Announcing an Innovative, Comprehensive Social Advancement Agenda that Can End Our Dark Times

Los Angeles police ignore tent residents “stopped” for months under the “NO STOPPING ANY TIME” signs because the homeless shelters and jails are full.

Imagine a nation where prosperity is equitably shared and its government is genuinely of, for, and by the people. When a critical mass of people demands the implementation of an extensive public policy advancement agenda, we can turn that vision into reality.
America was born in the Age of Enlightenment. Enlightenment ideals demand a rebirth.

Now is the time for a New Enlightenment Era

What are people saying about The New Enlightenment?

ROBERT POLLIN, Ph.D., Economist, One of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers.”  Read more.
JAMES B. STEWART, Ph.D., Economist, National Economic Association Former President.  Read more.
MICHAEL ASH, Ph.D., Economist, One of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers.”  Read more.
JANELLE ORSI, Attorney, “Remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation,” American Bar Association. Read more. 

More comments on The New Enlightenment on the Endorsements page.

Available 2024

Read the Introduction

The Ways to Prosperity for All and a Genuine Democracy

If you believe that our economic and political systems require fundamental advancements, you will find this website and my books interesting, and I hope much more—inspiring and useful. If you would be satisfied with minor economic and political system reforms, you will not be interested in my work.

If instituted, the political system advancements I detail will create a better-functioning democracy than has ever existed in a large society. A well-functioning democracy will enable us to institute my proposed economic system advancements that will eliminate poverty, create a large dominant middle class, and bring democracy into the workplace.

Our nation’s birth was an integral part of the Age of Enlightenment when aristocratic societies were made more egalitarian and democratic. A New Enlightenment era must now begin, this time to radically advance the conditions of all races and genders. Read more.

21ST CENTURY AMERICA

The lack of a sense of fairness and empathy and the oppressive behaviors of the elites who motivated the American Revolution were due to their extreme wealth and power. They were inherently just as likely to behave with a sense of entitlement and disregard for others as anyone from the general population would be in their position.

Corporate elites’ character preexisting their rise to power is due to the motives to be at the top of large corporations and the requirements to get and be there. They are our nation’s most rapacious and ruthless pursuers of personal wealth and power. Read more.

The famously extravagant wealth and income of the “roaring twenties” plutocrats was little compared to our plutocrats’ wealth and income.

Extreme and Growing Economic and Political Inequalities Threaten Our Nation’s Survival
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Our Descent Into Darkness Can End

Technological Advancements Enabled Historically High Productivity

A well-functioning democracy would have ensured that our unprecedented productive capacity enabled everyone to meet their material needs easily. Instead, in the wealthiest nation in history, the U. S., 64% could not meet their basic needs if they miss one paycheck, and 38 million live in poverty.

The graph’s “Productivity” line is a measure of the value produced per workhour and “Hourly compensation” is for the typical nonsupervisory worker.

Why every American needs to understand this graph’s significance. Read more

Productivity and Pay, 1948-2018

(Hover over line to get data point values) Data: Economic Policy Institute

As our political system's functioning declined, a small elite’s share of national income boomed

Large corporations’ managers benefited massively from the profit boom created by the growing value generated by their employees. About 2/3 of our top 0.1% in income are top corporate managers. They are empowered to create extraordinary degrees of social harm. Reasons exist to be concerned about their power and character. Read more.

Average Income Ratio: Top 0.1%/Bottom 90% & Confidence in Congress

When stock prices rise, owners of stocks benefit.

Who owns stocks?

The public indeed owns public companies, but the top 1% own more than the rest of us combined and 16 times the amount 80% of Americans own.

73% of workers prefer to work for an employee-owned company rather than one owned by external shareholders. If most businesses were worker-owned and controlled, the wealth and income inequality reduction and other social benefits would be immense. See how we can accomplish this.

(I did not include a bar representing the .003% portion of public company value owned by the bottom 50% because you would not be able to see it.)

Percent Owned of “Public” Company Stock Market

A Small Elite Has Captured Massive Wealth Generated by Our Society

Wealth inequality is as extreme as this graph displays primarily because corporate ownership grotesquely favors a small elite. The 13,000 households in the top .01% have an average wealth of $608 million.

So you can see the $79,200 average wealth of households in the bottom 50%, I multiplied it by 500.

As a result of four centuries of systemic racism, Black families’ median wealth is about one-tenth that of white families. No progress has been made in reducing wealth inequalities between black and white households over the past 70 years. Read more.

Average Household Wealth by Wealth Percentile Groups, $Millions

The 2019 data graphed is from a Federal Reserve wealth survey. The vast inequality shown continued to boom. Based on Forbes data, U.S. billionaire wealth increased by $1.6 trillion, or 55%, from 3/18/20 to 7/9/21.

Click here for more graphs on the results of economic system dysfunction

Now Is The Time for a New Enlightenment

Extreme Inequalities Are Tearing
Our Social Fabric and
Harming Our Health

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One Way the Wealthy Captured Our Political System: Campaign Contributions

Democracies make real the preferences of the majority on social issues. Among the most significant of them is how the society’s systems divide what the society produces among its members both through tax and public expenditure systems and the fundamental character of economic systems. The extreme and growing inequality within nations worldwide indicates a widespread failure and continuing decline of democratic functioning—but in the developed world, the problem is most severe in the U.S.

Top 0.01%’s Share of All Campaign Spending with Their Share of All Income, 1980-2016

After elections end, policymakers’ offices are overrun by high-paid lobbyists providing information and advocacy to serve corporate managers and major owners’ interests.

The pharmaceutical industry spent $4.7 billion on lobbying between 1998 and June 2021, more than any other industry.  As a result, tens of millions of adults cannot pay for needed drugs. High drug prices that have contributed to the death of millions.

Drugs are cheap to manufacture, and R & D costs far from account for the difference in average manufacturing and retail costs. Without patent’s promise of monopoly pricing power to incentivize drug R&D, my publicly funded system will accelerate the development of effective and safe medicines. The system has no net cost for the government due to a large decrease in Medicare and Medicaid drug expenditures, and it makes prescribed medicines available to patients at no cost. Read more.

Money Spent on Lobbyists, $Billions

Democracy Lost

“The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.” (source)

Albert Einstein

The mass media does not report adequately on economic and political inequalities, their consequences, fundamental causes, and robust solutions. Read more.

Also biased in ways that benefit elites at the expense of the rest of us are our educational institutions. Read more.

Princeton University researchers analyzed 2000 public policy outcomes over three decades.  From their report:“… the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy…Policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans.”

The Capitol Building

Where We Have
a Corporate Elite
Twisting Public Policy
to the Right

More Graphs on the Results of Political System Dysfunction

The Wealth of Nations

The Wealth of Nations, the title of the famous book authored by the “father of modern economics,” Adam Smith, the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher, could be the title of the biography of some Americans. On February 11, 2022, Jeff Bezos had wealth greater than the nations Iceland, Iraq, Ukraine, Ecuador, Lithuania, Costa Rica, and Cyprus combined. Elon Musk had the combined wealth of the same nations plus that of Luxembourg.

No functioning democracy would allow systems to exist where a few individuals could take such a grotesque proportion of the wealth generated by collective action and social resources.

See Prosperity, Justice, and Inequality for the economic and moral justifications for a far more equitable distribution of income and wealth.

Economic and political inequality has grown independent of which party controls the congress or the presidency.

We need a new political party but not nearly as much as a new political system.

The New Enlightenment details the fundamental political system advancements we need.

Building Blocks at the Foundation of a Prosperous
and Far More Just and Democratic Society:

Worker-owned and controlled businesses perform most economic activity.
Read more.
Election system eliminates private money’s influence, ensures outcome integrity, empowers non-major party candidates. Read more.

Average citizens in deliberative groups involving 0.1% of the citizenry develop some public policies. Read more.

A media system dominated by worker-owned and controlled media  enterprises with public support. Read more.

Lobbying system puts all citizens and corporations on a level, transparent playing field. Read more.

Public Sector enhancements for housing, college tuition, Social Security, public defense, broadband, misc. other. Read more.

New public institutions disperse benefits of internet commerce, support pharma R&D, resulting in free prescription drugs. Read more.

Widespread understanding of the moral and economic justifications for less inequality. Read more.

A much more progressive tax system, including a wealth tax. Read more.

Manuals for a Movement

Far more than offering details and new perspectives on our social ills, The New Enlightenment and Amazon as Metaphor are manuals for a movement to a fundamentally superior society. 

Free Review Books

Progressive political organizations or activists planning to form one, consider my public policy proposals for your advocacy. I will send you the books for no charge.

Only Systemic Advancements Can Solve Our Social Problems

If a detailed agenda for creating a fundamentally more just and better-functioning society is what you desire, you will find my books useful and inspiring.

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense” was crucial in motivating the American Revolutionary War. This excerpt would apply now if “economic elites” replaces “king”: “…this continent can make no laws but what the king gives leave to [permits]; and … suits his purpose…” Read more and see comparisons between conditions described in the Declaration of Independence that motivated the Revolutionary War and ours.

John Adams

Property monopolized or in the possession of a few is a curse to mankind. We should preserve not an absolute equality—this is unnecessary, but preserve all from extreme poverty and all others from extravagant riches.” Read more and see comparisons between conditions described in the Declaration of Independence that motivated the Revolutionary War and ours.

James Madison

“The great object [of government] should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate … accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which … reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.

“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.” Read more and see comparisons between conditions described in the Declaration of Independence that motivated the Revolutionary War and ours.

Thomas Jefferson

Each generation is … independent. It has then… a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness; consequently, to accommodate to the circumstances in which it finds itself.” Read more and see comparisons between conditions described in the Declaration of Independence that motivated the Revolutionary War and ours.

INCOME INEQUALITY: COMPARISON TO THE “ROARING TWENTIES”

If 2018’s average plutocrat (which I’ll define as the top 1%) had limited himself to the same amount of income (inflation-adjusted) as the plutocrats of 1928, and the total of the excess above this amount that they received were distributed to the rest of the nation, 99% of Americans would have had $2.93 trillion more in annual income.[i]

If $2.93 trillion were progressively distributed within households in the bottom 80% in income, on average, each would have $28,705 more per year, but the poorest could receive double this amount. A minimum wage worker earns $14,500 per year working full time, about half the additional $28,705 income per household.

[i] National income, FED data Q2 2018; UC Berkeley, Piketty-Saez-Zucman, 2017, Appendix II: Detailed distributional series, Last update: November 9, 2017, and 2016  Appendix I: Aggregate income, wealth, returns, and saving Last update: December 16, 2016

WEALTH INEQUALITY: COMPARISON TO THE “ROARING TWENTIES”

The average wealth of a top 1% member in 1928 was $3.46 million  (inflation-adjusted) and $13.30 million in 2019. The total of the excess that 2019’s top 1% had above what they would have had if they had the same average wealth as the top 1% of 1928 was $32.3 trillion. If the $32.3 trillion were distributed to all households having an annual income less than $128,000 (79% of households), on average, each would have received enough to buy a median-value home ($318,400) in 2019.

Robert Pollin

Robert Pollin, Ph.D, Is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Dr. Pollin has Co-Directed the University’s Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), University of Massachusetts-Amherst from 1998 to the present. He has numerous awards for excellence in teaching and research. 

Dr. Pollin books include The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (co-authored 1998); A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (co-authored 2008), Back to Full Employment (2012), Green Growth (2014), Global Green Growth (2015) and Greening the Global Economy (2015).
Dr. Pollin has worked as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and numerous non-governmental organizations in several countries and in U.S. states and municipalities on various aspects of building high-employment green economies.

Dr. Pollin has also directed projects on employment creation and poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa for the United Nations Development Program. He has worked with many U.S. non-governmental organizations on creating living wage statutes at both the statewide and municipal levels, on financial regulatory policies, and on the economics of single-payer health care in the United States. In 2018, he co-authored Economic Analysis of Medicare for All. Between 2011– 2016, he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Commission project on Financialization, Economy, Society, and Sustainable Development (FESSUD). He was selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the “100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2013.”

James B. Stewart

James B. Stewart, Ph.D. is a Professor of Labor and Employment Relations, African and African American Studies, and Management and Organization Pennsylvania State University, University Park. His Ph.D. is in Economics (University of Notre Dame – 1976). He has been Penn State’s Vice Provost for Educational Equity and Director of its Black Studies Program. Research interests include Diversity Management, Globalization, factors affecting the labor force participation and earnings of African Americans, immigrants, and women, and Africana Studies. He has numerous awards for excellence in teaching and research.

Dr. Stewart’s is a former President of the National Economic Association and President of the National Council for Black Studies. He has also been a past editor of The Review of Black Political Economy. During his tenure the scholarly reputation of The Review increased tremendously, as did its administrative efficiency.

Professor Stewart’s ten books include Black Families: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, The Housing Status of Black Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics and Poetics, African-Americans and Post-Industrial Labor Markets, Managing Diversity in the Military, Flight in Search of Vision, and African Americans in U.S. Labor Markets. He has published over sixty articles in Economics and Black Studies professional journals.

Dr. Stewart’s has served as the official Penn State representative visiting colleges and universities in various African countries on several occasions, with itineraries including Burundi, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Niger, Republic of the Congo, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.

Michael Ash

Michael Ash, Ph.D. has been the Chair of the Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts-Amherst from 2011 to the present. In addition to his classes in the Economics department he is also a professor in the School of Public Policy.

Professor Ash’s areas of research are labor, health, and environmental economics, examined through quantitative models. At UMass Amherst, Ash co-directs the Corporate Toxics Information Project of the Political Economy Research Institute, which publishes the Toxic 100, an index that identifies top U.S. toxic polluters among large corporations.

In 2013, Dr. Ash and his colleague Dr. Robert Pollin, with one of their Ph.D. students, Thomas Herndon, provided an important critique of the argument of Harvard University economics professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that high public debt strangles economic growth.  Ash, Pollin, and Herndon identified errors in Reinhart-Rogoff, undermined its key arguments, and spurred reassessment of the austerity agenda. Ash also served as staff labor economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (Washington, DC) in 1995-1996.

He is coauthor, with Francisco Louçã, of Shadow Networks: Financial Disorder and the System that Caused Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2018) and has written numerous articles on topics including environmental justice, unionization, and public debt. Ash was a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest, Hungary.

He has received a UMass Amherst Outstanding Accomplishment in Research Award and a College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award and was named one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. 

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Ph.D. is the Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law, and director of The University of Michigan Law School’s International Tax LLM Program. He specializes in corporate and international taxation.

Professor Avi-Yonah has served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on tax competition, and is a member of the steering group for OECD’s International Network for Tax Research. He also is a member of the American Law Institute, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the American College of Tax Counsel, and an international research fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Business Taxation. In 2019, he was awarded the IFA Italy Prize for his analysis of its country’s tax laws. Professor Avi-Yonah been a member of the executive committee of the New York State Bar Association Tax Section and of the Advisory Board of Tax Management, Inc.

From 1994 to 2000 he was Assistant Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and was also a professor of history at Boston College. Dr Avi-Yonah also practiced law with prestigious law firms in New York and Boston.
Professor Avi-Yonah has published more than 250 books and articles, including Advanced Introduction to International Tax Law, Global Perspectives on Income Taxation Law, and International Tax as International Law.

Janelle Orsi

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, activist, and writer whose work has focused on cooperatives, the sharing economy, land trusts, shared housing, local currencies, and rebuilding the commons. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Ms. Orsi is a Senior Fellow at Vermont Law School’s New Economy Law Center.

Ms. Orsi is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Books 2012), and co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community (Nolo Press 2009), a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds.

Much of Ms. Orsi’s work is focused on advancing permanent community stewardship of land and channeling investments (especially retirement savings) away from Wall Street and into our local communities.

In 2014, Ms. Orsi was selected to be an Ashoka Fellow, joining other social entrepreneurs recognized to have innovative solutions to social problems with the potential to advance society fundamentally. In 2010, Ms. Orsi was profiled by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel, an attorney who is “remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation.” In 2012, she was one of 100 people listed on The (En)Rich List, which names individuals “whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.” 

NOAM CHOMSKY

“It’s a well thought-out proposal, and if it could get off the ground, it could be significant.”

ROBERT POLLIN

“I am very impressed by your project. People who are looking to hear about serious alternatives to the ongoing neoliberal hegemony in U.S. policymaking circles will find your book very useful and even inspiring… a valuable resource for people seeking out a coherent vision of how we get from here to there in the struggle for a more just society…The book is also well organized and well written. Congratulations on the enormous work effort as well as the final product.”

JAMES B. STEWART

“I just completed your masterful treatise! It is truly the most comprehensive roadmap for national renewal that I have seen! Congratulations!”

REUVEN S. AVI-YONAH

“Bob Bivona offers sensible tax proposals with innovative aspects. If instituted they would greatly increase revenues for important public needs, including substantially improving the economic well-being of the middle class and the poor. Convincing evidence is also offered that the proposed tax and expenditure program will substantially increase GDP, while creating a federal fiscal surplus.”

MICHAEL ASH

“I want to compliment you on a well thought out progressive economic and political program.”

JANELLE ORSI

“Bivona makes a concise and clear case for worker-ownership, narrowing in on compelling facts, examples, and statistics. His worker-owned and self-directed enterprises policy proposal gets to the heart of very practical solutions for creating widespread worker-ownership of businesses. I sincerely hope that Bivona's work and policy proposals will reach broad audiences."

NOAM CHOMSKY

Noam Chomsky is considered the founder of modern linguistics. Before his position at the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor of Linguistics in 2017, he taught linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 50 years. Chomsky’s work has influenced the fields of cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, computer science, mathematics, childhood education, and anthropology. Chomsky is the eighth most frequently cited scholar in history. He has also been one of the world’s most influential political commentators and activists for decades.

Professor Chomsky has received numerous awards related to his contributions to many fields, including the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, and the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award.

In addition, Professor Chomsky has received honorary degrees from 24 universities, many among the most prestigious worldwide. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science.

Dr. Chomsky has written more than 100 books, his most recent include Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power and Chomsky for Activists.

In his groundbreaking book on the media, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Professor Chomsky (with co-author Edward S. Herman, Ph.D.) shows that contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice, they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.

Devastating Economic System Dysfunction

In 1968, the minimum wage was $11.60 per hour (in inflation-adjusted 2019 dollars), the highest in U.S. history. Productivity grew from 1968 through 2019 by a factor of 2.5.  If workers’ pay grew proportionately with the value they produced over this period, as it did over prior decades, the 1968 minimum wage could have been $29 in 2019; instead, it was and is $7.25 per hour. Also, the 1968 median annual household income of $55,738 in 2019 dollars would have been $139,345 in 2019; instead, it was $68,700

All Americans could be living prosperous and stable lives. Instead, our economic system’s dysfunction has 78% of Americans in a condition where they can’t pay all their bills if they miss one paycheck. 40% cannot pay a $400 emergency expense without borrowing money or selling something. Tens of millions are food insecure, or housing insecure, or can’t receive medical care when they need it. The economic hardships of many tens of millions of Americans result from systems (economic and political) that have allowed a small elite to capture almost all the benefits of productivity gains.

From 1968 through 2019, the income of the average household in the top 1% grew by 158%, from $789,200 to $2,034,300. The top 1%’s share of post-tax national income increased by 66%, from 8.7% to 14.4%.

James Haslam

James Haslam is the Executive Director of Rights & Democracy, which he co-founded after serving as the Executive Director at the Vermont Workers’ Center for over 15 years. He has extensive experience in labor and community organizing, and running grassroots legislative advocacy campaigns.

Rights & Democracy is a political advocacy group mainly focused on establishing universal, publicly and equitably financed health care in Vermont and across the country, raising the minimum wage, establishing paid family and medical leave insurance, and strengthening existing law to prevent employers from denying their workers protections and benefits by misclassifying them as “independent contractors.”

Mr. Haslam is one of the most influential and dedicated political activists in the New England region and the nation. He led many demonstrations of activists to the Vermont House of Representatives to advocate for the above and other policies to advance social justice.

James Haslam’s dedication to serving his vision that “Vermonters will have to lead the way by establishing healthcare not as a market commodity but as a basic human right” was instrumental in getting a 2012 law passed in Vermont establishing a framework for universal single-payer “Medicare for All” health coverage in the state. As part of his work on advocacy for the health coverage law, he organized a rally at the Vermont Statehouse of over twelve hundred Vermonters, the largest weekday rally in modern Vermont history. The law advancing universal health care coverage was an historic achievement, eventually destroyed by the same powerful interests that block the institution of universal health care coverage nationally. 

Doug Lowndes

Doug Lowndes, Ph.D., Scientific Director Center for Nanophase Materials Science, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, (retired). Dr. Lowndes received his B.A. degree with honors in physics from Stanford University in 1961 and his Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Colorado in 1968. He was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sussex (England). He served as an assistant professor, associate professor, and professor of physics at the University of Oregon until 1979, when he joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Solid State Division. Dr. Lowndes was also Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Dr. Lowndes is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He also is a member of the Materials Research Society and the American Section of the International Solar Energy Society. He is the author or coauthor of more than 225 research articles, including numerous invited papers at national and international conferences, and five book chapters. He holds four patents and has received several awards for his research at ORNL, including the Scientist of the Year Award in 1995 and six other achievement and publication awards.

I met Dr. Lowndes during the Occupy Wall Street movement, of which we were both active supporters. 

Sarah Hernandez

Sarah Hernandez, Ph.D is a Professor of Sociology at New College of Florida. Her research is primarily on efforts to overcome social inequality. She teaches courses on the sociology of development; work organization and alternative business and economic models; social movements; classical and Latin American social theory; globalization, social justice and human rights; as well as general sociology and sociological research methods.

She was awarded a 2008-09 Fulbright Fellowship. Through the researcher/lecturer grant, Hernandez taught a course in the areas of work organization, social movements or labor studies at the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico. She also conducted research exploring the changing relationship between Mexican and American labor unions, identifying the factors that facilitate and prevent their collaboration.

Dr. Hernandez has done research on cooperativism and transnational labor collaboration in Mexico. Her local research (Sarasota, FL) has included needs assessment for the Latino population and data gathering for Habitat for Humanity. Dr. Hernandez mentors low-income, first-generation Latino students, helps address the needs of homeless people, and supports environmental causes and movements to raise the minimum wage in her community.

In 2020, Sarasota Magazine asked readers to nominate people for Unity Awards to honor community members who help to bring the community together across “racial, ethnic, religious, sexual orientation, socioeconomic and physical and mental ability groups.” The magazine’s editors and external judges selected Professor Hernandez from among them as one of two winners. 

Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray, Ph.D. has a master’s degree in Agricultural Economics and Ph.D. in Rural Sociology. He also holds a master’s degree in Social Work and has completed psychoanalytic training at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Washington DC.

Dr. Gray’s research has focused on the study of different types of cooperative structures for mid-size farm survival. More than 80% of agricultural land in the US is managed by farmers whose operations fall between small-scale farms with direct access to local markets, and larger industrialized farms. These farmers in the ‘middle’ increasingly struggle to find a place within the food production system.

For his lifetime contributions to the generation, dissemination and applications of knowledge to agricultural cooperatives across the United States at the university and community levels, Dr. Gray received the 2004 Rural Sociology Society award for excellence in public service. The Rural Sociology Society stated that Dr. Gray is the person most responsible for keeping an interest in co-ops alive among the nation’s rural sociologists.

Dr. Gray is a ‘Cooperative Scholar’ with the Canadian Centre for the Study of Cooperatives. His research focuses on cooperatives on three levels of analyses: micro – member participation studies or on what “individuals” think, believe, feel, do as related to their participation in cooperatives, meso – organizational analyses of governance construction of membership structure, and macro – contextual issues such as changes in the structure of agriculture. In 2019, he received a travel grant to study governance in Japanese agricultural cooperatives. 

Stephen Bezruchka

Stephen Bezruchka, M.D., has researched, lectured, and written extensively about population health in the U.S. and abroad. In addition to medicine, Dr. Bezruchka has university degrees in international health, mathematics, and physics.

Dr. Bezruchka is one of the world’s most knowledgeable people on the socioeconomic determinants of health. His work emphasizes that even though health in the United States is declining despite having been one of the healthiest nations 70 years ago, no attention is being paid to consider the primary causes, which are mostly economic and political. Those most important are related to inequality and supporting early life. Social spending matters more than medical care in producing health.

His activist efforts include co-chairing the Economic Inequality Health Task Force of the Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, where he is also a member of the board of directors.

Dr. Bezruchka has worked as an emergency physician in the U.S. for three decades and spent ten years in Nepal, where he set up a remote district hospital as a teaching hospital for Nepali doctors whose training he supervised. 

Carmine Gorga

Carmine Gorga earned his Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Naples, Italy in 1959 and earned a diploma in International Relations, Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University in 1961. Gorga also earned an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., 1962.[7] He is a Council of Europe scholar and Fulbright scholar.

Carmine Gorga is president of The Somist Institute and has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals and five books. During 50 years of research and publication, 27 of them in collaboration with Franco Modigliani, a Nobel Laureate in economics, Dr. Gorga has developed Concordian economics.

Dr. Gorga is an authority on hoarding and its negative impacts. During his over 35 years of experience as an economic researcher, he has proposed fundamental changes to the Federal Reserve System. Dr. Gorga is also the creator of a master plan for Provincetown, MA, 1968.

Dr. Gorga was an economist for A.C. Nielsen in Milan, Italy. He later did academic research at Brandeis University. He was City Planner for Community Planning Services in Boston, Massachusetts and Director of Planning and Economic Development for Action Inc. in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Gorga also worked for the U.S. Department of Commerce Gloucester Laboratory of the National Marine Fisheries Service and was the executive director of Gloucester Community Development Corporation. 

Bill Barry

Bill Barry was the Director of Labor Studies for the Community College of Baltimore County from 1997-2012. The program offers an Associate Degree in Labor Studies, emphasizing all of the basic union training courses. It is one of the very few college programs in the United States that has not either become a research facility or part of an “industrial relations” program with little practical union organizing training. Bill Barry also helped to establish a series of Continuing Education workshops offered by the program, including Public Speaking for Union Leaders, Workers Compensation, Great Officers Training, and New Technology for Union Officers.

Mr. Barry was a field organizer or administrative officer of several major unions. He is the author of three books, I Just Got Elected—Now What? A New Union Officer’s Handbook, Union Strategies for Hard Times: Helping Your Members, Building Your Union in the Great Recession, and his newest book is From First Contact to First Contract: A Union Organizer’s Handbook. Barry is developing a history of the steelworkers at Sparrows Point, and information on the project is available at www.sparrowspointsteelworkers.com.

He has written for labor magazines and The Baltimore Sun on labor issues, and his Labor Day editorial runs annually on WYPR-FM.

In 2003, 2007 and 2011, Mr. Barry was a City Council candidate in the 3rd District of Baltimore City for the Green Party, taking 27% of the vote in 2007, the highest vote a non-Democratic gained since 1939. He is a member of Healthcare Now of Maryland, which supports a single-payer health insurance policy.

Robert Bivona

Since my early teens in the 1960s, I have been aware of the advantages of having wealth in gaining more and the wealthy’s disproportionate influence on our political system. Each decade since then, economic inequality and our political system’s corruption by wealthy individuals and corporations have grown more grotesque.

Also since my teens, it seemed to me that a society where maximizing business profits motivates economic activity would inevitably be dysfunctional. In pursuit of maximum profits, private actors will too often ignore resulting public harm. The environmental contamination in the 1950s and 1960s made this defect obvious. Extremely polluted air harmed the health of tens of millions of Americans, and some toxic rivers ignited into flames. The profit motive and a political system corrupted by corporations and wealthy individuals resulted in these conditions.

Among the other characteristics of modern-day capitalism I  never felt I could comfortably conform to is one where people earn a living by subordinating themselves to “bosses.” Also in my early teens, I was aware of neighbors whose social contributions far exceeded others with much higher incomes. Since then, the disconnect between social contribution and rewards has grown more obvious and extreme. Its incongruous character I describe in my books with many examples.

Despite my long-term interest in developing policy responses to systemic defects creating increasingly severe social problems, several decades passed before I detailed some because in my teens and twenties I pursued a more intense interest in science and mathematics. Although not directly related to my later focus on economics and politics, my formal educational and professional background developed the analytical skills I needed to write The New Enlightenment and Amazon as Metaphor.

I was excited to study physics at the college level after being introduced to the subject in high school. But as the process proceeded, I found it stifling. Professors would give equations such as the Schrödinger equation and show how physical systems will behave using it with too little emphasis on the creative process that resulted in the equation. I was interested in solving the problems professors assigned on determining physical system’s behavior, but I was more interested in the creative process that led to the problem-solving techniques.

I did not proceed with my education in physics immediately after receiving my Bachelors’s degree in 1975. Instead, I found employment as a “Lab Coordinator” in a physics teaching lab of a university. It involved setting up and maintaining lab equipment and assisting lab instructors. It was a 20 hour per week job, so I established a math and physics tutoring service to supplement my income. My clients were mainly high school students whose parents paid for the tutoring sessions. After about a year as lab coordinator, I began taking graduate courses in physics part-time, a free benefit of employment.

After witnessing the energy crisis of 1979 and early 1980s—the second major oil crisis within a decade—cause major social disruption from long gas lines (in some cases five miles long) and skyrocketing prices, my interest grew in a career change. It seemed to me I could make the best use of my technical skills by gaining expertise in designing and performance predicting alternative energy systems and energy conservation measures for buildings. Further motivating this desire were the incorrect predictions of “pundits” that the world would likely run out of sufficient qualities of oil to continue using it as an energy source within a few decades. I viewed active and passive solar systems, photovoltaics, and energy conservation as solutions to the reported oil supply crisis. Their environmental advantages added to their appeal. (However, at the time, I did not fully understand the significance of fossil fuels’ use in global warming.)

Some engineering firms offered design and economic analysis services for building energy conservation and alternative energy measures; after taking a few classes in the subjects at local universities, I succeeded in gaining employment at one. I was relegated to a cubicle like most of the other engineers and given projects to work on, mostly in isolation.

I didn’t particularly appreciate working at the engineering company, and it made me aware I had too large a deficiency of knowledge in the field. So, I sought the best educational program in designing and analyzing building energy conservation and alternative energy measures and decided it was a graduate program at Arizona State University. I applied, was accepted, and left my birthplace, the New York state region, for the first time for the very different environment of Arizona. While in the program, oil prices dropped 40% from their highs, the supply shortage seemed to be resolved, and within a couple of years, prices declined 80% from their highs. As a result, work in the solar and energy conservation field was scarce.

Since Arizona adjoined a state I had wanted to see for most of my life, California, I visited, and the beauty and climate (including cultural) of the northern California coast caused me to cancel my plans to return to New York and relocate to Marin County, CA, a suburb of San Fransisco. I established a tutoring service and soon also found work as a part-time consultant to a company that helped architects and contractors meet the California energy conservation code. The company paid me $20 per hour and charged clients $60 per hour for my work (this was the mid-1980s), so I started my own company providing the same services to architects and contractors directly. Also, I assisted a company in performing detailed comparative energy performance analyses of various energy conservation measures for large commercial buildings using a sophisticated computer program (DOE-2) that I learned how to use at ASU.

Eventually I longed for involvement with physics again in an academic setting and found employment as a lab manager at a major university. I supervised a staff of six part-time students in setting up equipment for the undergraduate physics teaching labs and lecture demonstrations, repaired or supervised the repair of the equipment, and assisted lab instructors. I wrote chapters of revised lab manuals, designed some equipment instructors used in the labs and lecture demonstrations, and managed a major expansion and move of the labs to a new building.

From 2010 through 2016, I devoted myself full-time to the research for and writing of 2017 released book, The New Enlightenment. I was highly motivated to write it. Our economic and political systems have been widening the chasm between our professed ideals of democracy, liberty, and justice for all and our reality for decades. Ignorance of significant facts, faulty ideas, and corruption among political and economics professionals contributed to the widening.  I viewed our social decline trends as inevitably leading to social disintegration without a social movement dedicated to creating a fundamentally more democratic, egalitarian, and just society based on some new, unconventional ideas.

In 2019, I began work on the research for and writing of my book, Amazon as Metaphor that I finished in 2023. My visions of the societal advancements we needed (and need) were clear, and I felt compelled to express them. My two books detail fundamental economic and political system reforms and why we need them. If instituted, they would create a far more just and better-functioning society.

                              Robert Bivona

JAMES HASLAM

“The political revolution we are beginning to see in this country will require the kind of new paradigms for political and economic development that you will find in The New Enlightenment. Bivona offers many new and important ideas for the 21st-century agenda which puts people and the planet first.”

Let’s “assemble with all the coolness of philosophers, and set [our Constitution] to rights.”

Our Constitution has been inadequate as a foundation of a well-functioning representative democracy. And Supreme Court decisions over the last few decades have turned its First Amendment into a kind of powerful weapon against the majority of Americans by equating money with speech and corporations with people. As a result, we have a government even more extremely serving a wealthy elite at the expense of the majority than it had in prior years.

The words “democracy” or “democratic” do not appear in the Constitution, and it tolerated slavery. Amendments since then have improved the Constitution but amending it is overly burdensome and much needs amending. When we amended it, we had a diverse media, which allowed and helped motivate the amendments. We now have a highly concentrated, elite-dominated mass media stifling public debate and widespread exposure to public policy reforms that would greatly benefit the majority. Mass media has been essential to enabling grotesque inequalities to grow. (The media system reforms I detail in The New Enlightenment, if instituted, would robustly solve this problem.)

A constitution should ensure political equality among all citizens, and it should foster consensus building and promote effective problem-solving. Instead, ours results in exactly what Madison warned against; it has “divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.” It is past due for us to take an honest look at the deficiencies of our Constitution and create one that best serves our citizenry.

The fundamental political and economic system advancements I detail in The New Enlightenment and Amazon as Metaphor, if instituted, would significantly advance us toward a well-functioning democracy and just society.

Base on an analysis of about 2000 public policies instituted over three decades, Princeton University researchers found: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy…Policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans.”

In 2018, HUD public housing operating expenses for 1.1 million units were $4.37 billion or $331 per month per unit, including repair, maintenance, and all other operating expenses. However, HUD’s massive repair cost backlog on public housing indicates insufficient budgeting for regular repairs and maintenance.

According to a National Apartment Association “Survey of Operating Income & Expenses in Rental Apartment(s),” private sector apartments spend on average $0.54 per sq. ft. per year for repairs and maintenance.  Since an itemized accounting of HUDs repair and maintenance expentiures was not available, I assume HUD spent half this amount and add half to estimate operating expenditures for well-maintained buildings. For the 850 sq. ft. average apartment, this adds $19.19 to HUDs $331 prior cost per month per unit, totaling $350.19.  

The average percent increase per year in the number of households over the last decade, now about 130 million, was roughly 1%. 1,040,000 is 80% of the 1,300,000 new households expected next year. 1,040,000 is a desirable number more than needed for new households in the bottom 20% wanting an apartment to gradually satisfy pre-existing bottom 20% demand. Eventually we will satisfy this demand enabling opening the program to the second from the bottom income quintile households.

 

The 350,000 units purchased are about 20% of the multifamily units sold per year. These buys will moderate multifamily units price declines due to the newly built low-priced apartments added to the market per year, which will lower private sector rents. (Multifamily unit sales are about $175 billion per year. Assuming a $100,000 per unit yields 1.75 million units total; 20% is 350,000.)

DOUG LOWNDES

“A great book, certainly full of provocative analysis and suggestions as well as good use of figures/graphs. I can also visualize the book as a sort of “manual” for a much larger movement.”

The Decline of Small Businesses

Over about two decades, the number of small businesses has fallen dramatically. For example: (source)

IndustryDecline in Number
Small construction firms15,000
Small manufacturers> 70,000
LocaL retailers108,000 (40% decline)
Community banks, credit unions13,000 (50% decline)

Between 1997 and 2012, the share of total business revenue going to firms with fewer than 100 employees fell by nearly one-fifth. One study found in over half of the 26 industries analyzed that two corporations now control over half the market. In many industries, the top two firms gained over 20% of their market from the early 2000s to 2018. Over the last two decades, over 75% of U.S. industries have experienced an increase in concentration, while United States public markets have lost almost 50% of their publicly traded firms. The Fortune 500 corporations captured 73% of our economy in 2013.

The Black-White Wealth Gap

In the first six decades of the 19th century, more than half of the nation’s exports consisted of raw cotton, almost all grown by slaves. Wealth created as a result passed on and appreciated over subsequent generations of White families instead of the Black families that generated it. Then when slaves were freed, the promise made to them of 40 acres in land grants went unmet—while many White Americans were typically provided 160-acre “hand outs”  of land in the west. This “free equity” translated into greater economic security and wealth accumulation over subsequent generations.  

In the 20th century, a major contributor to Black wealth denial was racist home ownership policies, which reduced rates of Black homeownership and associated wealth appreciation. In the late 1940s, the GI Bill’s home loans overwhelmingly benefited White veterans. By the time GI Bill ended in 1956, nearly 8 million World War II veterans had received 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion. But relatively few loans went to Black veterans. For example, in Mississippi only two returning Black veterans received home buying benefits from the GI Bill. In the north, Blacks did not fare much better; in New York and northern New Jersey, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages backed by the GI Bill supported non-whites.

The GI Bill’s college education benefits also went overwhelmingly to White veterans. Twenty-eight percent of white veterans went to college on the G.I. Bill, while only 12 percent of black veterans did so. And the colleges Blacks were allowed to attend tended to be of lower quality.

THOMAS W. GRAY

“A well written, well documented 1) treatise on the structural ills of a global neo-liberalism, 2) a manual for social action in what is essentially an agenda for societal re-democratization and a 3) reference book for fact retrieval and argument building to support his agenda for major societal progress. Robert Bivona has done this in not three, but one book. Easily understood charts, graphs and data clarify and support his descriptions of many social ills and proposals to solve them. I can highly recommend The New Enlightenment as a good read for those looking for solutions to what may seem like intractable and forever unresolvable problems of our era.”

STEPHEN A. BEZRUCHKA

“Bivona notes that we are the wealthiest country and wealthier than we have ever been, yet we rank close to or at the bottom among advanced countries on many of the most important measures of well-being such as life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty rate, incarceration rate and equality. Our political system no longer responds to the major issues affecting the majority of Americans. Systemic solutions are needed, and The New Enlightenment details some that are powerful and innovative.”

CARMINE GORGA

“Modern day corporate capitalism directs far too much of the benefits of the hard work and creative ingenuity of workers to a tiny economic elite. A country comprised mainly of worker-owned and democratically run corporations will solve our inequality problem, greatly reduce the tendency for corporations to create negative externalities and have other major positive impacts on society. Bivona provides the clearest vision of exactly how to get there from here. His detailed program, if instituted, will result in worker controlled and owned business enterprises performing most of the economic activity of the country, after a two-decade transition period. It can be of revolutionary importance. The book also offers many perspicacious recommendations on ways to improve our tax system. If you wish this writer luck, you wish all of us luck. The 1 percenters have to be concerned about a stable society as well.”

BILL BARRY

"If the 1% could ban books, this would be the first one on their list."

SARAH HERNANDEZ

“Bob Bivona unifies the concerns raised in various disciplines regarding 21st-century inequality into a cohesive, progressive, humanitarian outlook for our future.”