19/21).  She proposes the filibuster be returned to its roots.  Not only does someone have to talk for hours and hours, but all Senators must be present for the occasion, not off fundraising or doing other business.  She sites that previous leaders of the Senate had Senators arrested for not showing up.  They could be again.  If they all have to be present, the talking marathon will get on everyone’s nerves and force a vote.  Mandatory attendance can be done by Senate Majority Leader Schumer without changing the Senate rules at all, but does he have the guts?

Riding the Wave

With the Civil Rights Act, the National Organization of Women, protests and violence of the late 60’s and early 70’s, it looked like racism was on the wane and women were on the rise.  The gains women and blacks made, however, turned out to be little more than tokens.  In the interim some gains remained.  Others were undermined.  Others quashed altogether.  Black or female CEO’s and corporate board members have increased little since then.  Unions were gutted by Reagan and others.  The worker rights of Roosevelt’s New Deal were rolled back.  The middle class got hollowed out, the result of embracing Neo Liberal Economics.  Women were marginalized, racism quietly rose.  Economic inequality grew to its greatest extent.  We did elect a black President but the backlash to that resulted in the last 4 years.  

This time seems different.  There is great hope that substantial strides toward equality may be in the offing.  It is time for all of us to paddle out and catch the wave. See you on the shore!

It is no secret that we, in America, are as divided as we have ever been since the civil war.  We may already be in another civil war.  The next few months will show us whether all the FBI alerts for domestic terrorism are backed by serious people rather than people more like Trump, all talk. The great partisan divide will continue nevertheless until we address the issues that have created this gap. 

It has taken us several decades to find ourselves on the two sides of this great divide.  We will not close this gap overnight.  Even if we act with the same determination and vision as when building the interstate highway system, it will likely take a decade or more.   If we wait to start, however, the chasm will continue to grow until real shooting in the streets finally breaks out.

Four of the last 5 Presidents (Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton) ran for office promising to bring us together.  The divide was greater at the end of each administration than at its beginning (Obama, Bush, Clinton).  Obviously, none of these men seriously knew how to bring us together because they all have the same idea of what “bringing us together” is: Asking the other side to help and then further shutting them out when they don’t.  This kind of action only addresses the symptom not the cause(s).  Trump isn’t mentioned here because he was out there with a wedge and a sledgehammer willfully making the divide worse.

This division we are experiencing is a complex thing.  I am sure I do not know more than a few causes out of many.  The white majority has been declining since the 1960’s.  By 2045 whites will officially no longer be more that 50% of the population.  That cause of division cannot be changed.  To do #1 (see list in picture), addresses a symptom.  To do #2 (see list in picture) addresses our divide at the causal level.  Here are a few more things we need to do to begin to heal the soul of this nation.

Redistricting

Redistricting is a process that takes place every ten years following the national census whereby each individual state reapportions their congressional districts based on its new population figures.  Population increases in some places and decreases in others.  That determines the number of representatives that get elected and sent to Washington from each state.  State legislatures have been gerrymandering legislative districts since the word ‘gerrymander’ was coined in the early 1800’s.  Gerrymandering is drawing congressional district lines to produce a permanent majority of representatives from the ruling party at both the state and federal level.  In over 260 of the 435 congressional contests every two years, candidates run unopposed by someone from the other party, the result of gerrymandering.  In these districts the primary decides who wins the election.  In left candidate only districts the array of candidates covers the spectrum from liberal to communist and in right candidate only districts the gamut is from conservative to fascist.  In both instances the primary candidate needs to be balanced between moderate and radical, not between conservative and liberal.  Unopposed liberals position themselves further to the left to get elected, unopposed conservative candidates to the right.  This tends to eliminate moderate candidates and skew the politics toward the radical over time. This serves to further widen the gap by allowing elected representatives to pick their constituents, exactly opposite of what it should be.

In 2010 the Republicans captured 32 state governments and proceeded to gerrymander themselves into a permanent majority.  There have been a number of lawsuits launched and decided on this topic.  According to Common Cause nine states have instituted ‘non-partisan’ boards to manage redistricting.  In the remaining 41 states the party in charge does the redistricting.  Partisan redistricting only divides us further.  This problem must be solved if we are to begin to heal the rift in America. 

The Fairness Act

Prior to 1987 the FCC in regulated news programming using the Fairness Doctrine which required TV and radio broadcasters to give equal time to all sides of a political or social issue.  In 1987 congress tried to put that requirement into law. President Reagan vetoed the bill.  Since the doctrine did not apply to cable TV, when Fox News came along in the 90’s, there was no such requirement.  They didn’t provide equal time for all sides.  Other news outlets followed their lead.

Now the public could get ‘news’ that only expressed their point of view.  As a result we began to silo into one camp or another.  The news, just like our districts, in order to reach more and more viewers on their end of the political spectrum, needed to position themselves further from the center widening the divide.

If we enact a Fairness Act that requires ALL purveyors of news to provide equal time for all sides of any issue, once again news from the other end of the political spectrum will get into each news silo, each information bubble.  Hearing all sides of an issue tends to moderate one’s position.  This will reduce the gap further.

Anonymity/Transparency

 Anonymity is rarely used for positive or charitable purposes. Remaining anonymous is generally associated with hiding while doing something illegal, immoral, or downright despicable. 

Being anonymous covers the wide spectrum from posting fake photos on a dating app to Russians anonymously running radically different political sites to whip up anger, fear, and animosity for ‘the other side’ and further divide us.  Between ‘fake dating pics’ and fake sites designed to divide are internet trolls, buying and selling guns illegally, human trafficking, child porn, phishing for personal IDs, cyber bullying, blaming innocent people for things they did not do, moneyed interests avoiding taxes or influencing an election with misleading ads and commercials…  This anonymity is another wedge dividing us.  It is an enormous factor in our distrust of one another.

The opposite of anonymity is transparency.  In order to bring us closer together we need to dismantle anonymity and build transparency.  Here are a number of things we can do to reduce opacity and increase clarity.

All charities and super PACs should be required to disclose all donors.  All websites, Facebook accounts, Twitter (including bots) accounts should be accompanied by a real picture and name of the person responsible for its operation. All corporate entities should list names of real people who operate them.  If they are owned by other corporations (i.e., shell companies), they should be traceable back to the originators, officers, participants.

Let’s make GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) spend some of the billions they have accumulated in profits during this pandemic to make sure no one on any of their platforms is anonymous.  While we’re at it lets include the new titans: Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Parler, etc.  The owner/operator/account holder’s actual picture, name, and state (or country of origin) should appear on every page of each and every one of their accounts.  Every post should be accompanied with this same information.  “Q” would have to reveal himself/herself. 

This is not a breach of our right to free speech.  You may still say whatever you want to say any time you want to say it, but now, you would have to be responsible for the utterance and deal with the consequences. 

All these things will help knit us back together.  By fixing redistricting we increase the power of the voter to change what is wrong.  By enacting fairness in news media we more completely inform voters to aid them in choosing representatives.  By erasing anonymity we ferret out wrong doing, shady dealing, and misinformation making it easier to see what is really happening around us.  All these things will allow us to really see each other.  That’s a good thing, right?

The Red States are red precisely because the Democratic Party has failed them.  Most of the good jobs are in big cities.  Away from cities the dearth of jobs continues to hollow out small towns and communities.  Corporate farms are squeezing out small farmers.  Store fronts are empty because fewer people generate less commerce.  Less commerce means a smaller tax base.  Reduced tax dollars take a toll on infrastructure.  

Rural America knows how to meet most of their needs by themselves.  Some things, however, will make a great difference in American lives there.  Infrastructure, Jobs, Medical Care.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure means bridges and streets and garbage pick-up among other things.  It needs to be addressed everywhere but especially in Red State America.  

In the age of technology infrastructure also includes the internet.  There are swaths in the middle of this country where effective cell service is non-existent, larger swaths that do not have access to high-speed internet.  Bad cell service and lack of high-speed internet stands in the way of creating jobs that require both in an area already plagued by unemployment.

America needs another “Interstate Highway” type project to put geostatic communications satellites in place to provide these necessary services for the interior of this country. The satellites can pay for themselves by being leased to ISP’s and cell providers.

In the post pandemic era, more and more work and communications will be online.  Bringing high-speed internet and blanket cell service to middle America will create employment opportunities.

Jobs

According to USA Today, following the great recession in 2008, a vast majority of new jobs went to cities.  Rural areas lag behind cities by more than 4% in creating new jobs while, statistically, maintaining a higher percentage of self-employed business proprietors.  The employment disparity is noteworthy.  Is it any wonder that anger, fear, frustration, and rebellion are brewing in Red America?

If you look at the table shown in “Updated employment multipliers for the U.S. Economy”, creating 100 direct jobs in any major category (i.e., durable manufacturing, utilities, etc.) will create between 134 and 957 additional new jobs.

Commerce online, following the great pandemic, will only accelerate. If the pandemic has taught us anything, there are a multitude of jobs that can be done from anywhere.  So, why not reach out to the dying and dilapidated small towns across this great land and make those jobs available there?  Why not build small solar and wind farms to supply electricity to lots of sparsely populated rural areas at a price they can afford?

In the next decade or so, Additive Manufacturing will produce larger and larger portions of what we consume.  These plants can be built and operated anywhere, but considerably more cheaply in rural areas.  How do we populate the center of the country with this technology?  Business entities and corporations need to be encouraged to create outposts in smaller towns and cities by making a physical presence there and hiring local people to work for them.  Office space abounds.

Creating jobs in rural America will, in turn, create even more jobs and better infrastructure.  Dying towns will revive.  Communities will grow. Peace will ensue.

Medical Care

The NIH has noted that people in these areas don’t live as long by more than three years and the gap is increasing.  People in rural America are dying at higher rates from heart disease, cancer, lower respiratory disease, stroke, and unintentional injuries.  Opioid addiction continues to rise but more significantly in rural areas.  Why is that?  Both the CDC and NCBI agree that access to quality, affordable health care is the cause of this situation.  But how do we address this problem?

Little quality health care exists in rural America for the same reason that high-speed internet and cell service are poor:  there’s no money in it!  The most obvious solution to this challenge is Universal Single Payer Healthcare and a massive expansion of the VA system of hospitals and clinics across the interior of America.  Americans are dying. How can we not afford to do this?

Urgency

The insurrection on January 6 failed in its attempt to overturn the presidential election.  Unless the Senate convicts Trump in this second impeachment trial, January 6 will happen again.  Next time the attackers will be more organized and better armed.  

We find ourselves here because both Democrats and Republicans have failed us. Millions of Americans are out of work.  The rates of suicide and opioid addiction are climbing.  Good medical care is scarce or non-existent in a large swath of America. Thousands of small towns have more vacant buildings than occupied.  The pandemic is killing 2500 Americans a day.  The vaccine roll out is a disaster.  Climate change is creating 100-year storms and droughts every few years. battering the entire planet making many places in America practically unlivable.

We are at a crossroads.  Only with bold action now will we have the slimmest chance to redeem our democracy.  Without serious headway on all these issues, the forces that would destroy our American experiment will win.

All that is America depends on taking bold action now.

Mitch McConnell broke with tradition when he denied President Obama his pick to replace Antonin Scalia with Merrick Garland.  It was high hypocrisy to replace RBG with Amy Coney Barrett after firmly, and repeatedly, vowing to never confirm a Supreme Court Justice in a Presidential Election year.  This was extremely unfair but well within Republicans’ rights to do both.  They controlled the Senate.  It may have been a naked power grab on their part, but they broke no laws, violated no Senate rules.  

What can be done?

“Expand the Court to 11 Justices” has been bandied about in the news media as a solution for Democrats.  That would be a purely political move.  Nothing wrong with that.  It is what the Republicans did.  In the last election the Republicans called that idea ‘packing the Court’ and used it as a cudgel to beat the predicted Democratic tsunami into a ripple.

Besides the divisiveness of the idea, there is a problem with ‘expanding the Court to 11’.  Republicans will do the same the next time they are in power.  Then the Democrats, then the Republicans. In a decade or so there will be 121 Justices, only serving to further degrade the Court’s stature in America as an independent, non-partisan voice.  Eventually, no one will trust the Court’s judgement in matters of Constitutionality.  If we expand the Court to eleven, we kill the effectiveness of another institution of democracy.

We could go the other direction and reduce the court to 7.  The two longest serving members, Thomas and Alito, would be required to retire.  However, with political divisiveness still in play, tit-for-tat will follow.  The number of justices will go up and down like a seesaw.  The Supreme Court, as a trusted institution, still bites the dust.

Reform the Federal Justice System

Our current situation was produced, in part, by a Supreme Court Justice (RBG) dying in office.  A Republican Senate denied hundreds of lifetime judicial appointments to Democratic President Obama and confirmed hundreds under Trump…  because they could.  In the Georgia run-off election in January if either Republican is elected, hundreds of lifetime judicial appointments will again be denied, this time to President Biden.

The problem here is that federal judges are appointed for life.  They have no retirement age or date.  They only leave office when they die or choose to retire.  Filling vacancies, then, becomes serendipitous, whimsical with no sense of urgency or purpose beyond winning.  If we change this one thing, it will not only solve the problem at hand, but reduce the incessant squabbling between the President and the Senate over judicial appointments because it will happen with regularity and without fail.

How it works

Each President of the United States will fill 1 Supreme Court seat and 172 other federal judgeships without fail.  One federal judgeship will be eliminated (there are 861 other federal judgeships).  The longest serving Justice will retire as will the longest serving 20% of Federal judges.  That translates to a complete turnover of the Supreme Court every 36 years (every 20 years for other federal judges).  It will be mandated by legislation that all retiring judgeships be filled during each presidential term without fail.  Deaths and voluntary retirements will continue to be handled as they are now.

The President will nominate 3 candidates for the Supreme Court.  The Senate, through hearings, will confirm one by Independence Day.  This process is to take place at the beginning of the second year of each term of each president.  Other federal judge appointments will take place over the course of the term but be confirmed by the end of that term.

In practice, then, in January 2022, President Biden would nominate 3 candidates for the Supreme Court.  The Senate, through hearings, would confirm one by the 4^th of July.  Thomas, the longest serving Justice, would retire.  This returns to the balance on the Court prior to Gorsuch and Barrett.  Biden must get re-elected or succeeded by a Democrat to change the balance of the court.  What could be farer?

This is not a political move.  It allows each President, regardless of party, to appoint a Supreme Court Justice and have them confirmed regardless of the political balance in the Senate.  Since it is mandated to happen without fail, it will eliminate delays and Senate technicalities.  Since it happens every 4 years, it will become the regular work of the Senate further reducing the friction over the process.  Since 20% of the judicial appointments happen without fail every 4 years, there is no drive to dominate the courts for decades to come.

This all becomes possible if Democrats secure both Georgia Senators and then, kill the filibuster.