The New Enlightenment A Twenty-First Century Peaceful American Revolution

Almost everyone agrees that the following are among the most serious problems in our society: • The dominating importance of money in elections is destroying meaningful democracy• The highest poverty rate since 1966 and more people in poverty than ever in our history, despite the fact that our nation has almost two times the per capita income as in 1966. • An economic system concentrating vast amounts of wealth and income in a small elite, while tens of millions of people are compensated for their work in unjustly low amounts and have no or little wealth.• High official unemployment plus many millions who have lost hope of finding work and so have dropped out of the labor force. • Despite large productivity gains over the last few decades, most households are working substantially more hours to maintain a desirable income. This has stressed individuals and families, and diminished capacities for democratic participation. Husbands’ and wives’ combined work hours has grown by about 13 hours per week since 1968.• A dysfunctional media dominated by a few huge, powerful and manipulative corporations that control almost all we learn about our society. • A large federal deficit and debt.All these problems have solutions. This book describes them, yet it will be very difficult for these solutions to be instituted because of the narrow interests of an economic elite who are dominating our political system and media, and influencing our educational institutions – and many millions of people’s strongly held prejudices created by these institutions. The book contains evidence all of this is true. But if enough people learn of it, the truth will set us free. This is the hope on which The New Enlightenment is based, and is designed to develop.Our current political system is in need of radical reform because it is selecting for policymakers unwilling or unable to serve the majority. When good and capable persons overcome nearly insurmountable barriers for their entry into elected office they are largely disabled by dysfunctional rules of Congress and colleagues serving narrow, moneyed interests. So further decline or paralysis is inevitable without system change.A major cause of the dysfunction our political system is our appalling election system. The person who may be the most well informed judge on the relative quality of our election system is internationally renowned election observer Ex-President Carter, whose Carter Center has monitored 96 elections in 38 countries. He said “we have one of the worst election processes in the world right in the United States, and it’s almost entirely because of the excessive influx of money.” For this and other important reasons the U.S. Congress’s approval rating reaches new historic lows each year, & is now at 9%. Only 12% of Americans think Congress is mainly influenced by the voters they represent.The outcomes of our economic system are to a large degree determined by the regulation, tax and government expenditure policies created by our political system, so major economic injustices and hardships are evident. About one in sixteen live in “deep poverty”, less than half the poverty income limit, and a recent Gallop poll found that 20.2% or 24 million households did not have enough money to buy the food they needed at least once over the prior year. Our largest private employer, and many others, pay the majority of their full time workforce well under a living wage. Meanwhile 1.7 million households had income well over $1.5 million each. Sometimes paradigm shifts are necessary to solve fundamental problems. It seems to me now is such a time, so innovative, transformative solutions are promoted here. My goal is to present the evidence to convince you that the policies in this book best serve the country as a whole so you will join us. We can reach a critical mass in numbers for this change to be inevitable. Let this time of crisis be a time of opportunity, a time for a New Enlightenment.