My father Dwight Gill Porter (17 Feb 1944 - 16 Feb 2024) lived a rich life, did many things in many places, influenced and delighted a lot of people, and left a very large void and vast amounts of written and spoken material. I will be collecting some of his writings, stories, photos and memories here over time.
The first instalment is going to be what he referred to as the "Hate Book", something he wrote under quite difficult conditions in the last months of his life, a distillation of many of the ideas he had been honing for decades in thousands (literally) of emails, Facebook posts, Quora answers, etc. It's not quite finished or polished but I have decided to post it without further ado, starting today, 17 Feb 2025, after a full year without his voice in our ears.
I think this text succeeds in capturing the flavor of his mind and what I always found a very inspiring, compassionate, and idealistic way of thinking.
Enjoy and feel free to write duganp@gmail.com or post on Dwight's Facebook page with any reminiscences, reactions, or anything else at all.
Huge thanks to Ingrid and Yvonne Klintborn for their editing and fact-checking.
FOREWORD
“We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, afraid of each other” --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Are you really a resentful bigot? Did you hate having a black man in the White House? Do you loathe Jews, people of other races, nationalities, sexual orientations, religions, and especially, “woke” liberals and the “hard left"? Do you disapprove of feminism, abortion, and same-sex marriage?
Or are you genuinely concerned, say, about the floods of migrants Trump warned about in 2015: ‘When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Do you feel your way of life is threatened, that white people will be replaced, or discriminated against?
Of course you can think what you like and believe what you like. In recent years we have seen how willingly people will believe whatever conforms to their prejudices, even when those beliefs don't hold up to any kind of logic. We have also seen how fear, anger, and hatred act like stimulants impelling people to find others of similar views, and to express them forcefully, a phenomenon which the social media are all too happy to monetize. If they had had any social conscience whatsoever, they could have promoted support sites, solidarity sites, educational sites, and goodness in general. But they chose otherwise.
So yes, believe what you like.
But we hope you have noticed that today, like almost every day, the world is very quiet, as 8.1 billion humans are sleeping or going about their business,
Almost nobody is looking for or expecting trouble.
Why should they? In every American and European town and city, in Lagos and every African village, in Istanbul, Nagoya, Beijing, Seoul, Manila, and all Asian beach towns, in Mexico City, Lima, Sydney, Cairo, Christchurch, Johannesburg, London, Reykjavik, Helsinki, Bilbao, Lisbon, Barcelona, on all the islands and continents, people are dressing, cooking, eating, working, or going somewhere. They may be chatting, or doing something with their phones, playing cards, or caring for their families.
Like the rest of us, they're thinking about what they have to do today, or worrying about their problems. Life is a joy. But it's not always easy.
Yes, there are definitely some bad actors out there, and there always will be.
There are wicked madmen and a few madwomen, looking to commit horrific crimes such as mass shootings. There are narcissists, psychopaths, and sociopaths, incapable of pity or mercy. There are people whose parents never taught them how to behave. Some people who were hurt or molested as children will go on to hurt or molest other children. There are people with severe mental illness, some of them highly unstable.
But how many of these exist in the world? Not that many.
Almost everyone else is happy to be living a lawful, peaceful life.
Somewhere today a few hundred of our fellow earthlings may be rioting, screaming angrily and brandishing weapons. A few thousands may be fighting in bloody wars.
Wherever they are, that's where the television cameras will be.
That's why we always see the scary-looking people, not the familiar boring ones that are just like us, and probably watch the same series on television.
Is it possible that we're getting the wrong impression?
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This little catalogue of our favorite scapegoats is intended to explode the myths and expose the lies we have been told about our fellow humans, and especially about our favorite scapegoats –people of other races, national origins, cultures, beliefs, or gender identities, migrants, Jews, feminists, or people we suspect of being hostile to us, or posing a danger to our way of life.
A few other actors have been added for balance, including the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, and the billionaires, which now threaten humanity's future.
But the violent, death-threatening white supremacist nationalist populists also come under our scrutiny, as do their arch-enemies, the “woke” liberal elites with their identity politics and cancel culture.
Lastly, we look at left-handers, to show how silly humans can be. Did you know that as late as the mid-20th century, efforts were still being made to correct the “condition”, and to prevent people from writing with their left hands. Can you believe it?
There are several links to outside articles, all of them eye-openers, namely about corruption in US defense spending, trans men in bathrooms and trans men in women's sports. Please read them all.
We hope you enjoy this short read and learn something from it.
The first group in our catalogue of scapegoats is none other than:
YOUR NEIGHBORS
“It is easier to love humanity than to love your neighbor” --Homer
People often hate those closest to them. Whether they live next door, or in a neighboring town, region, or country, you may feel a stronger enmity towards those terrible people than for foreigners you don't actually know.
Remember that for centuries rival Christian sects slaughtered each other in Jesus’ name, and that the deadly enmity between Sunni and Shiite Muslims continues unabated.
Underlying the hate is always the question, expressed here in its most extreme form:
"How dare those people have different skin colors, beliefs and customs from mine? Some even have beards, cover their faces, or wear funny hats! Why should I have to tolerate that? Can't they all go away and die!"
MIGRANTS
We hear horrible things about illegal immigrants. How they smuggle drugs, steal our jobs, commit horrible crimes, and live on welfare.
We dehumanize them and even demonize them.
Here's the true story, with the facts to back it up.
When people are threatened by death from war or starvation, many will gather up their children and belongings and try to escape. But many will not. Most people, however desperate, will not leave home.
But those who do, whatever their country, religion, or color, are likely to be the healthiest, bravest, most resourceful, and most enterprising members of their societies.
But let us begin by throwing a few historical facts about how the social fabric of the US came to be.
First peoples
By most accounts, the native population of what is now the US is roughly estimated to have numbered about 3.7 million before the arrival of Europeans. By the time westward expansion to the Pacific coast had taken place this number had dropped dramatically due to conflict and disease. Today 9.2 million people identify at least partially as Native Americans, though the census data is admittedly unreliable.
Immigrants
Now for a shocker. In the history of what is now the US, there has been only one major crisis involving immigrants. It was not experienced so much as a crisis as a rolling trend which had gradual but devastating consequences.
It was when immigrants flooded in from Europe in the 17th,18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and slowly killed off the native population or drove them from their hunting grounds, ultimately nearly erasing their rich and varied cultures, and leaving them demoralized.
Yes, this outrage was committed by white people, many generations ago. Their actions were not premeditated, and while we of today should be aware of them, we needn't feel guilty about them personally. The stronger had prevailed over the weaker, and selfishness prevailed over solidarity, as in most of human history.
This invasion and conquest reflected the technology and mentality of the times. Advances in ship construction, navigation techniques, and food storage made it possible for Europeans to explore the world, seeking spices, treasure, and whatever opportunities they could find. Advances in weaponry made it easy to subdue native populations whom they conveniently classified as savages, as subhuman, which they were not –they spoke languages and belonged to families and tribes with complex cultures.
It turns out that all subsequent problems involving immigrants were due not to invasions or crime, but to their shortage!
The young country needed more people to occupy the territory, to do the work, to farm the lands, to dig the mines, and to build the railroads.
In the1860s some 12,000 Chinese laborers were recruited to complete the US transcontinental railroads. It was backbreaking and dangerous work –up to 1,200 of them died, and many had their bones sent home for burial. Chinese employees received wages of $27 and then $30 a month, minus the cost of food and board. In contrast, Irishmen were paid $35 per month, with board provided.
In the 1880s and later in the 1950s there were some half-hearted attempts to restrict immigration from Asia, and also by Irish Catholics. But otherwise the borders remained wide open for most of American history.
Unwilling Immigrants
Between 1525 and 1866, about 12.5 million free human beings were captured in Africa and sold as slaves in the “New World” of the Americas. Only about 10.7 million survived the Atlantic crossing, where they were chained to the bottom of slave ships. Some 388,000 slaves were sold in what is now the US, mostly to work in the tobacco, indigo, and cotton fields of the southern states. The slave population grew to some 4 million by the outbreak of the US civil war in 1865.
Many white Americans are deeply prejudiced against black and mixed-race people. They fear violence and are on the lookout for "uppityness" or a defiant attitude.
No US demographic has been more cruelly treated than African-Americans. First, they were captured, then transported –many died– and then bought and sold as property from 1619 to 1865, when 4 million were freed but without compensation or provisions for their future. As slaves they lived very restricted lives and it was illegal to let them learn to read. Females were commonly raped and impregnated by their white masters, and the offspring were kept or sold as slaves. Slave owners were rarely penalized for killing slaves in the course of punishing them.
When the slaves were freed, they were given nothing, no land or means to make a living. In contrast, many states gave land and jobs to European immigrants and to Civil War veterans who had fought in the Union (northern) army
Lynch mobs killed some 4,000 African-Americans with impunity between 1865 until the middle of the 20th century.
So-called "Jim Crow" laws prevented former slaves from voting or exercising other rights. Communities in which African-Americans managed to prosper were burnt to the ground by whites, as in the infamous Tulsa massacre in 1921. Their children attended segregated and inferior schools. African-Americans rode in the rear of buses, and were denied the use of public and many private facilities used by whites.
They were “red-lined”, or banned from living in or near white neighborhoods.
This changed with the civil rights and voting rights legislation passed in the 1950s and 1960s. But efforts to keep them away from the polls continue today with "gerrymandering", or changing voting districts to exclude as many African-Americans as possible. Other laws made it difficult for two-parent families to stay together, and a disproportionate number of black children continue to be raised by single mothers.
These disadvantages are reflected in a higher crime rate among African Americans, especially in cities. While making up only 13% of the national population, African- Americans account for 40% percent of the prison population, and 27% of all people killed by police (2021 data collected by The Washington Post).
Refugees
However, there is no denying that war, oppression, natural disasters and global warming are causing surges in migration throughout the world, bringing challenges which must be faced rationally and –one hopes– humanely.
The UN Refugee Agency most estimated that, by the middle of 2023, the number of people forcibly displaced had reached a historical record of more than 110 million, with more than 36.4 million refugees.
Here are the top countries where the refugees were in 2023:
Iran 3,443,522
Turkey 3,368,976
Germany 2,509,506
The United States hosted 389,335 refugees, almost 20,000 more than a much smaller country like Spain with 369,722.
Statistics
The CATO Institute Website features a wealth of statistics and scholarly articles on the subject of illegal immigration, namely a very detailed comparison of migration movements under the most recent administrations (Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden) by Alex Nowrasteh Here are some of the highlights:
The US Labor Market Explains Most of the Increase in Illegal Immigration
The flow of illegal immigrants across the southern border has markedly increased over the last several years. In FY2023, Border Patrol had 2,045,838 encounters with illegal immigrants and other border crossers along the southwest land border. From a low of less than 20,000 in April 2020, due in large part to the pandemic‐induced collapse in employment, encounters have risen steadily and began to rise even faster after President Biden took office. Many are blaming him for this rapid increase, but most of it has to do with the strength of the labor market rather than border enforcement policies.
However imperfect, the number of border patrol encounters is considered a good proxy measure for the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States, even if they count repeat border crossers each time, and don’t include “Gotaways” nor visa overstays. Hence, a number of figures comparing the number of encounters under different administrations.
There were more than 9.5 million non‐farm job openings in September 2023, , i.e. higher than at any point during the Trump, Obama, or Bush administrations. The wage gain for immigrants in the United States is four to ten times higher than in Latin American and Caribbean countries, even accounting for the higher cost of living in the United States. Since legal migration is very restricted, many come illegally to work.
There simply are not enough temporary work visas available for legal migrant workers to meet the demand.. The already high wage premium and extraordinary labor demand likely explain why the number of Border Patrol encounters and job openings track closely.
But the labor market can’t explain all cross‐border movements. Conditions in sending countries, the cost of travel, and US border enforcement also matter.
The next measure of the strength of US labor markets is the unemployment rate, which has averaged 4.3 percent during the Biden administration compared to 5 percent during the Trump administration (higher due to the pandemic) and 7.4 percent during the Obama administration. The last measure of demand in the labor market in this post is the vacancy‐unemployment ratio (V‑U ratio). The V‑U ratio during the Biden administration has averaged 6.3 percent, while it averaged 4.1 percent during the Trump administration. Plotted against SW Border Patrol encounters, the Biden administration really is an outlier with an exceptionally high V‑U ratio that is attracting many more illegal immigrants and other border crossers.
In a nutshell, the economic gains from working in the United States mostly explain why immigrants want to come here in the first place and the dearth of visas is why so many come illegally. However, the state of the US economy and labor market should be the first explanation that people consider when explaining changes in the flow of illegal immigrants. Policy matters, but the economy matters more.
Until Donald Trump's election in 2016, Mexican workers had crossed the southern US border in both directions without impediment, mostly to do seasonal work in agriculture.
Today, most irregular immigrants to the United States do not come by crossing the Rio Grande. In 2017 only 200,000 did that, while 600,000 came by car or airplane, and overstayed their visas.
Also, there are only a handful of cases in which those who crossed the river were found to be carrying drugs.
Looking at crime by refugees and immigrants, the Cato Institute reports that in 2018, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 782 per 100,000, 535 per 100,000 legal immigrants , and 1,422 per 100,000, native‐born Americans. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was 45% below that of native‐born Americans in Texas. These rates hold for violent crimes, property crimes, homicide, and sex crimes.
The illegal immigrant population of the United States peaked by 2007, when it stood at 12.2 million –only 4% of the total US population. Estimates in 2016 put the number of illegal immigrants at 10.7 million, representing just 3.3% of the total US population. Since the Great Recession of 2008-2010, more illegal immigrants left the United States than entered it, and illegal border crossings were at the lowest in decades until 2021, when a record of 1.7 million people were caught trying to cross the southern border illegally. Since 2007, visa overstays have accounted for a larger share of the growth in the illegal immigrant population than illegal border crossings, which declined considerably from 2000 to 2018. In 2012, 52% of illegal immigrants were from Mexico, 15% from Central America, 12% from Asia, 6% from South America, 5% from the Caribbean, 5% from Europe and Canada. As of 2016, approximately two-thirds of illegal adult immigrants had lived in the US for at least a decade.
Opponents of illegal immigration argue that people who enter the United States illegally are criminals, as well as social and economic burdens on law-abiding natives. Opponents also argue that illegal immigrants who enter the United States illegally should be deported instead of being rewarded with US citizenship and social services. Some argue that illegal immigrants should instead enter the United States lawfully through legal immigration.
But research shows that illegal immigrants increase the size of the US economy, contribute to economic growth, enhance the welfare of natives, contribute more in tax revenue than they collect, reduce American firms' incentives to offshore jobs and import foreign-produced goods, and benefit consumers by reducing the prices of goods and services. Economists estimate that legalization of the illegal immigrant population would increase the immigrants' earnings and consumption considerably, and increase US gross domestic product. According to a CATO Institute update of a National Academy of Sciences report, immigrants generate in inflation-adjusted terms nearly $ 1 trillion in state, local and federal taxes, almost 300 billion more than they receive in government benefits, including cash assistance, entitlements and public education. There is scholarly consensus that illegal immigrants commit less crime than natives. Sanctuary cities --which adopt policies designed to avoid prosecuting people solely for being in the country illegally– have no statistically meaningful impact on crime. Research suggests that immigration enforcement has no impact on crime rates.
In 1996 Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) which banned federal, state, and local bodies from public benefits from flowing to illegal immigrants. They are however still entitled to medical assistance, immunizations, disaster relief, and K-12 education, although federal law still requires local and state governments to deny benefits to those illegal. The implementation of PRWORA demonstrated the shift towards personal responsibility over "public dependency." There were about 8 million illegally present workers in the United States in 2010. These workers were 5% of America's workforce.
There are numerous incentives which draw foreigners to the US. Most illegal immigrants who come to America come for better opportunities for employment, a greater degree of freedom, avoidance of political oppression, freedom from violence, famine, and family reunification.
International polls by the Gallup polls in 2013-2016 in 156 foreign countries found that about 147 million adults would happily move to the US, making it the most-desired destination country, followed by Germany and Canada.
Now we have seen that illegal immigration in itself poses no threat to anyone, and that it actually confers advantages upon host communities.
This is exactly the opposite of what we have been told by the fear mongers!
Hungary is a special case as a country with very few immigrants but the greatest fear and rejection of them, stoked by Victor Orban's government. But you may want to skip this and go to our next scapegoat candidate, the LGBTQ community.
HUNGARY, A SPECIAL CASE
Hungary is a relatively ethnically homogenous country with a population of 9,689,010, where only 202,525, or 2%, are immigrants –only 6 countries in the world have a smaller proportion of immigrants.
A restrictive policy limiting immigration together with the higher number of deaths over births, is the reason behind the shrinking of the population of Hungary. The Hungarian government has introduced incentives to encourage women to have more children, rather than turn to immigration to address the problem.
Although most immigrants live in Budapest, the fear Orban has managed to instill in voters in order to remain in power resides chiefly in the countryside where most people have never seen an immigrant.
LGBTQ PEOPLE
No child is happy to discover that they are uncomfortable with the sex they were assigned at birth, or that they are attracted to members of the same sex, because it makes them feel different, and other people often react badly.
In 2021, an IPSOS survey in 27 countries around the world of people's sexual orientation and gender identity found that about 80% of people worldwide identified as heterosexual, 3% as gay, lesbian or homosexual, 4% as bisexual, 1% as pansexual or omnisexual, 1% as asexual, 1% as "other", and 11% didn't know or wouldn’t say. The survey found that men are more likely than women to identify as homosexual (4% vs. 1%).
No one can trick a child into this unwelcome realization of being different. Many children try to conceal it out of shame or fear. The lucky ones may become parents, or find partners for lifelong loving relationships. But almost all will suffer bullying, hostility, and discrimination, or even punishment. In some countries LGBTQ people are jailed or executed.
And yet none pose any threat to you or your children --homosexuality and gender dysphoria are not contagious. No one can be "groomed" to go against their nature, nor can they be "cured" of their orientation.
So please show some sympathy, or at least respect. Don't make things worse just because you feel uncomfortable with trans or other LGBTQ people. You may not like "pride parades", drag shows, or same-sex marriage, but you can understand how it must feel to be out of the closet at last, with a chance be judged by your worth, not your gender or your possibly weird looks.
And keep in mind that very few instances have been recorded of any ill-intentioned masculine trans man in a ladies' room. It's usually the other way around. See: https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-for-trans-men-to-be-forced-to-use-the-womens-bathroom
As regards trans men seeking to compete in women's sports, numerous solutions have been proposed and implemented
Here's a good discussion of the issue.
http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/OU-Sport/
According to Human Rights Watch, at least 67 countries have national laws criminalizing same sex relations between consenting adults, Sentences range from fines to life imprisonment and even the death penalty.
Here are some of the countries in which homosexuality and “propaganda for homosexuality" are outlawed.
AFGHANISTAN
BANGLADESH
BRUNEI
INDONESIA
IRAN
IRAQ
KUWAIT
LEBANON
MALAYSIA
MALDIVES
MYANMAR
OMAN
PAKISTAN
PALESTINE
QATAR
SAUDI ARABIA
SRI LANKA
SYRIA
TURKMENISTAN
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
UZBEKISTAN
YEMEN
KIRIBATI
PAPUA NEW GUINEA
SAMOA
SOLOMON ISLANDS
TONGA
TUVALI
Meanwhile, in response to recent legislation outlawing discrimination against LGBTQs, more than a dozen US states have proposed so-called 'Don't Say Gay' bills.
They are Florida, Alabama, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, South Carolina, Missouri, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.
The proposals seek to prohibit schools from using a curriculum or discussing topics of gender identity or sexual orientation.
Opponents say this will institutionalize transphobia and homophobia and goes against all public health evidence in creating a safe and supportive environment for transgender, nonbinary, queer, gay and lesbian youths and their teachers. It could lead to marginalization, harassment, or even violence.
FEMINISM
A modern misogynist speaks:
"I hate women. Some are too sexy, and others aren't sexy enough. I don't mean my mother or my sister or the girl I liked in school. Maybe I never learned to charm them or to be the "gentle protector" I'm told they like. But I do know for a fact that some women like to be dominated by men."
“Feminism has done a lot of damage. It is very confusing. People don't know where they stand or when to take the initiative. Sex is a problem, and in some ways it's getting worse."
"I understand that women don't want to have fewer rights than men, including the right to be educated, to get equal pay for equal work, and to wear what they like without getting raped."
“I agree that abortion should be a medical decision taken by a woman and her doctor. After all, nobody benefits from the birth of an unwanted child, least of all the child, and until people calling themselves Evangelical Christians took up the right-to-life banner only a few decades ago, no religion or tradition has ever claimed a fetus is the same as a live baby or had ‘rights’. The Christian Bible has nothing to say about abortion."
"I agree that women shouldn't be treated like the property of their fathers or husbands, who in some countries are allowed to beat or even kill them."
"I can live with the fact that women now win Nobel Prizes in the sciences. It doesn't bother me that in 1900 they made up only 5% of law students in the US and now account for 55.6%, or that women represented only 24.9% of medical school graduates in 1980, but by 2018 they made up 47.9%."
“Fine. We need them all. But what about the men? What’s happening to us?"
“I guess I will adapt to the changes. But there are still many problems”
“Like all these sex crimes. Sometimes I think the feminists have underestimated the strength of the male sexual and romantic urges, but I don't know what can be done about that. Here's a quote from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on the subject, which seems pretty realistic to me."
“The relation of the sexes […] is the cause of war and the end of peace; the basis of what is serious, and the aim of the jest; the inexhaustible source of wit, the key to all illusions, and the meaning of all mysterious hints."
“The sexual impulse, next to the love of life […] shows itself the strongest and most powerful of motives, constantly lays claim to half the powers and thoughts of the younger portion of mankind, to the ultimate goal of almost all human efforts, interrupts the most serious occupations every hour, sometimes embarrasses for a while even the greatest minds, does not hesitate to intrude with its trash, interfering with the negotiations of statesmen and the investigations of men of learning, knows how to slip it's love letters and locks of hair even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts, breaks the firmest bond, demands the sacrifice sometimes of life or health, sometimes of wealth, rank, or happiness, nay, robs those who are otherwise honest of all conscience, makes those who have hitherto been faithful, traitors; accordingly, on the whole, appears as a malevolent demon that strives to pervert, confuse, and overthrow everything”
JEWS
About 15.7 million people, or 0,2% of the world population, identify as Jews. Some 7.2 million live in Israel, followed by the 6.3 million in the US, one of the few Western countries in which they have never been persecuted.
Jews are the classic scapegoats in Western history. They declined to accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah when the Roman emperor Constantine (CE 306-337) made Christianity the official religion. As outsiders in the Christian --and later the Muslim-- world, they looked after each other's welfare, and tried to be useful to their host communities, lending money with interest when it was illegal for Christians and Muslims to do so. Banned from owning land, many made their livings as merchants. They kept their money in coins, jewels, and works of art for easy transport. They also kept and copied scrolls from ancient times and taught their children to read and write, while most Christians remained illiterate.
However, in times of trouble, such as outbreaks of the plague or other diseases, they were often blamed. Kings reneged on their debts, Jewish communities were burned down, and Jews were expelled en masse from kingdoms or countries, as in Spain in 1492. But they kept their connections and learned new languages, which made them even more useful as “cosmopolitans”.
But as late as the 19th early 20th century many Jewish villages and city ghettos in Russia and Eastern Europe were burned down in “pogroms”, driving many Jews to emigrate to the US. Then, of course, there was Nazi Germany and one of the saddest chapters in the history of mankind.
While Christians held 55% of global wealth in 2015, which should dispel the notion that Jews somehow ‘control* the world's finances as their enemies claim, there are many wealthy Jews, including 267 billionaires with a combined net worth of 1.7 trillion dollars.
Lastly, it can hardly be regarded as “anti-Semitism” to oppose the current Israeli government ministers who call openly for the annihilation of Palestinians as “sub-humans”. Most Jews do not support these policies.
MUSLIMS
According to the Pew Research Center, there are 3.45 million Muslims in the US, making up only 1.1% of the population. They have lived peacefully in the US since colonial times, but conflicts in the Middle East over the past several decades have given rise to strongly anti-American sentiment there, climaxing in the 9/11 attacks, which in turn has sparked Islamophobia, especially where few Muslims live.
The largest US Muslim communities are in New York, California, Illinois, New Jersey, Texas, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Muslim communities are invariably well-assimilated and generally prospering. Some Muslim women keep traditions such as wearing the hijab.
It's true that the Quran calls for the killing of several categories of people, from infidels to apostates, but no one outside the Middle East pays much attention. There are as many such injunctions to kill whole groups of people in the Christian Bible, which are also ignored in our increasingly secular world.
And please remember this: The “wall” in the US Constitution separating church and state was not erected because of conflicts among Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, but rather among Roman Catholics, Quakers, Scottish Presbyterians, French Huguenots, German Reformed pietists, and Dutch Calvinists, all of them mutually hostile Christian sects.
HARD DRUG ADDICTS AND SUPPLIERS
The US has a major drug problem. But it may not be as bad as we imagine in terms of the total population.
Here are the most important figures.
Overdose deaths are now running at about 70,000 a year. That's 70,000 prematurely ended lives and bereaved families, not to mention the often violent crimes addicts may commit to buy drugs, the murders among rival drug dealers, and the cartels who make huge fortunes from the lucrative trade, corrupting entire governments (“o plomo o plata’ –”lead or silver”) and the killing innocent bystanders.
But the 70,000 deaths represent only 0.02 percent of the US population.
In the US, half of people aged 12 and older have used illicit drugs at least once. That's a lot.
Total drug overdose deaths in the US since 2000 are nearing one million. That's also a lot.
But that's only 0.3% of the US population.
The federal budget for drug control in 2020 was $35 billion, a tiny percentage of the 6.6 trillion US budget for that year.
THE SOLUTION
In the best of worlds…
"Quick, turn on your phone. Biden is going to give a speech."
"This is President Joe Biden. I have an important announcement to make.
"In one week, all currently illegal hard drugs will not only be legalized, but will be supplied without charge to all users over the age of 18 who request them. Deliveries will be made discreetly and names will not be taken. Detox and treatment opportunities will be offered. The amount of drugs handed over will be roughly one week's supply, as determined by supplier and user.
"Sterile syringes will also be supplied without charge on request.
"Initially, supplies will come from stockpiles of confiscated drugs, so there will be no guarantee of their quality. Later they will be purchased from specially licensed manufacturers.
"The supply of free drugs will not include cannabis, alcohol, or tobacco, which users may continue to purchase commercially. However there will be no restrictions on the cultivation or brewing of the latter products for private use by adults, so no money ever needs to change hands.
"People now serving prison time for drug use, possession, or sale will be released when testing shows them clean of drugs for one month. This is to improve their chances of remaining clean after release.
"About 70,000 hard drug users die every year of overdoses. Regrettably, we expect this number to increase temporarily owing to this change in policy.
"The benefit to society of the new policy is the immediate ending of the immensely profitable sale of hard drugs by criminal gangs, which have corrupted public institutions and entire governments, damaged economies, and murdered tens of thousands of people.
"We admonish all those who now make their livings from the cultivation, transport, or sale of illegal drugs to seek honest jobs or start legal businesses. We call on those who hold large fortunes as leaders of the cartels to invest them where they can undo some of the damage, especially in clean energy and high-yield agriculture. The new policy does not exempt these leaders from prosecution for the crimes they have committed.
"We enjoin all other countries to adopt this policy.’
Now let us point a few fingers of our own.
BANKS AND BILLIONAIRES
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith warned that "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their privilege.”
US President Ronald Reagan seemed to agree when he observed that “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”
Then, in 1981, the year he took office, Reagan proceeded to cut the top federal tax rate from 73% to 28% on incomes over $29,750 –the lowest this rate had been since 1925– and all hell broke loose.
Reagan had ushered in a cutthroat, winner-take-all economy.
The tax cuts effectively ended the hugely successful experiment in social democracy with which President Franklin Roosevelt had rescued capitalism by “taming” it, following the Great Depression in the 1930s.
Reagan’s tax cuts brought the greatest disparity between rich and poor in all of human history, and the gap continues to widen.
1950-1981: The Golden Age of American capitalism for (almost) all.
In the US in the 1950s and 1960s, a single-income family –whose breadwinner was not necessarily a college graduate– could afford to buy a home and two cars, and to take a vacation every year, putting children through public schools and colleges.
It was a time when the rising economic tide was lifting almost all boats –minorities didn't do as well– and the new and growing ”middle class" had high expectations.
There was no shortage of wealthy people. Some were professionals –doctors, lawyers. Others invested in stocks, real estate, or their own businesses which made good profits, even though their workers were protected by unions, their suppliers by the law, and their customers by regulations and inspectors.
They were not billionaires or super-rich, but they could afford trips to Europe, recreational boats, and luxury goods.
1981. The seizure of the US economy by the greediest, most unscrupulous and dishonest people ever.
The Reagan tax cuts –the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986– popularized the now infamous phrase "trickle-down” or “supply side” economics"
The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981) also cut the highest capital gains tax rate from 28% to 20% but this was later reversed.
Reagan's second cut, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, reduced the highest personal income tax rate from 50% to 38.5%, decreasing to 28% in the following years, and brought it down in further, to 28%.
An ABC News Poll in September 1986 showed that 63% of Americans didn't know enough about the Tax Reform Act of 1986 to say if it was good or bad.
At first it looked OK.
Unemployment fell from 7.5% in 1981 to 5.4% in 1989 after peaking at 10.8% in 1982.
Inflation fell from 11.8% when Reagan entered office, to 4.7% when he left in 1988, and the US Average Real Income grew by 16.8% from 1980 to 1989.
But the US Federal Tax Revenue as % of the GDP –the gross domestic product, or the total output of the US economy in one year– fell from 18.5% to 17.4% in 1980-1990.
The budget deficit increased from $74 billion in 1980 to $221 billion in 1990.
The US budget deficit as a percentage of GDP increased from 2.6% in 1980 to 2.7% in 1989.
The national debt as a percentage of GDP climbed by 62% from 30.9% in 1981 when Reagan took office to 49.9% when he left.
Median real wages dropped by 0.6% by 1990.
To make matters better for the billionaires and worse for everyone else, spending on public education was slashed in the wake of Reagan's tax cuts.
See the Education Data Initiative website to get the full picture
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
As a result, this is how ¨well¨ we fare in education as compared to the rest of the world;
Overall, US students placed 24th in reading, 38th in mathematics, and 25th in science. The total average of the students’ performance was 470. The OECD average was 490, putting the U.S. students' academic achievement way below their OECD peers, despite the US being home to many of the world's top universities.
The Rest of the World
The territories with the best results in 2018 were China (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang), Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, and Estonia. Students in China’s main cities had average scores of 555, 591, and 590 in reading, mathematics, and science, respectively.
After all, “Education is a danger. Every educated person is a future enemy.” –Martin Bormann, private secretary to Adolf Hitler
How about the safety net?
https://econofact.org/is-cutting-the-safety-net-an-effective-way-to-reduce-government-spending
The federal Deficit reached $1 trillion in 2020. This is the equivalent of 4.6% of GDP. The federal budget deficit is expected to grow to 5.4% of GDP by 2030.
Less than a week after Trump’s Treasury Secretary Mnuchin claimed that the Trump tax cuts of 2017 would pay for themselves, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) showed that if tax cuts actually paid for themselves, they would reduce deficits based on faster revenue growth that comes from faster economic growth. But deficits immediately shot up after the 2017 supply-side tax cuts. Read the article in full in Forbes website, Trump’s Wasteful Tax Cuts Lead To Continued Trillion Dollar Deficits In Expanding Economy
This is a much worse outlook for the current deficit than CBO showed just before Congress passed the Trump tax cuts. In June 2017, CBO anticipated a deficit of 3.6% of GDP for 2020. The current deficit is thus 27.8% greater than CBO projected before the tax cuts. Moreover, this one percentage point difference in the current projected deficit and the prior projection equals $221 billion for 2020. This is a substantial gap that follows in large part from the tax cuts, especially since the economy continued to grow during this time.
A temporarily larger deficit may be worth it, especially in a world of very low interest rates, if it translates into faster economic growth. But that is not what has happened. Economic growth increased briefly in early 2018 but quickly fell back to or even below the modest levels that persisted before the 2017 tax cuts. Not all deficits are bad, but the ones from the supply-side tax cuts have proven to be.
Congress enacted the trickle-down tax cuts, known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in December 2017, aimed at accelerating growth. The argument in favor of these cuts was that something giving corporations a lot more money and showering the richest households would give them more cash to invest. This would lower the cost of investing and spark a boom in investments in new manufacturing plants, office buildings, vehicle fleets and energy upgrades, among other things. These new investments would translate into faster productivity growth, higher economic growth and stronger wage and employment gains. That was at least the argument for selling lopsided tax cuts for the biggest winners in the current economy.
But the first step in this chain –faster business investment growth– never happened. But corporations were already profitable and sat on piles of cash in 2017. The richest households had also reaped the benefits of the economic expansion since 2009. And interest rates were very low. Yet none of these factors were enough to spark an investment boom. Those looking for cheap money for their investments didn’t have to look far. The problem was that there weren’t enough companies looking to invest.
Other factors likely held back investments. Most notably, incomes have grown only slowly, households face increasing costs for health care, housing and education and continue to be burdened by massive amounts of consumer debt. There was and still is no reason for firms to invest in more capacity to make more stuff since they know consumers are maxed out.
This has important implications for using the federal purse to boost economic growth. Rather than wasting the money on trickle-down tax cuts, Congress could have spent the money on badly needed infrastructure improvements, on making education and health care more affordable and on greening the economy, to name just some of the bigger ideas. The result would have been direct income and job gains for American workers. Families would have gotten help with necessary yet costly items such as health care and education. And the cost of doing business for all companies would have been lower, not just for large cash-rich corporations. Both the economy and workers would have won. Investing in people and the country instead of wasting money on the lucky few actually works.
ERTA (ECONOMIC RECOVERY TAX ACT) gave the wealthiest Americans who received dividend and interest payments a hefty yearly tax cut of $6.7 billion, the equivalent of $21 billion today. Out of 95 million taxpayers who filed that year, this bounty went to just 82,000: the richest sliver of the top 1%.
People in this group who received $250,000 in dividends owed $175,000 in taxes on them for the 1981 tax year. ERTA gave them a tax cut of $50,000 the next year — more than twice what the majority of American families lived on at the time. It was a gift that kept giving, year after year.
To fully understand the amount of money involved, think of it this way:
If the 70% rate were still on the books, taxpayers with more than $1 million in income in 2019 could have owed $87.9 billion more in taxes that year, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of IRS data. That’s more than enough money to rebuild and repair all the bridges and water systems across the country slated for work under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed by Congress in 2021.
Cutting taxes for the rich over the past 40-plus years has had a huge impact, leaving less money for public programs that benefit millions of Americans while enriching a tiny percentage of the population. Where once the code strove for a certain balance — the more you earned, the more you paid — the rates have been reduced so much that there’s not nearly as much difference now between the top tax rate a billionaire investor pays on their income and what a middle-class salaried professional pays on theirs.
Income inequality in America is at heights not seen for a century. A variety of factors have contributed, including the erosion of good-paying manufacturing jobs, deregulation, a weakened trade union movement and the elimination of pensions and other rungs in the safety net. But taxes have been a principal engine of worsening economic inequality simply because the wealthy, thanks to their success in Congress, now have more money — to buy stocks, invest in real estate, build mega yachts, blast off into space and make campaign contributions to politicians so the cycle isn’t interrupted.
It wasn’t always this way.
For decades leading up to 1980, all incomes from top to bottom rose at nearly the same pace. But that changed dramatically afterward. While median family income was largely stagnant, top incomes soared.
In 1980, the top 4% of taxpayers earned as much as the bottom 39%. By 2019, the top 4% earned as much as the bottom 57%, according to a Public Integrity analysis of the most recent IRS data.
As more money flowed upward, the gap in accumulated wealth widened. In 2019, the top 10% of Americans had three times the wealth of everyone else in the country combined.
The pandemic greatly exacerbated the trend. The stock market has been volatile this year, but a June study by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies concluded that 745 U.S. billionaires had grown $2.1 trillion richer since the start of COVID-19.
Five years after ERTA, tax cutters triumphed again.
Two Democrats, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, cosponsored bills to wipe out abusive tax shelters in exchange for lowered tax rates.
Reagan embraced the plan as a way to further gut progressive taxation. As it worked its way through Congress, the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was widely hailed by Democrats and Republicans.
On the plus side, the law for the first time taxed long-term capital gains at the same rate as wages and salaries in addition to restricting tax shelters.
“[The bill] will close the loopholes and curb the tax shelters that giant corporations and wealthy individuals have used for decades to escape their responsibilities and avoid paying taxes,” Rep. Robert A. Borski, a Pennsylvania Democrat, told his House colleagues on Sept. 25, 1986.
But overlooked in the euphoria was the price paid in other parts of the legislation. It lowered the top rate on wages, salaries and all other personal income from 50% to 28%, the largest single drop in the history of the federal income tax.
Proponents contended that was justified because few wealthy people were paying the top rate, thanks to tax shelters.
However, the data shows that not every wealthy taxpayer was loaded with tax shelters, and the 1986 act gave them a big break.
How the top tax rate works
Under the federal system, people pay a larger percentage in taxes as their income goes up. The more you make, the higher your tax rate.
But the highest rate you pay applies only to the last portion of your income — not your total income. The highest federal tax rate today is 37%, but on average, wealthy taxpayers pay only 25.6% on their total income, according to the IRS.
The tax code groups taxpayers according to their incomes into categories called tax brackets. The lowest bracket for single filers in 2022, applying to income up to $10,275, is 10%. The highest bracket taxes income above $539,900.
The system is considered progressive, especially when compared to states that tax their residents at the same rate, regardless of income. Even so, the federal system is far less progressive than it once was. Today there are only seven federal tax brackets, ranging from 10% to 37%. In 1970, there were 25 — from 14% to 70%.
Today, an upper-income person pays the same tax rate on any income earned above $539,900 as a wealthy investor would pay on millions of dollars in income above that amount. Decades ago, that wasn’t the case.
In 1985, all taxpayers reporting income of $1 million and up had an average income tax of $910,931, according to IRS data. In 1988, the first year showing the full impact of the law, that same group paid $226,000 less on average.
For Reagan, the low rates were the heart and soul of the bill.
“Our Founding Fathers… never imagined what we’ve come to know as the progressive income tax,” Reagan said while signing the bill on Oct. 22, 1986. He said it “struck at the heart of the economic life of the individual, punishing that special effort and extra hard work that has always been the driving force of our economy. … I feel like we just played the World Series of tax reform — and the American people won.”
Some won much more than others.
IRS data shows that taxpayers with upwards of $40,000 in income received on average a modest tax cut of $603 a year. Upper-income Americans earning $500,000 to $1 million took home an average of $73,617. And those at the top received far more.
To those who knew how the benefits of tax reform had been oversold to average Americans, this came as no surprise. Daniel Halperin, a former assistant treasury secretary, told a congressional committee as the bill was being considered: “Over 40% of American families will either have a tax increase or no change.” People with the highest incomes, he said, would be “the biggest winners.”
Republicans claimed that the 1980s tax cuts would stimulate so much economic activity that tax receipts and budgets wouldn’t suffer. But by the end of the eight-year Reagan presidency, revenues were an unprecedented $1.3 trillion short of federal spending. That was more than three times the deficits for the eight years before Reagan — combined.
In 1980, while running for the Republican presidential nomination against Reagan, George H.W. Bush called his competitor’s claim that the country could cut taxes but not add to the national debt “voodoo economics.”
In 1991, Bush, by then president, went along with a Democratic plan to raise the top tax rate for the richest Americans from 28% to 31% to stem the red ink. Though top rates remained far below what they were when Reagan took office, any tax increase was anathema to large swaths of the Republican party. Bush paid the price when he lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton.
After that, every Democratic president tried to increase taxes on the wealthy and every Republican president did the reverse.
In 1993, with his party controlling the House and Senate, Clinton proposed raising taxes to deal with deficits and offset Reagan-era tax cuts, settling on a package that raised the top rate from 31% to 39.6%.
“After 12 years of trickle-down economics where taxes were lowered on the wealthiest Americans… we now have real fairness in the Tax Code,” Clinton said as he signed the bill in August 1993.
Republican lawmakers and conservative pundits condemned the increase and warned that it would hurt the economy. “It will kill jobs, kill businesses and yes, kill even the higher tax revenues that these suicidal tax increasers hope to gain,” said Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican.
Rather than tanking, the economy took off. The seven years that followed represented what was then the longest sustained period of economic growth in the nation’s history. Tax revenues soared, prompting three straight years of budget surpluses under Clinton — the only time that’s happened in the past half century.
The Clinton-era top rate and surpluses didn’t last long. The federal government began running deficits again after President George W. Bush put through two tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.
While those tax bills contained modest cuts for most Americans, the benefits once again flowed largely to the rich: The top 1% of households received an average tax break of $570,000 for the eight-year period that followed the second bill, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
It wasn’t just a result of lowering the top rate to 35%.
For decades, dividends paid to shareholders — predominantly wealthier people — were taxed like salaries and wages. But the 2003 law created a new category called “qualified dividends.” What constituted such a dividend was complicated, largely how long the stock was held, but its main benefit was that it would be taxed at 15% rather than 35% for upper-income people.
An auto worker in Detroit who received $5,000 in qualified dividends might have saved $500 under the new law. An auto executive who received $100,000 in such dividends would have saved $20,000.
This tax break, narrowed since then but only modestly, has cost the U.S. Treasury an estimated $350 billion since 2004. Upper-income taxpayers have benefited the most. In 2019 alone, it was worth $16.2 billion to taxpayers earning $1 million or more.
To put that $16.2 billion in perspective: It’s the equivalent of the federal income taxes paid by everyone earning $50,000 or less in California, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin — combined.
President Barack Obama later signed legislation that made the tax break permanent, but he also steered tax increases through Congress, pushing the top rate back to where it had been under Clinton as well as imposing a surtax on investment income and hiking Medicare taxes for high earners to help pay for the Affordable Care Act.
All this led to what would be the signature legislative triumph of the Trump presidency, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The sheer magnitude of the tax cuts it gave to the wealthy and corporations made the law the most significant since the Reagan era.
The arguments for it sounded very familiar
“I not only don’t think it will increase the deficit, I think it will be beyond revenue neutral,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared after the bill’s passage. “In other words, I think it will produce more than enough to fill that gap.”
Instead, with its generous tax cuts for individuals and companies, it gushed red ink. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2018 that it would add $1.9 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.
In 2019 alone, the tax cuts cost the U.S. Treasury $259 billion. Virtually half that money flowed to those earning $200,000 or more, according to data from the Joint Committee on Taxation.
Workers earning between $50,000 and $75,000 that year got a tax cut of $840 on average. Those earning $1 million or more? Over $64,000.
As Congress cut the taxes of wealthy Americans after 1980, it also slashed taxes on corporations. Their rate plummeted from 35% to the present 21% — the lowest in 80 years.
With the help of corporate lobbyists, companies have found ways to cut their share of taxes even more by exploiting rules deep in the dense thicket of the Internal Revenue Code.
Many corporate tax provisions are so complex as to be indecipherable to the average person, and even to most lawmakers. A change in one percentage point here, an addition of a word there, the insertion of a date — any one of those can be worth millions of dollars to a corporation by giving it permission to do something previously prohibited.
The section on taxing the foreign income of U.S. companies is full of gifts negotiated by lobbyists. Here, thanks to Congress, multinational corporations enjoy a special status: They can offset their U.S. income with credits and other write-offs generated by their foreign operations. One economist estimated that the U.S. Treasury in one year alone — 2008 — lost upwards of $90 billion in revenue as a result.
The top corporate tax rate was once 35% on income earned anywhere in the world. But U.S. corporations such as Procter & Gamble, Pfizer and Hewlett-Packard had long avoided paying that rate on overseas income by stashing profits in offshore tax havens.
As billions and billions of corporate profits piled up offshore and began to approach $1 trillion, the companies fretted. A group that included Microsoft, Intel, Apple and Coca-Cola formed a lobby called the Homeland Investment Coalition to pressure Congress to change the law so they could bring that money back to the U.S. — at a lower tax rate than domestic corporations pay.
For example, while a local construction company in Des Moines might pay 35% on profits from building a high school in Iowa, the coalition proposed in 2003 that multinationals with foreign earnings would pay only 5.25% in U.S. taxes on profits earned from selling products or services outside the country.
Lawmakers were happy to help.
“We want job creation,” Sen. Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, said when the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 was being considered with a provision he helped insert to make the tax holiday happen. “We want this to get to the shop floor, not to the corporate boardroom. … We want it to go to those things that will improve the productive capacity of American industry and the rehiring of American workers. We don’t want it to be part of some financial flimflam.”
But flimflam it was. After the bargain-basement tax break became law, companies did bring money back to the U.S. Nearly half the repatriated $312 billion came from just 15 companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Pfizer and Merck. The U.S. Treasury later estimated that the tax break benefited only 4% of American corporations.
How many jobs were created by the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004? None.
That’s according to a 2011 report by a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security committee. In fact, it found the 15 largest repatriating corporations cut jobs and reduced their overall U.S. workforce by 20,931 people.
The top companies increased stock buybacks, rewarding shareholders and boosting their executives’ pay — despite provisions of the 2004 law prohibiting use of the repatriated cash for those purposes.
It’s another way that tax changes are worsening both income inequality and the racial wealth gap, because stock buybacks disproportionately benefit high-income white Americans.
The 2004 repatriation “not only failed to achieve its goal of increasing jobs and domestic investment in research and development,” concluded the sub committee's report, “it did little more than enrich corporate shareholders and executives while providing an estimated $3.3 billion tax windfall for some of the largest multinational corporations.”
Congress responded by doing it all over again in 2017, giving the same group of companies a variation on the tax break it had awarded them in 2004.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 lowered the tax rate on most repatriated funds to 15% — not as bargain basement as in 2004, but still a dramatic cut — and gave multinational corporations a much longer holiday to bring the money home: eight years.
Promising that the tax break would “turn America into a job magnet,” President Donald Trump claimed that no less than $4 trillion would come back to the States. “This is money that would never, ever be seen again by the workers and the people of our country,” he said.
The money is coming back — but not to American workers or communities thirsty for corporate investment. Instead, just as in 2004, it is flowing to shareholders and executives. A report by the Federal Reserve found in 2019 that share buybacks for the 15 largest corporations holding offshore cash “rose sharply” after the law passed.
Money helps explain why this sort of thing keeps happening.
Every year corporations spend more than 85% of the total reported expenses associated with lobbying Congress. By contrast, labor unions, which represent the interests of working people, account for less than 2%.
And though corporate donors lean Republican as a rule, they give generously to both parties. Over the past six election cycles, business-related donors contributed roughly $7 billion to Democrats and Republicans apiece, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan body that tracks contributions.
Ellen Miller, who long oversaw Washington-based nonprofits that tracked the influence of money in politics, thinks that’s why Republican zeal to cut taxes was long met by less-than-energetic opposition.
“The campaign finance system we have that is inundated by corporate donors has kept Democrats asleep on this issue,” she said in an interview.
The so-called carried interest loophole is a perfect example of how companies use the influence they’ve bought.
Democrats and some Republicans have railed for years against the provision, which lets private-equity and hedge fund executives pay taxes on their pay at nearly half the going rate. Even Trump called for its end. The Inflation Reduction Act negotiated this year by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin would have narrowed the loophole, but even that was too much for the private-equity industry.
Company lobbyists turned to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a Democrat to whom investment firms have contributed $2.7 million in the past five years.
She killed the provision. The carried interest loophole lives on.
The ‘angel of death’ loophole
Washington’s restructuring of another tax — one that affects only a handful of Americans — may best show how elected officials have shaped the tax system for the few.
In place since 1916, the estate tax has been defended by Democrats and some Republicans for many years to prevent what President Franklin D. Roosevelt once described as the “transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift.” Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest Americans and an income tax foe, had this to say about the estate tax: “Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest.”
But laws enacted by the Republican-controlled Congress slashed the number of taxpayers paying it from 27,568 in 1982 to 2,584 in 2021.
Collections, adjusted for inflation, were virtually unchanged over that period — even though household wealth among the rich exploded during that time.
That dramatic reduction in estate tax filings is the result of highly successful campaigns over the years by Republicans labeling it the “death tax” and advancing specious arguments about alleged injustices. One of the most popular was the claim that it forces the sale of family farms.
“They have wonderful farms, but they can’t pay the tax, so they have to sell,” Trump said in 2017.
But according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, several analyses have not turned up “a single farm that went out of business due to estate tax liability.”
Because of favorable laws and clever tax planning, the number of estate tax returns continues to plummet. “Only morons pay the estate tax,” Trump White House advisor Gary Cohn is said to have told congressional Democrats in 2017 when they were calling for a rate increase.
Even before cuts in the estate tax, the wealthy long ago figured out how to pass along the family fortune tax free: It’s called the “angel of death” loophole, the vehicle by which great wealth is passed from one generation to the next and allowed to compound tax free into even greater value. It is the foundation on which the wealth of some of America’s richest families is built.
It works like this.
Say you bought 1,000 shares of Widget Company stock at $50 a share in 1980. By 2022, the stock is worth 10 times as much. If you sell those shares, you’ll owe capital-gains taxes of $100,000. But if you die and leave those shares to your favorite niece, no tax is owed and your niece has escaped a $100,000 tax bill.
Estimates put the amount of lost tax revenue from this loophole as high as $54 billion a year.
Closing it is on Biden’s agenda, as it was on Obama’s, as it has been on tax reform agendas for decades. But still it exists, having avoided any serious challenge in recent years.
Contrast that plum preserved by Congress for the rich with what Congress took away from the middle class in the so-called SECURE Act in 2019 (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement).
Prior to the law, someone who inherited an IRA could withdraw payments from that retirement account over their entire life, thus stretching out taxes owed over many years, possibly decades. But SECURE mandated that withdrawals from an inherited IRA be taken within 10 years. Now a much larger portion of inherited IRAs will go to taxes because many beneficiaries will have to withdraw the money while in a higher tax bracket, before their own retirement.
That means a middle-class worker who inherits a $1 million IRA might pay $240,000 to $320,000 in taxes. A scion of a wealthy family who inherits $100 million in stock, meanwhile, pays no capital-gains taxes at the time and can cash it out whenever desired.
Faith leaders and activists take part in a demonstration by MoveOn and the Poor People’s Campaign on November 15, 2021 in Washington, D.C. Among the policies the Poor People’s Campaign advocates for are higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for MoveOn)
The bottom line
Over the past four decades, the federal tax system has been transformed into something akin to a private-equity fund for wealthy taxpayers, giving them remarkable returns from multiple sources. As Congress showered them with benefits, most Americans struggled to keep up with the cost of living.
Median household income in 1981 was the equivalent of $62,000 in today’s dollars. Since then, the earnings of the majority of American families have been mostly stagnant, just barely keeping up with inflation. Think of it as standing still financially for 40 years.
Social Security and Medicare taxes add to the brutal squeeze. They take 7.6% of wages from workers who earn $60,000. It’s only a 2% bite for someone earning $1 million because Social Security taxes are capped for high earners.
The flow of money to those at the top is at the heart of the growing concentration of wealth. The more money you make, the more opportunities to save and allow your excess income to compound.
No group of working Americans has paid a steeper price for income inequality in the tax-cutting past four decades than African Americans. Their median household income of $45,870 is nearly 40% lower than that of white households. Over the decades, “next to no progress has been made in closing the black-white income gap,” concluded a report for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2018. “The typical black household remains poorer than 80 percent of white households.”
Because Black families have fewer opportunities to set aside money and accumulate assets, the wealth gap between white and Black families is even worse. White families on average have six times more wealth than Black families: $983,400 for whites; $142,500 for Blacks, according to Federal Reserve data. Half of African American families have assets of less than $25,000.
And those numbers were compiled before COVID-19, a bigger financial hit to African Americans than any other racial or ethnic group, according to the Census Bureau.
For most of the period when the country had a more progressive tax system, racial discrimination was legal. By rule and practice, the U.S. government largely blocked Black families from accessing federal programs that helped white families build generational wealth.
In the past four decades, meanwhile, wealth-building opportunities for people with modest resources have been in short supply. Sixty percent of the country — the people on the less-income side of the scale — have a lower share of total assets in the U.S. now than in the late 1980s, according to the Federal Reserve.
It would take a big change to turn that around. The tax provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act are only a modest step in that direction.
Biden’s original tax proposals were much more ambitious than what wound up in that law. He called for raising top tax rates on individuals back to the Clinton-era 39.6% and on corporations from 21% to 28%, taxing capital gains like wages, eliminating the “angel of death” loophole that allows the wealthy to pass their stock holdings to heirs tax-free, and many other provisions to shift more of the tax load to those at the top.
Public opinion polls show significant support for most of his tax proposals. But there’s virtually no hope for their adoption by the politically split incoming Congress.
Yet some believe that these proposals show a shift in thinking about taxes that could pave the way for more in the future.
“Biden’s investment and tax plans were more impressive than in any other previous election campaign, and he followed through with those proposals in his budget,” said Clemente, the Americans for Tax Fairness executive director.
To Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies who has been tracking income inequality for years, it is more urgent than ever that the U.S. do something about the growing chasm between those at the top and everyone else — something besides making it worse.
“Our current policies are propelling us toward a society that even the rich don’t want,” he said, “with the ultra-wealthy living in walled, gated communities driving bulletproof Mercedes, a precarious middle class with a larger percentage of people with no financial reserves.
“You don’t want your children growing up in an apartheid society. It creates volatility and social and political instability. Which is what we are wading into now.”
OF SECTION TO BE BOILED DOWN AND SUMMARIZED
MONOPOLIES AND QUASI MONOPOLIES
American citizens, including Trump voters are vulnerable to medical bankruptcies, mass shootings, decaying social services, and being mercilessly overcharged for pharmaceuticals and other goods supplied by monopolies or quasi monopolies such as the food industry.
Food: These eight companies account for no less than 80% of food sales.
PepsiCo
Nestle
Kellogg's
Unilever
Coca-Cola
Procter & Gamble
Mars
Danone
Only 10 commodities traders account for half a trillion dollars’ worth of food sales. A similar situation occurs in the seed market and in food transport and storage.
Health Insurance: The 10 largest health insurance companies in the US control nearly 57% of the market, underwriting $821.5 billion worth of premiums in the past year. They are:
UnitedHealthcare
Cigna
Kaiser Permanente
Anthem
Centene
Humana
Aetna
HCSC
Elevance Health
CVS Health
Just two, UnitedHealthcare and Humana, held 44 percent and 23 percent of new enrolment, respectively.
Reagan also reinterpreted antitrust and anti-monopoly laws in order to relax their enforcement.
Today, three companies control about 80% of mobile telecoms.Three have 95% of credit cards. Four have 70% of airline flights within the US. Google handles 60% of search. In agriculture, four companies control 66% of US hogs slaughtered in 2015, 85% of the steer, and half the chickens, according to the Department of Agriculture. Open Markets Institute)
They have no incentive to deliver better products or to get more efficient. They simply rake in cash from people who have no choice but to hand it over.
The number of listed companies is shrinking because (a) cheap capital lets them stay private longer and (b) the founders and VCs often “exit” by selling to a larger, cash-flush competitor instead of going public
An economy in which it is easier and cheaper to buy your competitors rather than out-innovate them is probably headed toward stagnation.
It is like watching the small farmer disappear. Your heart is with them but the market demands scale. Can small farmers producing locally grown food survive? Absolutely. But it is a niche market.
And as the world demands scale, cheap money helps it go even faster
Mergers between health insurance companies have created virtual monopolies that limit consumer choice, do not offer savings on premiums, and give doctors little or no bargaining power, a report from the American Medical Association claims. The past decade has seen more than 400 mergers among health insurance companies and managed care organizations, says the report, which analyzed the insurance markets in nearly 300 metropolitan areas. As of 2005, in 95% of these metropolitan areas, one insurer had at least a 30% market share. In 56% of areas, one insurer had more than half the market share. And in 4% of areas, one insurer had more than 90% of the market share.
WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group now control a third of the US health insurance market and cover 61 million US citizens, the study says. This trend is likely to continue, as large health insurers take over smaller plans. Large health plans have the power to set prices when they purchase health care for those they insure, and they can ensure competitive prices which are difficult for other health insurers to compete against, or to undercut.
“Patients do not appear to be benefiting from the consolidation . . . Health insurers are posting historically high profit margins, yet patient health insurance premiums continue to rise without an expansion of benefits,” said James Rohack, a member of the American Medical Association’s board.
Consolidation does not reduce costs because healthcare costs are rising, the health insurance industry claims. Health insurance premiums have risen by as much as 13.9% a year; they rose 9.2% last year.
“Physicians across the country have virtually no bargaining power with dominant health insurers,” the study says. Two thirds of doctors are self-employed. Most work in small groups of four or fewer doctors.
When a single health insurer provides 30% or more of a doctor’s income, the insurer may have power over the doctor’s practice “to the detriment of patients,” the report says. Doctors often rely on higher payments from health insurers to offset the lower fees from Medicare and Medicaid, which, respectively, provide health insurance for elderly and poor people.
The report used a Department of Justice index to measure whether there is a monopoly in a market that arouses concerns of not being competitive. The higher the score, the more concentrated and less competitive the market and the greater the risk of a monopoly situation. A score above 1800 shows high market concentration. The report found that 95% of US metropolitan areas scored above 1800 and 67% scored above 3000.
The association called the imbalance in bargaining power “an urgent matter” and said that it had asked the Department of Justice to consider this as an antitrust matter, but the department had seemed uninterested. Competition in Health Insurance: a Comprehensive Study of US Markets is available at www.ama-assn.org.
What Are Windfall Profits?
Windfall profits are large, unexpected gains resulting from lucky circumstances. Such profits are generally well above historical norms and may occur due to factors such as a price spike or supply shortage that are either temporary in nature or longer-lasting. Windfall profits are generally reaped by an entire industry sector but can also find their way to an individual company.
In terms of an individual, a windfall profit could be a spike in income as a result of a specific, one-time event, such as winning the lottery, inheriting money or suddenly being able to sell that rare piece of music memorabilia you own for a large amount of money after the singer passes away.
There was previously a tax on corporate windfall profits;
however, it was unpopular and there are currently no such taxes in the United States, though reintroducing the tax has drawn much debate on Wall Street and in Washington.
How Windfall Profits Work
Among the reasons that windfall profits can arise are a sudden change in market structure, an executive order from the government, a court ruling, or a dramatic shift in trade policy. Companies that are beneficiaries of windfall profits had not planned for them, but they would be naturally pleased to receive them.
These profits would have a variety of uses: dividend increases or a special one-time dividend, share buybacks, reinvestments in the business for future growth, or debt reduction. Windfall profits are presently not taxed in the U.S., though there have been tepid efforts to reintroduce the tax.
For an individual, a windfall profit might result in a sudden boost in their income, beyond what they could have reasonably expected. Unlike a corporation, an individual is not expected to pass the profits on to others.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Windfall profits are a sudden and unexpected spike in earnings, often caused by a one-time event that is out of the norm.
A business reaps windfall profits when there is a sudden industrywide change, such as a drop or spike in prices or a spike in demand for a certain product.
Businesses typically use these profits in part to increase dividends, buy back shares, reinvest in the business for future growth, or reduce debt.
Example of Windfall Profits
From time to time, surging prices for crude oil and natural gas have generated windfall profits for many energy companies. In this industry, wherein supply and demand are the main force determining price levels for the commodities, unexpected supply shortages have led to sharp and quick price rises.
In 2008, a barrel of WTI crude oil climbed above $140 from $60 per barrel just one year earlier. Several factors on both the supply and demand sides conspired to spike the price. Turmoil in the Middle East, lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina, supply disruptions in Venezuela and Nigeria, strong demand from developing nations, and speculative fervor by traders were all believed to be causes of the steep ascent of oil prices. Windfall profits for oil and gas producers followed, but they proved short-lived because a mere five months after the price peaked, a barrel of oil was trading at only $40 per barrel.
AND HERE'S BERNIE. This goes at the end of the left and liberals section.
The following are a few excerpts from Sen. Bernie Sanders take on big pharma and Medicare
Big Pharma will have to answer to the American people
One of my top priorities is to substantially reduce the price of prescription drugs in America
It is no great secret that millions of Americans feel that Congress is more interested in protecting large corporations than looking out for ordinary people.
As a nation, we spend almost twice as much per capita as any other country on health care – over $13,000 for every man, woman and child. . One of the major reasons for the high cost of health care in America is that we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.
You tell me: why does Merck charge diabetes patients in the United States $6,900 for Januvia when the exact same product can be purchased in Canada for $900 and just $200 in France?
The good news is that we are beginning to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry. Medicare, for the first time ever, is negotiating the price of some drugs, including Januvia, Stelara and Eliquis.
The bad news is… the giant pharmaceutical and health insurance lobbies have spent huge amounts of money over the past decades to ensure that their profits come before the health of the American people.
Over the past 25 years, the drug companies have spent $8.5 billion on lobbying,
Providing over $700 million in campaign contributions… to both Republican and Democratic candidates.
The result of congressional inaction is that these large corporations have driven up the prices of prescription drugs.
While millions of Americans suffer – and some die – because they can’t afford the prescription drugs they need, 10 of the top pharmaceutical companies in the country made over $110 billion in profits in 2022 and paid their CEOs outrageously high compensation packages.
As the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), one of my top priorities is to substantially reduce the price of prescription drugs in America. One of the ways to do that is to hold the chief executives of some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in our country accountable for their actions.
And let’s be clear: these are not struggling companies forced to charge high prices to survive. Believe me, they are not going broke. In 2022, Johnson & Johnson made nearly $18 billion in profits, paid its CEO over $27 million in compensation and spent over $17 billion on stock buybacks and dividends.
That same year, Merck made $14.5 billion in profit, handed out over $7 billion in dividends to their wealthy stockholders and paid its CEO over $52 million in compensation.
And Bristol Myers Squibb made $6.3 billion in profits last year, while recently spending over $12 billion on stock buybacks and dividends and giving its CEO over $41 million in compensation.
The committee’s efforts are paying off, but much more needs to be done.
There is an issue that is always on peoples’ minds because, by definition, it touches every single one of us. And that is healthcare, and the reality that today we have a dysfunctional and collapsing healthcare system... the most inefficient, bureaucratic, and expensive healthcare system in the world.
Every year in this country, tens of thousands of Americans die because they are uninsured or under-insured and hundreds of thousands of Americans declare bankruptcy because of medical-related expenses.
Despite spending far more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, we don’t have enough doctors. We don’t have enough nurses. We don’t have enough dentists. We don’t have enough medical providers in general.
We have more than enough people who bill us, and more than enough debt collectors who hound us to pay for a bill we cannot afford.
The result is that our healthcare, our life expectancy, and other healthcare outcomes lag behind most other countries in the developed world.
Unless you are wealthy. Then it's a different story.
Today, the top one percent of Americans live 15 years longer than the poorest people in our society and study after study has shown that working class people live shorter lives than the wealthy.
That is why I have introduced Medicare for All legislation repeatedly as a member of the House and the Senate.
That comprehensive healthcare coverage would end out-of-pocket expenses and, unlike the current system, it would provide full freedom of choice regarding healthcare providers.
No more insurance premiums, deductibles or co-payments. No more “networks'' which deny you your choice of doctors.
Medicare for All being comprehensive… would cover dental care, vision, hearing aids, prescription drugs and home and community-based care.
Would it be expensive? Yes, but significantly LESS expensive than our current dysfunctional system because it would eliminate an enormous amount of the bureaucracy, profiteering, administrative costs and misplaced priori byties inherent in our current for-profit system.
In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicare for All would save Americans almost $700 billion a year.
Insurance and drug companies have told us that if Medicare for All becomes law, your taxes will go up.
But what they won’t tell you is that… you will no longer be paying premiums, deductibles and copayments to private health insurance companies and there will be no more out of pocket costs.
And what they certainly won’t tell you is that Medicare for All will save the average family thousands of dollars a year.
Guaranteeing healthcare to all Americans as a human right would be a transformative moment for our country.
It would not only keep people healthier, happier and increase life expectancy, it would be a major step forward in creating a more vibrant democracy.
THE DARK ECONOMY
“At least $11.3 trillion in wealth is held offshore, according to a 2020 study by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Oct 3, 2021” https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/global-investigation-tax-havens-offshore/
This unregistered money, much of it hidden by wealthy tax evaders in tax havens, some of them legal, is very convenient for banks, corporations, investors, arms dealers, and every kind of criminal, including those involved in the drug trade and prostitution.
In 2022, CEOs were paid 344 times as much as a typical worker in contrast to 1965 when they were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker. To illustrate just how distorted CEO pay increases have gotten: In 2021, CEOs made nearly eight times as much as the top 0.1% of wage earners in the U.S.Sep 21, 2023
CEO pay slightly declined in 2022: But it has soared...
The average CEO salary in the United States is $832,600 as of January 26, 2024, but the range typically falls between $629,200 and $1,072,700. Salary ranges can vary widely depending on many important factors, including education, certifications, additional skills, the number of years you have spent in your profession. https://www.spainexchange.com/faq/what-education-do-you-need-for-ceo
CHINA'S ROLE
China's rise as a manufacturing giant originates in 1978 and the announcement of “Reform and Opening,” when the country's leadership took the first steps to allow foreign investment and to move away from the planned economy. https://hbr.org/2022/11/has-trade-with-china-really-cost-the-u-s-jobs Nov 10, 2022
The idea that trade with China is inherently disadvantageous for the United States and that it has cost the country jobs continues to shape the political discourse in Washington...Scholars generally find that prior to 2010, imports from China negatively affected manufacturing jobs in the United States. However, there are mixed findings on the net effect on the economy, the final balance of jobs lost in manufacturing, and the growth in service sector jobs… There is one other result that all scholars seem to agree on: better-educated, more economically diverse regions of the United States were affected far less by the surge in imports from China.
(https://bigdatachina.csis.org/the-china-shock-reevaluating-the-debate/)
STANDARDS FOR MEN AND WOMEN WORKERS OF COLOR WITHOUT A COLLEGE DEGREE.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law in November, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), invests about $550 billion in new federal funding for roads and bridges, railways, broadband, and other infrastructure. And an even larger social safety net and climate change bill awaiting a vote in the Senate—the Build Back Better Act (BBBA)—would invest roughly $2 trillion in child care, long-term care, universal pre-K, renewable energy, electric cars, and other human and climate infrastructure. But although these job-creating investments are welcome, they constitute just a down payment on a much larger agenda of investments needed over the coming decades to rebuild the American economy and complete the conversion to a zero-carbon, clean-energy future by 2050. And the current investments are already at risk: If steps are not taken to rebalance trade so that more of the goods consumed in the United States are made domestically, much of the new spending and new jobs will leak away to foreign suppliers. The threat is real: We continue as a country to import more than we export, and the surging imports mean that the reported U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods for 2021 is likely to exceed $1.1 trillion.
Following are some key data points in the chartbook:
Nearly 7 million jobs would be supported by a four-year, $2 trillion infrastructure and climate change investment program combined with trade and industrial policies that dramatically boost U.S. exports and eliminate the U.S. trade deficit. This includes at least three million good jobs (with high wages and benefits) in manufacturing and construction. If implemented with policies to help ensure that workers of color and women can access these jobs, this program would help reduce racial and gender inequities in the job market.
Rebalancing trade, investing in infrastructure, and addressing climate change would help rebalance the economy back from lower-paying service- sector jobs to higher-paying jobs in manufacturing and construction. Essentially all of the net new jobs created in the economy over the last two decades were in services. In contrast, 45.7% of job
POLITICAL CORRUPTION
“Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.” Edmund Burke
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States regarding campaign finance laws and free speech under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The court held 5-4 that the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.
Check the summary under https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/
Argued March 24, 2009
Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission
The provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 restricting unions, corporations, and profitable organizations from independent political spending and prohibiting the broadcasting of political media funded by them within 60 days of general elections or 30 days of primary elections violate the freedom of speech that is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. United States District Court for the District of Columbia reversed.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. I, Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002
This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990)
McConnell v. FEC (2003) (in part)
The case began after Citizens United, a conservative non-profit organization, sought to air and advertise a film critical of then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton shortly before the 2008 Democratic primary elections. Broadcasting the film would have been a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which prohibited any corporation, non-profit organization, or labor union from making an "electioneering communication" within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of an election, or making any expenditure advocating the election or defeat of a candidate at any time. Citizens United challenged the constitutionality of this law, and its case reached the Supreme Court.
In a majority opinion joined by four other justices, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy held that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act's prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech. Because laws that restrict Free Speech must be justified by a compelling state interest, an earlier decision had allowed the speech restriction based on an "ant distortion interest".[2] The majority in Citizens United found this interest "unconvincing and insufficient", overruling that case as well as a portion of McConnell v. FEC (2003) that relied upon the same interest to uphold restricted corporate spending on "electioneering communications".[3] The ruling effectively freed corporations (including incorporated non-profit organizations) to spend money on electioneering communications and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates. In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the court's ruling represented "a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government".
The decision remains highly controversial, generating much public discussion and receiving strong support and opposition from various groups. Senator Mitch McConnell commended the decision, arguing that it represented "an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights". By contrast, former President Barack Obama stated that the decision "gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington". The ruling represented a turning point on campaign finance, allowing unlimited election spending by corporations and labor unions, and setting the stage for Speechnow.org v. FEC, which authorized the creation of "Independent Expenditure Committees", commonly known as Super PACs, and for later rulings by the Roberts Court, including McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), striking down other campaign finance restrictions. While the long-term legacy of this case remains to be seen,
In a nutshell, the high court’s 5-4 decision said that it is OK for corporations and labor unions to spend as much as they want to convince people to vote for or against a candidate. Thanks to the ruling by the US Supreme Court in favor of Citizens United, the current class of billionaires seems to have made a clean sweep of corrupting institutions, politicians, and judges.
This also made them very successful in persuading ordinary people and struggling people to vote against their own interests.
Aided by armies of talented lawyers, accountants, and public relations specialists, and the Heritage Foundation, Friends of the Supreme Court, Koch Brothers, the American Enterprise Institute, and other right-wing lobbies, the super-rich and billionaires appear to spend their time thinking about how to squeeze more money out of their businesses and customers.
With the meritorious exception of Bill Gates and his campaign to eradicate malaria, one hears little from them about philanthropy, or dedicating any of the fabulous sums the super-rich have accumulated to address such causes as the climate emergency, or the public welfare.
Elon Musk enjoys starting new businesses which keep him in the headlines.
Mark Zuckerberg and the other tech billionaires are always happy to explain to Congress why they have no responsibility for the harm their companies do to ordinary people.
They seem more concerned with their ranking on Forbes, and also confident that no mere politicians or Supreme Court justices will stand up to them.
Some are building bunkers in New Zealand or Hawaii, or even spaceships in which presumably they expect to be saved from the unspecified “event” which many acknowledge to be coming, but who will guarantee their security or keep them alive in space?
THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
First, here are the numbers to show the gargantuan scope.
It is followed by descriptions of its corruption and of its corrupting business model.
Scope: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated worldwide military expenditures as of 2018 at $1.82 trillion.This represented a relative decline from 1990, when military expenditures made up 4% of world GDP. Part of the money goes to the procurement of military hardware and services from the military industry. The combined arms sales of the top 100 largest arms-producing companies and military services companies (excluding China) totaled $420 billion in 2018.This was 4.6% higher than sales in 2017 and marks the fourth consecutive year of growth. In 2004, over $30 billion were spent in the international arms trade (excluding domestic sales of arms). The institute reported that the five largest exporters in 2014-2018 were the US, Russia, France, Germany and China, while the five biggest importers were Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt, Australia and Algeria.
Many industrialized countries have a domestic arms industry to supply their own military forces. Some countries also have a substantial legal or illegal domestic trade in weapons for use by their own citizens, primarily for self-defense, hunting or sporting purposes. Illegal trade in small arms occurs in many countries and regions affected by political instability. The Small Arms Survey estimates that 875 million small arms circulate worldwide, produced by more than 1,000 companies from nearly 100 countries.
Personnel: There were 27,406,000 military personnel worldwide in 2020.
In 2022 the US government spent $766 billion on military supplies and services, including personnel, or 12% of all federal spending.
Exports of military equipment in the same year amounted to $14,515 billion.
Overall, the weapons industry employs some 2 million people in the US.
But the US Department of Defense is the country’s largest employer, with 1.3 million active-duty military personnel and over 800,000 in reserves.
The aerospace and defense industry reported revenues of $741 billion in 2022 (up just 3% from 2021) and $67 billion in operating profit (up 8%), and accounted for 10% of total US factory output.
Corruption: Opportunities for corruption --overpricing and kickbacks-- are rife, and scandalous examples emerge from time to time, such as the $640 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers.
For a fuller exposé of this corruption, please see:
https://quincyinst.org/2022/02/03/what-a-waste-778-billion-for-the-pentagon-and-still-counting/
Many people believe the security interests of the US would be better served by additional investment in strategic expertise, intelligence gathering and analysis, and effective diplomacy. But hardware alone is what provides the corruption opportunities.
Defense spending is so out of control that recent attempts to audit the $3.8 trillion in assets have all failed.
Meanwhile, the State Department –the diplomatic service– budget for 2024 is $57.7 billion, the 2024 budget for the NationaI Intelligence Program (NIP) is $71.7 billion, and for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) it is $29.3 billion. The total –$158.7– amounts to only a small fraction of the hardware budget.
Business Model: The business model of the weapons industry calls for one or more armed conflicts to be taking place in real time, partly to test the weapons and expend ammunition, and partly to show the world that war is necessary and inevitable. The model also deploys agents whose full-time job it is to stir up mistrust and tensions between countries as a means of boosting arms sales. These agents also bribe local officials in client countries. Check https://quincyinst.org/research/promoting-stability-or-fueling-conflict-the-impact-of-u-s-arms-sales-on-national-and-global-security/ for a good read on the subject.
Can we afford it? As humanity faces existential crises --the climate emergency, resource depletion, ecological destruction-- can we afford to spend so much on weaponry, and so little on remedial action? Couldn't a diplomatic initiative bring about at least a pause in war and the threat of war?
An even more serious question is whether it makes sense to destroy precious human lives and property in war? In the 21st century, a time of immense progress in technology, medicine, food production, education, communications, entertainment, and even animal rights, we continue to murder each other by the tens of thousands, almost casually, for the most trivial of reasons, as if human lives had no value at all.
“It is sad that man is not intelligent enough to solve problems without killing […] Man is not a bloodthirsty animal, and war is only due to the greed and lust for power of relatively small groups, the conspiracy of the few against the many.”--Henry David Thoreau
How many Palestinians have died to stop Netanyahu from facing corruption charges? How many Russians and Ukrainians have died --or killed-- to keep Putin in power and nourish his fantasies of the "glories" of Russia's imperial past? How many Iraqis and Afghans, each one beloved to their families, died so that George W. Bush could keep his job as a war-time president?
Is this how we value human life, including the lives of soldiers? Or is there a way to stop the unnecessary killing (is there such a thing as “necessary” killing?). Let's call it by its name --murder-- which is what it is when not a case of immediate self-defense or preventing a crime. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform which only adds servility to the crime of murder.”
Of course we can –and must– stop it.
Through diplomacy and negotiation, a majority can be formed of nations which agree to act immediately against any other nation that attacks or invades another, or a part of its own population, instantly cutting off travel, trade, and communications, freezing assets, and not budging until the threat is withdrawn.
In addition, those called on to do the killing and dying would refuse, as their shared humanity requires.
Problems, disputes, and conflicts, including the thorniest ones, such as competing claims for vital and diminishing resources like water, would have to be worked out at the bargaining table in a civilized manner. Reversion to violence --which brings death, but not solutions-- would not be on the table.
Does this mean dismantling -- in the least traumatic way possible-- the huge and immensely profitable military-industrial complex and its lethal business model?
Of course it does.
Jobs must be found for the people now employed in the industry.
You can easily find and insert here the list of countries that the United States has invaded, pointing out those with were the democracy which the US presumably champions
Mass shootings
Perversely, every mass shooting in the US triggers a sharp rise in gun sale to people who believe guns will keep them safe, when the opposite is true. Statistics show that the more firearms there are in a country (whether for self-defense, concealed carry, or recreational use), the higher the incidence of gun violence. Even after controlling for other factors like income, crime levels, and demographics, many studies over the last decade confirm this conclusion.
Americans are about 5% of the world’s population but have 42% of the world’s privately owned firearms. A fact which David Hemenway, professor of health policy at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, believes contributes to the higher rates of gun-related homicide in America compared with other industrialized nations. “Within the United States, a wide array of empirical evidence indicates that more guns in a community lead to more homicide. The prevalence of guns in the community means incidents like robbery and other crimes are more likely to carry the risk of gun violence. In states that have “stand your ground” laws, Rand Corporation found even minor disagreements or Physical altercations carried a greater risk of turning into violent crime. In short, gun ownership does not increase safety, and the prevalence of guns directly correlates with significantly higher rates of death. Also check https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/arms-control/gun-violence/.
BIG OIL
The petroleum and gas industry employs millions of people around the world and has made billionaires of scores of them, including entire families in the sparsely populated oil states like Saudi Arabia, the largest producer. It is followed in order of production by Canada, Russia, the United States, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Algeria, Libya, and Venezuela.
Price fixing among the largest companies has played havoc with the world economy on numerous occasions over the past century.
As early as 1954, scientists working for major US oil companies and car makers predicted with startling accuracy the rise in atmospheric pollution that would be caused by the continued burning of oil and gas, and also its precise effects on the world's climate. Check https://www.nrdc.org/stories/fossil-fuels-dirty-facts#sec-examples.
But instead of sounding the alarm, the industry spent millions to cast doubt on its own findings. Fifty years were lost during which corrective actions could have been taken.
Today the industry continues to deploy lobbyists whose mission is to delay the banning of oil and gas as energy sources, showing no regard for the consequences on the habitability of the earth by humans. Urgent measures must be taken to find alternative employment for them.
LEFT-HANDERS
Left-handers were routinely accused of consorting with the devil and, during the excesses of the Inquisition and the witch hunts of the 15th and 16th centuries, left-handedness was sometimes considered sufficient to identify a woman as a witch, and to contribute to her subsequent condemnation and execution.
Left-handed people in history:
Aristotle
Charlemagne
Leonard da Vinci
Michelangelo
Raphael
Issac Newton
Napoleon Bonaparte
Frederick Nietzsche
Marie Curie
Pierre Curie
Albert Einstein
Alan Turing
US PRESIDENTS
Barack Obama
James Garfield
Herbert Hoover
Harry Truman
Gerald Ford
Ronald Reagan
George H.W. Bush
Barack Obama
BILLIONAIRES
Henry Ford
John D. Rockefeller
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg
Lou Gerstner
CELEBRITIES
Brad Pitt
Oprah Winfrey
Whoopi Goldberg
Julia Roberts
Angelina Jolie
Brad Pitt
Jimi Hendrix
US BASEBALL PLAYERS
Babe Ruth Lefty Grove
Sandy Koufax
Warren Spahn
Ty Cobb
Stan Musial
Ted Williams
Barry Bond
Legend has it that Napoleon objected to the time-honored military practice of marching on the left side of the road with weapons at the ready in the right hand: it put lefties like him at a strategic disadvantage. Once in power, the story goes, the French emperor –whose queen, Josephine, was also left-handed– ordered his armies to switch sides. Civilians in countries he conquered had to do the same. Hence, supposedly, the rules of the road as we know them were born, which also explains why the British (who, along with the Prussians, defeated Napoleon at Waterloo) still drive on the left.
In the late 20th century, left-handedness became less stigmatized, and in many countries, particularly the Western world, left-handed children were no longer forced to switch to their right hand.
LIBERALS, AND THE “HARD LEFT”
The right –traditional Republicans, Trump supporters, British Tories and their supporters, other “conservatives”, plus dictators like Russia's Putin, North Korea’s Kim Il Jong, China’s Xi Jingping, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman al Saud (MBS), and would-be dictators like Hungary's Orban– all tend to favor “small government” that interferes as little as possible with “free enterprise”. As we have seen, they use the tactics of spreading fear and naming scapegoats to win the support of many voters, including those who suffer the consequences of conservative policies.
They despise today's leftists and liberals for their “woke” concern with social justice and minority rights.
Liberals also come in for criticism –perhaps fairly– for their censoriousness and a condescending attitude to the less educated, along with “identity politics” in which they get to define what is politically correct and allow no discussion, silencing or “cancelling” those who disagree.
Liberal contributions:
Traditionally, however, the left and liberals always stood up for common people, and especially the poorest and most vulnerable.
The so-called ‘Founding Fathers' of the US were liberals, under the influence of enlightenment values –the weakening of religious rule and the advent of humanism and science. They instituted the world's first “government by discussion” since the ancient Greeks, to replace tyranny, autocracy, and theocracy. Government “subjects” became “citizens” with inviolable rights.
Having won the war of independence from Britain in 1783, George Washington was offered the crown but refused to be king. He knew that the rule of law must replace the rule of powerful men who use intimidation and violence to govern and exploit their subjects. A government was formed with a system of checks and balances in which none of the three branches of government –the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary– could dominate the others. Periodic elections, the right to vote, and other Individual rights were specified and guaranteed in a written constitution. Initially the rights were conferred on male property owners, but they were eventually extended to all men, to freed slaves, and –lastly– to women. These rights include freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition for the redress of grievances, fair trials and equal protection under the law with due process and the right of appeal. Later on, laws were passed banning discrimination against women and minorities. Since the presidency of Donald Trump some states have overturned some of the anti-discrimination laws, along with women's right to end their pregnancies at will.
Like it or not, it was the liberals who gave us public schools, anti-monopoly laws, women's suffrage, trade unions, the 40-hour work week, unemployment insurance, social security, Medicare for over-65s which private insurers do not provide, flood insurance which private insurers do not provide, the interstate highway system, consumer protection regulations and inspectors, along with cheap loans for buying homes or paying for higher education through agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. [In September 2008, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that it would take over the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac). Both government-sponsored enterprises, which finance home mortgages in the United States by issuing bonds, had become illiquid as the market for those bonds collapsed in the subprime mortgage crisis.]
WHITE SUPREMACIST NATIONALIST POPULISTS
These are the people, mostly male, who advocate and use violence for political ends. Their fears of being "replaced" by non-whites lead them to form militias such as the Proud boys and Oathkeepers, and to make anonymous but very effectively intimidating death threats to those who disagree with their politics. Republican politicians who would like to break with Trump are often reported as failing to do so because of these threats whose power should not be underestimated. When someone tells us, even anonymously, that they know where we live and where our children go to school, and they promise to kill you but not until they have killed our children, we will probably take it very seriously.
Some of them openly call for a "race war" in which they can kill black people and others they disapprove of, such as liberals. Most of them supported Donald Trump's claim that the 2020 presidential election had been rigged and stolen, despite the absolute lack of evidence. They are not committed to democracy, the rule of law, the US Constitution, human rights, or logical, evidence-based thought or reasoning, and would prefer to be ruled by a "strong man" who can do what he likes and is accountable to no one. How this will “make America great again”, improve the US's position in the world, or benefit the American people is not clear.
A peculiar feature of the white supremacist nationalist populist community is its widespread rejection of Covid vaccines and the use of protective face masks, on the grounds that these constitute an attack on their freedoms.
Vaccines that were developed in the early 20th century saved millions of children's and adult's lives from smallpox, measles, chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, diphtheria, and polio. They were all welcomed without controversy, and are routinely used today.
AFTERWORD
“He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.” William Drummond
You may approve or disapprove, but now you know there Is little or nothing to fear from illegal migrants, LGBTQ people, Jews, feminism, drug addicts, African-Americans, Asians, liberals, or left-handed people.
Now you also know there is everything to fear from selfish billionaires, foot-dragging fossil fuel countries and companies, violent white supremacist nationalist populists terrorizing people with death threats, the bloated –and soon, we hope superfluous– military-industrial complex, and any others who are deliberately delaying efforts to deal with the climate crisis and other threats to the future of humanity,
If we are serious we will stop playing the fool, and not succumb to the fear-mongers who have lied to us.
In the early days of social media, it became apparent that fear and hatred generated far more traffic than solidarity and cooperation.
It also appeared to make us more gullible, more willing to believe in the absurd and the illogical.
This was duly monetized by the owners of the social media, who claimed that the right to free speech required them to publish whatever people wanted to say, including outright lies, imaginary conspiracies, hoaxes and hate speech.
The right to free speech only means that the government cannot arrest you for expressing an opinion, as long as it defames no one or is intended to cause danger or violent behavior.
If we are serious about saving our still habitable planet, and even make it a happier place for all of us, and not only the wealthy, we will mobilize every intellectual, technical, capital –and yes, moral– resource that we possess to address the massive disruptions and sacrifices that are inevitably to come.
There will be a need to provide incomes for the millions of people left redundant by the shutting down of the military and weapons industry, the fossil fuel industry, and to a large extent the livestock industry –the other major polluter of the atmosphere.
We must also provide for climate and other refugees who need food, shelter, healthcare, education and prospects for satisfying and useful lives.
We now understand that humanity's presence in the universe will be brief in cosmic terms. We showed up some 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang –about 300,000 years ago–, and our sun will go cold in another 5 billion years. But meanwhile, we may be the sole conscious entity there is –there may be others, but we will never know. And, as far as we can ever know, we are the only entity able to give “meaning” to the existence of the universe. That's because we give meaning to ourselves and our own lives.
So should we try to survive as a species? It's up to each one of us to answer that question.
Our nature as primates offers both difficulties and promise. We humans can be aggressive, cruel, treacherous, selfish greedy, opportunistic. Like the billionaires. But we are also very much a social species with a great talent for cooperation, and an instinct for solidarity. As we learned when pilot Sully landed his crippled airplane on the Hudson River in 2009, there lurks in our genes a phenomenon which psychologists call “elevation”. At times of great danger to all, we don't look first to ourselves, but beyond ourselves, to each other. That's what the passengers did, and what we must now do.
So. If you need a scapegoat to blame for what you don't like about the world or your life, we hope you have found one in this catalogue.
Or you may make a different choice. The German thinker Ludwig Boerne wrote:
"If you must hate, if hatred is the leaven of your life, which alone can give flavor, then hate what should be hated: falsehood, violence, selfishness."
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To end, here are some quotes that may help us in our task of saving our planet, and future generations.
The Situation
Need for education
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”.–H. G. Wells
“Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion be enlightened”. --George Washington
An attack upon systematic thought is treason to civilization”. –John Wesley
Obstacles
"Liberty is not the natural state of man, but the achievement of an organized society, and is lost almost immediately when the primitive passions of men are unleashed." –Walter Lippman
Who Does it and How
Need for Equality
“Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin." Wendell Wilkie
“Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility. In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have is the ability to take on responsibility’. –Michael Korda
“The natural enemies of liberty are Ignorance, superstition lust of conquest, love of ease, caving for power, craving for food. Lord Acton
“Organization or anarchy; man’s intellect or the forces of nature.” Heny Brooks Adams
“Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint” –John Adams
“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people”. John Adams
“The end of government is the good and ease of the people, in a secure enjoyment of their Rights without oppression’, but it must be remembered that the rich are people as well as the poor; that they have rights as well as others, and that oppression of them is as possible and as wicked as to others.” –Joseph Addison
“Knowledge is, indeed, that which, next to virtue, truly and essentially raises one man above another.” –Alcuin
“The turbulence of the mob is always close to insanity.”–Henri-Frederic Amier
“Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.” Henri Frederic Amiel
“Philosophy means, first, doubt; and afterwards, the consciousness of what knowledge means, the consciousness of uncertainty and ignorance, the consciousness of limit, shade, degree, possibility. The ordinary man doubts nothing and suspects nothing.”,,--Anacharsis
“The market-place is a place set aside where men may deceive and overreach each other."–Robert Ardery
“It was government by discussion that broke the bond of ages and set free the originality of mankind.” –Walter Bagehot
“The goal is a society with a minimum of compulsion, a maximum of individual freedom and of voluntary association, and the abolition of exploitation and poverty.” –George Bancroft
“The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force.”
Simone de Beauvoir
“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.”
Henry Peter, Lord Brougham
“Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.”
Sir Thomas Brown
“Ignorance is not innocence, but sin.”
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham
“The world is made up, for the most part, of fools and knaves, both irreconcilable foes to truth: the first being slaves to a blind credulity, which we may properly call bigotry; and the last too jealous of that power they have usurped off the folly and ignorance of others, which the establishment of the empire of reason would destroy.
Edmund Burke
“The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich, and that of the rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the burdens of the poor.”
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
John Burroughs
“Science has done more for the development of western civilization is one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.”
Lord Byron
“I wish men to be free, as much from mobs as from kings –from you, from me
Thomas Carlyle
“That there should be one man who died ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call tragedy.”
Jimmy Carter
“The principles of the Judeo-Christian ethic –honesty, integrity, compassion, love, ideals of hope, charity, humility.”
Cato the Elder
“To say that private men have nothing to do with government is to say that private men have nothing to do with their own happiness or misery, that people ought not to concern themselves whether they be naked or clothed, fed or starved, deceived or instructed, protected or destroyed.”
Ralph Chaplin
“Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie / But rather mourn the apathetic throng / The cowed and the meek / Who see the world’s great anguish and it's wrong / and dare not speak.”
Fenimore Cooper
“It is the besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which the masses of men exhibit their tyranny.” –William Cowper
“The rich are too indolent, the poor too weak, to bear the insupportable fatigue of thinking.” , --Richard H. S. Crossman
“Every economic system, whether Capitalist or Socialist, degenerates into a system of privilege and exploitation unless it is policed by a social morality which can only reside in a minority of citizens. […] Freedom is always in danger, and the majority of mankind will always acquiesce in it its loss, unless a minority is willing to challenge the privileges of the few and the apathy of the masses.--”Clarence Darrow
“You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.”
“A thinking being is one that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refutes, imagines, and perceives.” ,,--John Dewey
“The only freedom that is of enduring importance is freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment exercised on behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worthwhile. –William O. Douglas
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions.” --William Drummond of Hawthornden
“The strongest desire known to human life is to continue living. The next strongest is to use the instruments by which life is generated for its own rewards, not for the sake of generation. The third potent desire is to excel and be acknowledged.” –Dorothy Dudley
“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” –Albert Einstein
“I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves –such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine.” --Albert Einstein
“The quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action, its sovereignty that is to say.”
“Man is here for the sake of other men.” –Eisenhower
“The right of mankind to knowledge and the free use thereof. –”T.S. Eliot
“The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins.”
“Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influences, and need not to be flattered but to be schooled. I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up. And draw individuals out of them.” --Epictetus
“Only the educated are free. --François de Salignac de la Mothé-Fénelon
“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.”–Ludwig Feuerbach
“Liberty consists in the power to do anything that does nor injure others, accordingly the exercise of the rights of man has no limits except those that secure to the other members of society the enjoyment of those same rights. These limits may be determined only by law.
“The first man to use abusive language instead of his fists was the founder of civilization.” –Erich Fromm
“Good is all that serves life. Evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence of life and all that enhances life. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it to pieces.--”Henry George
“Let no man imagine that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.--”William Godwin
“The injustice and violence of man in a state of society produced the demand for government.”
“The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains the general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.”
“Soundness of understanding is connected with freedom of enquiry; consequently, opinion should, as far as public security will admit, be exempted from restraint.” –Goethe
“National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest where there is the lowest degree of culture.” Stuart Pratt Sherman
“There are nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure; Wealth enough to support your needs; Strength enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; Grace enough to confess your sins and overcome them; Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished; Faith enough to make real the things of God; Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.”
“What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and fewer jails; more books and fewer arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed, more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures, to make manhood more noble, womanhood more beautiful, and childhood more happy and bright.” –Stefano Guazzo
“The ignorant in comparison to the learned, are worse than dead.” –Francesco Guicciardini
“He who speaks of the people speaks of a madman; for the people is a monster full of confusion and mistakes.” –Francois Guizot
“Men who make revolutions are always despised by those who profit from them.” --Marc R. Gurwirth
“Intellect shows the unity of mankind; pride and contempt, lust and hatred, zeal and indifference are what divide them.” –Ernst Heinrich Haeckel
“By reason alone can we attain to a correct knowledge of the world and a solution of its great problems. Reason is man’s highest gift, the only prerogative that essentially distinguishes him from the lower animals.” –Eric Hoffer
“It is doubtful that the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power –power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors, they want to retaliate.”
“Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing, and dancing sooner than war.” –Robert M. Hutchins
“A liberal education frees a man from the prison-house of his class, race, time, place, background, family, and even his nation”. –Thomas H. Huxley
“Much can be done to change the nature of man himself. The intelligence which has converted the brother of the wolf into the faithful guardian of the flock ought to be able to do something toward curbing the instincts of savagery in civilized man”
“It is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.” –?
”Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness.” --Jose Ortega y Gasset
“The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creature, those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties, and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort toward perfection; mere buoys that float on waves.”
“The political doctrine which has represented the loftiest endeavor toward common life is liberal democracy […] Liberalism is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities, hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet.” --Linus Pauling
“It is this change in the grain that permits the inheritance of acquired characteristics of a certain sort –the inheritance of knowledge, or learning, through communication from one human being to another […] Man’s great power of thinking, communicating, and remembering are responsible for the evolution of our civilization.” –Petrarch
“Three great enemies to peace inhabit within us, viz. avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride. If those enemies were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.” –Wendell Phillips
“Revolution is the only thing, the only power, that ever worked out freedom for any people. The powers that have ruled long and learned to love ruling, will never give up that prerogative until they must, until they see the certainty of overthrow and destruction if they do not.” –William Pitt (the younger)
“Necessity is the plea of every infringement of human freedom, It is the argument of tyrants. It is the creed of slaves.”--?
“Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, awls be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or by predatory poverty.” –Joseph Pulitzer
”The basis of international anarchy is man’s proneness to fear and hatred. This is also the basis of economic disputes; for the love of power, which is at their root, is generally an embodiment of fear. Men desire to be in control because they are afraid that the control of others will be used unjustly to their detriment. The same thing applies to the field of sexual morals: the power of husbands over wives and wives over husbands, which is conferred by the last, is derived from fear of the loss of possession.” –Benjamin Spock
“Inhibition is not unnatural […] Civilizations are built on restraints.” –John Steinbeck
“I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security –out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.”
“I find it valid to understand man as an animal before I am prepared to know him as a man.” –Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
“There will never be a free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly..” –De Tocqueville
“In the principle of equality I discern two tendencies: the one leading the mind of every man to untried thought; the other prohibiting him from thinking at all.” –Ernst Toller
“Fascism exploits the fear of reason which lives secretly in the conscious and subconscious minds of many people. Reason means facing life and its facts.”--??
“Physical violence is the basis of authority.” –Leo Tolstoy
“Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.”
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking: where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless.”
“We must say what everybody knows but does nor venture to say. We must say that by whatever name men may call murder, murder always remains murder. […] They will cease to see the service to their country, the heroism of war, military glory, and patriotism, and will see what exists: the naked, criminal business of murder.” –Barbara Tuchman
“If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements, corrupts even more.”
“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.”
"Democracy was invented as a device for reconciling government with liberty. It is clear that government is necessary if civilization is to exist, but all history shows that any set of individuals entrusted with power over others will abuse their power if they can do so with impunity." --Bertrand Russell
"The passion of a man who believes in freedom differs essentially from the passion of one who flees from it. The first one is committed to the idea of responsibility, which carries with it commitment to the life of intelligence. Responsibility requires anticipation of consequences, and a present response to an envisaged future. Intelligence, in this sense, is both the source of power and judge of its own limitations, and the free man is never so sure of the truth that he is willing to sacrifice other human beings for it." –Eric Hoffer
"The problems of technological production are virtually solved, but not those of distribution and consumption, which are social, and, ultimately. political. (?)
"A resolute democracy must favor the dispersion and not the concentration of power, and must resist the natural tendency of power to concentrate, whether in private or public hands." --(?)
"A pragmatist puts his emphasis on shared interests, for though it is differences which constitute the data of our problems, it is agreements which point to possibilities of solution."