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.

Why POPE's objectives would be good for business bottom lines

Lest these proposals be construed as pushing yet one more unfunded mandate upon a beleagured public, let me repeat that I do not think that this should be a mandatory program. In fact, the incentives of easy access to extremely cheap government financing are compelling enough, on their own, to merit making this program one that companies would have to qualify for.
In fact, I'd go one further. I don't think a company ought to be allowed to participate in the POPE system unless it has put the matter to a company-wide vote and shown that a majority of over 60% of its workers want the company to enlist. This will promote internal debate among employees - a good thing from my point of view.
I think that people are astute enough to recognize that having a silent partner in Uncle Sam makes for better job security and making a show of taking the high road can be very good PR for a business, more especially if the government were to take the time and the effort to recognize POPE participants over publicly-supported media, radio and television and in the progress-oriented periodicals that have become so popular of late.
Any sensible management team under the scrutiny of shareholders would be on thin ice if they were to reject the option of federal backing. It would leave them looking as if they were more intent on lining their own pockets than doing right by the company, its workers, its shareholders and the public interest.
The upfront task facing the People's representatives in government would be to convince a sufficient number of companies that the cost/benefit ratio of participating constituted a compelling case for them to sign on. To achieve that, implementation could start with those already known to be headed by people with strong leanings toward improving social equity. Though currently a definite minority, they exist in numbers sufficient to forge an excellent beginning that would make others stand up and take notice.
One thing is for certain: an astute government, intent on improving social equity, would not overlook the potential strategic advantage offered by the real-world existence of some companies that already try a lot harder than others to promote social equity in the way they treat their employees. Costco is a notable example of one such company - and a very profitable one, at that.
These companies are headed by executives who willingly accept whatever relative financial disadvantages that doing so may levy on them personally, compared with what executives burdened by no such scruples in other companies face, because they believe in building a better society through right use of will in business. In so doing, these pioneers have taken it upon themselves to create an opening for social conscience in the corporate world and are now waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak - namely, for society to meet them halfway. As things stand, the only thing they get now for their commitment to right action is knowing God (or Good) is on their side. With POPE, we can add a little public muscle to God's approval.
Let's face it; the long track record of government being all but indifferent to matters of social conscience in the free market has got to end. Without government leading the way and clearly delineating what living up to the social contract of our conclave actually requires of them, millions of Americans simply drift along in a haphazard way, each trying to secure his or her daily bread, often working at cross purposes to one another and the Greater Good. We can do better. The time has come for the People's representatives in government to help, in a substantive way, the leaders of the emergent social equity movement who strive to do right by their social contemporaries.
Accordingly, it would be entirely consistent with the spirit of the social contract if those who signed up to play by the rules of the POPE system were to get whatever preferential treatment from the People is both lawful and fiscally prudent. By the same measure, those who consciously opt to continue doing business in the discredited isolated-interest mode of old that created the conditions we are now so challenged to fix must be denied such help. Constructive reciprocity works.

An ace in the hand - shareholders

A big part of the logic of this general approach depends on the pressure that shareholders would be likely to put on company executives to enhance the viability of the companies in which said shareholders had bought stock.
When you're the head of a significant enterprise, as we have been shown of late, being able to guarantee that you have Uncle Sam standing just behind your right shoulder during shareholder meetings with a big bag of money at the ready to help you get by is nothing to be sniffed at, especially when the stakeholders in that company have it in their power to discontinue your employment. During a recession, it could be a lifesaver for the company and a career-saver for you.
Come tax time, the federal government could drive the point home by sending a form letter to all taxpayers who own stock, via the IRS, advising them of the program's existence and the potential advantages to them of their shares being under the wing of the program. It would be similar in the way it worked to the FDIC insured advisories behind the products of more reputable financial investment companies.
It isn't hard to see who wins in the POPE program - most of the workers in the payroll, the company itself, the shareholders, the economy and the American socio-political compact. The small minority who would give up some material advantage to make this possible don't lose anything they absolutely need while, at the same time, gaining membership among an esteemed group of people the country could use more of.
To be sure, the sacrifice made by the most well-paid would make a relatively insignificant difference to the overall enjoyment of their lives. For the civically-minded, it might even improve their lives. Numerous studies on the connection between wealth and health and happiness bear that out.

In stark contrast, for those at the bottom, that very same money would produce a HUGE increase in access to things the rich take for granted - rent money, mortgage payments, car insurance, dental or medical care, childcare, education opportunities, vacation opportunities, etcetera - making their lives significantly more enjoyable.
As to what serves the Greater Good more - subscribing to the program versus not doing so - the contest is something of a moral pushover.

The time to act is NOW

Of late, hitting speed bumps in the road has loosened our thinking up sufficiently to create room for doubt. The party that had been the main bastion of neo-conservatism for the past thirty years - the Republican Party - is as discredited (some might say, reviled) as it is ever likely to become, especially among the better educated young. The situation presents a rare opportunity to take an honest look at our shortcomings and use government auspices to spearhead the alter-ethic of advancing the interests of the greater public against the opposed interests of a minority of wealthy individuals in the private sector.

Whatever tolerance we have shown up to now toward entrenched social inequities among ourselves we only indulged because the nation was seen to be so abundantly gifted by nature and opportunity that it was assumed that none but the laziest and most degraded among us could possibly be left without options in the event they were moved along by the eminent domain of growth. The displaced were presumed to have plenty of other ways of providing for whatever they might need.
But times have changed. The once seemingly inexhaustible national fecundity that allowed us to content ourselves with the moral out that we did not have to worry about the collateral costs of our socio-economic processes, is no longer. Whether this was ever actually true or just a myth, the idea that anyone could find greener pastures elsewhere, as long as they chose to expend the necessary effort, was commonly accepted.
In spite of it being a giant economy, it is not an unlimited one. Our social conclave is beset right now with far greater systemic and geophysical problems than at any time in the nation's history. Never before have we had to contend with the threat of progressive socio-economic decline on such a massive scale, while having to factor the very real danger of a collapse of the world's life-giving natural systems into whatever recovery plans we attempt to institute. Further, at this time, there are no easily exploitable fields of new development into which we can plunge that can stave off having to come to grips with the darker side of our national condition and our slipping rank within the current hierarchy of nations. To many around the globe, we are a bull in the china shop of a planetary community fighting for natural survival - a community that, by and large, has come to consider us the biggest offender in most of what seems to be going wrong with the natural and social mechanisms of the planet, not because they think we're bad people but, rather, because we're just flat-out inept.
Some assert the development of green technologies will save us: alternative energy is the great new economic frontier, they claim.
While green technologies are certainly a promising area of national enterprise, they are, as yet, far from enough to provide a boost of sufficient size for us to rekindle an optimistic sense of national condition among ourselves; and, already, China and India (among others) are aggressively undercutting the U.S. with cheaper products of comparable utility and quality which cost-conscious Americans have no compunctions about buying.
The truth of it is, if you happen to be one of the many millions either displaced or shunted aside, there are no greener pastures to which you can easily repair unless you have a huge pile of hidden cash to expend on that endeavor. What kind of displaced person has a huge pile of hidden cash? In short, the cheap seats on the bus to Easy Street are gone and woe to those who are left outside.
Faced with the enormity of this, the person of good conscience, intelligence and practical mind would probably agree - it's high time we retired socio-economic management based on dog-eat-dog principles. If the cost of moral indulgence now is only going to be profound complications for our children, and our children's children, later, why be indulgent for one minute longer?
Before it's too late, we have to clean house and divest ourselves of forms of entrenched thinking that no longer bring us benefit, forms of thinking that only serve to divide and weaken us.
Chief among those thought forms is that staple portion of the "American Dream" - a perversion, really - that there will always be an accepted place for grossly disparate personal material excess in our society, even as a growing segment numbering in the millions slips from having meaningful access to even the most basic forms of dignified providence. With most of the planet's primary resources now being stretched to the very limit by the competing demands of humankind, how can we justify that kind of truly senseless personal hyper-acquisitiveness, let alone laud it, even as those limits close in on us?
This perception of slowly drowning in a sea of planetary distress of our own making is not some hysterical or sentimental mush-pile, spawned in the counterculture disinformation mill, as some still try to claim. Rather, it's what the huge majority of Americans are gradually coming to realize is their probable future unless significant changes are made soon.
With the sole exception of the very rich - many of whom keep other homes abroad so they can get away when being here begins to get on their nerves - there is nothing to be seen ahead for most sectors of our society but protracted social and economic struggle. Whether it be at the individual, institutional or public level, we continue to borrow our way into uncharted territory just to stay afloat and prop up what is, essentially, a rotting economic corpse dolled up to look good.
To add dishonor to injury, the way we still deal with the daunting liabilities we are racking up is by shamelessly fobbing them off onto our children to deal with as best they may when their turn to sit in the hot seat comes around.
We know all of the above to be true. So, how is it that we can't seem to rise to dealing with these realities head on? How do we excuse ourselves the monumental indolence of meeting the most pressing of our moral challenges with the same discredited set of bankrupt approaches, doomed to disserve and fail before they ever hit the ground?
What I prefer to believe is that we are finally pretty much done with ducking the hard choices required to fix things. Like turning a page in a book, we will face the music, stop making excuses and implement a broad swath of radical reforms within the next decade, not because we want to, but because we finally acknowledge we have to in order to survive as a civil society.
Which gets me back to my initial question: How can we continue to indulge society doing nothing about people who receive fabled compensation packages even as other Americans who labor just as long and hard in different locales and situations actually end up going hungry or malnurishsed - along with their families - after non-elective monthly costs have been met?
In principle, of course, we cannot, because these are our sisters and brothers in nationhood; and yet, in practice, it's what we are still doing and will continue to do until the precepts that have ruled our thinking, deliberations and actions for too long are dramatically revised across the board.
Let me borrow some meat to put on the bones of my discontent by referring the reader to an appropriate book for the job - "Bad Money, Reckless Finance and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism" by Kevin Phillips. In it, one discovers the power of the inner circles of the executive class to inflate the importance of their contributions, not just to the civilized world but, more importantly, to themselves. That having been accomplished, it is easier for them to inflate perceptions of the deference that we, the ordinary, owe them in return for their services, whether they succeed or fail. (Notably, there have been some truly mind-boggling failures among those people since the release of Phillips' book.)

This trend of looking after Number One among America's highest paid has reached such outrageous proportions that top executive employment contracts often resemble the statutory privileges of royal families, with sumptuous cushions of extra cash promised for such things as moving expenses, car expenses, entertainment, not leaving, retiring and, of course, being fired, as if mere millions in the body of one's normal paycheck were somehow insufficient to deal with those contingencies in a satisfactory manner. It's just ridiculous!
Why do we put up with such outrageous self-aggrandizement? Isn't it time we, The People, put a serious damper on such boardroom largesse?
For the sake of the betterment of our society, we owe it to ourselves to try a little harder, instead, in defense of that seminal responsibility under the Constitution that the nation was forged in war to uphold: not just that we should protect citizens from harm but, also, that we should spare no effort or expense in creating and protecting meaningful opportunity for each and every human being under the legal protectorship of this republic - citizens and others alike - that they may enjoy the fruits of personal dignity and equality in daily association with their fellow human beings. How else are we going to coax into action America's next generation of job-creating entrepreneurs?
Lest we forget, it isn't just the individual that is being diminished by the current order. There are cumulative costs to society that must be taken into account.
Nothing so impedes the inherent right of people to bring the gifts of their inner strengths forward, to the ultimate enrichment of society, as paying them only enough to squeak by, day to day. Any influence that contributes to making the peonization of people ubiquitous or acceptable is inimical to the goals that our constitution was formed to serve.

If, by some dread stroke - say a meteor strike or air-borne pandemic - the nation were to be laid low in such a way as to deliver one and all into dire financial straits, evenly spread across the nation, it would be a burden, no doubt, but not as intolerable as the current state of relative poverty is to the millions most acutely affected.
What makes relative poverty so intolerable to those on the losing end - and deeply injurious to general social amity - is trying to deal with life on the leftover crumbs spilled from the table of gross disparity while a select few of one's contemporaries lavish upon themselves a state of almost incomprehensible excess. Even though such extreme financial excess is almost always a problematic thing to manage, those who have it rarely elect to trim their earnings to leave more for others who could use a boost. It's as if they consider the rest of us some kind of less developed worker species equipped by evolution to be more able to tolerate the privations levied by financial paucity.
This is not semantic conjecture. I'm being perfectly serious. It was, precisely, the outlook of white South Africans toward blacks under apartheid when I lived there and, when it was codified into law as the Job Reservation Act, it allowed whites to accept it as an unavoidable fact of life - entirely natural - and, therefore, not something they should have to question or worry about. It may be hard to credit, but the very same thought form is tacitly at work in the United States today. When it comes to certain kinds of work, the general attitude is that certain kinds of people lower down on the pecking order are going to do it. Similarly, there's also a mirror attitude that certain kinds of high paying work should be reserved for those whose developed sensibilities and superior education are best suited to it, and that leaving the balance of more distasteful and poorly paid work for tougher, less educated, lower-ranking groups is socially acceptable. In the case of apartheid-era South Africa, it was seen as a white versus non-white dichotomy. Here, in America, while skin color definitely enters into it, the real divide between people considered deserving of exquisite consideration and those deserving of far less comes down to more subtle delineations of money and influence - like where you were born, whether you're a native or an immigrant, where you went to school, your professional associates, educational pedigree, what part of town you live in, family connections, income, sex, etc. Like it or not, there’s always some kind of profile by which you can be devalued and used accordingly for the greater convenience of those with higher social status. How else can one account for the following concentrations within the job market - Latinos in the lower paid ranks of agriculture, construction, hospitality and maintenance; Africans in the least desirable health and eldercare jobs; Sikhs in the taxi industry; Ethiopians and Eritreans in 24-hour convenience stores; Filipinos in the lowest ranks of the merchant marine industry; and American black males in the collection end of waste management?
The real reason for these worker clusterings is that, outside of those sectors, work with better conditions and pay is disproportionately difficult to track down because tacit social hurdles impede the process of applying for those positions, getting them and then successfully holding on to them.
The conscionable in society ought to be concerned by the fact that the main driver of social disparity - income disparity - is effectuated, for the most part, by varying degrees of conscious and unconscious collusion among those of a relatively small subset who decide what Americans get paid. This close-knit professional clique and their agents (lawyers, consultants, accountants and the like), by and large, maintain a calculated and willful indifference toward the national need for greater social equity.
Ideally, it wouldn’t be that way. The interests of the nation are not well served by it.
If ever the use of the power of the People in defense of the Greater Good were to be deemed justifiable and laudable, using it to lift up the common right to live in a more cohesive social collective would have to be one of the most obvious.
This basic tenet is more especially true in a time of war. The sons and daughters of citizens in lower economic circles are playing a preponderant role on the field of battle, in part, to preserve the interests of the rich (almost none of whom have kin in harm's way). Given they do so at grave risk to the psychological well-being of their families and their own lives, no lower standard of common reciprocity ought be tolerated.

A moral and rational argument for a new 'New Deal', like POPE

It is entirely appropriate that public sector assistance to companies be predicated on the enlistment of those companies in the general great effort to improve the nation's system of socio-economics; otherwise, we might as well give up on the idea of ever reaching that vaunted state in America on a sustainable basis and, with it, the many forms of security and happiness doing so would bring within reach for many millions more Americans.
There can be no enduring fix of that nature in the economic system without first obliging those at the top of the corporate world to be more aware of how serious we, as a nation, are prepared to get in restoring robustness to the American middle classes.
I'm sorry, but the bland recommendations of high-profile study groups, alone, aren't going to do it. We have to strike while the iron of recent troubles is hot and let these people know, in the clearest of terms, what we expect them to contribute as we strive to make things better for all. If we don't, why would they see any reason to alter what seems to have worked well for them up to now? We have to indicate loud and clear that it is, in large part, through fairer distribution of the profits of enterprise and the concomitant tempering of disproportion in executive pay that we intend to achieve improvement in the prospects for greater social equity.
Why beat around the bush? We all know that personal security is a relative measure that only has meaning when it describes a respectable altitude on the mountainside of possible earnings that rise from least to greatest. The only way we're going to ease the logjam of people stuck at the bottom of that mountain in this country is for them to earn more, relative to those at the top, period. In effect, we have to make that mountain both shorter and stouter. If that doesn't happen through more equitable disbursement of the gross profits of America's corporations, how else is it supposed to happen? Tax and spend? Religious discourse? Divine intervention? I think not.
One thing is for sure: we have to know who's on our side and who's not. Since compensation inequity in the nerve centers of companies is where things first go wrong, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion: no taxpayer-funded capital assistance should come from us, The People, if no reforms are being implemented by them. It's a case of productive reciprocity. To those who might disagree, I'd like to ask, what part of the word 'fair' do you not understand the social necessity of?

The need for committed resolve from the White House

The ball is now in the Obama camp to come up with domestic programs that demonstrate a stepped-up willingness to take on sacred cow thought forms that impede our way to a better future.
That being the case, how could we imagine not having to deal with the issue of inappropriate levels of privilege and power being commanded by disproportionate means, to the detriment of core tenets of mutual concern and universal sovereignty that the authors of the Constitution sought to advance under nationhood?
Clearly, we cannot. And if we cannot, how can we imagine having to do so without anybody's ox being gored in the process? The well-intentioned people that most of us are, we would, no doubt, prefer not to do so, if such were possible. Only the foolish and the insane like to make new enemies. Our intent, after all, is to heal, not hurt.
Regrettably, if we want to reach the levels of societal elevation we desire to see within the remainder of Mr. Obama's tenure, we will have no choice but to take on the principal cause that nourishes and perpetuates the wealth dichotomy - the high-flying compensation of those few whose pay privileges are incompatible with what building a truly equitable societal complex is all about.
How nice and how convenient it would be if we could just put brilliant ideas down on paper, have them signed into law by the President, and watch everyone conform to them to the delight of all - but that's not how change happens in America.
The bitter truth of it is that, for better things to become the norm, some will have to be persuaded - or forced - to relinquish a good part of what they have grown accustomed to having all to themselves. This they will not do without putting up a spirited counter attack - much of it conducted through lavishly paid and highly skilled political and legal proxies.
Trying to reason with the most ideologically dedicated of such people is literally useless. They are masters of the semantic arts and their fixation on personal advantage is as deeply rooted as any other fundament of their respective identities. The only approach that will bear fruit is to know what you intend to achieve, put on the mantle of duly accorded authority and move ahead with quiet determination, while being as impervious to the opposition's countervailing machinations as you can, all the while trusting that your core constituency will remain supportive, or at least come 'round to supporting you. It's a gamble, I know, but if history is anything to go by, making positive change in the world seems to require taking on the risk of possible failure.


The point of the preceding pages is not simply to fulminate over the evils of being too damn rich for anybody's good but, rather, to lay out the justificational ground for why it is in our interests, as a society, to stop being complicit in what harms us and finally attach some socially restorative consequences to the practice of excessive (usually self-awarded) pay to corporate executives - pay whose derivatives (pun intended) compromise the well-being of lesser earners and the greater societal complex in so many ways.
Trusting that I have made a sufficiently strong case in that regard, I can now describe how the First Leg of the POPE system would be augmented by a Second Leg to take the issue of top tier corporate pay in a more direct way.

Section C: The Second Leg

Once again, why do we need a Second Leg? Because the possibility exists that executives would take pay from the bottom earning ranks to meet the graph straightening requirements of the First Leg which would totally short-circuit the goals of the POPE system. This is what is known as a loophole. Loopholes, in this case, are not our friends. Allowing the greedy to make an end run around the redistributive intentions of the First Leg would be a disaster. Theoretically, if the First Leg were not supported by a Second Leg, top earners could gain access to cheap capital while doing nothing to temper excessiveness in their own pay, a situation that would simply aggravate social inequity.

The practical ends achieved by having a Second Leg are:
1.) to encourage executives to direct more of what they might otherwise take for themselves toward their lower paid co-workers, right down the line, and
2.) so that, failing the above occurring, we may augment the public funds needed for government to mitigate the diverse negative consequences to society that trace their causal beginnings to such instances of mal-distribution in pay.

Why target extravagant compensation with a context-specific POPE membership surcharge? First, because I think we greatly underestimate the negative consequences we are having to absorb by continuing to do nothing. There's a bull in the china shop and someone needs to grab that nose ring.
The consequences referred to are like an iceberg of grief - partly seen by others, but mostly unseen. The seen part forms the staple diet of want, crime and ruination peddled every evening by local TV newscasts, multiplied hundreds of times over. The far greater, unseen part consists of lost personal potential, lost individual and national growth opportunity, lost financial security and lost joy that requires a keener form of insight to gauge the full extent of. These losses represent where American society could have been if tens of millions of humbler earners had not been thwarted in their aspirations and their daily lives by the unforgiving financial odds stacked against them.
They say that, after one's first million a year, the rest is just confetti. It's a trite little homily, oft repeated and more than just a bit too flip. The trouble is, seen from another point of view, that same confetti could have meant lifeblood itself to those who might otherwise have got some of it but, instead, were forced to watch as huge amounts floated upward out of their grasp into the hands of company executives and their immediate associates.
That's the first reason I think this approach makes good social sense.
The second reason I like this approach is because it nips the problem in the bud, before temptation starts to create some sort of irresistible (though inherently tendentious) rationale for disproportionate division of the company's earnings.
If there is ever going to be anything like fairness in what people are able to earn, it's going to have to be achieved at the point of pay.
Government managed, ex post facto wealth redistribution - aka, tax and spend - is all but impossible to do to good affect here in America, as we well know. The only way that seems to have any hope of succeeding is to preempt mal-distribution right at the point of pay; and the only way we can do that is by getting executives to sign on to the idea of financial consequences for those who knowingly go along with, negotiate for, or just plain engineer, disproportionate division of the spoils of enterprise in their favor, with complete disregard for what such disparity does to those who lose out on the split.
These people aren't stupid and they aren't saints. For them to sign on to a deal like that, they're going to have to get something of value in return. In the case of POPE, the advantages extended don't go directly to top executives. They go towards the company's future prospects. The executive who loves his company will sign on; the one who is in it only for the money won't, foregoing participation in the POPE program, enabling shareholders to more easily differentiate between who's in it for the company and who's in it just for themselves.
Let's lay one potential excuse - made famous by the late Ken Lay of Enron - to rest: It's the "I just didn't know" tack. That's something we all need to get solid on; playing dumb about social inequity in these troubled times just won't cut it. How can you claim to have superior abilities of critical thinking worthy of lavishly disproportionate pay, on the one hand, while on the other, be genuinely oblivious to the bulk of negative consequences grossly disproportionate executive compensation sets in motion? Putting those two contradictory claims together inevitably exposes you as either playing dumb or just being dumb (take your pick). Whichever shortcoming pertains, a person so afflicted is not fit to head up a big corporation, let alone to be paid a princely fortune for playing at it.