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Chapter 30
Beyond Plutocracy

Capitalism, the market economy, is our best form of economic relationship. At its best it promotes freedom of action and interaction, motivates personal and local decision making, creativity, improvement, entrepreneurship, and productivity; and it creates much wealth. But an unbridled capitalism that reigns supreme concentrates excessive power and wealth into the hands of ruthless, greedy elites within and among nations who then create, populate, and use self-serving governments to exploit the rest of the populace and override the common good. Unbridled capitalism often plays nations and people against one another in a most underhanded way in search of its Holy Grail: maximum growth and profit and minimum responsibility no matter what the environmental and human costs. Creating constitutions, governments, laws, rules, and economic entities that cause the fruit of the labor of millions to be taken from them and handed to the sly, cunning, manipulative few is economic rape, and it becomes, at its worst, economic terrorism.

Everywhere today, American elites who exploit our own populace conduct business with elites of other nations who exploit their populaces. One method used among others, political and economic elites agitate and manipulate religious and moral conservatives and others to achieve their self-serving ends. And the politically and economically excluded and exploited use whatever means that are available to them, including religion, to fight back or fight for inclusion. Thus, once or at least potentially peaceful religions become radical, polarized instruments of political-economic and ultimately physical warfare.

Fanatic religious and other extremist and terrorist groups spring up like mushrooms and are empowered worldwide because we drive people to them. Insurrection and revolution within nations and now international terrorism are the result of fundamental injustice. Hatred and rage come from long experience of violence done against one in one form or another including economic violence.

Attempting to harden and protect an unjust state and its populace against insurrection and terrorism that can come from any direction at any time is enormously costly, inefficient, and destructive to personal freedom and the social fabric. When it ultimately fails and a nuclear bomb, poison gas, or infectious organism is successfully let loose on the nation and it retaliates by vaporizing… well, you choose your worst escalating nightmare. To think one can take everything from everyone else and take one’s way in everything and then live in peace with them or militarily hold them at bay forever is pure folly.

The notion that the West in general and America in particular are fostering democracy and individual freedom within themselves and around the world is also pure folly. Not being true democracies themselves but only plutocracies, the most powerful, wealthy nations are really only attempting to push a worldwide plutocratic empire unto a reluctant world. They are trying to create a worldwide plutocracy in which they reign supreme by sufficiently and permanently politically, economically, and militarily rendering everyone else everywhere else subservient to them.

Even as they engage in this immorality it must be said, wealthy nations are not inherently more evil than are others. All current nations, great and small, are authoritarian plutocracies that practice some good and much evil, each in its own way and as it sees its own interests. While great powers are capable of and all too often engage in great evil, some of the world’s worst atrocities are conducted by some of its poorest nations. And everywhere religious and other groups immorally attempt to shove their values and systems down the throats of others by brute force.

The best way to fight terrorism is to not create the terrorist, the insurrectionist, or the revolutionary in the first place. The best way to do that is to create inclusive, just, equitable governments, societies, and relationships within and among nations that do not drive individuals and nations to anger, rage, desperation, and violence. Political-economic inclusion, justness, and equity attract people toward the current state, taking the wind out of the sails of radicals.

There will always be some level of competition and disagreement among us. That is only natural and even healthy. But we now exist at an extreme and in an extreme state of illness. We currently function at the level of three year olds fighting over the toys while our world spins increasingly out of control. It is time for us to grow up.

 

Historically, government design has long been improving. Continuing to improve it should not be considered radical or unwise. We Americans have now had over two hundred years to see and we must finally admit that while the founders got much right what they got wrong is terribly wrong. It is time and over time to improve yet again and improve very fundamentally the design of our government. This is so for all of the world’s governments.

The government design offered in this book represents the minimal partial redesign of current governments that gets the job done, that actually moves us beyond plutocracy. Anything less merely rearranges the furniture, merely reorganizes the plutocracy a bit while keeping it firmly in place. The design presented here creates a new kind of relationship within and among nations that takes us well beyond our current dominance, authoritarianism, and plutocracy. It facilitates peaceful, equitable, humane relationships among just nations, each possessing a demos practicing consensus democracy as part of its governing structure. Simply because people participating within a demos in each nation will not permit such conditions to exist, it makes possible a worldwide free trade that does not exploit local conditions of tyranny and misery to unduly fatten the lives of distant others. Everyone will fairly benefit from the trade.

Notice that no mention is made here of a sovereign world government, a decidedly dangerous entity. We have merely the association of and agreements among free, sovereign nations, each possessing a demos and a just, equitable political-economic system.

This government design takes us into a new national and world order that is worthy of the word new. Almost miraculously, all of this is gained simply by including within our current governments a modest measure of just the right kind of true democracy.

 

To date, we have not managed to overcome dominance by the few and our authoritarian, plutocratic forms of government. But someday, if we do not self-destruct first, we will transcend our current state. Rule by dominance, oppression, and exploitation is inherently unstable. It carries within itself the seed of its own destruction. We possess an inborn need to be free and treated fairly. We never cease trying to overthrow injustice and abuse. We dream of and work toward a more just, happy, and peaceful way of being in this world. We do not mouth empty words but truly seek kinder, gentler nations and a new world order.

Our inability to date to correct the distributions of power and wealth in America (and elsewhere) may be taken as a measure of the ignorance, division, and apathy within the many, and, indeed, among all of us. Those among us who hate and feud with each other—those within various racial and ethnic groups; the political and religious liberals, conservatives, and fundamentalists; those of differing genders, orientations, and lifestyles; the rich and the poor—must loosen their fanatical grips on their cherished divisions, hatreds, and fears.

To counteract the many forces pulling us apart, we desperately need a force which brings us together and sets our nation aright. We must come together at least to an extent sufficient to create and participate effectively in a true democratic process within a demos. The only way that we may fulfill our promise and reach and sustain our fullest potential as a people and a nation is to create within our government at long last the true democracy and the just balance of power that we now only profess.

A nation divided cannot stand. A momentary, patriotic upsurge in the face of crisis and war should not be confused with the ongoing love and pulling together that would come from true democracy and justice and the political and economic inclusion of everyone. Even as America reaches its pinnacle of power and wealth, it suffers severe cracks in its foundation and the beginning of decline. Our very freedom is in decline. We are a nation of the blind leading the blind, and we have, indeed, fallen into a ditch. We are at odds both with each other and with the larger world community. Polarization, hatred, rage, and discord abound. Our nation is being torn asunder. America must become just, or it will perish.

A world divided cannot stand. Not just an ideal, we must someday become a community of just nations … or we will die. Meanwhile, we live in a purgatory of physical and economic warfare and terrorism, and we remain a crippled caricature of our fullest human potential. We will continue to suffer our current purgatory or worse so long as we do not achieve justness, inclusion, and equity within and among nations.

It has the means, and, were it not so blind, America could become the world’s first truly just nation and a light unto the world. But, as we are now, we can only show that part of the world which needs and accepts our guidance the way from hell to purgatory. We cannot show the way to heaven for we have not yet found our own way. We have mastered the creation and accumulation of wealth, but we are spiritually bankrupt. Inclusion, justice, and brotherhood remain but dreams. In truth, in our current state, we merely attempt to impress plutocracy the American way onto a reluctant world. We cannot serve as a model of true democracy and just governance for the world. True democracy and just governance are lights we do not yet possess.

 

Article V of the Constitution of the United States of America gives us the means to alter the Constitution, but our right to amend it and even to tear it up and create a whole new constitution and government comes from an entirely more fundamental source. That source was beautifully proclaimed and appealed to in The Declaration of Independence which was signed by some of the same people who created and signed the Constitution:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Well said, don’t you think? We have unalienable rights; governments are instituted to secure these rights; governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and when a government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right and the duty of the people to alter or abolish it and institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

It is ironic that the very people who embraced such weighty ideas and lofty ideals created a plutocratic form of government which prevented most of the people living under it from directly participating in any of the decisions which determine the conditions under which they must live. It is the height of duplicity for them to have claimed that their government derived its powers from the consent of the governed when they deliberately excluded the vast majority of the population from even participating in the government that they created.

Given the opportunity that most people living in those times were denied and most people living in our times are still denied, we would not have then and certainly should not now give our consent to their self-serving, wealth-serving government! “We the people” have suffered enough under their unjust government!

The wrongs that they did in their time we can and should set right in our time to achieve at long last a proper balance of real power and a fair and just measure of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for everyone. It is time and over time to move beyond their plutocracy and create a more perfect union.

 

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