Those barriers which hinder or obstruct our progress can be called the primary impediments to creating a republican form of socialism. By republican socialism I mean a version of popular government that has impartial, open elections with results that can be verified as the actual will of the people, not a gerry-rigged farce that has excluded many of the countervailing forces that  democracy encourages. The socialist element comes from the fact that socialist leaning voters of many strips see the redistribution of the benefits and amenities of a complex modern economy as pieces in the negotiable social contract that determines who our representatives are and how the fruits of our labors are apportioned through taxes and programs that are created to benefit everyone. The cant and lie of the current formula is that ‘the job creators’ or the investment and banking elements deserve the bulk of society’s wealth as they are, to use the old rubric of the Chinese imperial dynasties, ‘the masters of the earth’. Under that system those  arrangements would continue to apply as long as the leadership enjoyed ‘The Mandate of Heaven’, which usually came to mean that as long as there was stability and the sense of forward progress and social order, the group in charge should continue to rule. In the United States today it’s apparent our masters have lost their mandate. It is our task to replace them by way of the ballot box.

Toward that end and purpose we need to be more clear as to the program that we wish to see enacted. The basics, which as I stated  in my last post, include safety of ones’ person, healthcare, food and housing, education and a means of work or livelihood; in short, both survival and a meaningful existence are all valuable and doable as social goals and should not be too big of a  burden for the political system to engineer. They are low hanging fruit if we have the will to do it. They are prerequisites to achieving the next absolute levels of necessities, such as dealing with climate change and species die-off, war and nuclear proliferation, authoritarian usurpation at home and imperial adventures abroad. How in the world can we Americans  be able to do the great things that history at this moment is asking of us if we cannot even discuss these matters in the public forum and then put them to a vote in our elections and by our representatives in our legislatures and by our justices in our courts ? We have been resting on our laurels and enjoying the successes of our forbearers .  .  .  we need to guarantee equality for women, insure the peoples’ right to vote, create and repair great public works, and, as Rev. ML King noted in his most famous speech, honor the promissory note that our founders put forth in The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, that of equality, opportunity, and the rule of law.

As the Jewish New Year 5781 commences, the final push for the White House, and thousands of other elected posts in America, has already commenced with over six states having already begun in-person early voting and the first Presidential debate only ten days away. While entirely too much space is still being allotted to fantasies and fabrications as to what the current US head of state might do if he loses, many real issues are starting to gel, and together with glaring differences between the representatives of the major parties, there is a  rising awareness of how much will need to be done in 2021 after the dust from this election settles.

Back in April before the insufficiency of our country’s response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was obvious to most Americans, Adam Tooze, in the London Review of Books (“Shockwave”, 16 April, 2020), noted that the US federal system and the EU multi-nation organization were both challenged at a level well beyond China and South Korea. As successful as the Western economic bloc was at managing  the rules of global finance and strategic power, they had serious problems in dealing with an invisible enemy that seemed to dictate a choice between lockdown or a staggering death count. The US especially, because of the absence of both a national system of unemployment insurance system and a national health care system, found that even with budgeting huge dollar amounts they could not get sustained traction. Now, six months later, with young people going back to school, notably to colleges away from home, and the end of the European tourist season with the fall flu season not far behind, the citizenry of the most developed economies in the world are nervous. The US Senate cannot come up with a deal for more money, fiscal stimulus is sorely needed, the European economies are moving more deeply into recession, and the US GDP is now smaller than our national debt for the first time since WWII. With climate change adding an emphatic punctuation to the current state of affairs, it’s safe to say that this is an election that will impact human communities all over the world. It is our challenge and our opportunity to move away from war and abuse and toward meeting the real needs of our people  and our planet.

Full disclosure: Federal Tax Return for 2019

JKF tax return 2019