We can create a well-functioning democratic government enabling us to eliminate poverty, create a large dominant middle class, and bring democracy into the workplace.
“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
“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.”
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, 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, 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 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 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 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.
“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.”
“Bob Bivona unifies the concerns raised in various disciplines regarding 21st-century inequality into a cohesive, progressive, humanitarian outlook for our future.”
“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.”
“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.”
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
"If the 1% could ban books, this would be the first one on their list."
“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.”
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%.
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.
Over about two decades, the number of small businesses has fallen dramatically. For example: (source)
| Industry | Decline in Number |
| Small construction firms | 15,000 |
| Small manufacturers | > 70,000 |
| LocaL retailers | 108,000 (40% decline) |
| Community banks, credit unions | 13,000 (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.”
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, 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.