November 27, 2024
Dear Friends,
I dedicated my October newsletter as a thank you to Donald Trump for his role in giving us the potential breakthrough of a Kamala Harris presidency devoted to advancing a profound global cultural and institutional transformation. I was, at the time, confident that Kamala was on a path to victory led by the votes of women thrilled by the prospect of a female president committed to creating a better future for all. It gave me new hope for the deep transformation essential to a viable human future.
We must now face the reality that Donald Trump and the Republicans will have control of the executive and legislative branches of government backed by a supreme court and cabinet led by unqualified Trump loyalists.
If a majority chose to give control of the powers of government to self-serving billionaires and their handmaidens, what hope do we have for a viable human future? Perhaps more than we realize.
– David Korten
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A Unifying Agenda:
Creating a New Economy
David Korten | November 27, 2024
While Trump was in the process of naming devastatingly unqualified candidates for his key administrative positions, Senate Republicans held a secret vote to choose the next Senate Majority leader. There were three candidates. John Thune of South Dakota won. Trump-endorsed Senator Rick Scott of Florida came in third.
Though Thune was quick to pledge his loyalty to Trump, his election is an early sign of possible principled Republican resistance to Trump’s appalling judgment. I’m hopeful there may be potential for an alliance between principled leaders of Democratic and Republican parties to restore their responsible collegial collaboration of days gone by.
Data from 2024 Presidential election voter exit polls reveal that Trump’s victory was driven by working class rage against what Trump correctly identified as a failed economy. Trump blamed the failure on the Biden/Harris administration. Rather than acknowledge the economy is failing a majority of the electorate because of decisions made by both Republican and Democratic administrations over many decades, Harris simply denied the failure and assured voters that the U. S. economy is doing well under her and President Biden. She went on to direct attention to other issues like abortion restrictions, automatic weapons, and environmental harms. This further fed the working-class rage that propelled Trump to victory. That victory in turn drove the stock market to an historic high that in a single day grew the financial assets of the world’s ten richest billionaires – the real winners of Trump’s victory – by a collective $64 billion.
The economy is working extremely well for most billionaires. It is also working well for most of the 37.3 percent of the U.S. population age 25 or older who in 2021 possessed college degrees.
According to election exit polls, white voters with a college degree favored Harris by 7 percent. The 62.7% of white voters with no college degree favored Trump by 34 percent. The livelihoods of many of those without college degrees depend on poorly compensated jobs that reduce them to living in fear that an emergency expense of $400 or more will put them on a path to bankruptcy or homelessness. Trump’s claim that the economy is failing speaks forcefully to these economically stressed Americans.
Older Americans recall life in the 1950s and 60s when most—especially white—families owned their home, and one wage earner could produce a secure and comfortable living for a family of four. Debilitating education, medical, and consumer debts were then rare, as was homelessness. The children of that day had good reason to believe that their adult lives would be better than those of their parents.
Those days are no more. For all our signs of progress, our economic and political systems are failing in profound ways. We have gone backward to become a nation of extreme and ever-growing inequality that ranges from the homeless on the bottom to the obscenely rich centi-billionaires like Elon Musk at the top. Meanwhile, we are destroying Earth’s capacity to sustain life, putting all humans—including billionaires—at extreme risk of self-extinction.
If we include the environmental issues, the economic failure is far worse than Trump acknowledges. His initial appointments give no suggestion that he has any clue as to why the economy is failing or concern for the wellbeing of low-wage workers who voted for him.
One lesson here for college educated environmentalists such as myself is that if we are to build serious political support for the deep institutional change needed to deal with environmental issues, we must recognize and address the economic situation of those essential workers whom the economy is most immediately and directly failing.
Bernie Sanders has spelled it out in his assessment of the election outcome for the Boston Globe.
“In my view, the Democrats lost this election because they ignored the justified anger of working-class America and became the defenders of a rigged economic and political system.”
Sanders went on to spell out an agenda for securing the wellbeing of working people. That agenda includes legislative action to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that legalized the buying of elections by corporate interests; increase social security benefits; raise the federal minimum wage to at least $17 an hour; build at least 3 million units of low-income housing; and make public colleges and universities tuition-free.
Sanders does not address environmental issues directly in this piece. We can assume he recognizes that before we can win the support of the working poor for less immediately visible environmental issues, we must address the more immediately visible threats to the wellbeing of the working poor. A person facing threat of homelessness because they cannot pay the rent is not likely to put environmental issues on the top of their list of political priorities.
Democratic and Republican party members dedicated to the wellbeing of their constituents best join in a bipartisan alliance behind the Bernie Sanders agenda to benefit those providing essential labor. Once these essential workers have greater economic security, they can become key allies in addressing other crucial issues that will determine the fate of Earth and all its people.
The failed economy created by well compensated college educated elites at the top of the system depends on the cheap labor of the working class to meet their essential needs. Many such elites have become skilled in making money from nothing without producing anything of real value. Most common is collecting rents on inherited resources or gambling on price changes in the stock market. An increasingly favored method of generating money from nothing involves the creation of derivatives and cryptocurrencies—essentially legalized counterfeiting. Proceeds from these financial games are often invested in the invention and production of technologies, such as AI data center facilities, that threaten nature and the livelihoods of the working class. This is not only a failure of the economy. It is a failure of our institutions of business, government, and education.
Our appropriate human goal is an economy that secures the wellbeing of all—and especially those who do essential work like growing and preparing our food, caring for our children and the elderly, and providing basic personal care, house cleaning, and other services essential to health and comfort in our homes and public places.
To fully grasp the implications, I find it useful to outline the defining features of an economy that works for all.
In this economy money will be recognized as a sometimes-useful tool, but never our defining human purpose. Newly created money will be launched into circulation to meet the otherwise unmet needs of Earth and its people.
Gambling will be confined to licensed and carefully regulated gambling casinos. Radical progressive taxation will redistribute and ultimately eliminate concentrations of wealth. Financial derivatives and cryptocurrencies will be prohibited. Social programs will ensure back-up protection against economic crisis as needed. Immigration pressures will be addressed by making every place livable through initiatives to end war and restore Earth’s environment to full health.
Some of our most essential reforms will be in education. Rather than emphasizing degrees preparing us for jobs that maximize corporate profits, education at all levels, including trade schools, will be free and designed to secure and enhance the wellbeing of one another and the living Earth.
Achieving the needed economic transformation presents a daunting challenge. We don’t even have a name for the outcome we seek. Capitalism favors big business. Socialism favors big government. Our current system features an alliance between big business and big government organized and managed from the top down by elites with advanced degrees from prestigious universities. Call it capitalistic socialism.
A viable human future requires institutional transformation supportive of local self-rule on a global scale by people engaged in essential work and life-long learning. The goal is a self-organizing world of small governments, which should please Republicans, and small businesses, which should please Democrats. Most Republicans and Democrats naturally prefer to live in a place with happy people and a clean and healthy environment. Perhaps the appropriate name for the idology underlying an Ecological Civilization is localism.
The needed transformation will not be easily or quickly achieved. By its nature, we the people must join in common cause across the many barriers that currently separate us in recognition that we all share an interest in successful transformation. As members of both parties face Trump’s appalling choices for cabinet positions, let us encourage and support responsible politicians in both parties willing to work with one another across party lines to assure a good life for all people doing essential and useful work as we find our way to the healthy and viable human future.
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Noteworthy…
Inspiration for David’s essay (above) came, in part, from two recent essays by close friends and long-time colleagues, Gus Speth and Jeremy Lent, who reflect on the recent election – and what’s next.
David reinforces the themes from Gus’s essay for the Democracy Collaborative -“Underlying the Democrats’ Defeat,” and Jeremy’s piece, “The Political Cataclysm: Initial Reflections and Invitation for a Conversation.”
Read more about Gus and his work…
Read more about Jeremy and his work…
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We highly recommend the weekly newsletter from the team at Inequality.org for covering breaking news, highlighting eye-popping statistics, bold solutions, profiles of game-changers (and “pentulant plutocrats), “Greed at a Glance,” and “must reads.”
Relevant to the subject of David’s essay, they draw attention in their November 20 edition to a Common Dreams article about an agreement at the recent G20 conclave to work together to “insure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.'”
Read the article here…
Read the entire Inequality.org newsletter here…
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From the Book Shelf …
“It is only in the past 100 years that we have begun to create global institutions that reflect and shape our values and relationships as a now globally interdependent species. So far, we have approached this challenge by building on the inherited centralized, hierarchical, institutional values and structures of the imperial era. The result is a globalized, money-centric economy devoted to relentless growth in material consumption by the few. We reached and exceeded living Earth’s planetary limits in the early 1970s.
We are now awakening to the reality that a viable human future—an Ecological Civilization—requires transitioning to institutions that facilitate our bottom-up self-organization as a living democracy, spawn businesses in service to community, and structure our financial operations to serve our wellbeing while reducing our dependence on money.”
“Eco-nomics for an Ecological Civilization” (p 18), by David Korten (March 2024)
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