Copyright © 2021 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet website http://www.foundationwebsite.org. May be copied or reposted for non-commercial use, with attribution to author and website. Updated 18 March 2021.
The Foundation website, http://www.foundationwebsite.org, was set up in 1999, for the purpose of disseminating information about planetary management. The first major publication was the book, Can America Survive?, which describes the present status of Earth’s biosphere and the prospects for survival of America, modern civilization, and the Earth’s biosphere, as we know them.
The website was designed for use by microcomputers having large screens, not for mobile devices having small screens, such as today’s mobile phones. Many of the items posted on the website, such as books and technical reports, were much longer and more detailed than is appropriate for mobile devices. In response to this situation, this page, Foundation Headlines, has been set up (December 2020). It contains brief observations (Headlines), short notes and articles, extracts from documents covering diverse topics (such as the Foundation Miscellany series), and summaries of long or technical documents (such as books, technical reports and lengthy articles).
Over the years, the scope of the Foundation website expanded, to include material on a number of topics of interest to the author, including music, short courses on statistics, economics, politics, spirituality, military models, and current events. This Headlines page includes items on those topics, as well as items on planetary management.
Contents
The Late Great United States. 1
Is America Fascist? Does It Matter?. 1
A New Health-Care System for America: Free Basic Health Care. 1
The Value-Added Tax: A New Tax System for the United States. 1
Here follows the Introduction and Summary to the article, A New World Order: The Coming Transition from Fossil Fuels and Capitalism to Nuclear Energy and Eco-Socialism, published in 2021.
This article describes a plan for establishing a long-term-sustainable planetary management system on Earth. The proposed system will enable humankind to live with a high level of freedom and without poverty in harmony with an ecologically rich biosphere.
The current global civilization based on a high level of human population and industrial production has proved disastrous both for mankind and the biosphere. Three-quarters of the human population – about six billion people – live in miserable conditions, enduring poverty, hunger, crowding, disease, oppression, limited freedom, limited access to nature, and lack of opportunities to lead meaningful lives and achieve a significant measure of fulfilment and happiness.
The high level of human population and industrial production has caused great damage to the environment, including pollution of the atmosphere, land and oceans; destruction of natural habitat; mass species extinction; and climate change. A recent (2018) report estimated that human activity has destroyed 83 per cent of all wild animals, 80 per cent of marine mammals, 50 per cent of all plants, and 15 per cent of all fish. Almost two-thirds of all tropical rainforest has been destroyed, and much of the old-growth forest has been degraded. The current rate of extinction of species has been estimated at about 1,000 times higher than the natural background extinction rate. The release, caused by human activity, of large amounts of “greenhouse gasses” into the atmosphere is contributing to global warming of the atmosphere and oceans to a degree that represents an existential threat to millions of species, including the human species itself.
While the species that have been exterminated are gone forever, and while it is not considered possible to stop global warming immediately, mankind possesses the technology and resources to bring the destruction of the biosphere to a halt and to provide decent living conditions to all people. Mankind has the capacity to resolve the ecological crisis. All that is lacking is the will to do so. This article examines the reasons for the lack of will, and develops a plan for overcoming this obstacle.
The mechanism by which human population has soared to biosphere-destroying levels is growth-based economic activity, implemented by capitalism. Growth-based economics / capitalism has proved to be the greatest weapon of mass destruction, exhibiting the power to destroy a planetary biosphere in less than two centuries. While growth-based economics / capitalism has played a key role in causing the current ecological crisis, it has at the same time been a tremendously powerful tool for advancing scientific and technical knowledge and technological development. The human population explosion has been accompanied by an explosion in knowledge. This knowledge represents the key both to understanding the nature of the crisis and to resolving it.
Growth-based economics / capitalism has caused the ecological crisis and simultaneously provided the means – science and technology – to resolve it. Through its phenomenal success in achieving truly astounding growth in industrial development and in knowledge, this system has sown the seeds of its own destruction. It has been extremely useful, but it has served its purpose and now poses an existential threat to the biosphere and to the human species. Mankind now possesses profound knowledge of the nature of the physical universe and sophisticated technology to interact with it.
To allow growth-based economics / capitalism to continue to operate will result in the annihilation of the species-rich biosphere, perpetuation of human misery, and, arguably, the extinction of the human species. For mankind to continue to exist, and to achieve a high-quality existence, the operation of this incredible system must now be halted, and it must be replaced with a system that enables mankind to live in harmony with a species-rich biosphere. Such a system is eco-socialism, implemented in the framework of steady-state economics.
Over the past century, there has been much hand-wringing about mankind’s destruction of the environment, but, despite the facts that the nature of the problem is well understood and means for addressing it are available, to date no effective plan has been constructed or course of action has been taken to halt the destruction. This article presents a feasible plan for replacing the planet-destroying system of large-scale industry with a long-term-sustainable system of planetary management, of replacing growth-based economics / capitalism with steady-state economics and eco-socialism. The essence of the plan is to make use of the present system of growth-based economics / capitalism to make preparations for an immediate transition from that system to eco-socialism in the wake of a global catastrophe, such as economic collapse, social collapse, severe pandemic or famine, global nuclear war, ecological collapse, or radical climate change.
The new world order to be established will be designed, implemented, operated and maintained using the methodology of systems engineering. With this methodology, many alternative systems are synthesized, analyzed, evaluated and compared, and a preferred system selected. Here follow the major characteristics of one such candidate system.
As global petroleum reserves exhaust, the world will soon see a massive wave of construction of nuclear power reactors, to generate both heat and electricity energy. The following alternative incorporates this feature, of moving from the petroleum age to the nuclear age.
1. Government: A unitary system of government, based on representative democracy and eco-socialism.
2. Global organizational structure: The world is divided into approximately 100 city-states based on the concept of bioregionalism, with maximum population of eight million per city-state. Industrial activity is permitted only within the cities.
3. Economic features: No capitalism. No private ownership of means of production. No property income (rents, interest-bearing loans, profits). Fiat money. (Economics is the science of the management of scarcity, of efficient allocation of limited resources. The proposed system will be designed to operate in harmony with the biosphere, so that natural resource limits will not impose global constraints on human activity. There will be no scarcity and no poverty. Economics may be used to accomplish efficient allocation of renewable resources, but not to allocate nonrenewable resources. To this extent, the economic system may be characterized as steady-state economics in the tradition of Georgescu-Roegen, Daly, Kohr and Schumacher.)
4. Welfare: Guaranteed employment, basic income. No poverty.
5. Health care: Free basic health-care.
6. Education: Universal; mandatory eight years; free merit-based beyond eight years.
7. Judicial: English common law. No prisons. If violate laws, then reeducate. If reeducation is not successful, must live outside the city.
8. Rights: All human beings are full citizens of the unitary state. Basically, human rights are the same as specified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but with “symmetry” so that the cost to society of providing the benefit of the right is reasonable. All people have a right to travel anywhere on the planet. No right to own land or fixed property (land, buildings). No right to own other human beings (slaves) or living creatures. No factory farming. No battery production.
9. Ethics: Consequential and symmetric, à la Taleb.
10. Energy: All industrial energy is from nuclear power plants or renewable biomass. No fossil fuels. No solar (solar electric, hydro, wind, tides).
11. Defense / security: Confidential.
Here follows the Introduction to the book, Can America Survive?, published in 1999.
Can America survive? The answer, quite simply, is no – not in its current form for very long, and perhaps not in any form at all for very long. This book describes why pending changes in energy availability, cultural changes brought about by recent massive immigration, the global population explosion, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, technology and materials will combine to bring an end to the United States as we currently know it – soon.
In the past four centuries, the world human population has skyrocketed, from about half a billion people to six billion at the present time. Population projections from various sources suggest that, barring a major change of some kind, the population will continue to soar, to nine billion or more by the year 2050. In the past half-century – less than a lifetime -- the population of the US has exploded from about 150 million to over 270 million. This explosive growth occurred despite the fact that fertility rates in the US dropped to low levels – it is the result of uncontrolled immigration.
The tremendous global population increase has been brought about by the development of technology to utilize the energy stored in fossil fuels, such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Petroleum and gas reserves will be exhausted, however, by about 2050, and coal reserves will not last much beyond that date if industrial development continues to expand worldwide.
Look around you. If you live in the US or other economically developed country, every man-made thing you see or see happening is a product of the expenditure of energy, and most of that energy is derived from fossil fuels. To establish and maintain our present lifestyle requires prodigious amounts of energy – an amount equivalent to about 8,000 kilograms of oil annually for each man, woman, and child living in the country. Pre-agricultural man lived “off the land,” consuming only the bounty of nature. Agricultural man could produce about 10 calories of energy with the expenditure of about one calorie of energy. Industrial man, it has been estimated, uses over ten calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food! The present system is not only exquisitely wasteful, but it is completely unsustainable. Most of what you see in the industrial world is a transitory illusion made possible by a one-time windfall supply of energy from fossil fuels that were accumulated over millions of years. When the fossil fuel reserves deplete in about 50 years, the modern world will simply disappear along with them.
Whatever age you are, if you were raised in a town or a small city, go back to where you lived as a child and observe what has happened to the nearest natural field you played in. Chances are it is now urban sprawl – pavement, concrete, and steel. For each immigrant admitted to the US – legal or illegal – about an acre of natural land is permanently destroyed, by roads, buildings, parking lots, houses, schools, and other structures that take the land out of production – both for wildlife and for agriculture. Last year the US admitted 1.2 million more immigrants. That represents the complete destruction of another .6 million acres of farmland, forest, and pastureland. Who cares? Certainly not the people in charge – they want more people because it makes more money, and they are not particularly concerned with the concomitant destruction of the environment!
Industrial activity at the massive scale of the present is causing substantial changes to Earth’s environment. By now, everyone knows that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other gases produced by industrial activity is increasing substantially every year, and that the planet’s climate and weather are controlled by these concentrations. Large-scale industrial activity is causing substantial changes to the planet’s environment – land, air, water, and ecology. In view of the established relationship of the planet’s climate and ecosystem to these concentrations, it is possible that man’s industrial activity could cause dramatic changes in the sea level, and trigger another ice age or create a lifeless “hothouse.” And for what good reason? What is the good purpose of burning all the planet’s fossil fuels as fast as possible, when it risks the destruction not only of mankind but of much other life on the planet as well? The answer is “None.” This activity cannot continue at current levels without risking dire consequences, even apart from the issue of depletion of fossil fuel reserves and other nonrenewable resources. To continue to do so is the height of folly.
This book describes the current situation and its predicted course. For the US – and any other overpopulated, multicultural, high-energy-use country -- the future is one of war, social fragmentation, and dramatic population reductions. Power will consolidate in a single dominant ethnic group; others will be eliminated or reduced to slavery or serfdom.
This book is not “just another book” on the human population “problem.” Thousands of books have been written on the problems of human population, energy and the environment. The real “problem” is that everyone is talking about the problem and no one is doing anything about it. Proposed solutions to date have either failed or been ignored. Environmentalists and ecologists continue to wring their hands while the planet croaks. This book identifies a radically new approach to the problem – one that offers the promise of reducing the risk of ecological destruction to a low level. It identifies an approach to population policy analysis and a course of action that will bring an end to the massive environmental destruction being caused by human industrial activity and significantly increase the likelihood of the survival of the human and other species.
The author of this book has a career that includes both military defense analysis and economic development. He worked for about fifteen years in defense applications and about fifteen years in social and economic applications. His work in military applications includes ballistic missile warfare, nuclear weapons effects, satellite ocean surveillance, naval general-purpose forces, tactical air warfare, air/land battle tactics, strategy, civil defense, military communications-electronics, and electronic warfare. His work in social and economic development applications includes tax policy analysis, agricultural policy analysis, trade policy analysis, health, human resource development, demography, development of systems for planning, monitoring and evaluation of social and economic programs, and educational management information systems. He has lived and worked in countries around the world. He holds a PhD degree in mathematical statistics and is an expert in mathematical game theory, statistics, operations research, and systems and software engineering. The analysis presented in this book is derived from years of experience related to, and years of analysis of, the population problem.
The organization of this book follows a logical progression, starting with a description of the current state of the planet and human population. Current trends in human population growth are identified. The relationship of human welfare to energy availability is described, and the future availability of energy is discussed. The role of economics to population growth is examined. Policies for determining what the human population size should be are identified. A new approach to population policy is introduced; it is called the “minimal-regret” approach. The likelihood of nuclear war is considered, and the damage that would result from a limited nuclear war is estimated. The impact of this war is assessed for the United States, Canada, and other countries. An assessment is made of the likelihood that the United States and various other countries will prevail after a nuclear war. The relationship of the minimal-regret approach to nuclear war strategies and the postattack environment is discussed in detail.
The main text of the book is generally nontechnical – as much as it can be for subjects (population growth, economics, energy, nuclear war) that are technical in nature. Technical discussions are presented in appendices. The appendices include graphs and tables in support of the arguments presented in the text.
The research underlying the population policy approach introduced in this book was conducted over a four-year period. During the course of doing the research, a large number of books and articles were reviewed and analyzed. The bibliography includes a list of about 600 books that were reviewed. To keep the message of this book as succinct as possible, little description is given of the content of these books. Instead, the most relevant publications are simply listed. Little space is allocated to describing the state of the environment or other population policies – just enough to provide a context for the new material presented.
Here follows part of the Introduction to the book, The Late Great United States, published in 2008.
The Late Great United States: The Decline and Fall of the United States of America
Max: You know, one thing I can’t figure out is whether these girls are real smart or just real, real lucky.
Hal: You know, Max, brains will only get you so far, and luck always runs out.
-- Thelma and Louise (A Ridley Scott film, 1991, MGM United Artists)
The United States Is Already Dead, and Just Doesn’t Know It
In the 1990s, I wrote the book, Can America Survive?, in which I analyzed the current situation of the United States and the world. I started writing the book in 1994, revised it a couple of times, completed it in late 1998 and posted it on the Foundation website in 1999. My brief answer to the question posed in the title was, “No, – not in its current form for very long, and perhaps not in any form at all for very long.”
In the years since I wrote this book, nothing has changed to modify my prognosis. The problems that I described and analyzed have not been resolved, and not even addressed. They have, in fact, gotten much worse.
It is my opinion that the United States, as a society, is in the final stages of disintegration. The country has allowed the invasion of 12-20 million illegal aliens. The financial system is bankrupt, and the government is now in the process of “selling the furniture” (i.e., selling its infrastructure, corporations and land to foreign interests). The country’s culture is fragmented. The government has alienated the citizens – it now serves the wealthy, not the middle class. The nation has lost its sovereignty to “globalization.” All that lies between its current status and total collapse is the “tipping point” – the proverbial “last straw” that breaks the camel’s back.
When I was a boy, we were taught that dinosaurs were so stupid that even though they were mortally wounded, they would thrash around for minutes before their small brains finally realized that they were dead, and they collapsed. I believe that this perception of dinosaurs is no longer held, but the analogy is an apt one to describe the present state of the United States. Its economic “engine” is so large and powerful that it has a large amount of “inertia” or “momentum,” that carries it along even though its vital essence, its spirit, has died. It is like an airplane that is about to crash into a mountain. Everything seems fine at the moment, but disaster is imminent and there is absolutely nothing that can be done to avert it.
Am I predicting a date for the collapse of the United States? No. In my view, the real collapse has already occurred – there is nothing of significance to predict. As Ariel Durant once remarked, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” The United States has destroyed what made it great. It has abandoned the concepts and principles on which the Founders established the Republic. It has lost its vitality, its life force, its direction, its purpose. The government has turned against the middle class, and, without the support of the people, the country is in the final stages of dissolution. It may continue operation for a while, but it is no longer a vibrant entity in control of its destiny. The car is running out of gas, and the joy ride is almost over.
Reasons Why the US Will Collapse Soon
There is not just a single symptom or sign of the United States’ moribund condition. (By the way, in medical parlance a “symptom” is a subjective indicator, and difficult to measure quantitatively, such as a feeling of nausea or anxiety, or a headache; a “sign” is a measurable indicator, such as a temperature or blood pressure or red blood cell count.) There are many. In Appendix A are listed a large number of specific indicators that suggest why the US is in trouble and will soon collapse. The major sections of this book were determined simply by arranging that long list into groups, or categories, containing related indicators. The following is a list of these categories. In the remainder of the book, I will present a brief chapter discussing each category. The categories are listed in order of my assessment of their importance.
1. Destruction of the Biosphere. Global industrialization is destroying the planet’s biosphere (global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction). All countries will soon perish. (Note on “global warming”: I am not going to get into the argument concerning whether global warming is happening, or what causes it. With the imminent breakup of ice at the North Pole for the first time in human history, it seems pretty clear that something is happening (although some people point to volcanoes as the cause). It doesn’t really matter very much whether global warming is happening or not, when large human numbers and global industrialization are causing the extinction of an estimated 30,000 species per year – that is a real threat to our existence, quite independent of global warming.)
2. The passage of Peak Oil. Global production of oil is peaking, and will start to decline. Our society is oil-based, we are running out of oil, and there is not a comparable substitute. All countries will fail as the petroleum age comes to an end and the era of global industrialization with it.
3. Overpopulation. The world and US populations are far higher than the current-solar-energy carrying capacity. When global oil production starts to decline, a global die-off will begin, concurrent with massive political upheavals.
4. Fractionated Culture. Because of mass immigration and little assimilation, the country’s culture has become highly fractionated. It is held together only by extreme wealth, rather than by race, religion, language, culture and ethnicity. As soon as global oil production starts to decline, the wealth (glue) holding US society together will dissolve, and the society will disintegrate.
5. Decline in US Culture. To an increasing degree, US culture has become soft, undisciplined, greedy, selfish, egocentric, hedonistic and materialistic. Through mass immigration from third-world countries, many of which are corrupt and inimical to traditional US culture, US culture is being overwhelmed by those cultures and reflecting them more and more.
6. Loss of Spirituality and “Manifest Destiny.” Many of the US middle class see no future, no hope.
7. Globalization. Globalization is destroying the hegemony of the US relative to other major world powers and the nation’s sovereignty.
8. Low Security: With open borders and massive international free trade, the US is very vulnerable, both on the national and individual levels.
9. The Politics of Envy. Both within the US and outside of it. (The “politics of greed” is the motivation for people to use political power to accumulate wealth for themselves; the “politics of envy” is the motivation for poor people to destroy those who have wealth.)
10. Oppression. The US government has adopted systems, programs and policies that have made economic slaves of the US middle class. Debt is a major tool of the government in this system.
11. Decline in Freedom. Each year, Americans have reduced freedom. Increased crowding from mass immigration and the “War on Terror” are the two principal causal factors.
12. Alienation of the US People from the US Government. The US government is no longer for the people. The government is waging war on the middle class. Its policies to vastly increase the riches of the wealthy elite have the direct effect of reducing the quality of life and discretionary income of the middle class, and subjugating it. The US government has become the enemy of the people. It is doing to the middle class exactly the same thing that the developed nations, through the international lending agencies, are doing to the third-world countries – miring them so deep in debt (through compound interest and debt-based money) so that they can never escape, are under total control, and are paying all of their discretionary income as interest.
13. Quality of Life Is Declining for the US Middle Class. It is now necessary for both parents to work in the competitive (paid, formal) labor market to support a family, whereas one person could support a family 50 years ago. Children are in “industrial” day care. Most young people today cannot hope to own their own home. Long commutes; high housing costs; high energy costs; diminished access to natural land; high medical costs; epidemics of disease and obesity caused by the system, stress, and poisoned food. Lower expectations for children. The current system is designed to enrich the wealthy, not protect the middle class. The goal and function of the present US political and economic system of US government is to “privatize the costs and socialize the benefits,” transferring much wealth from the middle class to the wealthy (e.g., via use of “eminent domain” and tax credits for the wealthy for major economic development projects; payment of interest on the national debt using income taxes, most of which come from the middle class; and “bailouts” of the wealthy when their financial schemes fail, also using income taxes).
14. Increasing Income Gap. Tremendously increasing income gap between top management and average workers, conspicuous consumption and flaunting of wealth. Increasing media attention to conspicuous consumption and flaunting of income. Instant billionaires. The ratio of the pay of top management has skyrocketed from about 40 to 1 a half-century ago to over 500 to 1 today. Heightened sense of economic class (wealthy versus poor). Increased dissatisfaction, politics of envy. Government policies and systems (income tax, the health care system and massive debt based on compound interest) transfer much wealth from the middle class to the wealthy.
15. Technical Reasons. (Factors involved in the collapse of complex societies, carrying capacity, economics.)
16. Political Incompetence. Just as King George III, US political leaders have failed to follow the dictums of Machiavelli, Sun Tsu, Liddell-Hart and others, and have lost the country.
This book is a summary. It is simply an annotated taxonomy of the items listed in Appendix A. It states my views and highlights my reasons for holding them, and presents a brief discussion of each reason why I believe that the US is finished. Most of the points that I make have been made many times before by others, in much greater detail than I present here. In a number of sections, when discussing very important concepts, I will include quotations from works of others, simply to show that I am not the only one making these points.
As part of the discussion, I cite references that provide additional detail. For convenience, the references are also categorized, but the categories used for the references are not at all the categories used to summarize the categories of reasons for my view, since people write books on general topics and those topics are not the categories of reasons for my view. The reference categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, a book on the history of warfare might be placed in “war” or “history.” A book on religion and ecology could be placed in either “religion” or “environment.”
Within each category of reference, I have sorted the items (mainly books) in approximate order of my assessment of their importance relative to the category. Just because a reference is included does not necessarily mean that I recommend it or endorse it. A number of references are included to illustrate views that I consider wrong, or to illustrate examples of bad predictions or poor methodologies. (The references on predictions and prophecies are included simply for interest. None of the information contained in any of those works has any bearing on the views presented in this work – in fact, a review of almost any of the older ones will quickly reveal how wrong and useless most of them are. In general, I am loath to make predictions, and certainly any involving dates – this book is a discourse on the current state of the US, not a prediction of a specific year in which it falters or collapses. Everything in the physical universe eventually dies – in the long run, there is nothing to predict.)
Here follow excerpts from the article, Is America Fascist? Does It Matter?, published in 2003 (expanded in 2008).
I have been reading more and more, on the Internet and in books, the argument that the United States has become a fascist state. This article considers that thesis from the viewpoint of The Omega Project (i.e., establishing a long-term-survivable planetary management system on Earth).
What is a fascist state? What is fascism? When I was a boy, I heard these terms a lot. The phrase “fascist dictatorship” was often used to refer to Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. But I never was told what the term really meant. The term has also been applied to Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Pinochet’s Chile, Papadopoulos’ Greece, Suharto’s Indonesia, and many other countries. But these are examples, not definitions.
At some point, I am sure that I looked up the definition, and my high-school history books no doubt included one, but I can still recall that the definition was not very satisfying, and I never really felt very certain about exactly what constituted a fascist state and what did not.
With the fall of “fascist” states in the last century, the term was mainly used in an historical context. Until recently. All of a sudden, there seems to be a proliferation of articles decrying America as a “fascist state.” But America has not really changed very much in recent years in its fundamental philosophy – it is a liberal democracy that embodies a capitalist, mildly regulated free-market economy. That has not changed. About the only major event that occurred recently was the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Subsequent to that, there has been a little tightening of security restrictions, but overall, very little has been done – the US still follows a policy of mass immigration and open borders. The economy has soured somewhat, but life for most Americans is still at a high material standard. A few months ago, the US invaded Iraq, but it did this subsequent to a UN resolution approving the action. So what has changed? How has America crossed over the fine or fuzzy line that separates a fascist state from a nonfascist state? Was it a single action, or the sum total of a lot of little actions? Was it the fall of the Soviet Union, so that the actions of the world’s sole remaining superpower, with little to oppose or moderate them, are automatically classified as fascist? Or is America really changing in its fundamental character?
Some Background
…
In his article, Fascism Anyone?, posted at Internet website https://secularhumanism.org/2003/03/fascism-anyone/, Laurence W. Britt analyzes fascist regimes and constructs a list of fourteen characteristics common to them. These characteristics are listed here. See Britt’s article for explanations and references.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights
3. Identification of enemies / scapegoats as a unifying cause
4. The supremacy of the military / avid militarism
5. Rampant sexism
6. A controlled mass media
7. Obsession with national security
8. Religion and ruling élite tied together
9. Power of corporations protected
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
12. Obsession with crime and punishment
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
14. Fraudulent elections
In an earlier version of his article, Britt closed with a quote from Huey Long: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.”
In reviewing Britt’s list of attributes of a fascist state, it is interesting to see that the US scores “high” in a number of them. On item 3 (Identification of enemies / scapegoats as a unifying cause) the shift of focus from communism to the never-ending “war on terror” stands out. On item 4 (The supremacy of the military / avid militarism), the tremendous investment of energy and resources in the military is without parallel in the world. Item 5 (Obsession with national security) is prominent on a continuing basis, with daily announcements of the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq and the continuous maintenance of “yellow” (elevated) status for the nation and “orange” (high) status for all domestic and international flights, under the Department of Homeland Security’s Security Advisory System. With respect to item 8 (Religion and ruling elite tied together), the strenuous efforts of organized religions to support the US government in its program to encourage and support illegal immigration are notable. Item 9 (Power of corporations protected) stands out as a hallmark of the country’s government, across the legislative, executive and judicial departments. On item 10 (Power of labor suppressed or eliminated), the government’s waging of a war against the middle class continues unabated, with several decades of mass immigration, massive international free trade and open borders. All of the benefits of increased productivity have gone to the wealthy, and the middle class now work twice as hard as in the past (with two family workers now in the competitive labor force, compared to one fifty years ago). Item 12 (Obsession with crime and punishment) stands out egregiously, now that the US imprisons one percent of its adult population and one in seven black males. (The US has more prisoners than any other country in the world, and has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.) The “war on drugs” has gone far to make criminals out of many people (recreational drug users) and to spawn much crime (to purchase drugs at the grossly inflated prices resulting from their criminalization). Item 13 (Rampant cronyism and corruption) is exemplified by the symbiosis of the US government with the powerful corporate lobby system. The fact that the Clintons could amass 109 million dollars in the period 2000-2006, after leaving the White House with negative assets, stands in tribute to this system. The classic example of item 14 (Fraudulent elections) is the “stealing” of the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore by voting-machine “problems” in Florida, and the continued efforts of the government to promote the use of electronic voting machines.
Here follows the Introduction and Summary to the article, A New Health-Care System for America, published in 2017.
Introduction and Summary
This paper proposes a new health-care system for the United States, based on the provision of free basic health-care services to all Americans. The paper is comprised of five major sections: this introduction and summary; a section presenting background information on the present US health-care system; a brief section that summarizes the major features of the proposed new system; a section that discusses aspects of the new system; and a section of annexes that provide additional detail on some items.
The United States health-care system is a disaster. On a per-capita basis, the cost of health care in the US is two-and-one-half times the cost in other developed countries, yet the quality of US health care overall is no better than in other developed countries. This means that about sixty percent of the US health-care dollar is wasted – spent on health-care services that do little or nothing to improve outcome quality.
Americans spend about three trillion dollars a year on health care. Sixty percent of this is wasted – that represents two trillion dollars a year. Every year! Americans are being ripped-off, year after year, by a massive confidence scheme, and they seem powerless to do anything about it.
Where is the wasted money – the two trillion dollars per year – going? It is going to inflated incomes for the health-care establishment and profits for insurance companies.
The present US health-care system is a national disgrace, an obscene outrage, yet it continues, year after year. For decades, Congress has been pretending to reform health care, but, year by year, the system gets worse, not better.
Congress is unable to fix America’s broken health-care system because it is in thrall to the medical establishment and the insurance industry, and it is determined to keep a system that, every year, funnels two trillion dollars of wasted expenditures to the medical establishment and insurance industry. Congress can make changes that make the system more efficient at making money, but the system controllers will not permit any fundamental change that will decrease their income. That is why costs cannot come down. Given this constraint, it is impossible for Congress to fix the present system.
The fundamental problem is that the present system is profit-driven. Its structure, purpose and function are to make money for the medical establishment and the insurance industry, not to provide high-quality health care at reasonable cost.
To obtain a system that provides high-quality health care at low cost, it is necessary to compare the benefits of treatment to cost for each case, and to select treatment alternatives for which the ratio of benefits to cost is high. The present system does not do this. If it did, profits would plummet.
The present profit-driven system is fundamentally flawed in approach and structure. It cannot be modified to provide high-quality low-cost health care. The present system has been tried for half a century, and found to be severely lacking and not amenable to repair. It is designed to make profits, not to deliver quality care at low cost. To achieve high-quality health care for low cost, it will be necessary to scrap the present system and replace it with a system having the latter purpose.
This paper describes a new approach to delivery of health-care services that will cost a fraction of the current amount and deliver more appropriate care. Specifically, it is proposed to move away from a national health-care system based on insurance and establish a national health-care system based on the provision of free basic health care through neighborhood clinics and regional hospitals.
The new system will provide basic health care to all Americans at no cost to the patient, and less cost to the government / taxpayer than the present system. Based on the experience of other developed countries, high-quality basic health care can be provided for a “cost” of about five percent of gross domestic product, rather than the 17 percent of the present system.
The new system will achieve a very high level of equity, or “fairness.” All Americans will receive, from the public health system, exactly the same level of care, for exactly the same cost – zero! Under the present system, high-quality care is provided to those with high incomes, while those with lower incomes may receive a lower level of care and experience financial distress. This situation will end. Like public education and national defense, public health services will be provided free of charge.
The new system will take two trillion dollars a year away from the medical establishment and the insurance industry. They will fight very hard to prevent this from happening. The US government will side with them, not with the American people, in this fight, just as they sided with banks and insurance companies in the financial meltdown of 2007-2008. If Americans want a high-quality low-cost health care system, they are going to have to fight very hard for it. Congress is not willing to help in this fight. If the American people want this, they are going to have to force Congress to implement it.
Based on the experience of other developed countries, the present US health-care system is a massive rip-off. Americans are being ripped off to the tune of two trillion dollars every year. They are being driven to financial distress and ruin to pay for care that is reasonably priced in the rest of the world. They should be mad as hell, yet they continue to put up with it. Why? Quite simply, they have been brainwashed by the medical establishment to believe that if they depart from the current insurance-based business model of health care, the quality of care will plummet. The experience of many other countries belies this assertion. It is not true. Quality care can be obtained for about forty percent of the present cost.
As costly as the present system is, the care that it delivers is generally high quality – it is just not appropriate care. It is like getting your car washed three times, when once is quite enough. There is no good reason for Americans to continue to pay two-and-one-half times as much as citizens of other developed countries, except to enrich the medical establishment and the insurance industry – and, to many people, that is not a very good reason at all.
Many people profit extremely well from the present system. It will not be changed unless there is powerful movement to do so. Allowing Congress to go on posturing year after year with no results is not going to produce any meaningful change. One is reminded of the scene in the Network movie (1976) where the character Howard Beale exclaims, “… you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'.” When Americans get mad as hell about getting ripped-off big time and decide to do something about it, that is when things will change.
What, specifically, should the American people demand in a new health-care system? I propose the following:
• Direct access to health-care services, not to health-care insurance
• Optimized (managed, rational) care, for which benefits are high compared to cost
• Free to the individual: free public health, just like free public education and national defense
Here follows the Summary to the book, The Value-Added Tax: A New Tax System for the United States, published in 1987.
The Value-Added Tax: A New Tax System for the United States proposes elimination of the personal and corporate income tax system in the United States. The central theme of the book is that the income tax system is not only a bad tax system from an economic viewpoint, but that it has severe political and sociological drawbacks as well. The book describes how the invasion of privacy and authoritarian tactics on which the current system is based have seriously damaged the relationship of the US citizen to his government.
The book describes the inadequacies of the current US tax system; its incredible complexity; its undesirable economic incentives which discourage saving, investment, and economic growth; the high administrative cost; the instability in government revenues caused by a narrow, volatile tax base; the incentive for wasting productivity in tax avoidance; the problem it causes in international trade; the invasion of privacy; and the tyranny of the IRS. The book shows how the Tax Reform Act of 1986 has not solved the fundamental problems of the income tax system, and explores why the US Government has perpetuated such a bad tax system for so long.
A major problem with the current US tax system is its inability to produce a sufficient level of revenue to cover desired government programs. The current system has resulted in massive government deficits and extreme wealth concentrations that threaten US and world economic collapse. The new tax system proposed in this book addresses these problems; it can help avoid economic collapse and reduce the severity of depressions.
The historical development and inadequacies of the US tax system are summarized. The archaic legislative process by which the current system was developed is described, and a modern approach to "tax engineering," based on the concepts of systems analysis and systems engineering, is presented. Alternative tax methods are identified, and the advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. A new tax system, based on the value-added tax, or "VAT," is proposed. The book shows how the VAT can raise the same or greater revenues as the current income tax system, but with far less economic, political, and sociological cost. The new system takes a humanistic approach to taxation: the tax system is viewed as a servant of the citizen, rather than his master. The VAT is a practical and feasible alternative to the income tax system.
Through the income tax system, the US Government has set up an elaborate and powerful police-state system for regimentation of the individual citizen. You are registered and monitored, and have lost not only your privacy but also most of your Bill of Rights personal liberties to the IRS. This book tells how you can help eliminate the income tax and stop the intrusion of the IRS into your life.
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