Eric Schechter for President in 2024

MY CAMPAIGN

This web page essentially is my campaign. I will revise it many times; I invite your suggestions. Can you think of any shibboleths that I haven’t assaulted yet?

GOALS: I am running for president, not to win, but to spread ideas. It’s a thought experiment: What if we said the truth, instead of what the plutocracy permits us to say? What if we questioned traditions? I may take the idea of winning more seriously if this document becomes wildly popular, but at present I’m not expecting that.

FUNDING: None. I am not taking money from corporations, individuals, or my own retirement savings. I’m donating a bit of my time.

PUBLICITY: Only word-of-mouth. YOU are my publicity. I’m quite certain that the corporate press will never mention me. But if you like this web page, tell other people about it. If the revisions you suggest are good enough, this page will spread like wildfire. See, the future is really all up to you.

VOTES: If you think voting can make a difference, vote for someone who has a real chance of winning. Not me. I don’t really care about getting votes. But I would like it very much if you help with the publicity (see previous paragraph). If these ideas spread widely enough, then whoever wins the vote will be forced to deal with these ideas.

MY OWN UNIMPORTANCE: Think about the ideas, not about me. And I’m not calling them “my” ideas, because there are plenty of other people posting similar web pages. Those people are not my competitors, but my collaborators.

12 Oct 2022, version 1.10.

THE ISSUES

(Underlined blue phrases are links to related materials.)

We all want a safe place to live for ourselves and our children. There, I’ve said something we can all agree on. Probably the only thing we can all agree on.

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FAKE NEWS. The truth is hard to find. The two money parties call each other liars, and they’re both right about that. We all have different trusted sources for what we believe to be “facts,” and trust — like friendship — cannot be won through debate. You don’t know me, and have no reason to trust me, but at least you can think about whether my strange assertions seem plausible.

I get my news from non-corporate sources. The “mainstream” news is really the corporate news, and it is owned by the same corporations and rich people who own the government. They will lie in whatever fashion serves their own short-term profits. Most of their lies are not direct lies, but lies of omission: They never talk about the real basis of our society or the very different world that is possible. They omit the historical context of news events, and that completely changes the story. A striking example is the Ukraine War, which I’ll discuss later. They pretend that the Democrats and Republicans are, respectively, the “left” and “right,” when actually the two money parties are both quite far to the right. They pretend that there is a symmetry between the “extreme left” and “extreme right,” and so both factions should be treated with respect, even though

• by “extreme left” they mean socialists, who want everyone to have a decent life, and
• by “extreme right” they mean fascists, who believe might makes right, and who would like to either enslave or exterminate nonwhites.

But most people read only the “mainstream” news, and so they live in a world as unreal as the “matrix” that Neo awakened from.

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DEMOCRACY in the USA is an illusion. Money is influence. Regardless of elections, our government pursues the public policies preferred by the rich, and ignores the preferences of the people. That’s why we still don’t have universal healthcare and why anyone can buy machine guns. The ineffectiveness of our elections has long been evident to anyone paying attention, but it was proved statistically by Gilens and Page in 2014. Our politicians must serve their largest donors. They have little choice in the matter: Other statistics show that elections are almost always won by whichever candidate has the most money.

Rule by the rich is called plutocracy. It is not much different from oligarchy (rule by the few), since the rich are few. And power corrupts, as we see even on a smaller scale, in workplace bullying, killer cops, prison torture, etc.

Plutocracy in the USA is nothing new. James Madison, the chief author of our constitution, wrote (though not in the constitution) that it was important “to keep the spirit and form of popular government with only a minimum of the substance,” and he wrote that the primary goal of government is “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The USA has been a plutocracy thinly disguised as a democracy ever since its founding in land theft, genocide, slavery, and indentured servitude.

And of course, plutocracy did not begin with the USA. Poverty for the masses and riches for the few has been the way of the world for thousands of years. Perhaps Madison and the other plutocrats believed, like Hobbes and Malthus, that the only possible alternative was poverty for everyone. I don’t hold that view.

Some people think that to achieve true democracy, all we have to do is to “get the money out of politics.” But that is a fool’s errand: Money is influence. Money will find its way through or around legislators and legislation as surely as a river will find its way down a hill. We will only end rule by the wealthy class when we no longer have a wealthy class. That will require a different economic system; I’ll say more about that later.

Democracy is certainly preferable to oligarchy, but democracy is not enough. The majority is not always right. Democracy means that 51% can ride roughshod over 49%, which is not the formula for harmony. And we cannot vote wisely when we are misled by lies of the corporate press. Really, we need a great awakening, a cultural change.

Our two money parties disagree on some little issues, but they agree on all the biggest issues. For instance, every war gets strong bipartisan support. You might not notice these agreements, because they aren’t arguments and don’t get discussed much in the corporate press. Both money parties support plutocracy, but they lie about it in different ways.

• Democrats: “We’re not for plutocracy” — fools blind voters
• Republicans: “Plutocracy is good” — fools stupid voters

I admire the spirit, efforts, hopes, intentions of progressive reformist organizations such as DSA and the fancifully named “Our Revolution,” but I don’t believe they can accomplish much. Sometimes they do succeed in getting lipstick onto the pig, but to what ends? Electing better plutocrats will not end plutocracy.

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GLOBAL WARMING is real, and it is coming much bigger and faster than the corporate press says. The press keeps talking about what will happen by the end of this century, but I’m worried about what will happen in this decade. This world is starting to look like several different visions of Hell: floods, droughts, fires, plagues, crop failures, species extinctions. The calamities are about to increase explosively due to feedback loops, tipping points, and cascading failures, which are mentioned too rarely by the corporate press. Feedback loops cause exponential growth. If we don’t take drastic measures immediately, we’re on the verge of extinction. Even the rich, in their luxury bunkers, will run out of canned food.

Many people believe that the temperature will level off at a new normal, and people will adjust. That’s incorrect. On our present course, the temperature will continue rising until long after it has killed us all. The feedback loops were triggered by human activities, but many of the feedback loops are now self-perpetuating independently of human activities, and can only be stopped by much greater human activities. Here is a simple example:

Warmth is melting the Arctic ice. Sunlight, formerly reflected by a white surface, is now absorbed by a dark surface. That causes even faster warming. And what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.

The apocalypse arrives some places sooner than others. For instance, Pakistan was devastated in summer 2022. Coming soon to locations near you. Don’t think it will always be “somewhere else.”

To save our species, we must immediately phase out fossil fuels, beef, deforestation, etc, and make many other big changes. I could list more of the changes here, but experts in that subject can do that better than I can. If I get elected, the experts I appoint for advisors will not be oil executives or anyone else in the greenwashing-for-profit business.

When will you do something about global warming?

• Republicans: “Never.”
• Democrats: “Later.”

Those are the same answer.

We’ve known about global warming for decades, but we’ve done almost nothing about it while it keeps getting worse, and getting worse faster. That’s because the polluters have been running a disinformation campaign, greenwashing all their activities, and paying politicians quite well.

I admire the hopes and efforts of climate activist organizations such as Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise Movement, 350 Dot Org, etc. They show great heroism in getting themselves locked up, and the demonstrations by Extinction Rebellion are wonderfully colorful and entertaining. But they are too few, and they are not addressing the fact that the world is ruled by short-term profit and there is none in saving the ecosystem. I’ll say more about that later. And, alas, most of the world prefers to “Don’t Look Up.”

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WARS. “Yes, our government has lied about all the previous wars, but this time they’re telling us the truth.” — Really? In 1967 Martin Luther King Jr called the USA “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has only become more true. Why do people ask so few questions before going to war? How did killing our cousins become normalized? Some people join the national mafia and go to war just for college money; how did that become normalized? I would like to believe that I would rather starve than become a murderer, but I must confess that personally I haven’t been faced with that choice.

All of the USA’s many many wars are mass murders based on bipartisan lies to make a few rich men richer. Thus all our presidents and all our members of congress are liars, thieves, and mass murderers. They would be hanged if the principles of the Nuremberg Trials were applied.

Some people, upon hearing these things from me, claim that I hate the USA and I should leave. They are mistaken. I love my country the way that you love your mother when you discover that she has some terrible disease and you search desperately for a cure. You certainly don’t abandon her.

All of the USA’s many wars are imperialist wars. That means wars to build and maintain empire. Most of the land area of the USA was acquired through one conquest or another, starting with the conquest of the land’s previous democracy, which was described falsely as “merciless Indian Savages” in the Declaration of Independence. After the USA spanned from sea to shining sea, the conquest switched to economic control of other nations. On that topic I recommend John Perkins’s book “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” or this 2-minute summary: https://youtu.be/37Dvt2EqXF4

The USA’s many many wars and “interventions” make the rich richer in a variety of ways. Here are a few examples:

• US oil companies currently are simply stealing oil from the parts of Syria that the US military has occupied.
• The war in Ukraine gives the USA an excuse to pressure Europe to stop buying oil from Russia, and instead buy more expensive oil from the USA.
• Many of the USA’s recent wars and coups overthrew governments that were about to go off the dollar standard. Thus profits are maintained for private banks comprising the so-called “Federal” Reserve.
• Every US war is also an operation to launder money that congress steals from the public. It works like this: Congress purchases weapons from US companies such as Boeing, Raytheon, General Electric, etc. Those sales are at highly inflated prices, so those companies make huge profits. A portion of the profits goes back to members of congress in many forms: campaign donations, speakers’ fees, profitable investments, and promises of a lucrative career as a lobbyist. Lobbyists explain why we need more wars.

Most of our society has accepted the “mainstream” view of the Ukraine war:

It began with a totally unprovoked Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, and nothing relevant happened before that date. Putin is a megalomaniacal madman who simply wants to grab territory, and he cannot be reasoned with. He even bombed his own pipeline! Sure, the USA has lied to us about all of their many previous wars, but this time they’re telling us the truth! There is no further context — i.e., there’s nothing further that needs to be said on this subject.

Sorry, I get a rather different story from my non-corporate sources. Here’s an abridged version: Russia is actually fighting in self-defense. It’s like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, but with the roles reversed. “Mutually Assured Destruction” has prevented nuclear war for 70 years, but now the USA — far from Russia — is trying to end that by moving powerful weapons into countries adjacent to Russia, thus achieving “First Strike Capability.”  (If you don’t know those terms, look them up — they’re old but still very relevant.) NATO gradually expanded over 30 years — think of armed thugs moving into your front yard but not yet shooting you. Then in 2014, NATO overthrew a democratically elected government in Kiev and installed Nazis, who began bombing eastern Ukraine. The people of eastern Ukraine appealed to Russia for help. Russia tried to negotiate, but USA, NATO, and Kiev refused, and installed more and more weapons pointed into Russia. The Ukrainians waving Nazi flags and wearing Nazi insignia are not helping any: The Russians will not forget how their population was decimated by Hitler. So what are the real reasons the USA has provoked this war? Chiefly, to weaken Russia, a major economic rival of the USA. My top three recommendations for further details are Caitlin Johnstone, Aaron Maté, and Scott Ritter.

“I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.” — John Pilger

The USA’s recent brinkmanship against Russia and China is unprecedented. In the past, the USA has only picked on smaller, weaker countries that could not fight back very much, but Russia and China are nuclear powers. Their retaliation might result in nuclear war. That might kill everyone, even other nations that did not participate in the war, as clouds of radioactive fallout drift around the globe. I do not know what has possessed US politicians to begin gambling with everyone’s lives in this fashion.

But even without the recent increase in belligerence, the arms race puts us at great risk. There have been many instances where a nuclear war has nearly started by accident. We can only be made safe by mutual disarmament; that requires universal friendship; that requires other great changes.

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MASS SHOOTINGS. You take your life into your hands just walking down the street — our country has become like a war zone (more so if your skin is brown). We know that gun control legislation would help, because it helped in Australia, a country much like ours that had a problem much like ours. However, I see that as only a temporary remedy, because new technologies would soon go around such legislation. (I will not describe these new technologies, as I do not want to hasten them.)

Personally, I don’t carry a gun, I don’t own a gun, I have never even touched one of the horrid things. I don’t think I’m likely to ever want to kill somebody. Do you carry a gun? Do you go around thinking about how you might get the drop on people around you? I’m sorry, but I don’t think that’s healthy.

Guns make it easy to kill people, but ultimately the problem is deeper than the availability of guns: Why do so many people in our society want to kill other people? I have a few thoughts about that.

The journalist Johann Hari said that we are social animals, and we evolved in tribes, but now our culture is disbanding our tribes. As a result, “we are the loneliest society in history.” Marianne Williamson, spiritual leader and political activist, followed up on that; she said that “all of life has been consumed by the logic of the market.” I will say a lot more later about how our economic system alienates us from each other and makes us desperate. But now let’s look at how that brings shootings:

Our loneliness makes us susceptible to cults and demagogues. A demagogue may become powerful by gathering a cult around himself. He may do that by blaming our difficulties on some scapegoat group, some group of people who look or speak differently. The mass shooter may actually be a brave, generous, but desperate and misguided soul who is trying to free us from those aforementioned difficulties. We’d have fewer shootings if we had a clearer understanding of the real causes of our difficulties. We should all talk with each other about that more.

And by the way, scapegoating is fascism. And it’s not the good kind of fascism, like what so many of us imagine about the Nazis in Ukraine. It’s the bad kind of fascism, like what we’ve seen in movies about World War 2, where German soldiers were evil incarnate and American soldiers could do no wrong. Spoiler alert: All the soldiers are actually just human beings, generally misled by their politicians.

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KILLER COPS. I cannot imagine any situation in which I would ever phone the police for help. “If your only tool is a hammer, then all problems look like nails” — but for many cops, the only familiar tool is a gun. If the police answer my call, they may shoot me, or at least my dog. Not really helpful. And then the other cops won’t testify against the killer cop. They have so-called “qualified immunity,” actually impunity. Okay, maybe most cops won’t shoot you, but I’m not about to bet my life on which ones will answer my call. So I’m not going to call the cops.

The bad cops have given all cops a bad name. If there are any good cops, and they want to restore their reputation, they need to do something about it. Maybe something like Serpico, though that’s a difficult task. They don’t seem to be doing that. Maybe there aren’t any good cops left. I just don’t know.

This is like my questions about war. How did we develop a culture in which some people take killing so lightly?

If the police are doing anything worthwhile, I’d like to find someone else to do it. Most of it doesn’t require guns. Your fire fighter, your postal carrier, your ambulance driver don’t carry guns. Are guns really necessary? Are cops really necessary? or can we abolish them, and find some way to do without them altogether? I’m just getting started on that question; I’d like to investigate it further. Some people have written about it; I still have a lot of reading to do.

The government and the “mainstream” press act as though the police mete out their injustice equally to all. That is not so. The police show a decided preference for beating up or killing nonwhites, the poor, and demonstrators who lean to the left. On the other hand, the police are eager to protect a citizen’s right to protest and demonstrate, when the demonstrators are fascists. The police do not exhibit the symmetry between socialists and fascists that the press pretends to believe in.

I’m just speculating here, but maybe the problem is that cops are too authoritarian. Actually our whole country is too authoritarian, but the job of police is inherently authoritarian. Authoritarians are people who believe someone should be “in charge” and should be giving orders. Of course, once you believe some people are above other people, it’s an easy step to racism, fascism, various right-wing views. Look up the book “The Authoritarians” by psychologist Robert Altemeyer — it’s free on the internet, and it’s pretty good.

[revision for this section: Look up statistics; how much violence is done by cops compared with violence done by other people, the ones cops are supposed to arrest. There should be several different statistics, e.g., total versus per capita. I think there’s also a high incidence of domestic violence among cops, which may support my authoritarianism analysis; find statistics for that too.]

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ABORTIONS. Perhaps I should skip this topic; I may delete it in a later revision. I don’t have all the answers, and there is no way that I’m going to get everyone to agree. Still, I have some thoughts that might be helpful, or at least interesting.

“It takes a village to raise a child” is allegedly an African proverb. I agree with it, but I think Americans have mixed feelings about it. Many will say “what I do with my child is none of your business.” And yet their behavior might show a different view:

Imagine you’re sitting at home, reading your newspaper or watching television, and you hear screams coming from the house next door. It sounds like your neighbors are beating their 3-year-old child to death! If you’re like many Americans, you might make it your business. You might call the police (I hope not) or Child Protective Services.

But here’s my point: The people who want to ban abortion see themselves as the neighbor calling Child Protective Services. If you want to understand the people who favor forced pregnancy, start by understanding that they believe the fetus is just like a 3-year-old child. That’s what they’ve been taught. I’m not sure where that idea originated. Many of them are religious, and many of them believe that idea is part of their religion, and some of them even believe it’s in the bible, but it’s not. The bible repeatedly refers to “the breath of life,” never “the heartbeat of life.”

Personally, I would not assert

“the fetus is a child,”

nor would I assert

“the fetus is not a child.”

Both of those assertions are too simple. All of us, including me, like simple answers, but we should try to not be seduced by simplicity. Sometimes life is not so simple. Don’t harden your heart and amputate your brain in the name of simplicity.

I could make a list of exceptions to the abortion ban, a list circumstances under which I thought an abortion would be justified. Perhaps you could make a list too. But such a list runs the risk of overlooking complications we weren’t aware of or didn’t understand. Who am I, to make such decisions for other people whose lives I don’t know intimately? Who are you? Who is the pope? What expert is qualified to make such a huge decision about some other person whose circumstances he doesn’t know?

The legislators who want to ban abortion are the same legislators who have opposed funding for healthcare, education, and other things that children need. Evidently they are not really “pro-life”; they are merely “pro-birth.” They are demagogues, appealing to the emotions of a cult. They are trying to focus blame, anger, and punishment on the mother, a scapegoat who they believe will be an easy target. But this week, as I write this sentence, women in Iran are uniting and burning their hijabs. Perhaps women are not such an easy target. Perhaps women in the USA will soon unite and burn the papers that enslave their uteri. In that action they’ll have the support of many men, including me.

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ECONOMICS. This will be hardest topic to discuss, because I’m going way, way, way outside the “mainstream.” The ideas I’ll put forward are not detailed blueprints, and they cannot be implemented without great popular support. So don’t think of them as an action plan. Think of them as a topic for discussion.

Many electoral campaigns nowadays advocate reparations, i.e., monetary payments for the USA’s past crimes. But those crimes are too great — there isn’t enough money in our entire economy to really pay for them — and anyway we can’t fix the past. Let’s try to fix the future. We need to bring up to a decent economic level not just those disadvantaged by past crimes, but those disadvantaged by any circumstances at all.

Some people are excited about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and other corrections to classical economics. MMT says, roughly, that a national budget is not like a household budget, because the government can print or destroy money. That’s true, but that’s a rather small thing; I have much bigger corrections in mind. Our entire economic system is all wrong. I’ve already mentioned it as the cause of some of our problems — global warming, war, mass shootings — let’s look at that in more detail.

For many years, fans of capitalism have claimed that it is making the world better for everyone. A recent research paper by Sullivan and Hickel reaches just the opposite conclusion; it shows statistically that wherever capitalism has been introduced, it has made most lives worse. I have several ideas about how and why capitalism has made lives worse:

• The enormous economic inequality, the enormous concentration of wealth that we see today is too consistent to be a result of random chance. It must be built into the system in some very fundamental way. I would explain it this way: If we don’t share, we must trade — for money, labor, food, rent, interest, influence, whatever. Trade brings greater profit to whichever trader was already in the stronger bargaining position. That greater profit makes him stronger still, thus increasing inequality, even when trade is honest and voluntary. (Which it often is not. Think of dishonesty and coercion as two more ways that a strong trader can make himself stronger.)
• David Graeber wrote: “The market is supposed to work on grounds of pure competition. Nobody has moral ties to each other other than to obey the rules. But, on the other hand, people are supposed to do anything they can to get as much as possible off the other guy — but won’t simply steal the stuff or shoot the person. Historically, that’s just silly; if you don’t care at all about a guy, you might as well steal his stuff. In fact, they’re encouraging people to act essentially how most human societies, historically, treated their enemies — but to still never resort to violence, trickery or theft. Obviously that’s not going to happen.”
• Anything that can be done competitively, can be done better cooperatively. But our present system forces us to compete against each other for jobs. That kills empathy, alienates us from each other, makes friendship difficult. Separate property creates separate lives; your loss is not my loss and might even be my gain. The stress causes heart disease and other illnesses that shorten our lives; it’s not just in our heads. I think we’ll have fewer shootings when we change our culture so that we are all friends and no one is left behind.
• Many species are already going extinct, but that’s just a side-effect, not intentional. It’s not like we’re dropping bombs on the bees, or hiring people just to spray methane into the air. The problem is that our economic system pays no attention to side effects. Those side effects are called externalized costs, or externalities, because they are outside the considerations of business negotiators. Externalities can be very harmful — for instance, they cause global warming, which is about to kill us all. Laws attempt to regulate these externalities as an afterthought, but they can’t keep up, because our economic system rewards the creation of ever more externalities. Besides, the legislators’ attempt is only half-hearted — they are in the service of the plutocrats, which includes the polluters. We need to eliminate the problem at its source: an economic system based on not sharing.
• On what planet do the oil executives hope to spend their ill-gotten gains, after this one is destroyed? If the rich were organized like the fabled Illuminati, then they would say to one another, “come, let us take steps to save the ecosystem, on which even we gods are dependent.” But the rich aren’t organized like that. Our economic system forces them to compete against each other for investors. Any capitalist who loses that race, ceases to be a player. And investors are fickle; they will move their money to whatever scheme is profiting fastest. Thus capitalism cares only for short-term profits, and cannot plan for the future. That’s why it is destroying the ecosystem. The sci-fi film “Snowpiercer” is a good metaphor for our situation: The elites are as trapped on this crazy train as the rest of us; they merely have more comfy cells.
• Capitalism only works by growth, but our planet isn’t getting any bigger. In fact, some of the resources offered by the planet are getting used up, getting smaller. This can’t continue; one way or another capitalism is coming to an end. But if we wait it out, capitalism will take us all down with it.

All these problems are inherent in any kind of capitalism; they cannot be reformed away. What can we do about it? What can we replace capitalism with? To answer that, we must understand ourselves.

Here is a greatly simplified history. Our species has been on this planet, in our present form, for something like 200,000 years. For most of that time we were hunter-gatherers, living in tribes, sharing everything as equals. The only way anyone could “get ahead” was by bringing the whole community ahead. Sharing is still what we teach our kids, still where we turn in crisis, still who we are in our chromosomes. Any changes from that have been a mere cultural overlay.

The big cultural change came 12,000 years ago, when the ice age ended and agriculture began. That made it possible — not necessary, but possible — for us to stop sharing as equals and begin hoarding as unequals. That has led to all our problems. Since then we have invented many technologies; our inventiveness did not depend on our economic system. Our technologies have made us more powerful for good or ill, and much of it has been ill. The existence of nuclear weapons is a blatant proof that we have been clever but not wise. We need to find wisdom.

Sharing is still in our genes; we are capable of returning to it. But it wouldn’t be easy. The idea of sharing is simple and yet difficult: simple in that it has few moving parts, but difficult because unfamiliar. After all, we haven’t shared for 12,000 years; by now our culture is built around not sharing. Sharing would be a big change. But the alternative is extinction, an even bigger change.

I’m not suggesting that we should return to hunting-gathering. So really I’m calling for a new way of life, one that has never existed before. I cannot lay out a detailed blueprint — we need to figure this out together. My proposal is just that we should start thinking and talking about it.

Some people claim that sharing is contrary to human nature, and that it won’t happen except by Stalinist dictatorship. I disagree, and I’m not calling for new laws imposed by force. I’m calling for a change in culture. That happens when we all see the old culture more clearly, see it for what it really is. The story of “the rugged individual” must fade away — we have always depended on each other. Even Robinson Crusoe brought to his island tools and knowledge devised earlier by other people.

What is human nature, really? It is very flexible. We have lived in many different cultures. Perhaps the strongest proof of that is in Sapolsky’s baboons. Most baboon tribes are hierarchies of bullies. But biologist Robert Sapolsky observed one tribe that accidentally switched to an egalitarian culture of friendship. What the baboons can do accidentally, we can do intentionally.

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REVOLUTION. By now it should be evident that I’m not really running for president. Rather, I’m doing the little I can to contribute to a Great Awakening. But this format, of pretending to be a presidential candidate, makes it easier to say certain kinds of things.

To get the changes we need, to prevent the near-term extinction of our species, we’re going to have to replace not just the president, but also all of congress, the Supreme Court, the corporations, any institutions of power. We’ll also have to replace the worldview of most of society. Instead of saying “we must change them,” it may be more realistic to say “we must change us.”

I can imagine changing most of the 99%, though that is a huge stretch. I cannot imagine changing the upper 1%. People who are rich and powerful will resist change violently; they will kill some of us. Still, they will be helpless without their servants, who will join us if the cultural change is complete enough. Then we can say to the former 1%, “we will no longer honor your pieces of paper, now you must live like the rest of us.” Many of them will prefer to hang themselves.

No, the hard part is getting most of the 99% on our side. That’s going to be a very big conversation. Please join the conversation.

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Links to sections: Fake news, Democracy, Global warming, Wars, Mass shootings, Killer cops, Abortions, Economics, Revolution

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