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Table of Contents

The New Enlightenment excerpt, pages 1 – 6

Introduction to The New Enlightenment

Every observer of our society can see we are facing many serious problems. These problems are not isolated; they are connected through political and economic systems serving the majority of Americans increasingly poorly. The New Enlightenment describes some of the ways these systems are descending us into alarming levels of injustice and dysfunction, but its primary focus is on solutions. You will learn how we can create a more prosperous and far more just and democratic society, one in which prosperity will be more equitably shared. 

Sometimes paradigm shifts are necessary to solve fundamental prob­lems. Now is such a time, so innovative, transformative solutions are pro­moted here. They are evidence based to best serve the country as a whole. Few of us want what we have now, a political system mainly serving a small elite most able to influence it, and their dominance is growing. We can have a truly democratic republic through the political system reforms I detail in this book.

The beneficial transformations I design for—some are summa­rized below—may seem too large to be achievable. Many will believe that no policies can exist that will achieve these goals because if they did exist they would have already been implemented. However, if you consider the policies detailed in this book carefully, you will see that this prejudice is misguided. The de­tailed program described in this book will:

  • End unemployment or reduce it to historic lows.
  • Create a minimum tax-free annual income of $34,980 for full-time work. Expanding and reforming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and raising the mini­mum
  • Reduce full-time work-hours to 36 hours per week. Despite 10% fewer work-hours, and consequently as much as 10% lower com­pensation from the workplace, people’s take-home income whose income now is under $160,000 will rise, and rise proportionally more the lower the income, due to either lower taxes or the ex­panded EITC.
  • Transform the economic system to one where most economic ac­tivity will be performed by worker-owned and controlled busi­nesses at the end of the designed 20-year transition period. Loans, grants, tax benefits and subsidies within several detailed pro­grams will accomplish this. By extending democratic practices into the workplace, and substantial capital ownership to the work­force, income and wealth inequality reduction, productivity en­hancements, and other important benefits result.
  • Eliminate the dominating importance of money controlled by national public office candidates and their allies, and thereby allow a meaningful democracy to exist. This will be ac­complished mainly by instituting a TV and radio station license requirement to offer generous allotments of airtime free of charge to four qualified candidates per national public office contest within a thoroughly detailed system. No reasonable need for the purchase of airtime will exist. All airwaves are pub­licly owned, so they should best serve the public interest. Also, support qualified candidates with postal, newspaper, and internet advertising subsidies, and institute a new Fairness Doctrine.
  • Enhance democratic functioning with new, innovative democratic forms. Average citizens in deliberative groups involving 0.1% of the citizenry will develop some public policies.
  • Create a vigorous media of, for, and by the people necessary for a well-functioning government of, for, and by the people. This book details these ways to accomplish this: Insti­tute a license renewal requirement for worker-ownership and con­trol of air media companies, and support it with loans, grants, tax benefits and subsidies. Motivate ownership and control by work­ers of other kinds of media businesses, also through loans, grants, tax benefits and subsidies. Media ownership and control by workers will eliminate important media content selection biases resulting from the character of current media ownership and management, and result in other important benefits. The media’s role in the functioning of a democratic society is essential, and our media corporations’ current structure is inevitably serving this role This policy will create a new and vigorous media culture more responsive and accountable to the majority.
  • Eliminate tuition for two and four-year public colleges. This will help meet our stated ideal of equal opportunity for all and help create the well-informed citizenry needed for a well-functioning democracy and economy. It will also remove an enormous burden from millions of future college graduates whose education serves the national interest.
  • Increase Social Security payments by $500/month to all recipients, and provide it to some who are currently ineligible. The United States ranks 30th among 34 developed countries in the percentage of a median worker’s earnings that our public pension system replaces, and private pensions are becoming less common and generous.
  • Eliminate the deficit.

The economic and political system reform program detailed in this book will also have other transformative beneficial impacts if instituted. 

Impossibly grandiose goals? They are not—on one condition: Your support and the support of many others for the detailed program in this book and the organization devoted to seeing it be instituted. Please join us so we can reach a critical mass in numbers for this change to be inevitable. Let this time of crisis be a time of opportunity, a time for a New Enlightenment where, unlike during the 18th century Enlightenment,  all people independent of race and sex share in its benefits.  All of our lives can be improved, for tens of millions of us dramatically so, through policies that will create a far more just and beneficial political, social and economic order. Now is the time to make it happen.   

Our current political system needs radical reform because, inherently, policymakers unwilling or unable to serve the majority are its result. When good and capable persons overcome nearly insurmountable barriers to their entry into elected office, they are largely disabled by dysfunctional rules of Congress and colleagues serving narrow, moneyed interests. So further decline or paralysis is inevitable without system change.

The person who may be the most well-informed judge on the relative quality of our election system is the internationally renowned election observer, former President Carter, whose Carter Center has monitored 96 elections in 38 countries. He said, “We have one of the worst election processes in the world right in the United States, and it’s almost entirely because of the excessive influx of money.” For this and other important reasons, the U.S. Congress’s approval rating reached a historic low in 2014 of 9%.[1] Only 9% of Americans think Congress is mainly influenced by the voters they represent.[2]

The outcomes of our economic system are to a large degree determined by the regulation, tax, and government expenditure policies created by our political system, so major economic injustices and hardships are evident. A 2013 Gallup poll found that 20% of the U.S. population did not have enough money to buy the food they or their family needed at least once over the prior year.[3] In 2013, about 50 million, that’s over one in every seven, Americans lived in poverty, a higher fraction than at any time since 1966, a higher number than ever. Our per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $52,800 in 2013, but in 1966 it was $28,680 in 2013 dollars. So on average, each person in the United States had an income almost two times higher in 2013 than in 1966, yet about the same fraction of the population was in poverty because nearly all the country’s income gains have gone to a small economic elite.

The average wealth of the poorest 40%, 126 million Americans, was negative $10,800 in 2013, but as our GDP per capita indicates, we are a wealthy country, not a poor one.[4] The total wealth of just 400 people, less than .00013 % of our population, was over $2.3 trillion in 2013.[5] This is approximately the total wealth of the least wealthy 190 million Americans or 60% of the country and is about the GDP of Italy, the eighth largest national economy in the world. The top 400 people have wealth equivalent to 12.8% of U.S. GDP in 2013. In 1980, the wealthiest 400 Americans had wealth equal to “only” 2.8% of U.S. GDP.

The Gini coefficient measures inequality, with numbers between 0 and 100 that rise with greater disparities. The UN-Habitat Monitoring and Research Division defines an income Gini coefficient of 40 as an “international alert line” indicating that a society’s “Inequality [is] approaching dangerously high levels” that could “lead to sporadic protests and riots.” Our income Gini coefficient is now about 48 and has risen to about 80 for U.S. wealth.[6] Our economic inequality is the highest in the developed world and our economic mobility the lowest.

We cannot have a functioning economic system if income or wealth is divided equally, but disparities so large that the top 1% of Americans have 24% of the nation’s income is unjust and economically, politically and socially harmful.[7] The average income of the top 1% of U.S. households in 2011 was $1,530,773, while the average income of Americans in the bottom 20% was $9,187. The highest income for an individual was $4.9 billion. Part 4, Note 1 details why this degree of income disparity is unjustifiable and harmful.  

With the huge disparity in economic power inevitably comes a huge disparity in political power, resulting in greater economic disparity. This vicious cycle of growing power disparities will lead to disaster unless it is consciously and forcefully interrupted and reversed. Yet it seems we are continuing to run on this path of predictable outcome, like lemmings over a cliff.

Increasingly, people are aware of their powerlessness, so they no longer bother to vote. If people believe their interests will not be served whoever is elected, they have little motivation to vote. We have, by far, the lowest voter turnout in the developed world.

Concurrent with the decline in trust in our political system and leaders is a decline in trust in our business leaders and media. And this decline in trust is extending not just to our most important institutions, but also to one another as individuals. The percentage of Americans who believe that other people can generally be trusted fell from 46% in 1974 to 33% in 2012. Trust is essential to social cohesion and political stability, and it is negatively correlated with economic inequality. Trust in a democratic system of government requires trust in the few who represent the interests of the many.

These ominous signs for the future of our country and many other signs of societal dysfunction and decay we urgently need to address with robust policy solutions. Some of these other signs I describe in Part 1 of this book. For decades, both major political parties have allowed the development of, or created, a long list of shocking economic, political and other societal conditions. Why are we tolerating this?

We are a creative people, yet little creativity has been applied to the most important domains of ensuring that our economic and political systems best serve the majority of people. The debate on all the important related issues has been too narrow, due mainly to a dysfunctional media. But the problem runs deeper to those in our academic institutions’ political science and economics departments, where adherents to failed dogmas are common—dogmas that, not coincidentally, have served a narrow elite, to the detriment of the majority. Academic economists have commonly supported or actively promoted the policies of removing important and necessary regulations on corporations, and of lowering taxes on high-income households and corporations that have been instituted over the last few decades. These policies have served the country poorly. However, some members of these academic disciplines have had clearer vision or higher purpose, and some of the policy proposals in this book use ideas of some of these and other exceptional people.

Clearly, a mass movement is needed for fundamental change, and I hope this book attracts you to be part of the one in the direction it defines. Recent history gives the Occupy movement and the Tea “Party” as examples of important political forces that rose unexpectedly and quickly to great prominence. These movements are far from the limit of what can be accomplished, and what has been accomplished by political movements in the past.

I chose the name The New Enlightenment mainly because economic inequality was one of the most important motivations for the Enlightenment period’s societal transformations, including the one that created the United States. Data from medieval England and today indicate it is more extreme now than it was before the Enlightenment. For this reason and others, it is time for a New Enlightenment. These data and this analysis are in Part 1, Now Is the Time for The New Enlightenment.

If you are aware of the evidence that our economic and political systems require major reforms, you can skip most of Part 1 with little loss of continuity. The data from England before the Enlightenment are rarely seen, though, and their analysis and comparison with conditions today is original here, so I recommend that no one skip this Part 1 information and other historical and essential information in the first ten pages of Part 1. The facts in Part 1 may cause despair, but do not despair. The rest of the book is designed to create hope by providing the major part of a foundation for a New Enlightenment.

   Robert Bivona

The New Enlightenment was written over about a five-year period beginning in December 2011

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx

[2] Congress Still Ranks Low in the Public’s Eyes, Rasmussen Reports, 1/3/15 http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/archive/mood_of_america_archive/congressional_performance/congress_still_ranks_low_in_the_public_s_eyes

[3] More Americans Struggle to Afford Food, 9/12/13, Alyssa Brown http://www.gallup.com/poll/164363/americans-struggle-afford-food.aspx

[4] Household Wealth Trends In The United States, 1962-2013:What Happened Over The Great Recession? Edward N. Wolff, National Bureau Of Economic Research, pg.14

[5] Inside The 2013 Forbes 400: Facts And Figures On America’s  Richest http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2013/09/16/inside-the-2013-forbes-400-facts-and-figures-on-americas-richest/

[6] Fortune magazine, America is the richest, and most unequal, country, Erik Sherman  9/30/15, http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/america-wealth-inequality/, U. S. Census data http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-157.html

[7] Striking it Richer:The Evolution of Top Incomes in the United States (Updated with 2013 preliminary estimates) Emmanuel Saez, UC Berkeley,1/25/15. The data in Saez’s document is determined using income tax statistics. Based on the authors communication with Emmanuel Saez, about 2% additional income share would likely result from taking into account income directed to tax havens.

The New Enlightenment excerpt,
pages 8-11,16, 17

The Age of Enlightenment

During the Enlightenment, people imagined and acted on a vision of a radically more just world

The original Enlightenment period in the 18th century was a time when many people in Europe, and later in the American colonies, shared a vision of a transformed world. The more widespread use of printing presses, more extensive roadways, and newly created postal services needed to distribute periodicals and other print media allowed their means of mass communication, print media, to dramatically increase public awareness of societal issues. There was an explosion in the number of books and other publications. Literacy rates increased greatly, and debating societies and other public forums were used to discuss the important issues.

As a result, many people were able to imagine the possibility of a fundamentally more just world order than the one in which they were living—an order based on reason, the ideals of equality for all, democracy, and fundamental individual human rights. More importantly, they also acted on their new and radical vision. During this period of revolutionary transformations, the powers of monarchy, the privileges of the nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church were overturned. There were also dramatic revolutions in science and philosophy. The American Revolution (1775–83) was an integral part of the Enlightenment period.

Enlightenment revolutionaries strove to create more egalitarian societies

The awareness of the importance of economics to politics was a fundamental part of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment revolutionaries experienced the injustice of the majority of the wealth of their society being controlled by a tiny fraction of the population. This small minority used their vast wealth to control the political and social order. So Enlightenment revolutionaries formed more egalitarian societies where political leaders were accountable to the majority. Governments were designed to ensure that public policy served the ideals of democracy, equality for all, reason, and basic individual human rights. America was one of these societies.

America was the most egalitarian society in the world

In America’s early years it was the most egalitarian society on the planet, and our Founders were proud of these conditions. In a letter from Monticello dated September 10, 1814, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

“We have no paupers …. The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich … such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families …. Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?” Jefferson contrasted these conditions with an England of paupers and plutocrats: “Now, let us compute by numbers the sum of happiness of the two countries. In England, happiness is the lot of the aristocracy only; and the proportion they bear to the laborers and paupers you know better than I do. Were I to guess that they are four in every hundred.”[1]

George Washington, nine months before his inauguration as the first president, predicted that America “will be the most favorable country of any kind in the world for persons of industry and frugality, possessed of moderate capital, to inhabit … it will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people, because of the equal distribution of property.”[2]

After Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous journey to America in the 19th century, he returned to France and wrote that nothing “Nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of conditions… the influence of this fact…has no less empire over civil society than over the Government; it creates opinions, engenders sentiments, suggests the ordinary practices of life, and modifies whatever it does not produce…the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.”[3]

Early America was the world’s most egalitarian society.[4] Today, we are the outliers in the other direction—we are the most unequal of all the developed countries. On a per capita basis, we produce over 30 times the amount of goods and services per year than when the country was founded.[5] Yet, in 2012, almost 50 million Americans were in poverty and over 20 million were severely poor, with incomes less than one-half the official poverty income.[6]

During America’s early years England’s 1% were so rich that the country’s average national income was nearly as high as that of the colonies, despite the much greater prosperity of the majority of Americans. Today, America’s 1% are taking a greater share of national income and wealth than the old English aristocracy did, and a larger percentage of the country’s income and wealth than any other advanced country.

[1] Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, 10 September 1814

[2] Letter from George Washington to Richard Henderson, 19 June 1788

[3] Democracy In America, Introductory chapter, Alexis De Tocqueville

[4] NY Times, America, Land Of The Equals By Chrystia Freeland, 5/3/12

[5] American Enterprise Institute: Life Expectancy v. Real GDP Per Capita, 1800-2007 Mark J. Perry. In 1800, in the U.S. per-capita real GDP was $1,343 by 2007, it was $42,952. https://www.aei.org/publication/life-expectancy-v-real-gdp-per-capita-1800-2007/. Worker hours per capita are much lower now than in 1800, so the GDP/capita ratio is an underestimate of the productivity gains.               

[6] U.S. Department Of Health & Human Services, Information On Poverty And Income Statistics: A Summary Of 2013 Current Population Survey Data 09/18/2013 https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-report/information-poverty-and-income-statistics-summary-2013-current-population-survey-data

The Enlightenment Era’s Ideals Were far from Fully Realized

The tolerance of the atrocity of slavery and the near extermination of Native Americans

The Enlightenment era ideals of freedom and equality for all, democracy, basic individual human rights and using reason to determine action, advanced societies greatly. But they had (and we still have) a long way to go. Many Enlightenment era Europeans’ and Americans’ understanding of who was fully human was tragically deficient. Racist atrocities during the Enlightenment era resulted from faulty information and evil people, not Enlightenment ideals.

Slavery pre-existed the Enlightenment era, but the large Transatlantic slave trade was facilitated during the era by advancements in weaponry and their production processes, the ability to travel, and to produce ships that could carry large numbers of people. Unfortunately, advancements in science and technology, a major characteristic of the Enlightenment era, have always resulted in advancements in the abuse of science and technology.

The Enlightenment transformations were imperfect and incomplete advancements, as have been all others. Basic individual human rights were not extended in the U.S. and Europe to races other than the white race, and to women, until well after the Enlightenment, and even in the 21st century this extension is far from complete.

Social orders dominated by elite powers of monarchy and nobility were inhumane, and eliminated based on Enlightenment philosophy. We now are in a period where a kind of aristocracy is again dominating our social order. This book will describe some of the resulting dysfunction and injustices.

So we need a New Enlightenment, one where all people independent of race and sex share in its benefits. But these benefits will be largest for those currently most disadvantaged by the unjust social order now.

If enslaved African Americans were justly compensated for their labor, what would the assets received then be worth today? Also, a hundred years of Jim Crow laws and economic oppression from other forms of discrimination followed enslaved African Americans’ theoretical emancipation. The result is that African Americans now have 1/20 the per capita wealth of whites.

Although not targeted to benefit any specific race, New Enlightenment reforms will reduce disparities between the races. But to what degree should we further correct disparities resulting from injustices of the past? This will best be answered after the true democracy and other social reforms of the New Enlightenment. 

Economic Disparities Now and Then

Greater economic disparities exist now than before the Enlightenment, as the table shows, for income inequality. The first three columns of the table include data from Gregory King’s classic early study of British income inequality that published the information on 26 classes of persons in England and Wales in 1688. The fourth column is calculated by multiplying the first and third columns. (A summary and analysis follows this detailed table.)

Income Distribution in 17th Century Britain

Number of Families in Class

Class

Yearly Income Per Family (£)

Total Income in Class

160

Temporal lords

3,200

512,000

26

Spiritual lords

1,300

33,800

800

Baronets

880

704,000

600

Knights

650

390,000

3000

Esquires

450

1,350,000

2000

Eminent merchants & traders by sea

400

800,000

12000

Gentlemen

280

3,360,000

5000

Persons in greater offices and places

240

1,200,000

8000

Lesser merchants and traders by sea

198

1,584,000

10000

Persons in the law

154

1,540,000

5000

Persons in lesser offices and places

120

600,000

40000

Freeholders of the better sort

91

3,640,000

5000

Naval officers

80

400,000

2000

Eminent clergymen

72

144,000

15000

Persons in liberal arts and sciences

60

900,000

4000

Military officers

60

240,000

120000

Freeholders of the lesser sort

55

6,600,000

8000

Lesser clergymen

50

400,000

50,000

Shopkeepers and tradesmen

45

2,250,000

150000

Farmers

42

6,300,000

60000

Artisans and handicrafts

38

2,280,000

50000

Common seamen

20

1,000,000

364000

Laboring people and out-servants

15

5,460,000

35000

Common soldiers

14

490,000

40000

Cottagers and paupers

6

240,000

30000

Vagrants, beggars, gypsies, thieves and prostitutes (per  head)

2

60,000

Medieval Britain Income Inequality Summary and Analysis with a Comparison to America's Income Inequality in 2011

 

Medieval Britain

2011 U.S.

Maximum household income

3,200(£)

$4.9 billion (hedge fund manager John Paulson)

Median household income

38(£)

$51,413

Ratio of maximum income to median

84.2 to 1

95,307

Top 400 highest income household’s average income

1835(£)

$202,400,000

Ratio of top 400 average
income to median

48 to 1

3,937

The highest 1%’s income  percent of  all income

11.3%

24%

Income Inequality Is Far More Extreme Now Than In Medieval Times

The Scottish Enlightenment’s Adam Smith

Adam Smith was one of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, and he is widely considered the father of modern economics. His work was important to many other very influential thinkers, including David Ricardo and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century and John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman in the twentieth. Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776) is one of the most influential books ever written. In it he wrote:

 “Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.”

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”[i]

“Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”

Societies require systems that moderate tendencies for distributions of wealth and income to be highly skewed toward a small economic elite.

The term “economist” did not exist in the time of Adam Smith. He considered himself to be a moral philosopher dedicated to understanding ways for society to be organized to best serve the majority of people and the ideal of justice.

People should be taxed “as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.” Taxation should “remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.” 

Adam Smith

Smith maintained that sharing the feelings of others as closely as possible is ideally one of our main drives in life. The meaning of his famous “invisible hand” reference has been misinterpreted to justify individual greed as the driving force within society.

[i] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 5, pg. 316 and Book 3, Chapter IV, pg. 448

The New Enlightenment’s Index

For anyone with a copy of The New Enlightenment without an index and anyone else who would like it, here is a downloadable PDF of The New Enlightenment’s Index.

Amazon as Metaphor manuscript excerpt

Introduction to Amazon as Metaphor

Humanity has accomplished what was deemed possible only in the imaginations of visionary science fiction writers. Advancements in communication and computer technologies, medicine, transportation, and other fields are testaments to the immense power of the human mind.

However, technological advancements are occurring as we socially decline. Instead, they could have resulted in a science fiction-like utopia in the United States. To see this is not hyperbole, consider this: In 2023, our nation’s gross domestic product (GDP, a measure of its economic output) per capita, adjusted for inflation, was 24 times what it was in 1814[1] when Thomas Jefferson wrote:

 

“We have no Paupers…the great mass of our population is of laborers…most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich … such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above meer decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”[2] 

We have millions of “paupers,” over a thousand billionaires, and 65 thousand centimillionaires (possessors of wealth valued over $100 million).[3] With the productivity technological advancements have enabled, we could have no poverty and everyone living comfortably with all their material needs met, working less than 20 hours per week for the last several decades. And with an appropriate degree of economic inequality could have come rational, genuinely democratic governance. Remote from these conditions, we move further away within the bounds of economic and political systems that will destroy us.

Many attribute our technological and GDP per capita advancements to capitalism despite substantial evidence that it was not necessary. For several decades, the major technological advances resulted from the work of researchers in public institutions or who were otherwise publicly supported. Government investments yielded the Internet, which led to the digital economy. Digital GDP has grown 2.5 times faster than physical GDP for the past decade and is estimated to be worth $20.8 trillion by 2025. Government investments also yielded innovations in computers, information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, GPS, materials, voice recognition, touch screen, electronics, and aerospace that resulted in immense economic value. Also, the U.S. National Science Foundation funded the algorithm which helped create Google’s search engine.[4] Business enterprises owned and managed by elites were not necessary to apply these advances to consumer products and services. This book describes superior ways to organize an economy.

The success of U.S. “capitalism” also relied on its “gangsters.” Major General Smedley D. Butler, one of the two Marines in U.S. history awarded two medals Medals of Honor, near the end of his life, admitted that as a Marine, he was a “gangster” leader. Large corporation CEOs influence in government drove U.S. military interventions around the world to secure control over foreign markets, raw materials, and workers. Butler played a major role in early 20th-century interventions involving massacres of civilian populations, the institution of a brutal system of forced labor, and the seizing of resources—all to maximize the profits of Guilded Age corporate elites.[5]

In the 1930’s, corporate elite “gangsters” turned their attention to the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies required them to pay higher taxes, so they tried to overthrow him and install a fascist government formally under their control. The coup plotters included the CEOs of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, J.P. Morgan Jr., and DuPont’s former president. They asked Butler to lead a military coup, but Butler refused and revealed what he knew to members of Congress. He stated, “The plan…was to form an organization of veterans … to intimidate the government and break down our democratic institutions. The upshot of the whole thing was that I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men, which would be able to take over the functions of government.”[6]

 Early twentieth-century corporate elites’ coup failed, but modern-day corporate elites’ coup has succeeded. They did not need a military intervention to accomplish it. They have captured the government—and the media—with their money, so no possibility exists that an FDR-like agenda can be instituted—unless a mass political movement demands it. 

Less controversy exists on capitalism’s role in our social decline than in our GDP per capita advancements. The exclusive focus on maximizing private profits and the hierarchical structure of its enterprises are at the core of its destructiveness. A significant and related factor is the character of corporate elites due to the motives to be at the top of large corporations and the requirements to get and be there. We are long overdue for taking a close look at the people’s character at the top of our economic hierarchy and the systems responsible for their position, one of unprecedented power. Their power extends into the political domain, where they have destroyed democratic functioning.

Elections give the impression we have a democratic political system, but this is far from reality. Princeton University political scientists quantified how far. In their words, “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.”[7]

Most of us know it is unwise to enable individuals to have an overwhelming influence over society because it leads to the corruption of their character. This problem has been recognized for centuries. Lord Acton famously said in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[8] We are experiencing the result of this dynamic on people who were extraordinarily immoral before the corrupting influence of extreme wealth and power.

Some readers may be prejudiced against my claims on the character of top corporate managers. They see that all professions have morally good and bad people and that we should not characterize a group of people based on the acts of some in it. Some know of corporate elites who on occasion seemed to speak and act socially responsibly. However, such words and acts were often not as altruistic as they seemed.

For example, Jeff Bezos vowed in a CNN interview to give away most of his massive fortune during his lifetime. His announcement made headlines around the world despite the fact that he failed to provide any specifics, and on that same day, his company, Amazon, announced it would be laying off 10,000 of its workers right before the holidays.[9]  The layoffs got relatively little press. The world’s richest man uses philanthropy to shield his harmful treatment of employees, robust tax avoidance schemes, and political system influence that has very successfully advantaged his businesses at the expense of other businesses and, ultimately, all of us.

As Bezos tours the world on his $500 million yacht, he has his company monitor social movements worldwide, apparently to interfere with any that may lead to a world where he is not sitting at its top able to support whoever and whatever he pleases with a small fraction of his billions.[10] The time of kings and lords is not over; it’s modified with names changed that protect the guilty. Instead of the unacceptable kings and lords, we have large corporate managers and major owners, and workers are called employees, not serfs.

Unlike serfs, employees have some freedom of movement and occupation change. However, serfs had stability and were allowed a sufficient portion of their produce to be fed, clothed, and housed. Employees have no stability and commonly are compensated too little to be fed, clothed and housed, so they need charity or government assistance to meet their basic needs.

 Instead of democratic processes determining where massive resources are allocated, modern-day versions of kings and lords do so with their hoards and through their influence on government.

On Thanksgiving 2022, another possessor of wealth valued at over $100 billion, Warren Buffett, gave $750 million in charitable donations to organizations tied to his family. Also in 2022, his Berkshire Hathaway corporation, which owns BNSF Railway, one of the country’s largest railroad companies, refused to give adequate sick leave to striking railroad workers. The strike caused a nationwide economic crisis, so Congress forced rail workers to accept a deal that didn’t meet their very reasonable demands. Buffett’s $750 million in charitable donations would have been more than enough to pay for sick leave for every rail worker in America. If Buffett had been really concerned about making the world a better place, he would have acceded to the reasonable demands of the workers whose exploitation is making him rich. Instead, he widely publicized his charitable giving announcement, which distracted from his harmful behavior.[11]

To his credit, Buffet advocates for higher taxes on the rich, so his high-functioning sociopathology is milder than in most billionaires. They all must know they are exploiting large numbers of workers but do not care; any who do not know are willfully ignorant because it is obvious. Their billions are founded on historic and growing corporate profits, which are business funds remaining after all expenses, including labor. Profits are at historic highs because workers are not fairly compensated for their labor’s essential role in their creation. Profit’s size now and projected into the future is the basis of the value of billionaires’ massive corporate stock hoards.

 Philanthropy is the wealthy’s pressure release valve on demands they pay higher taxes or taxes at their rates of the mid-twentieth century, and a distraction from their rapacious and ruthless behaviors. Philanthropists will not fund what only the government can or will, such as Social Security, Medicare, and SNAP, nor institute the radical social advancements we need.

Only if corporate elites pay far more taxes can we meet our ideal of a government of, for, and by the people. Instead, over the last several decades, they have reduced their taxes through their corrupting influence on government and the use of tax havens. The resulting trillions of dollars per year reduction in public funds is a major contributing factor to our social decline.

The general population is on a moral spectrum, and so are those at the top of the corporate world, where their spectrum is shifted toward the depraved. 

 The corporate world is often characterized by cutthroat competition in the climb up to the top of the corporate ladder. The competition is most extreme in large corporations where the rewards at the top are massive. In this context, it is not surprising that ruthlessness, exploitativeness, narcissism, lack of empathy, selfishness, manipulativeness, and egotism are personality characteristics that advantage people greedy for the wealth and power of top corporate positions when they exist with excellent political skills. It is not uncommon for an extraordinary degree of immorality and political skills to coexist. One study found that people low on measures of honesty and humility were more likely to have high political skills.[12] The qualification process for some of our nation’s most influential positions filters out ethical people.

A central factor in judging people’s character is their capacity to feel empathy and willingness to act on it. Deep evolutionary roots exist for such a capacity. Many examples exist where animals have acted based on what appeared to be empathy, and we have no good reason to believe it was not, sometimes at great peril. Their capacity for empathy advantaged their social group.

Charles Darwin describes examples of animal behavior motivated by empathy in his book The Descent Of Man, including this one: After a zookeeper showed him deep wounds on his neck that were inflicted while kneeling on the floor by a fierce baboon, he described how a small monkey likely saved his life. The monkey was a friend of the keeper and lived in the same large compartment as the baboon. Despite being “dreadfully afraid of the great baboon,” as soon as he saw his friend in peril, he rushed to the rescue, risking his life with screams and bites that distracted the baboon, enabling the zookeeper to escape.

No survival advantage for the monkey’s species might seem to exist for an inherited capacity to feel motivated to risk their lives to save the life of a member of another species. However, a brain architecture that enables it to perceive the pain and risk of a friend and act accordingly has been essential to many species survival, including homo sapiens and our ancestors.

This YouTube video impressively displays mixed species emphatic behavior. It shows a hawk attack on an isolated chicken. Immediately, another chicken (likely a rooster, but it’s difficult to know from the video) comes running in to help save his friend, but with feathers flying off the first one in the struggle, the situation is not looking hopeful. However, to the great fortune of the chicken, it shared a large enclosure with a goat who witnessed the attack, and shortly after the chicken ran in to help, so did the goat, who, within seconds, removed the hawk, who then flew off. The goat acted based on its perception of the pain and risk of a friend.

The above is just a tiny sampling of known animal behavior motivated by empathy, a quality of mind essential to their species’ survival.[13]

As we have all seen video evidence of, animals can also behave ruthlessly with sometimes obvious survival benefits such as when predators kill and consume prey. However, violence also occurs within species that form social groups, such as baboons. Survival of the fittest selective pressures likely resulted in violent behavior, but some of it seems senseless. Males fight their way up the hierarchy, and the dominant ones attack females and low-ranking males. A University of Michigan primatologist reported that the females in the troop she studied received a serious bite from a male annually, in some cases losing a strip of flesh or part of an ear in the process. Their behavior is not wholly genetically determined. Cultural conditions can vary it significantly, sometimes dramatically.

Culture can be defined as behaviors shared by a population, but not necessarily other species members, independent of genetics or environmental factors, that persist past their originators. Many social animal species have cultures. They learn from one another and have regional variants in skills, conventions, and fashions. Researchers discovered a dramatic transformation in a baboon culture that gives us some hope.[14]

The dominant males in two baboon groups battled over access to the contents of a large food waste dump, to the great misfortune of the one victorious. As a result of their victory, they were exposed to dumpster meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which killed them. Left behind in their group were the males who lacked the aggressiveness needed for dumpster brawling and all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism. There was a significant increase in affectionate mutual grooming and decrease in incidents where dominant males expressed aggression against females and lower-ranked males. Base levels of stress hormones in low-ranked males decreased substantially.

A decade later, no males from the pacific culture were in the group due to death or migration (baboon males at puberty leave their original home), and new males from outside the group had joined it, yet the pacific culture persisted for at least two decades. The resident baboons successfully instructed the immigrants on the tribe’s customs, and the mutual benefit of all in it likely contributed to the success.

Species evolution has involved consciousness; as it has risen, so has all of its capacities, including empathy. One way it has increased is through our ability to foresee the consequences of actions so we can avoid those that would, in the future, cause pain or harm, physical or psychological, to other individuals. Human intelligence has thus extended empathetic behavior through time as it has through space. We can feel empathy for humans and other life forms that are not in our presence, even worldwide.

Our capacity for empathy significantly advanced early in our species’ evolution due to the character of human societies. Our language abilities and intelligence led to extraordinary success as a species by enabling the accomplishment of goals in cooperative groups far beyond that of any other species. When a small human social group (tribe) of the period had more empathetic members willing to sacrifice themselves for the common good, such a tribe would be victorious over other tribes. The number of well-endowed humans with the capacity for empathy thus tended to rise.

Self-sacrifice can also lead to self-destruction or no ability to procreate. However, due to repeated interactions between tribe members and our language abilities, the more self-sacrificing individuals would more often than destroyed would be widely praised and rewarded, including with the more desirable mates, both in terms of empathetic and reproductive capacity, creating selection pressures for the genetic component of empathetic personalities. In Part 1, I describe other factors that led to an increase in pro-social humans. Also, I describe how, in our possibly terminal phase of human existence, we have removed selective pressures for pro-social and added some for antisocial humans. The rise in capacity for empathy is not uniform throughout our species and is entirely absent in some of us.

We will not need to wait for evolution to increase the prevalence of antisocial humans sufficiently for species extinction; we have more than a sufficient prevalence now.

Our intelligence also enables us to reflect on past actions and feel guilt and shame when we act selfishly, also emotions not uniform throughout our species that are entirely absent in some of us. Empathy, guilt and shame will be an increasingly insufficient restraining force on our species dark side. Abuse of human tools makes us the most destructive and violent species. Everyone has a dark side; however, elites are responsible for the preponderance of the destruction and violence by motivating the dark side of some of the rest of us to act according to their preferences.

In our social hierarchy aggressive dominant males’ (mostly) behavior physically harms many members of our social group or nation and many outside of it. They don’t bite off any ears; they are much too sophisticated for that, and it’s too obvious a crime to avoid the prison time consequence. However, their behavior is far more destructive. Our species aggressive, dominant males destructiveness and violence, much of it insidious, threaten our existence and that of many other species. Our need to remove them from positions of power is more urgent than ever. Their wealth is unprecedented, enabling a corresponding level of power and abuse of it.

A disease will not remove them as it did for the studied baboons; the preponderance of members removed from our society by disease will continue to be in the lower classes due to many millions of them in poverty and rapacious elites in the healthcare sector. And we can’t remove our elites as the French did in their 18th-century revolution by employing guillotines while exclaiming, “Off with their heads.” Our revolution must remove elites peacefully through a mass movement that demands radical reforms of an economic system whose design inevitably results in rapacious, antisocial elites with a profound inability for empathy ruling our society.

We cannot wait for our policymakers to lead the way forward. Detailed public policies for fundamental social advancements must come from outside our corrupted political system, and a mass movement must sustain its demands that they be instituted. Some policies for this purpose are detailed in Part 3.

In Part 1, I will provide many examples demonstrating that hierarchically structured business enterprises with an exclusive focus on maximizing their profits have been and will continue to descend us into deeper levels of dysfunction and injustice. I will further detail the character of those at their top and why they threaten the survival of our and possibly many other species.

Part 2 provides a detailed view of the behavior of one particularly significant capitalist enterprise, Amazon, and its founder and executive chairman. Amazon reaches into Americans’ daily lives in more ways than any corporation in history and is growing more powerful.

 

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison?tab=chart&country=USA~OWID_WRL  2018 dollars shown are adjusted to 2023 dollars. 2023 GDP per capita source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RC0A052NBEA. Worker hours per capita are lower now than in 1814, so the GDP/capita ratio is an underestimate of the productivity gains.

[2] https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%22we%20have%20no%20paupers%22&s=1111311111&sa=&r=1&sr= (Of course, Jefferson was referring to the conditions of White people, not enslaved Black people.)

[3] 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm

[4] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/growth-entrepreneurial-state-direction-more-important-than-rate-by-mariana-mazzucato-2023-08, also see The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Mariana Mazzucato

[5] https://nacla.org/gangsters-capitalism-review

[6] https://www.democracynow.org/2022/1/26/jonathan_katz_book_gangsters_of_capitalism

[7] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

[8] Originally stated by Lord Acton in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887

[9] https://patrioticmillionaires.org/2022/12/08/dont-trust-billionaire-philanthropy/

[10] https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

[11] https://patrioticmillionaires.org/2022/12/08/dont-trust-billionaire-philanthropy/

[12] https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201803/why-toxic-people-get-ahead?amp

[13] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-implies-that-animals-feel-empathy/    https://www.economist.com/news/essays/21676961-inner-lives-animals-are-hard-study-there-evidence-they-may-be-lot-richer-science-once-thought

[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullies-baboons-retool-their-culture.html 

  Additional book excerpts are under the Economic System Advancements and Political System Advancements tabs   

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

“…a coherent vision of how we get from here to there in the struggle for a more just society.” Robert Pollin, Ph.D.

“…how to heal, restore, and enhance our nation as a secure and working democracy for all of its citizens.” Midwest Book Review

“… the most comprehensive roadmap for national renewal that I have seen! Congratulations” James  B. Stewart, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2022 Robert Bivona

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.”

STEPHEN A. BEZRUCHKA, MD

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.

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

“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.”

DOUG LOWNDES, Ph.D.

SARAH HERNANDEZ

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

SARAH HERNANDEZ, Ph.D.

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.”

THOMAS W. GRAY, Ph.D.

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.”

CARMINE GORGA, PH.D.

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

BILL BARRY

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

BILL BARRY

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.”

JAMES HASLAM

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%.

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.

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 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.)

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.  

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.”

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.

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.