The Real State of the Union

The Real State of the Union

My fellow Americans, I must begin by apologizing to you for failing to keep my promises to you, and for choosing the wrong people to lead us out of the disaster I inherited from my predecessor. While I have no excuse, you should understand that my elitist education and recent political career have unfortunately isolated me from the realities plaguing the lives of ordinary Americans. My task this evening is to assure you the I have gotten the message – that I will henceforth dedicate my life and my presidency to the task of restoring our democracy and the quality of life for everyone, not just for the privileged few.

I am sure you realize that this will not be easy, for either of us. For openers, though, I must insist, in the strongest possible terms, that it is time for the American public to stop acting and thinking like frightened, angry children. We can only find our way out of this dilemma as adults. Adults understand that they are responsible for cleaning up their own messes; they understand that risk is a part of life, that no government can guarantee that they will always be protected from the determined efforts of suicidal enemies; they understand that freedom carries awesome responsibilities, including the need to be fully informed and rationally motivated by that knowledge; they understand that liberty can never be license to do whatever one wishes without proper concern for the consequences of our behavior on others.

Most of you know that I worked for some time in Community Organizing. One of the fundamental tenets of that activity is that we are always trying to construct a type of social structure; like most structures, this one has a front door and a back door. We might say that, in Community Organizing, people with needs (some quite urgent and even desperate) come in through the front door and people with values (primarily, those which result in economic and social justice) come in through the back door. Now, my personal belief is that, when we strip away misinformation and fearful generalizations, we will find that a very large majority of Americans can be counted in one or both of those two groups. Again, those with needs and those with human values constitute a large majority. Lest there be any doubt, however, there are Americans who are not in either group. Since I have no concern about offending them, I will categorically state right now that those people have social values that would embarrass a hyena, and there is no need to include them in our discussion. They need to be marginalized and rendered powerless, one way or another, if our beloved country, humanity itself and even the planet are to have any future worth contemplating.

All of which begs the question: what should we be doing? If we can galvanize and organize this majority, what might we ask them to support? For openers, we need to understand that the economic models that got us into this condition will never get us out of it. I began by apologizing for choosing the wrong people to lead us back from the brink of disaster. The reason they are the “wrong people” is that they have spent their lives operating in a system which has outlived its usefulness. You might say, if you'll forgive the bad pun, that they were and are invested in it. If you look at that word, it's obvious that someone who is “in a vest' might well have difficulty “seeing” well. We have a saying, “he was invested in the idea, couldn't see the adverse consequences.” Yet, as Einstein once noted, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

So, the first thing we need is new economic models. Interestingly enough, the field of Economics has recently (finally!) been expanding its vision, having less emphasis on the “rational actor” and the self-regulating nature of unregulated markets, and spending more time and attention on the irrational, emotional elements of economic behavior that don't submit so easily to reductionist formulas. Now, remember, I am talking about new economic models, which excludes old ideas like communism and socialism. Big anything is potentially bad news. Big government is as vulnerable to corruption and incompetence as big business.

Speaking of Big Government, the issue is not, and should never be the size of government. What we should be debating is the proper role of government, its function. For the last thirty years, thanks to the demagoguery of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, we have been devolving back to a medieval concept of government – that it exists only to protect and enhance the wealth and privileges of the few at the expense of the many. Feudalism, if you will. Until 1980, our idea of the function of government had been evolving toward its proper role – to protect the weak and helpless from the predations of the powerful – to promote and facilitate economic and social justice. Like any large, powerful institution, government must be transparent and responsive to the people. Not to money, or the economic elite, or to any “special interests,” but to the people. As I noted earlier, this can only be accomplished by an intelligent, well-educated, well-informed, politically active electorate. If you look around you, the absence of such an electorate can only have disastrous results. We are living with those results.

There is plenty of room for a vigorous national discussion about what the new economic models might look like, but the first thing we have to recognize is that there will never be enough good jobs again. Never. Automation, outsourcing, and especially the need to cut back on consumption and environmental degradation – no amount of educational reform can create jobs where they don't exist. Moreover, in a world of rising population and diminishing resources we should be rewarding those who are willing to lead a simpler lifestyle, not punishing them. Up until now, we have based our economic system on an egregious extortion: work or die. We have refused, from its inception to endorse the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, precisely because it mandates economic Human Rights (food, clothing, shelter, education and healthcare) whether one can pay the market price or not. If we had followed the lead of Franklin Roosevelt, who was preparing before his untimely death to propose an economic Bill of Rights (freedom from want, among others), we would have removed the power of the extortion.

The time has come to join the civilized world and recognize these basic rights/needs. As I noted earlier, this need not be accomplished with Socialism, a term which is bandied about by ignorant people who don't seem to understand that Socialism was conceived as a means of providing universal access to basic necessities, not as the end. It is an economic model that proposes to transfer control of “the means of production” from private ownership to the government in order to prevent oligarchs from taking more than their fair share of the profits. You may have noticed that most of the “means of production” are no longer located in America, and that recent events have required the government to assume effective control, if not outright ownership of a large portion of the means that are still here to prevent them from self-destructing.

Yet, despite government ownership, there is no citizen participation in that ownership. I would like to suggest here that our discussion of new economic models should start with the idea of People's Capitalism, with citizen participation in the ownership of our mutual assets. We have the necessary technology, we have a precedent provided by a Republican Administration, we lack only the willingness to implement the program. If every citizen owned minimal shares in a national Mutual Fund (something like the CalPers program that invests for many California Public Employees), we could provide basic necessities as dividend distributions from that
Fund. Then, work could be chosen as a means of providing a better life for oneself or ones family, or even as a means of creating a better world. Work chosen is life enhancing. America is already heaven for those who work because they want to not because they have to.

In conclusion, then, I ask you to consider carefully what I have proposed. Those who are old enough will remember that Reagan and his advisors promoted the idea of a “Silent Majority” (most of whom were silent because they were ashamed of their racism, misogyny and resentment toward those who were unwilling or unable to “play the game”), and rode it into the White House and set in motion thirty years of social devolution. Recently we have learned that they are not so “silent.” Even the possibility of restoring government to its rightful role has frightened and angered them, as well it might. Ignorance and fear are the ultimate “potting soil” for the worst kind of demagoguery. The last time the world was brought to its knees by the titans of finance, only Roosevelt saved us from the Fascism that seized much of the developed world.

Regarding my previous comments about the potential majority of those with needs and those with values, I would like to suggest that it is time to galvanize and organize a Decent Majority, composed of those who know that a better world is possible if we are willing to work to create it. Will you join me?