A new word in our social lexicon is “permacrisis.” We’re not dealing with one crisis at a time anymore; at this point, we’re in a rolling state of crisis all the time.
This is what it has brought us to, that we’ve allowed the accumulation of corporate profits to become our society’s governing principle. Far too many times, consistently and chronically, we’ve allowed the wealth of a few to be earned at the expense of the many. We’ve allowed a soulless economic paradigm to replace democracy and humanitarian values as America’s bottom line.
Such irresponsible governance has put the world in a state of fundamental disrepair. The only adequate response is an equally fundamental dedication to a new beginning. We need to initiate a season of repair.
Trickle down economics has turned out to have been a pernicious canard. Such illusion, the idea that if we put as much money as possible in the hands of corporate stockholders – at the expense of other stakeholders such as workers, environment and community – then this would be great, see? It would lead to a greater good, we were told, since the newly rich stockholder class would become job creators and all that money would trickle down and lift all boats!
Except it didn’t.
Trickle down economics not only did not lift all boats; it threw millions of people into the sea without a life vest. Is created the largest income inequality in 100 years, leading to a $50 trillion transfer of wealth out of the hands of 90% of the American people. Why? Because the business model of the Reagan revolution was never job creation; it was job elimination, worker exploitation, suppression of unions, and tax cuts for the very rich.
Trickle down, in short, was a strategized return to a two-tier aristocratic system. It proved to be a wrecking ball to America’s middle class. There would in time become one America for the rich and another for those struggling to make it. Factories would close, communities would be decimated, our health would plummet, our environment would lie in ruins, and sicknesses and deaths of despair would become common.
None of this had to happen, but it did. And now it’s time to change it. It’s time to declare an end to an aberrational chapter of American history and begin a season of repair.
that is why I am running for Peesident.
Looking at America today, I see individual examples of societal and economic stress as symptoms of an underlying economic malfunction. If all we do is address the symptoms and not the root causes of our problems, we will always be in a state of permacrisis. That is why my agenda includes an Economic Bill of Rights. It is why I have a plan called Root Cause Healing. Our campaign is a call to disrupt the corruption of a “government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.” Whereas Lincoln stood on the battlefield at Gettysburg and declared that a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people …would not perish from the earth,” we need a new American President to declare that such a government has in fact perished – but that in our time it will be reborn.
This message is a new American sweet spot, as millions of Americans have come to realize that the real political dichotomy of our time is not between Left and Right but rather between powerful and powerless. As I campaigned this last week in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts, I received standing ovations from voters. For people seem to recognize that it’s the 11th hour, but not midnight yet. We can course correct. We can save our democracy. We can turn our ship around.
Wherever I go, our campaign resonates. But to further this message, we need many more people to know our campaign exists. Please give as generously as you can, so we can provide to the American people an option for fundamental change.
