Exercising the right of the People to decide what the state of the People shall be

To get up the resolve to push for putting the potentially controversial Second Leg of the POPE system in place, we have to ask ourselves the big cost/benefit question: How much is it costing America, in terms of lost peace of mind, money troubles and social damage for us to continue shying away from taking definitive steps to prevent the rich, the influential and the powerful from walking off with the lion's share of America's gross national product?
Let me shine the light of perspective on that problem - and, make no mistake, it's a huge problem. In 1980, the average CEO made 40 times as much as the average hands-on-the-product worker - even then, the highest such ratio in the industrial world. By 2006, that differential had soared to 433 times as much!
Why is that a disaster for the country now?
Well, for one, what we're talking about here is greed and greed is a sin, simple as that - one of the seven deadly ones named by the sages of old - and a great many in the country are now steeped in it to the eyeballs, winners, losers and also-rans alike, poisoning the way we feel about ourselves and others.

(Is it my imagination or do I hear the horrified fluttering of hands in the academic breeze? Oh, well, as Abraham Lincoln said, "You can please all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time.")
I know a lot of folks are pretty blasé about the connection between greed and sin, but if you start from the realization that the limited providence of the world's natural systems is to go 'round between six and-a-half billion humans in the world, along with all the rest of the planet's living entities, greed can get to become a very bad thing indeed, as resources begin to be tapped out and the pace to grab what little remains picks up.
Knowingly using one's power and one's intellect to cause what is of vital importance to another to be transferred over into your possession to enhance your own benefit by only a smidgeon, while he, by contrast, is left bereft, diminishes the sum quotient of the Greater Good. It is that willful diminishment, specifically, that qualifies any action as a sin, not the action per se. It constitutes the smothering of what is decent in you at the urging of some form of brutish impulse.
Allowing the same to occur, in a more passive way, where you raise no objection to being the beneficiary of what should rightly be going to some other party or parties, because that just happens to be the way things are done, may not be on the same order of sin, but it is still not on the decent side of neutral. It's just a lesser sin.
What is sin? Simply a betrayal of the Greater Good for the sake of one's personal gain. Religious affiliations - of which there seem to be countless - have nothing to do with it. Whether you're a bishop or an atheist, the existence and the nature of a sin is the same; it's the imposition of distress upon another by a self-aware human being for which no acceptable excuse can be made, whether it be by commission or omission.

But if sin and righteousness don't mean much to you and looking out for Number One is number one on your list of things to do, consider the following pragmatic concerns:
We all want a nice world to live on. Almost all of us support some kind of agenda to protect the environment we live in and most of us believe that stabilizing our global climatic system is of paramount importance to the future prospects of today's very young. Unfortunately, we're beginning to discover that, while the comfortably-set and well-educated are willing to engage in varying degrees of environmentally-friendly belt-tightening, the chronically poor - who have yet to reach some level of personal security - are far less persuadable. The worries they have about just surviving don't leave much room for thinking about externalities beyond the usual forms of base-level escapism associated with getting a bigger bang out of fewer bucks. The duties of social responsibility, I'm afraid, are not a high priority but, rather, of secondary importance. That's just a well-observed fact of life. Furthermore, a decent education is out of reach for the majority of those who find it difficult to make ends meet. The result is that many who are poor don’t have the common knowledge and education that would serve as a base for advocates of environmental consciousness to build their case on to good effect.
So clearly, social equity isn't just an ethical wishlist; it's what we will need to have before we can make the kind of nationwide - and worldwide - environmental investment that we will have to make if we are to avoid going down the tubes in the last days of the late great OSA - Oil-addicted States of America - on planet Earth.
Think about it for a moment. Is it logical to suppose that the hard-up are going to go out in their millions and buy high R-factor insulated windows and heat-saving siding to help save the planet or, failing that, pressure their in-it-just-for-the-money landlords to do so? No way, Jose! OK, some intrepid die-hards might, but the overwhelming bulk? Never! Nor, I might add, are they intending to buy a fuel cell- or electric-powered car anytime soon or install photovoltaic panels or direct solar water heating on the roof they sleep under but don't own.
Make no mistake about it. If the struggling classes are effectively shut out of the effort to bring about a quantum leap in efficiency and mindfulness in the way Americans use vital resources, by virtue of their relative poverty alone, we will all be swept up in the negative consequences of varying magnitude and severity that we so fear; especially the rich who (as we have recently seen) have the most to lose. To those who care enough to have been paying attention and realize that such consequences have already begun, affecting places hit by floods, fires, storms and droughts of historic proportions, I say, beware the delusion that wealth will be your enduring protector. Those unlucky enough to have been pummeled by Mother Nature's wrath have displayed no selectivity in income status. The damage, in every case, was across the board, not just in terms of structures affected, but even more so in the knock-on effects on families and businesses trying to bear up in the aftermath of those events –
soaring insurance premiums, plummeting retail activity and home resale values, public sector budget cuts and lost jobs.
Very tellingly, in Florida and California, where the subprime mortgage crisis first went into overdrive, many people were pushed beyond the point of no return by huge increases in home insurance premiums, as insurance carriers fought to recover from payouts on overpriced homes destroyed by fires and storms of increased magnitude and intensity.
These days, it is no longer sufficient to look at the causes of our worst national problems in a simplistic way. Causes feed into one another like tributaries combining to form a great river. One thing that many contributing causes to our worst problems seem to have in common at their source is social inequity. It's the first nick that subsequently turns into a run in the stocking of life's connected fabric.
Some may think that it wasn't that important to the national interest for a higher percentage of middle-class Americans to have invested more enthusiastically in a greener lifestyle. Not so. The current crisis for America's venerable car companies is a great example of the damage to progress that foot-dragging on this issue has done not just to the environment, but to a large swath of the American economic landscape.
The politics of social 'Darwinism' that had so effectively undercut the creation of a national healthcare authority, in favor of private sector alternatives, obliged GMC, Chrysler and Ford to make more profitable, larger vehicles with a higher CO2 impact on climate. Why? So that the rising cost of health insurance and other benefits for the workforce could be afforded. To facilitate the sale of large numbers of these high fuel consumption vehicles, both companies were forced to extend huge amounts of credit to buyers who, realistically speaking, were stretched to afford them. The presence of these vehicles on the road loaded far more CO2 into the atmosphere than was necessary for the transportation benefits gained. This added to the destructive effects of weather and fire, in southern and western states particularly, forcing home premiums up, along with foreclosure rates, spurring further the panoply of disruptive events in the economy that have caused liquidity problems severe enough to cut consumer demand for the cars that the Big Three make, to the extent of their being in danger of going under.

The prospect of their going under, in turn, is adding to foreclosure rates in counties dependent on GMC, Chrysler and Ford for their economic survival; counties that once exemplified model enclaves of personal exceptionalism, American style. In the above, we have the final linking of a circle of cause and effect, beginning and ending with social 'Darwinism', which has at its root our well-known antipathy toward government-engineered social equity. The final bitter irony of it all is that it proved to be an ethic we could not face the consequences of having to bear. We could not live by our own terms. When push really did come to shove, we blinked, saw the light and turned to socialism to save Chrysler and General Motors from starting a catastrophic unraveling of the economy. For me, that was final proof that all that puffed-up blathering about America being Numero Uno, that unrestrained capitalism was up there with baseball and apple pie and that anyone worth his salt could get ahead in America was a bunch of jingoistic claptrap. Even worse, the stubborn persistence of such claptrap was a fundamental impediment to the kind of progress the nation most needed to make.
As complicated as the workings of the world may be, it's easy enough to see how the compulsion toward disproportionate personal wealth substantially undercuts the potential of the nation to act in slowing climate change and how the damage from that goes out in many unexpected directions.
Those with the most to lose should keep it in the forefront of their minds: while inordinate means may impede efforts to contain mankind's carbon footprint, it doesn't necessarily follow that disproportionate wealth can forestall grave loss when a five hundred year climate event

rolls in. If the initial effects don't get you, the after-effects and their knock-ons will, regardless of who you are or where you live.
That makes one more good reason to help those in the middle become more financially empowered so they can be of substantive help in battling climate shift. Even then, it's a gamble. If the call to upgrade to greener technology is ignored, greater social equity could actually add to global warming. Nevertheless, it's a gamble we must take with faith that the financially capable will get on board and a risk we must manage as if the lives of future generations depended upon it.

So much for the effects of social inequity on climate change. What about the effects of social inequity on the exercise of democracy itself - the very fundament of the ties that bind us together as a nation?

The question is a pretty basic one: How, in Heaven's name, is the exercise of democracy supposed to deliver the good it was designed to while it is so obviously borne down by the relentless interference of a select group of very wealthy, bent on securing special access and special consideration, at any cost, regardless of whether doing so harms the prospects of the nation, or not? The answer is, it cannot.

And what have we reaped for turning a blind eye toward the presence of a few extremely astute self-sorters who have managed to command so much wealth and no small degree of power? Well, as anyone can see, times have changed - and not for the better! The stakes are as high as they have ever been. No one is exempt.
In fact, the overall condition of the nation's ability to deliver general security and providence is so bad right now that the challenges facing us threaten to seriously divide us. States, counties, cities, neighborhoods and individuals, all are contesting with one another for access to diminishing financial funding, employment opportunities and other resources. The period promises to be as difficult to traverse, while still remaining united, as any since the agonizing period of reconstruction after the Civil War of 1860-1865.
Now, as then, our internal reconstruction will be a matter of redoubled duty, not simply to the letter, but more to the intent of the national constitution. If we succeed, we will, perforce, have stepped up to providing for greater homeland security right here on American soil, in American towns, cities and neighborhoods, in ways that the common people can experience in a tangible way. On the other hand, if we don't, this country stands a good chance of descending, yet one more time, into civil unrest with sporadic outbreaks of rioting in areas of greater poverty and density that will make the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 look like a chess convention.

It may come as a surprise to the more well-set to know this, but poorer Americans are less afraid of what our high-profile terrorist enemies might do to their class than they are of what life-crushing moves their lower-profile, well-heeled contemporaries might pull on them, just when they are least able to protect themselves from the adverse consequences of legalized economic imposition upon their lives. When Americans are more afraid of developers, off-shorers and bankers than they are of terrorists - in the middle of the War on Terror, no less - we have reason to be concerned about what kind of state our nation is in.
With typical clinical dispassion, many economists make the mistake of reducing this potential for traumatic dispossession and displacement to industry jargon. They use euphemisms such as "the inescapable downside of social mobility". It helps to keep the impulse to empathy at bay.
In real life, if you happen to be on the receiving end of being shoved out of your neighborhood, it's more like a velvet-fisted mugging that leaves many of the displaced with symptoms of PTSD - depression, lowered self-worth, shattered confidence and an abiding sense of victimization, resentment and dread - for years after having been traumatized. It casts a deep, permanent shadow over one's hopes and one's sense of can-do, making it much harder to secure, and hold down, adequate employment.
No one powerless to protect what he or she values is safe. The weak are free game for the strong in this economy. While they may attempt to convince themselves they are living normal lives, with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, there is scant inner security or peace to be had.
Just ask the renters who've been turned out to make way for condo conversions or who have suffered the unexpected sale or foreclosure of the property in which they've worked hard to build a home over the years.
If you don't think that being kicked out of one's home is bad enough to qualify as economic brutalization, try asking the parents who, as a result of relative poverty, are having to watch their children suffer (and, on occasion, die) from "uncovered" health conditions because they can’t afford access to American-style healthcare - a system blatantly skewed to cater to the financially secure. If that seems too melodramatic, try talking to those who are in danger of being foreclosed on, after many years of monthly mortgage payments, now turning to smoke in the wind. Or how about those being gouged to death by payday loan-sharks charging huge interest rates, or those whose livings have headed off-shore, or those who sleep in their cars and under bridges, even as they hold down jobs that pay peanuts, or.....(make your own sorry list)?
By what twisted logic do we equivocate lamely allowing these financially weaker Americans to continue being bullied by pink slips and no-fault evictions, covert red-lining, overt red ink, penalty payments and late fees, slung at them with the backing of the law by their richer, more powerful and better represented social brethren - brethren to whom the hardships of the damaged and displaced clearly amount to nothing more troubling than a golden opportunity to get good labor or property at a steep discount, further amplifying their already overwhelming wealth advantage?
What is to be gained on behalf of the Greater Good by government continuing to countenance survival-of-the-fittest as the basic forming force of our socio-economic system? Obviously nothing, if the rising levels of gang activity and surging demand for jail space in a time of tanking state tax revenues are anything to go by. Maybe it's just that we have become so inured to images of low-key suffering on the part of fellow Americans that we are no longer moved enough by empathy or social conscience to prod the public sector into lifting the burdens of those variously oppressed or debased by the current system. Maybe it's because we're so broke collectively that we feel fatalistic about the way things are.
And so, our troubles gather to overwhelm us, like an unstoppable black tide, even as we, paralyzed, watching calamity slowly unfold before our eyes, continue to add to them.
It reminds me of what is said by those sinister villains of Star Trek fame, the Borg, as they absorb yet another hapless society into their collective: in the immortal words of the hive queen, "Resistance is futile!"

Given the abundant scholarly evidence that relative poverty is a principal inducer of both reactive and adaptive antisocial behavior, it says something rather unflattering about our collective powers of reasoning that we are quicker to blame the social diversity of our country for the fact that we now have 2 million people in prison than to lay it at the feet of the growing wealth dichotomization of America and all its poisonous spin-offs. This infamous red herring persists even though the research has clearly shown deep social inequity to be the true culprit. Why? Could it be that, as Americans, we are more comfortable being taken for thick-skinned, hard-working simpletons, too prickly to tangle with, than of appearing overly thoughtful, cautious, soft on crime and, thus, open to personal attack or ideological challenge from social hardliners?
Anyone who bothers to stay informed knows how legendarily fond we are of myths about ourselves that are more trite than true - a fondness, I surmise, that springs from a deep and covert fear that serious enquiry is nothing more than the beginning of a slippery slope above a huge can of worms. Pausing to consider things more carefully could well undo the confabulations of self-preserving bluster that we so often use to keep reality at bay. To avoid getting involved in the potentially uncomfortable consequences of self-examination, we hide behind a superficial façade of needing to get things done. When you're skittering along on thin ice, pausing to consider the landscape is not advised.
Inevitably, this kind of paranoia towards digging too deep lest we discover things about ourselves that it would pain us to know paints us into a corner. It compromises being able to implement both domestic and foreign policy that would ultimately benefit the country far more than the kind we currently are able to craft by working within prevailing paradigms. Even in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence, the status quo generally wins out, to the detriment of all.
Keeping up such a front requires training ourselves to be somewhat flip and cavalier about the consequences of our choices; a harsh self-defeating form of political fatalism.
This (some might say, congenital) social callousness is straining the bonds of American unity at a time when we can least afford to be socially fractured if we are to avoid falling behind in the world (and perhaps into permanent decline). As such, this hardened attitude constitutes a very real - and devilishly intractable - liability to the nation's ability to improve itself.