Though it is the Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, we have a very different country “worth saving” today by Glen Brown

We live in a country where the corrupt, dysfunctional two-party Democratic/Republican Party System is failing us; where venture capitalists and hedge fund billionaires are buying and destroying our democracy; where 401(k) s are fraudulent games of theft and greed played within the wealthy financial sector; where numerous senators and representatives are pawns of the American Legislative Exchange Council; where “the privatization of health services has corresponded closely with skyrocketing costs, leaving millions of Americans without access to care or deeply in debt for seeking treatment for their illnesses.” 

We live in a country where a major credit-rating agency was accused of “manipulating pension data”; where “Koch-supported groups have strongly worked behind the scenes on the federal and local levels to eradicate Social Security and Medicare as overly costly entitlements given to working class people,” and where the Koch Brothers and major corporations sponsor pension reform seminars for judges.  

We live in a country where Moody’s Investors Service, FitchRatings and Standard & Poor’s “gave out AAA ratings to sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. These securities turned out to be toxic, but the agencies were paid anyway. What's worse, when Wall Street ran out of questionable mortgages to securitize, it created a whole new market based on bets on those securities, bets called ‘derivatives.’ The Big Three kept on handing out AAA ratings to these complicated new products, and were again paid handsomely to do so. The rating agencies made hundreds of millions of dollars, but in the end, it was American taxpayers who paid the price -- losing their savings, their homes and their jobs in addition to having to pay billions to bail out banks…” 

We live in a country where breaking a constitutional contract with retirees and public employees is deemed morally and legally justifiable by legislative liars and thieves; where public employees and retirees are victims of plutocratic, concentrated economic privilege and power that accommodates and reinforces an enormous inequality of organizational resources for corporate self-seekers; where public schools are for sale; where public school teachers have been assaulted by a barrage of attacks on their autonomy, dignity and self-respect; where labor unions have lost political power and influence; where there is no pay equity or job security for college adjunct faculty, and where “memories of the university as a citadel of democratic learning have been replaced by a university eager to define itself largely as an adjunct of corporate power.” 

We live in a country where the plutocratic free market theory caters to self-interested desires and profit to the detriment of millions of Americans, while promising “freedom and prosperity;” where Free market principles advocate that the rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate, despite creating a vast inequity; where education, health care, retirement pensions, national parks (and most any function intrinsic to essential governing) become privatized to reap in more profits; where publicly-owned companies, services and their assets are auctioned off to private investors; that besides allocating vast amounts of wealth and resources from public to private ownership, there is a transfer of private debts to the public sector while public ownership and service are systematically dismantled.  We live in a country where systemic racism and bigotry are rampant; where xenophobia is pervasive; and where hypocrisy, prevarication, incompetence, immorality, inequality, poverty and injustice prevail. 

-Glen Brown

Postscript January 18, 2022:

For the Republican Party, reality is not an objective fact to be acknowledged. Today’s Republicans aim to reduce the range of thought through doublespeak, denial and deceit. Their language is stripped of reason and raped by propaganda. Power is not a means for them; it is an end for them—power for its own sake. With today’s social media and promulgation of falsehood, reality is no longer something to be known and experienced. It has been fabricated and transformed.

We have witnessed this trumped-up transformation and its exacerbation these past years. Trump is an authoritarian inhibited by no laws or moral consideration, and there are others who are just as dangerous and depraved as he is: Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Johnson, Mike Pence, Mark Meadows, Jeffrey Clark, Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, Scott Perry, John Eastman, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, Mo Brooks, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, Charles Grassley, Rick Scott, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, John Neeley Kennedy, Ron Johnson, Louie Gohmert, Barry Moore, (Democratic Centrists) Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, Tucker Carlson.... 

The destruction of America's fragile democracy will be the result of our failure to respond to those among us who choose to repudiate empirical truth and falsify reality for power and greed.

I am afraid that today’s Democratic Party’s ill-advised priorities, political stupidity, schizophrenic identity, split coalition, endless procrastination and vulnerable candidacies will enable the Republican Party to take over the House and Senate and the presidency in 2024.

What Biden and the democratic leadership need to address, besides the antiquated filibuster and Freedom to Vote Act, is the lack of unity in the Democratic Party; Republican propagation of lies; the ongoing Republican subversion of the next elections; the Republican attempt to rigged the voting system in their favor; the Republican focus on voting in partisan supervisors for elections; Republican gerrymandering; Republican legislator purges; Republican past sabotage of the U.S. mail system; Republican attacks on Medicare and Social Security; Republican obstruction of serious gun control legislation; Republican (or theocratic) takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court; rising American religious fundamentalism; the pandemic's effects on healthcare; the unvaccinated and their effects on hospitals and the economy; the global demand for thermal energy; the climate crisis; the education and teacher crisis; cyber security; immigration reform; corporate corruption; pharmaceutical greed; wage stagnation, inflation and reflation; Russia, China, North Korea, Iran...

What Biden and the democratic leadership also need to address is an expansion of Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing benefits; an expansion of the Child Tax Credit; an ample reduction of prescription drug prices; the availability of healthcare for those who cannot afford it; the income inequality and unfair taxation of the wealthy elite, to name just a few.

Finally, Trump needs to be incarcerated!

-Glen Brown 

Postscript November 19, 2023:

       Uphold the right to vote: pass a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens, which would provide a solid basis to litigate voting restrictions.

2.      Establish automatic registration in which all citizens are registered to vote when they turn eighteen.

3.      Expand early voting and easy mail-in voting options for citizens of all states.

4.      Make Election Day on a Sunday or a national holiday so that work responsibilities do not discourage Americans from voting.

5.      Restore voting rights without additional fines or fees to all ex-felons who have served their time.

6.      Restore national-level voting rights and protections. In the spirit of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, parts of which the Supreme Court struck down in 2013.

7.      Replace the current system of partisan electoral administration with one in which the state and local electoral administration is in the hands of professional, nonpartisan officials.

8.      Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote. No other presidential democracy permits the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency.

9.      Reform the Senate so that the number of senators elected per state is more proportional to the population of each state.

10.  Replace “first-past-the-post” electoral rules and single-member districts for the House of Representatives and state legislatures with a form of proportional representation in which voters elect multiple representatives from larger electoral districts and parties win seats in proportion to the share of the vote they win.

11.  Eliminate partisan gerrymandering.

12.  Update the Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the House of Representatives at 435, and return to the original design of a House that expands in line with population growth.

13.  Abolish the Senate filibuster, a reform that requires neither statutory nor constitutional change, thereby eliminating the ability of partisan minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities. In no other established democracy is such a minority veto routinely employed.

14.  Establish term limits for Supreme Court justices to regularize the Supreme Court appointment process so that every president  has the same number of appointments per term.

15.  Make it easier to amend the Constitution by eliminating the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify any proposed amendment.

These reforms would have a simple yet powerful effect: they would allow majorities  to win power and govern. Not only would these proposed reforms help stave off minority rule, but they would also eliminate constitutional protectionism, unleashing the competitive dynamics of democracy.

Levitsky, Steven and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die: The Tyranny of the Minority. New York: Crown Publishing Group. 2023: 230-37.

According to Bill Moyers,  “…The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. ‘The abuse of buying and selling votes,’ he wrote of Rome, ‘crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.’ 

“We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class. We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, ‘Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.’  

 

“We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives [and now a Senate] controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of ‘dark money’ unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.  

“We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities, and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans…  

“It is simply astonishing that in this rich nation more than 21 million Americans are still in need of full-time work, many of them running out of jobless benefits, while our financial class pockets record profits, spends lavishly on campaigns to secure a political order that serves its own interests, and demands that our political class push for further austerity. 

“Meanwhile, roughly 46 million Americans live at or below the poverty line and, with the exception of Romania, no developed country has a higher percent of kids in poverty than we do. Yet a study by scholars at Northwestern University and Vanderbilt finds little support among the wealthiest Americans for policy reforms to reduce income inequality…  

“The Unfinished Work of America: In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether ‘we, the people’ is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others…  

“But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy…  

“And so we are. One hundred and [sixty] years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to ‘the great task remaining.’ That ‘unfinished work,’ as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving” (The Great American Class War -- the rich against the people).

The Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. 

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. 

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we cannot consecrate -- we cannot hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. 

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. 

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863