The authoritarian Right and their GOP stupidity machine lackeys force me at times to turn articles into dissertations, because I do not know how well informed my audience is in the social sciences since Reagan & Co. placed them somewhere between recess and lunch in terms of relevance. The talk of secession makes me assume the worst, and rouses the spirit of Andy Jackson in me to go and hang a few gentlemen.

::::::::

“It is very nearly impossible . . . to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.”

James Baldwin (1924–87), U.S. author. “They Can't Turn Back,” in Mademoiselle (New York, August 1960; reprinted in The Price of the Ticket, 1985).

“It is an axiom in political science that unless a people are educated and enlightened it is idle to expect the continuance of civil liberty or the capacity for self-government.”

Texas Declaration of Independence, 2 March 1836.

“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.”

Sir Claus Moser (b. 1922), German-born British academic, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford. Daily Telegraph (London, 21 Aug. 1990).

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946), British author. The Outline of History (1920; 1951 ed., ch. 40).

Sometimes the articles I write require almost no groundwork or accompanying research. “Incompetent at Every Level” (OpEdNews.com, 14 August, 2009), is a perfect example of such an article, written quickly and straight from the gut. This was material I was quite familiar with: either from years of re-reading (the Isaac Asimov quote), or because I had made recent acquaintance with it (the quotes of Nietzsche and Kant), or it was my own fulminations against the arrogance of the haves with regards to national healthcare.

On the other hand, some articles remind me of the term papers I used to write in college: Lots of research, time spent at the library or on line double checking facts and quotes. Providing the background information that I feel is required in an era where—thanks to Ronald Reagan and the Republican stupidity machine—social studies (history, political science, civics, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, etc.), have had their importance reduced in our education system to somewhere between recess and lunch. My recent piece, “How Much is Enough” (OpEdNews.com, 2 September 2009) is an example of this type of article.

It is simply that in an age of sound bites, no in depth or true investigative journalism, infomercials posing as news, corporations buying time on the evening news just so they can quash unfavorable stories, and a diminishing interest in the written word, I feel that it is sometimes required to give my readers a short, but solid, background on the subject that I am writing the article on.  This covers the relationship of war profiteering and the rise of the three eras of laissez faire or antisocial capitalism in the United States:,the American Civil War and the Gilded Age, the First World War and the Roaring Twenties, and our current era, beginning with the Cold War and the growth of the Military-Industrial Complex. Concluding with the current rise to complete domination of the Neo-liberal brand of economics over the last thirty years as represented by the policies of President Reagan, President Clinton, and the two Presidents Bush.

It is unfortunate, but no one reads anymore! Or perhaps I should say no one does any serious reading anymore. Did any of you who read Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code, read any of the nonfiction books related to it? How about Elaine Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels, Picknett and Prince's The Templar Revelation, or the actual Gospels of Mary, Thomas, or Judas? Did you go to the bookstore or the library, and pick up a book about healthcare in this country and around the world after you saw Michael Moore's movie Sicko, or when we began to be bombarded with all of the contradictory “facts” concerning the recent controversy in Congress over healthcare. T.R. Reid's new book (which I have only had a chance to glance at; come on payday) The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, looks like it might be a good one.

The United States has long suffered a split personality on the matter of education.

On the one hand we have the spiritual descendants of Thomas Jefferson, who not only believe in the necessity of education for every citizen of the United States, but who realize that true education is a life-long journey, and not a destination. We—yes, I'm one of them—want every child and every adult throughout their lives, to have easy access to the tools and teachers they need to keep their minds healthy, active and less susceptible to propaganda and indoctrination by the enemies of liberty.

On the other hand you have the spiritual descendants of John Calvin, who want you to only have enough learning to keep your preordained role in society. They want you to accept, without question, their authority and their reality as they give it to you, without complaint, question, or opposition. They want Slaves to the Elect, who—if they serve their masters well enough—might get a good word put in for them to God. The most current example of these “masters” are Senator Ensign, Governor Sanford, and the rest of the neo-Calvinists in The Family's C Street House in Washington D.C. These men, because they believe they are “saved,” and “chosen by God to rule this land,” have the gall to believe that they are above such petty considerations as the laws and rules by which the rest of us poor slobs must abide.

The worst part about this willful ignorance is that these people, in their positions of authority, can tell their ill-informed followers any ill-conceived lie or half-truth and be believed. Then these followers are manipulated by these “masters” into doing things which none of them would ever have dreamed of doing under normal circumstances. One of my favorite examples of this is found in the concept of “personal sovereignty.”

As I explained in my article “The Tao of Government,” (OpEdNews.com, 28 February 2009), the idea of personal or individual sovereignty is ridiculous. Sovereignty exists at the nexus of power and authority, and we as human beings, have so little of either individually, over anyone or anything except ourselves, that to speak of individual sovereignty is ludicrous.

It is only when we—at the ballot box, in the streets with (hopefully) peaceful protests, or through pressure on our elected representatives—collectively exercise our rights as citizens to have a say in the functions of our government, that We the People demonstrate our power of sovereign authority.

This power and authority is based entirely on the belief of a majority of the people in the government and its institutions, no matter how badly those institutions may be flawed. The fundamental ability of any government to govern is dependent on the belief of a nation's people in the government's authority to do so. As I have said before: If tomorrow everyone believed me king, I would be king—and abdicate immediately.

In a recent article on Alternet.org, “The Wing Nut Code” (2 September 2009), Adele M. Stan brought to my attention the underlying meaning of “sovereign” for some people on the right. For these right wing crazies, “this term has two meanings. The most troubling refers to a notion called 'sovereign citizen,' a term popularized by the violent Posse Comitatus militia formation in the 1970s to argue that white people have a superior form of citizenship to that of black people. More commonly, the term 'sovereign' refers to a states' rights philosophy that is consonant with secessionist ideologies.”

Secessionist? Didn't we settle that in 1865? If not, my answer to all potential secessionists is that of President Andrew Jackson when South Carolina passed its Ordinance of Nullification back in 1833; “The Constitution of the United States, then, forms a government; not a league; and whether it be formed by compact between the states or in any other manner, its character is the same. It is a government in which all of the people are represented, which operates directly on the people individually, not upon the states; they retained all the power they did not grant.

But each state, having expressly parted with so many powers as to constitute, jointly with the other states, a single nation, cannot, from that period, possess any right to secede, because such secession does not break a league but destroys the unity of a nation; and any injury to that unity is not only a breach which would result from the contravention of a compact but it is an offense against the whole Union.” (Lost Triumph: Lee's Real Plan at Gettysburg—and Why It Failed; Tom Carhart; Copyright 2005, p. 25.)

In other words, the states implicitly surrendered their right to secede—or otherwise act in contravention of the Constitution—when they joined the United States of America. This is in part, the purpose of the Supremacy clause (article VI, paragraph 2) in the Constitution. Any attempt at secession (or nullification) is an offense against the other states that form the Union and their people, as well as the Union itself. And like President Jackson, I am not above hanging a few gentlemen in every tree from Columbia to Charleston—or Austin to Houston for that matter—in order to preserve the Union. Secession is the only area that I find myself even slightly in favor of the death penalty.

How many of you were aware of Andrew Jackson and his reaction to South Carolina's Ordinance of Nullification? How many of you know the reason behind the Ordinance? (High Tariffs.) How many of you knew that President Jackson informed the South Carolinians—including his former Vice President John Breckenridge—that he would bring the United States Army down to South Carolina and hang secessionists from every tree on the road from Columbia (the state capital) to Charleston (the major port) as an example? President Jackson's actions delayed the Civil War by nearly three decades, and—in my humble opinion—guaranteed the preservation of our Union.

Unfortunately, I believe that the answers to the questions I've posed above are, “Not many.” Certainly when we have Governors and other politicians who are “bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution;” (The United States Constitution, Article VI, paragraph 3), openly expressing support for secession, and being cheered by the crowds of Know-nothings (look it up) rather than driven from office by the people of their state; then I know that education and knowledge in this country, particularly for those on the authoritarian Right, have been replaced by propaganda and wishful thinking.

Another example of this endemic ignorance on the right is all of the people who describe President Obama as a “socialist,” “Marxist,” Communist,” “fascist,” or “Nazi.”

These are the same people who have cheered on Pat Buchanan for many years, despite his ongoing pro-Nazi (or at least Nazi apologist) sentiments.This includes his column, “Did Hitler Want War?” on the seventieth anniversary of the start of the Second World War in Europe. A casual reading of either Mein Kampf, or Hitler's second, unpublished manuscript, gives the lie to Mr. Buchanan's statement that Hitler did not want war. I, out of kindness and lack of solid evidence, will place Mr. Buchanan in the same category as Charles Lindbergh: a delusional fool. The people who call the President a “Nazi,” use the word as a pejorative and an insult, without understanding its underlying meaning.

Same thing with the word “fascist.” Although I must admit, if President Obama does not quit kowtowing to the health insurance companies, Big Pharma, and the other health related corporations that are bleeding the American people dry for their healthcare, and provide America with a strong public option to give the American people a real choice, I may have to reassess my position.

Marxist and Communist? Are you insane? President Obama, the man who oversaw the loan of billions to America's largest banking and financial firms, as well as the bail out of GM and Chrysler? Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, would all be spinning in their graves for one of their followers to misuse such a golden opportunity to overthrow the capitalist oppressors and begin the dictatorship of the proletariat in the United States. This simply demonstrates the ignorance of most Americans about Karl Marx and the system he proposed. This system was taken by men like Lenin, Stalin and Mao, and twisted into something Marx never would have recognized or accepted. I do not generally agree with Marx's solutions, but many of his observations about antisocial (or laissez faire) capitalism were on the mark.

Finally, there is the accusation of socialism. I still believe that most people on the right would not know real socialism if it came up and gave them a big, wet, sloppy kiss on the lips. In Europe, President Obama's policies would barely make him a centrist. His failure to push for single payer health care, let alone a strong public option, would probably mark him as center-right in Europe: like the Liberal Party in England or the Christian Democrats in Germany.

A nation can only be called “socialist,” in my opinion, when that nation's government actually takes over direct control of a significant percentage (25%+) of that nation's means of production and distribution of goods and services. It is not when the government regulates business in order to prevent price fixing, collusion, or other harmful business practices that lead to consumer fraud, monopolies, hostile takeovers, consolidations of economic power, or other abuses that makes the corporations and their owners a threat to the government and its citizens. Taken to its logical conclusion: total, unregulated consolidation of economic power in the hands of corporations and their owners, with the concomitant political power, has a name: fascism.

For those of you who are still clinging to the delusion that Adam Smith's metaphorical “invisible hand” is all that is required to keep control over the extremes of laissez faire capitalism, look around you: It has never worked in the past, it is not working now, and it cannot work in the future; because it is completely contradictory to the avaricious motivations and practices that make the antisocial capitalists successful within our economic system. The “invisible hand” is only a metaphor, not a reality.

In the United States, socialist is a label (to paraphrase Bertrand Russell) that the advocates of laissez faire, or antisocial, capitalism apply to those who attempt to deny them what they believe is their single inalienable principle of liberty,that the fortunate be unrestrained in their exploitation and oppression of the less fortunate.

There are certain industries which, by their very nature, are natural monopolies. Electric power, water, and sewage are the first to come to mind. Telephone service in the days before cell phones is another. Fire protection, public transportation, and law enforcement are other examples that have proven they work best as public services rather than private enterprises.

In every one of these instances, they have proven to provide better service to the public as a whole if they are run by a government entity—or are so tightly regulated by the government that they may as well have been run by the government—than as private enterprises. The privatization of electricity, water, and telecommunications under Prime Minister Thatcher proved disastrous to the pocketbooks of the British people. The savings and loans debacle, Enron and the artificially induced blackouts in California that cost Governor Davis his job, together with the recent meltdown on Wall Street, demonstrates the evils of deregulation in this country.

Capitalism works if, and only if, it has a broad competitive base at every level, and in every category to work from. By its very nature, capitalism has a tendency to eliminate competition in the name of market share, economies of scale, and shareholder dividends. In order for competition to be maintained, government has the vital function of preventing excessive consolidation and collusion in a given industry or market in the name of protecting the consumer from predatory business practices. Government may do this by using antitrust actions or restrictive regulation of a given business or industry. If this fails to curb the corporate malfeasance that is causing harm to the general welfare of the people, a government is left with no choice but to take over that industry in order to protect the nation's citizens.

Now we have the uproar over President Obama doing a webcast to America's school children; talking about the need to stay in school and get a good education, in order to maximize their chance at achieving the American Dream. There seems to be a group of Americans from the neo-Calvinist, authoritarian Right, who are scared to death that somehow President Obama will in this short webcast, succeed in indoctrinating all of these children into the joys of socialist doctrine.

We condemn most strongly in others what we despise most in ourselves.

The authoritarian Right would love to indoctrinate all of our children into their world view. They would love a group of compliant wage slaves, forced to work at or below a subsistence level, scared to death that their job will disappear tomorrow if they do not accept every demeaning or dangerous demand that their employer places upon them. This is much of the reason for the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries over the last thirty years. If they could teach us from kindergarten on to accept our place and not complain when the “elect” take advantage of them, the world would be a much simpler and happier place.

For the “elect.”

I suspect that this opposition in reality has two motivations: one racial, one financial; both of them closely related to one another.

The racial is obvious: the authoritarian right does not want President Obama to succeed. If he succeeds, it means that one of their main premises—a hierarchical structure being necessary for society to work—is false. If this black man from humble roots realizes his potential to become one of our great Presidents, it overthrows all of the arguments for an aristocracy based on birth. The heirs of the Mellons, Morgans, DuPonts, Rockefellers, Coors, Fords, Lodges, Bushes, etc., will be shown to be the drag on the American economy and soul that the majority of them are, and no longer receive deference due solely to their family's wealth. The authoritarian right will lie, cheat, murder, and steal to stop the President from succeeding. Because by his succeeding, he gives their Know-nothing followers an indication that there might be an alternative to their lives of “quiet desperation;” caused by the “evil” government showing preference to anyone but “white, Christian males.”

The financial is a little less obvious. Health care reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, re-regulating businesses (especially the financial sector), ending the war in Iraq and Afghanistan: every one of these will hurt the authoritarian right's bottom line, while helping to strengthen and rebuild America's middle class. If President Obama succeeds in keeping most of his campaign promises, it would eventually undo the financial gains the wealthiest one percent of Americans have realized over the last thirty years, including a doubling of the percentage of the nation's wealth that they hold: from twenty to forty percent. If the President follows through on his campaign promise of real change, it will enlarge and enrich the nation's middle class, and encourage all of the liberal and progressive folks out there to see that power in our country is returned to its rightful repository: We the People; not They the Rich.

Only by attacking President Obama (not to mention every other liberal and progressive) on every single action which he undertakes, while offering no alternative other than to keep things as they are, does the authoritarian right have any hope of maintaining its premise that the nation needs the steady hand of a wealthy (white) elite (namely them) at the helm, if the nation is to survive and prosper.

My great-grandpappy used the material that argument is made out of to fertilize the back forty.

It is time to see that the means for a strong and dynamic middle class is once again made available to every citizen of this nation.

It starts with the right to healthcare. When more than half of all bankruptcies in this country are the result of medical bills, and thirty percent or more of the population has inadequate or no medical insurance, the system is broken. Perhaps a purely socialized system such as we find in Great Britain is not the best answer for us; even though 52% of the British people rated their National Health Service as providing good service in a recent poll, and over 70% rated it as satisfactory in a poll two years ago, we do not have to settle for such relatively low numbers. A single payer system, such as our Medicare program, or a regulated non-profit system for health insurance providers, like they have in Germany, France and Japan—that includes negotiated costs—might be better suited for the American mindset.

Combined with this is the need to provide better healthcare access in rural and blighted urban areas. In order to do this, we need to rethink our entire healthcare professional training system. Qualified individuals are avoiding medical, dental, and nursing school because they have no desire to be $100-250,000.00+ in debt when they start their careers. Doctors aren't interested in becoming general practitioners, internists, or pediatricians because these front-line medical specialties do not pay enough to get them quickly out of debt.

I think the creation of a national medical service, which would see that rural and blighted urban areas have adequate medical and dental coverage is a good place to start. The government agrees to pay your way through medical, dental, or nursing school, in exchange for your agreement to spend a certain number of years helping to provide care in areas with little or no medical coverage. The number of years would be dependent on your specialty: a general practitioner is going to have to spend less time in service than a heart surgeon.

Such a system could be applied to other fields as a system to promote acquiring a college education without leaving people mired in debt. (Senator Bernie Sanders is already talking about such a system.) Money should be the last thing to prevent a person with talent from getting the education they need to make full use of that talent. Europe and Japan are far ahead of us in terms of the numbers of engineers and scientists graduated, because they provide a college education as a right.

Finally, we must encourage a return of manufacturing to our shores. A nation's wealth is dependent upon those things it physically produces, not the services it provides. We must return to the trade policies of Alexander Hamilton, and quit shipping our manufacturing overseas in the quest for additional profit. We have only to look at what happened to Great Britain in the Twentieth Century to see our future if drastic measures are not taken.

This future is dependent on our ability to educate our citizens in all of the subjects that are required for our nation to prosper. With education available to all, we can someday realize Thomas Jefferson's dream that, "The less wealthy people,...by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen."—Autobiography, 1821; The Complete Works of Thomas Jefferson, Memorial Edition; volume 1, page 73; (1904).

Authors Bio:

Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'