Imagine What We Can Do Together - United Way Of America: Fill & Download for Free

Before I get to whether that phrase will ever be removed, we have to consider why it is in there in the first place. Follow me for a while, if you don’t mind, and learn the true heritage of “Under God.”Did you know that we have a national motto? It’s on our money.[Image Source: Wikipedia]E Pluribus Unum. “Out of many, one.” That’s supposed to be what we believe in. Just as thirteen colonies came together to make this great nation, we believe that all of us contribute to make us what we are.Wait… I forgot. That isn’t our national motto. Well… it was never our official motto. Instead, our official motto (still on our money) is:[Image Source: Wikipedia]“In God We Trust.”Ah… those Founding Fathers. They were clearly quite religious to put this on our money, right? They decided this was who we were back in… wait… 1956? Hmmm… You know what was going on back in 1950s?This guy:[Image Source: Wikipedia]He had us afraid of our own shadows. Joe McCarthy, also known as “Tail-Gunner Joe” was a senator from Wisconsin. He ruined a lot of lives by claiming that various people were communist infiltrators. We saw spies all over the place. People were questioned on Capitol Hill. Some of the most famous people of the era were dirtied by his commission. Others were complete cowards, including Walt Disney who branded several of his former employees as communists simply because they wanted to form a union in the House of Mouse.[1]It was during this time that the phrase “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.Before I explain why, I should give a little more history on the Pledge.While taking a class on dystopian literature, I learned about Edward Bellamy. This well-known Christian socialist’s cousin Francis Bellamy was the author of the Pledge of Allegiance. The entire family was deeply into the idea that money was evil and that we should all share. In fact, Edward Bellamy’s book described a utopian future which sounds pretty communist. Because “What would Jesus do?” I guess he would make a bunch of fish and bread to feed everyone.Even though Francis Bellamy was about as hardcore a Christian as you’ll see (his father was the minister of a Baptist church), he didn’t include anything about God in his famous pledge.I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.See… the point here is very much like “E Pluribus Unum.” We believe that the United States is a place in which we all have undertaken the same mission, and that mission has made us powerful. A nation that cannot be divided.You know… dimes are pretty cool. Check this one out:Beautiful, isn’t it? This is the “Mercury Dime.” See that phrase on the reverse again? E Pluribus Unum? Now look at that funky ax in the middle. That’s called a “fasces.” It’s a bundle of rods with an ax sticking out. This Ancient Roman image is the origin for our modern word “fascism,” but don’t get too confused. Its imagery on the back of the dime harkens back to Rome’s use. A single rod is weak. Many rods together are powerful.[2]I like this version of America. I like the idea that we are powerful because we are united.But… back to 1956. I’m not going to claim that it was all a fear of communism that added God to the pledge. After all, the fear of communism had somewhat waned by that point. McCarthy would be dead the next year, a figure hated even by his own colleagues and former allies. Still, the fear of Russian atheist communism was at least part of why “Under God” was added.[3]For me, adding “Under God” is like some method of detecting witches in Miller’s The Crucible (also written during that time as a protest against McCarthy):BOGART I’m not sure what the Chairman is trying to say.MCCARTHY Surely, Mr. Bogart, you don’t have a problem reciting the pledge?BOGART I can do so, but I don’t understand the purpose.MCCARTHY Everything will be clear in a moment. Just say it.BOGART I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.MCCARTHY YOU SEE?! HE CAN’T SAY GOD! You know who else doesn’t say God? Communists. He’s one of… THEM!Cue the music… something with lots of strings in a dramatic and swelling but downcast tone.End scene.Do me a favor… make sure to imagine that in black and white… crackling audio feed… etc. Incidentally, I picked Bogart because he essentially told McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee to go fuck themselves.Again, let’s not pretend that the whole communism thing was all of it. After all, there was a lot of push from various Christian communities to add it. Still, it’s pretty obvious that a healthy fear of those communist agents in Russia was part of the drive.So where does that leave us? Will it ever be removed?“Under God” will never be removed. It was only added out of fear. Fear can cause us to push people away, but I’ve never seen it cause us to embrace anyone. It just isn’t a natural instinct. I looked up “fear gesture” on Google Images. They all look like this:[Image Credit: Alarmy]Keep danger at arm’s length. It’s safest that way.In order to make a change like the one proposed, we would have to experience something pretty powerful. Fear is far more powerful than love when it comes to politics. At present, I would say that we’re far more likely to add something rooted in our fear than a repeal of “Under God.”I can see it now.I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all who live North of the Border.Remember… out of many, one. That’s what I thought we stood for. Instead, we stand for loyalty acts, flim-flam, bread, and circuses.Footnotes[1] On This Day: Walt Disney Testifies Before HUAC[2] Mercury dime - Wikipedia[3] Why 'Under God' Was Added To The Pledge Of Allegiance

It isn’t “some” Americans. Even very liberal outlets hold polls that show most Americans are against the protests and when conservative outlets do the polls, the results are staggeringly clear. The protests did not achieve their goal of bringing attention because they were communicated poorly from the start.This is going to be really hard to explain if we don’t explain some basic things about people first. Let’s start off with something more neutral and just explain why people get so upset about the flag and the anthem. But before that, let’s begin by understanding this photo. Take a moment, and see if you can see what’s in the picture. What is it you see?You see clouds. That’s all there is. Objectively, there are only clouds. There is no man’s face. That’s just what the clouds temporarily looked like while someone took a picture. It’s weird that you saw a face. It’s weird because we all did because humans are very special creatures. Humans are a deeply symbolic species. We can look at anything and attribute profound meaning to something that objectively has none. No other creature we know of does that like we do.This is because our minds have the property to take ideas, memories, emotions, and facts and create frameworks built upon one another to describe the grander ideas that surround us. The ability to create frameworks of ideas give us the capacity to apply meaning to things. This is why metaphor works as a literary tool, why art is beautiful, and why simple words can have complex meanings vastly different from one person to another.Play a game to see what I mean. Take the word “apple.” Ask your friends to describe it with only three words, but forbid some obvious ones like “apple”, “fruit,” or “red”. Depending on the person, you might get “sweet”, “pie”, or even “sin”, or maybe even “iPhone.” You’ll be fascinated by how different the answers will be, demonstrating in a very tiny way how vastly different two people can view the same very simple idea. It’s like we really aren’t even speaking the same languages.Furthermore, our symbolic and metaphorical ideas take on new depth when they are confirmed by others. If you are in a group that treats an objective object with an agreed upon meaning, like a stop sign, it becomes deeply embedded in the collective psyche and takes on the qualities of truth. A red octagon always means stop. Now that meaningless thing, has meaning. That’s why our minds hold very different meanings applied to the same idea, but we can still manage to speak what appears to be a similar language.Here’s another. Take this picture below.It’s of the school seal of Brigham Young University. It’s placed on the floor, but surrounding it are ropes to prevent people from walking on it. This is a strange tradition, intentionally putting something in the middle of the floor which people must go around. Why would anyone do that?What it does is force people to stop and take notice, at least enough to avoid it. By creating this obstacle, it forces people to understand an implied rule that doesn’t need to be explicitly stated: this thing is not to be stepped on. That is because stepping on things communicates disrespect (another idea that has no objective basis in reality), but because that is the case, this thing which is protected is to be respected.People went out of their way to place the seal before students, and then even more out of the way to protect it. Because so many of the students agree to follow the implied rules around the seal, the idea of the seal’s significance is validated. It takes on a much more profound meaning than paint on the ground.In so doing, this tiny little tradition subconsciously informs everyone who walks past it the value and importance of the idea of their school, the student body, and its faculty and what it should mean in their lives. This idea is difficult to express, maybe impossible but has emotional weight that psychically binds the students of BYU together.It’s not an objective truth, but it is a truth nonetheless, “Our school deserves respect.”By that same token, I wonder if the girl slipping her foot underneath the rope is playing out some act of rebellion against the school, which can only be understood through many layers of symbolism.Now we’re ready to talk about the flag.Everything I’ve said is true of all people, but for the flag, liberals and conservatives seem to have created vastly different frameworks of ideas of what it means. In fact, it goes much deeper than the flag. It starts at the point of our first assumptions on basic human nature.I’ll start with the conservatives. Conservatives’ first assumption is that human nature is flawed. This is very important to understand. Every bad thing you can imagine is a part of each of us, but it is society which provides order by keeping our inner demons in check.This is a root belief of conservatives.Society achieves order by the overlapping of many institutions. This creates a mesh of traditions, values, ideals, customs, and a lot of work by many individuals and groups to ensure that we are all working towards some common good. The “good” is some arrangement where people have the most freedom, the most order, and experience the least chaos. Order is when what you do has the expected results, and chaos is when nothing you do returns the desired outcome. There is no perfect utopia where everyone is good and that they do only good things for good reasons. Utopias aren’t real. Working towards better is the only goal possible.What are these institutions? They are the church, the schools, the law, family, marriage, our police forces, our military, and thousands of other societal norms encoded in tradition that have lasted long enough to be not just useful, but necessary to society’s function in ways we can’t even understand until they are missing.The maintenance of these institutions requires work. That’s why we respect the work of mothers, as they instill values and tradition. We also respect fathers, who instill discipline and direction. That’s why we respect the work of preachers and churches, as they provide a moral guide, as well as serve as councilors and caregivers during times of tragedy. We respect teachers, nurses, and fire-fighters; people whose work prevents chaos and creates order, usually, far more order than what they are compensated for. For conservatives, the police are particularly important in this worldview. People are flawed and will pursue individual prosperity at the cost of others. The police are society’s acceptance of that reality and place themselves in the position of stopping those who act upon their evil and create chaos for the rest of us. The military, likewise, is profoundly significant, as their existence serves as a symbolic and literal insurance against foreign forces which are willing and desire to destroy our institutions to inflict their worldviews, their institutions, their values, and their laws, upon us.Again, it isn’t that conservatives believe things like racism don’t exist or that it isn’t a problem. Conservatives understand that racism exists and they don’t need to be informed that it is an evil. It’s that it is to be expected of humans. It may be politically convenient to assume otherwise, but we do understand that fact. In the context of the police, individuals will be bigotted, and even whole departments may be, but spreading that guilt across all of an institution like the 760,000 police officers in the United States, or even all of America itself, is a terrible way of solving the problem of apparent racism in our police forces. This is especially true if it involves upending a vital institution which would cause far more problems than what we already have.When pressed to “take action”, the first question we ask is to look at where the problem specifically lies. Is it institutional? Name the institution, specifically, and what part of it makes it racist? Let’s get rid of that policy. Is it an individual? Then let’s find out the individuals and take away their power and influence so that no one is empowered by their racism. But what if it keeps happening? Then we keep working. As long as it is less and less and less, which it is, then over time, it will eventually be none.The solution, therefore, for something like racism in police forces is to make only those laws that hold responsible only the individuals with the problem, weed out the bad individuals, removing their influence and sending the message that their behavior won’t be tolerated, and allow the institution to continue to do its job absent the negative influence. Society improves steadily, over time, without disrupting everything good. Then it is the job of the rest of us to have faith in this process because that’s what it is — a process and one which will never, ever be complete so long as humans are still part of the equation. How do we know? It won’t be when none of the things we hate never happen again. That simply won’t ever happen. It’s when you zoom out and look at the big picture. Someone tell me that racism is worse in 2018 than in 1985 when I was born, or that 1985 was worse than in 1965, or that 1965 was worse than in 1865. That’s how America progresses. Not through sweeping changes based on difficult to prove perceptions of how America is, but a painfully slow progression that actually works to create positive change without destroying society in the process.And this has been the process since our founding. The first Americans stitched together the values, traditions, and institutions of Europe they agreed to, and bound them together with the idea of basic freedoms and duties, to create a new society where steady gradual improvement made everyone’s lives better. What they created wasn’t just better. It was legitimately great. This process of steady improvement while unburdening itself of negative traits is what is great about America and over time, eventually made it a great country which the whole world aspires to emulate, whether they admit it or not.Now put all of this together.Take the ideals, ideas, values, and virtues, of American society.Combine that with the traditions and customs that act out those qualities.Combine that with the knowledge of hard work over the course of many generations to continually improve upon what exists.Combine it with the land, which in every way pushed back to test American will to tame it, but when they did, provided greater wealth than any other nation has ever known to validate their hard work and character.Combine that with the history of great achievements, of bitter disputes over values and what was right, and overcoming hardships towards our collective good.Combine that with the sacrifice of many that it took for the rest of us to prosper.Combine that with our definitions of heroes, the collective unconscious declaring what makes someone great.Combine that with a family legacy where your ancestors were participants in many of these national dramas.And finally, combine all that with the pride of being a part of that tradition, taking joy in it every time you celebrate beneath fireworks, watch the parades go by, and yes, at the start of a football game.Combine all of these and you have created an intellectual super-framework of ideas that itself is so complex it is indescribable, but the emotional and intellectual gravity of it borders on the sacred. To people who hold this view, that people are naturally flawed and corrupted, but because of America, the idea of America put into practice, people have been made as good as humanity has yet proven possible. It cannot be stated enough the significance the idea of America has for people who cherish it.I bet you thought they didn’t count, didn’t you? They do. Anyone who embraces this concept I listed… is an American. American isn’t a race. It’s an idea and those who embrace it, all of it, are American.Humans are a deeply symbolic species. We can look at anything and attribute profound meaning to something that objectively has none. Take this massive construct of ideas, emotions, history, meaning, and people. We can’t describe it, but we can feel it because we have the uniquely human ability to distill that construct into metaphor and attach that metaphor to objectively meaningless artifacts… such as a piece of cloth.I’m not trying to sell you on loving America. You either will or you won’t. But this is an explanation, perhaps the best I can give, on why conservatives are so passionate about something many liberals seem to fundamentally not understand about them.When liberals talk about the flag, or America, they don’t communicate an understanding of this meaning, the sacredness of America and the symbolism behind that to Americans who cherish it.And no, patriotism isn’t a distinctly conservative trait, but when liberals say things like “I love Ameria, but…” it always seems to communicate that what they love about America isn’t what it is, but what it could be. They seem to love its unique ability to change, to reform, or to evolve. That doesn’t communicate a love for the country as it is, but a love for the potential to become some something else. And the something else they usually point to usually appears to be something of an impossible utopia, like I said above, where everyone does only good things for only good reasons, there’s no inequality whatsoever and no hatreds. That’s an impossible standard to live up to. And it also doesn’t feel like real love to conservatives because it is nothing like the idea of the America conservatives have or why they love the country. Liberals seem to love something which doesn’t exist and don’t seem to love that which does.It’s like the feeling a bride would have if she found out her groom didn’t love her for who she was, but who he’ll make her into.Conservatives just don’t view that as sincere patriotism. I have liberal friends who served with me in the Marines, so I know that patriotism is there, but something gets lost in the messaging and I think that comes down to liberal’s broader worldview.Where the right views individuals as inherently flawed, the left views societies as inherently flawed. To the left, people are inherently good, but it is society and its institutions that corrupt us.People who commit crimes aren’t criminals, for example. Capitalism creates structural inequalities and the police enforce that structure, thus forcing good people to do what they have to do to survive. So they did not suffer a moral failure. Society failed them. Note, this is just one example of the thinking of an “everyone is basically good” view of humanity.With this view, institutions themselves are evil, as they were only created by the powerful to oppress the weak. This is their fundamental assumption. These flaws build up over time. Furthermore, as society’s values change, guilt is retroactively applied to previous generations. The endgame, therefore, is that no matter how virtuous a society is, it will reach a time where the left can see little more than detestation at the thought of it. The flag then becomes a metaphorical symbol of that society and its oppression and a toxic and inescapable history.People like Colin Kaepernick seem to view the world more extremely than even most liberals realize. I don’t think I’m generalizing because this is based on his, “I’ll never stand for a flag that oppresses black people and people of color,” statement as well as other messages he intentionally put out, most notably through his choice in apparel.His clothing choices have not helped him shed the appearance of anti-American sentiment, namely by choosing clothes for high profile events and press conferences that communicate specifically anti-American causes, beliefs, and figures. For example, he’s now famous for the “Cop Pig” socks, which the media tried to play defense that it wasn’t directed at all police, but have had less success with his other choices, such as shirts that glorify Fidel Castro, and the Black Panther Party, with Huey P. Newton (the party’s founder), made to emulate the famous visage of Che Guevara.It’s obvious that Kaepernick has an appreciation for an extreme left-wing revolutionary attitude that is, frankly, famed for anti-American sentiment. Far-leftists don’t just compare the world to a utopia, they held the ideas of radical disruption to what exists, to rebuild or dismantle all institutions of society which they view as innately oppressive. It seems that this at least in part informed his original protest.I’m also not judging, just communicating what I think people with the idea of America like his is and why it is so divisive to conservatives. I’m also communicating that given the history of the things he’s said, and the people he honors, when liberals don’t call these extremes because they don’t want to “betray the cause”, nor make an effort to communicate a vision that isn’t radically revolutionary, it’s hard for the majority of conservatives to view his vision of progress differently from theirs. I know too many liberals to believe that’s true, but it is very hard to justify the silence.That said, whether due to the loudness of their extreme elements or the silence of their more centrist faction, what the left as a whole communicates is that, to them, the most stand out quality of “America” is that it is a country with a history of bigotry.And that’s all.That is the inescapable truth to the left and nothing else can be said if not said through that context.In the case of Kaepernick, the flag obviously represents the oppression of blacks and people of color, the embodiment of institutionalized racism, and a memorial to a history overcome with hatred, racism, and oppression. It isn’t about the kneeling. These are things he specifically said when he started his original protest. Rather than see that as a particular issue needing to be solved, this meant that America didn’t meet his and may liberals’ definition of “utopia” and that it was therefore unworthy of praise or honors.Again, this isn’t judging, but it is explaining this one difference, that of how people view human nature creates a vast gulf in how they experience things very common to one another. Now, America isn’t to that point yet, but this flag protest tells me we may be getting there.Then came statements many are now making, such as Democrats like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, that “America was never that great,” which only solidify this view that the idea of America is something unworthy of praise. My view on Kaepernick was opinion, but when you add the many on the left now saying it, especially people of power and authority like Cuomo, it makes it very hard to say that they aren’t distinctly anti-American from the conservative perspective.I tried to not be judgmental, but it’s really hard to not be judgmental after all of that.Now, go back to Kaepernick. We talk about his kneeling. The context in which his protest began wasn’t kneeling. It was Colin Kaepernick sitting through the anthem. In the United States, sitting through the National Anthem is not something unprecedented. It has a specific and well-understood meaning which you can’t recontextualize or put your own meaning on the act. It’s like spitting on someone or dancing on someone’s grave. We all know that it is an explicit sign of disrespect towards the nation. By sitting, not kneeling, through the anthem, he made a very loud statement demonstrating his view of what America is. He established a deeply anti-American context to the protest that has followed it ever since and which is now inseparable from it.I’ll be honest, I don’t think he is a person who understood football fans, and how massive is the gulf between their definition of America and his own. I don’t think he possibly understood what that the flag and the anthem meant to so many of his own fanbase and how divisive of a move it was. For that matter, I don’t think many of his supporters understand either, or respect how egregious it was or how much it deeply hurt and angered them.We also need to deal with the issue of timing.Kaepernick’s protest began with the third preseason game of the 2016 season against Green Bay on August 26. On July 7th of that year, a Dallas, TX Black Lives Matter protest was ended by Micah Xavier Johnson, who ambushed and assassinated 5 Dallas police officers. Following that, on July 17th in Baton Rouge, LA, 6 more police officers were ambushed, and 3 killed by Gavin Eugene Long. In the months leading up to those killings, Black Lives Matter protests recorded chanting from the crowds of “What do we want? Dead Cops!” and “Pigs in a blanket. Fry’em like bacon.”I’m not holding Kaepernick responsible for that, at all. I’m not saying he in any way supported it or approved of the shootings of those police officers. But the timing of his protest was incredibly poor in that millions of Americans now viewed Black Lives Matter as a group fomenting hatred for the police more than their stated goals. Then in the next month, a protestor sits through the National Anthem repeating similar rhetoric and no one is allowed to bring up Dallas or Baton Rouge. As I said, millions of Americans were raw and angry from July before Kaepernick’s sit down protest in August.For many, it was a breaking point and nothing that could be said from that point on would ever be listened to.After that, he was called out by a veteran who at least understood why Kaepernick was angry. He told him kneeling was a way that wouldn’t have upset people. Would that he had asked for the veteran’s advice before he established the context for his protest, things might have been different. Now, however, in the minds of millions who don’t support the kneeling, the protest is about anti-Americanism. It will always be so, because that’s how it started. First impressions are important and most people never heard of Colin Kaepernick before he sat through the anthem. It isn’t because, as many have accused, they support racism or even more ridiculous, they want black people to die. It’s because Colin Kaepernick didn’t make a protest about black people and relations with the police in a way that was respectful to anyone or showed reverence to that which was sacred to so many. He started it specifically in a way to outrage as many people as he could by making blanket attacks against all of America and committing an act clearly understood to communicate patent disrespect to the American people.By establishing that as the context of the protest, it poisoned the well for #Takeaknee to follow. It could never have a respectful context after Kaepernick started the protests in the way he did.I feel bad for the other protesting athletes. I really do. I think some of them are informed by many of the same anti-American ideas that I believe informed Kaepernick, but I believe many were really just bothered by what they believe to be disproportionate violence directed at blacks and followed in. And I think that speaks a lot to how disconnected players now are to their fans that they didn’t understand the gravity of what they were doing and that this was not the way to get their message out.I honestly do feel sorry for them, because I honestly believe if they had all just worked together to get attention for their cause, together knelt from the beginning, backs straight and with their hands over their hearts, a clear sign of respect… America would have listened. America respected these guys, but then they followed a movement where the context had already been established and that context was distinctly anti-American.I don’t know how to communicate it any other way. What they are doing isn’t wrong, but how Kaepernick started it was and Americans will never be able to separate that out. Quite honestly, there’s actually a lot of anger over the fact that so many people seem to have washed the sitting out of their minds, or dismissed it as irrelevant altogether, or worst of all, targetting those who still bring it up as racist. Now it is too late to change that. By 2017 it was too late to change that. When Kaepernick stopped sitting and started kneeling, it was already too late. You can’t separate how it was started.You have to deal with that, and not dismiss it. People, especially liberals, have to hold him accountable for how he started this. They should have distanced themselves from what he did in the beginning. If just one of these players was given a platform to say,“Yeah, what Kaepernick did, in the beginning, was awful and I know it hurt a lot of people. I wish he hadn’t done that. But now there is a major conversation so I’d like people to know some things…”It would have worked. That’s all Americans really wanted. They wanted acknowledgment that their values and their ideas of America mattered, and that someone sitting through the anthem mattered, that it was hateful, and that he would be held responsible for that act of disrespect. But nobody did, or if they did, the news didn’t cover it, and that matters too.As it stands, that effort wasn’t made, and people who care about the flag feel betrayed. They don’t feel listened to, either by their football heroes or by the media who won’t communicate their values. Now they feel embittered that they’ve now been called racists for holding to a deep appreciation for what the idea of America means to them and many people smugly think that’s okay. It’s become a thing that’s okay to just assume people who disagree with you are evil. That’s a thing now. Well, there’s a lot of empty seats in stadiums and pretending that how this protest started was something that can be ignored, or that people who disagree with you are somehow wrong for having their views without listening to them, isn’t going to change that.Liked this? You might also like my YouTube Channel. You can also connect with The War Elephant on Facebook. If you want to help me make more content like this, please visit my Patreon Page to find out more.

Bernie Sanders.Really it's not about personality or about disliking the other guy. It's about what America needs. The USA is built on property, it's built on the idea that if you work hard you will get rewarded. Congress won't help, Clinton is in the pocket of big business, Trump and the Republicans will make it worse. I wrote an explanation of why I think that the USA has to remodel its economy so that it works for the majority of its citizens. It's rather long, I'm afraid, and those of you have already read it, please move on! But for those of you interested, I copied the text below.There's a huge gap between everyone having the same amount of wealth and everyone having enough money to live on. The USA was founded on the ideas of John Locke and it's to John Locke that we must look to in order to answer the question 'what is wrong with the top 1% hoarding so much wealth?' Many people seem to think that there are only two options --the current status quo or Communism. Such an observation is the product of a facile mind; there is of course, much latitude between these two extremes and where one finds latitude one can also find an equilibrium.So just because the Soviet attempt to create economic equality was not successful we should not assume that an attempt to create absolute inequality would fare any better. In fact, we have reason to believe --and indeed have historical examples that clearly demonstrate it-- that absolute inequality is far less workable than any attempt to distribute more evenly.So let's imagine an America where just one person has all the wealth. How would that look?Firstly, people have to be granted the opportunity to earn an honest buck to begin with. America, now barely clinging on to the title Richest Country in the World has taken itself from a workers' paradise to a middle class sweatshop in just a few decades.There will always be people who make more money than others; there will always be those who are luckier, more talented, smarter or whatever, but in order for a society to be stable there has to be enough to go around. If one person in America controlled 100% of the wealth, then society would cease to function. Everyone else would starve to death (actually they would not, because there would be a revolution, as both Goldman's stress indicators and Karl Marx's theory of class struggle predict.)We are, after all, only a few meals away from throwing bricks at shop windows and stuffing our trousers full of Hostess fruit pies, Twinkies and whatever the hell is in those cans of sprayable cheese. So we're off to a good start. One person can't own everything and that probably means that two people can't either. We can carry on moving through some really small numbers --ten people can't, 100 people can't and so on, until we reach the next logical conclusion: everyone needs something so the only percentage of people who can own 100% of the wealth is... 100% of the people.The rate of a nation's income inequality is called the Gini Coefficient and it's measured as a percentage of one (1). That is to say, in the above example the Gini Coefficient would be given a score of one --maximum inequality, with one person owning everything. Not even reverse-panda-eyed Donald Trump could think that a Gini Coefficient of 1 is acceptable or even workable, so we go back to our prior logical conclusion.Oh, look! America isn't doing very well. You'd think Americans would get tired of always being at the bottom of graphs like these.The ideal Gini Coefficient of a nation has to be significantly less than one since otherwise you have something of a French revolution on your hands.As I already noted, we can trace the genesis of such an idea back, through political philosophy, to John Locke. His proviso stated that you can take what you want from nature as long as you leave as much and as good for everyone else. This Lockean proviso is quite tricky since it seems to be advocating a Gini Coefficient of zero. It is not advocating that at all, but now is not the time for an in depth discussion on Lockean provisos; suffice to say that we find ourselves facing a question. If not one and if not zero then what number is both fair and economically desirable?That's a damn good question and sadly, the answer is not a number (which is one reason why politics needs to be studied instead of simply being applied via the ramblings of deluded amateurs like Ben 'Y'all know-I-Can't-Do-This Carson.) To leave as much and as good for everyone else really means that we must ensure that productive people can provide for themselves a reasonable standard of living. Work hard, get paid, have a roof over your head, food in your belly, regular haircuts, the occasional trip to an aquarium and take-away meals if not quite as regularly as the guys from the Big Bang theory, then at least a fair approximation of it.Furthermore, the 'as good' bit has to take into account socioeconomic realities. It's not enough to say that as long as Americans have enough to eat and can pay their mortgages (which incidentally a lot don't have and can't) then all other luxuries can be ignored. It doesn't work like that. In a country as rich as the USA, citizens have to be able to live a life free from debt and financial worry, though not necessarily be so filthy rich that they, like Trump, could afford to hire the now grown-up kids from Hanson to sell their blonde locks to Trump for his weekly hair transplant sessions.So now we have part of an answer. It's OK for the top 1% to own more than the bottom 95% so long as the bottom 95% are doing just fine. That is to say, as long as there is enough and as good to go around it doesn't matter how many pieces of furniture Trump decides to have dipped in molten gold.Look at it another way. Imagine an island where the only thing that grows is the potato. Imagine that a million potatoes grow every day and that there are just ten people. It's OK for nine of those people to share 500,000 potatoes and one person to have the other half but not OK for one person to have 1,000,0000 potatoes. He hasn't left as much and as good for the other islanders, who will get hungry and eventually beat him to death with a potato and/or tool fashioned out of a potato.Potatoes aside, this graph sort of cuts off in 2009 but it still helps us to understand what went wrong. See that big spike to the left? That's the Wall Street crash right there. I'm not going to get into that here because this is going to be a long answer as it is. Suffice to say that it's not such a great idea to have such income disparity. Inequality drops off dramatically during the Great Depression because so many investors lost all their money. The inter-war years show a healthy income proportionality, though there were still plenty of rich people about. But such a healthy diagnosis was not to last; Reagan systematically destroyed it and did so on purpose. At the height of the Cold War, even with Cold War money saving plans such as SALT I and SALT II Reagan knew that he couldn't really afford to give the super rich the tax breaks he did but he also knew that he could make it somebody else's problem. So he borrowed money like a second-rate out-of-work actor desperate for a pack of smokes..But never mind that; it was only future generations that he was screwing over and it wasn't like the 80's were going to end or anything.Take a look at that graph again.The red line certainly climbed dramatically under Reagan/Bush but take a look at that cliff around 1991. That's the end of the Cold War and, as we'll see later, it's not a coincidence that the line's climb coincided with that great geopolitical shock. It's also quite significant, so keep it in mind.But before that, let's look at some more graphs. Quite a few, in fact, because I want you to digest some information before we press on.Here we can see that something has gone a bit wrong in America. If you are in the bottom 80% --and, let's face it, most of you are-- then you are in a bit of a bind. Whilst the USA is rich, it's not so rich that it can afford to have 43% of its total wealth owned by some 3.5 million people. To make things worse 17.5 million Americans control 72% of all financial wealth. There is still such a thing as a middle class but it's being squeezed out of existence. It's being squeezed so hard that many hard working Americans work absurdly long hours, get no holiday pay, no state health cover, no paid maternity leave and so on and yet still cannot afford to pay their bills. There simply isn't enough money to go round. The USA's Gini Coefficient of 41.1 is really, really bad for a developed country as the USA, which is ranking 119th in the world and 29th out of 34 among the OECD countries in the coefficient. This isn't even close to matching the Lockean proviso.Allow me to digress for a second. Take a look at this graph:Here's a view of some happier times. See what happens to that graph in the mid nineties? Ah, just watch those property prices climb: it's beautiful! Alas, graphs that look like the north face of Mount Everest are usually worse news than actually being on the north face of Everest and realizing you forgot to wear thermal undies. But we'll get back to this.Meanwhile, let's look at income over time.This is a very nice graph. It shows a position in 1979 where after tax income (but not wealth) was pretty darn the same for almost everybody. Then something happened around 1980: Reagan took office and things started diverging as he initiated tax cuts for the super rich. Around 1990 everyone sort of said 'fuck it' and our long approach towards a massively unfair Gini Coefficient began. And in case you're wondering about wealth as opposed to income, well, here you go.The 80's and 90's in particular show that the poor just kept getting poorer but, more significantly, that only the truly super rich were making any headway at all. Even those in the top 10% --what is supposed to be the elite of the nation-- weren't doing so well. The USA decided to sort of lump its middle class with all the others in the bottom 90% and then maul them so badly that they weren't really a middle class anymore. I don't even know what to call them. At any rate, 42.4% of Americans earn less than Sanders' proposed $15 an hour and yes, that includes people who don't get paid by the hour. Maths is not my strong point but we can crunch some numbers here.Official Poverty statistics place poverty in the USA at 15%. We know that unemployment is rated at 5% so we have at least 10% of the population who are working and yet who are in poverty. That's 45 million Americans and it also means that the USA has, according to UNICEF, the second highest relative child poverty rates in the developed world.Map: How 35 countries compare on child poverty (the U.S. is ranked 34th)UNICEF Report: U.S. Child Poverty Second HighestHow did it come to this? Are we looking back with rose-tinted glasses? Weren't the poor always poor? Wasn't there a time when there was no Middle Class?Sure there were, as we can see in this shot of Russian Peasants circa 1900. I mean, come on, who really needs shoes? But in the post war years, we sort of got our act together and cleaned stuff up. We suddenly realised that, actually, everyone should have shoes, especially Russian peasants in the winter! We decided this was a maxim that society should observe and it was so. Nobody should suffer illness without the care of a doctor, we decided, and again it was so. And here are the really, really important things to take from all this thus far. Our act of liberation had nothing to do with recessions, it had nothing to do with booms or busts. The change was categorically not economic; it was political.How so? Well, check this out.Now, I'm not a Communist and, in all probability, neither are you. But we can agree perhaps on one thing. This is a picture of a happy life. The fat capitalist is taking it easy on a couch made of money and cannons and the poor worker seems to only have two quarters to his name and, to make things worse, is being forced to wear dungarees. Meanwhile, our Soviet friend has a nice coat, a warm hat, rosy cheeks and so many bags of produce that he's had to attach one parcel to his coat button. (Since the button is not coming off we can only assume that the box contains Turkish delight, which is good because I love Turkish Delight.) In the background we can also see that production rates are soaring.Lovely, no?Actually, no, because it's a big fat Soviet lie, but that's not the point. The Soviet Union was the political equivalent of ageing celebrities selling anti-ageing cream in adverts that have been airbrushed to high fucksy.However, since people both know about airbrushing and at the same time are more than prepared to buy anti ageing cream, it stands to reason that many people were taken in by Soviet promises.Karl Marx's contribution to the world was not the worker's paradise because the Soviet Union was, for want of a better word, shit. No, he helped create something else: the somewhat ironic Capitalist Paradise! No matter how rabidly anti-Communist you might be you have to admit that they were offering something that at least sounded pretty sweet. Full employment, good food, social housing, free medicine, free education. Forget about the Gulag and all that for a moment... I'm not saying that the USSR was great, just that what it promised was seductive. And seduced people were.Chances are you've never been on a starvation walk but in 1930's Britain such things were common. To those of you who haven't read George Orwell's Road To Wigan Pier I can highly recommend it; if nothing else it will help you to understand what unchecked capitalism looks like. Miners, for example, would mine coal for 14 hours a day, dig up a ton of coal each and then return home to a cold house since they didn't get paid enough to actually buy any coal.It's not really that surprising that these conditions radicalized politics: in Russia they went left, in Germany they went right. But post WWII things were very different. The far right had been utterly discredited by the legacy of Nazi Germany. The far left, however, looked rosier than ever before --victorious, powerful, righteous. Yes, I know Stalin was a monster but a lot of people did not know, or else turned a blind eye because the ideological promise of Communism was so seductive. Many post-war countries began to turn towards Communism and the US Marshall plan was conceived at least in part to make sure that Europe didn't become so dirt-poor that it went 'Red'.And what was good for Europe was good for the US, now a really, really rich place. The antidote to the Red Menace was not really missiles and tanks. It was capitalism with a smile. More like a grin, actually.Ordinary workers would be given a lifestyle they could only dream of before the war. Nice housing, new cars, domestic products of all kinds, holidays, great health care and on and on. The USA, far richer than the Soviet Union and without a border to 'protect', switched strategic emphasis to a nuclear defense and sat back and waited. Whilst the Americans sat back and watched I love Lucy, Soviet citizens, if they had a TV, got to watch their's explode...Seriously, they blew up a lot. Even the kid on the TV looks nervous.Ludwig Von Mises was correct about the Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth problem: the Soviet Union was unable to create a worker's paradise. The West looked and was far more attractive; we certainly never had to build walls to stop our citizens from trying to get East!Oh, there were still rich people in the West, of course, but they just had a lot of wealth --not 'almost all of the wealth'-- and so it was under control. More or less. For the most part it was commensurate with the relative rise of the USA's economy. The blue line gently curved up and the red line did the same, though it was a little bit more erratic.Then the Soviet Union collapsed and with it went the other system, the bad seductive system that promised so much more than blunt capitalism ever could. Not only that, it really had delivered more too. A soviet worker in 1965 was a hell of a lot better off than a British citizen in 1935. However, what Marx had failed to anticipate was that his ideas would scare the hell out of capitalists so much that they would massively tone down the exploitation of their workers.No, the Soviet system failed in comparison to a Western form of Capitalism that was actively trying to out-compete it. Such a notion is important to understand; the political intelligentsia in the West made a concerted effort to ensure that they had a happy healthy well-fed middle class; and they succeeded because it is very, very easy to create such a society. However, after the Soviet collapse, with nothing to prove anymore, the lie that Capitalism was all sunshine and lollipops was promulgated with great vigor. Look, they cried we won! And do you know what would make things even better? If we just sort of unleash Capitalism in all its fury, wouldn't that be great? What could possibly go wrong? I mean: it's not like human nature is inherently fucked up or anything. People will show an appropriate amount of restraint. Right?Uh. Wrong. Human nature is fucked up, that's why we need governments.We didn't see the Soviet collapse coming but we did see what was going to happen to Middle America. If Communism had remained a viable alternative we might have already addressed this issue. But it didn't, and its collapse coincided, more or less, with the end of the road for Middle America.Let's look at that graph again. The blue line is pretty flat actually and you might be forgiven for thinking that everything is OK. After all, if the median income stayed more or less the same, who cares if some other guys were buying second homes in Malibu? The reds have more potatoes than they can ever eat but the blues still have plenty of potatoes!Well, that would be OK if it wasn't for the fact that the line only really stayed straight because Americans adopted a number of strategies in order to keep their standards of living more or less static. There is only so much money to go round and as the rich soaked up more and more of America's wealth it became harder and harder for Americans to make ends meet. But they had options or rather they used to have options.Their strategy was as follows.A) Let's both work, honey!Now --yes I know-- there was more to women entering the workplace than simple economics. I mean no disrespect to the women's liberation movement and I'm glad that they have achieved so much. But cultural movements have origin points and there is little question that women initially entered the employment market en masse for economic reasons and more specifically in order to maintain living standards.B) Work yourself to death!Ah, there we go. Problem solved.And it's not just hours worked either. Productivity has steadily increased over time. You work harder, your wage stays the same. Trump gets all the money, Trump uses the money to build a 300 foot tall abstract sculpture of his ego made out of solid platinum.By the 90's both halves of a couple were working and were working as many hours as possible. What next? Living standards continued to be squeezed and those bills kept piling up! People took second jobs. People stayed late at the office, all in the name of productivity. The right vilified the poor so much that Americans, convinced they would never be 'poor', helped to systematically remove the social safety net. Americans live in terror of losing their job in an economic downturn since there was and is very little to prevent them from plunging into a poverty trap. So they began working themselves ragged and made fun of the Germans and the French with their paid vacations and paid maternity leave and free health care and... oh, and their much higher standards of living than US citizens despite the fact that the USA is wealthier than both countries combined.(See my answer here if you want to know why Germans are twice as well of as Americans.)Ian Jackson's answer to Are Germans content to earn 19% less than Americans in 2014?And when Americans couldn't work any longer hours, no matter how scared of getting 'canned' they were, they turned to solution number three.3) Borrow.Poor Canada.You might notice that the USA Income Debt ratio kind of peaked at around 2007/2008. It looks like things are getting better but I'm afraid that's not the case. Remember that graph of housing prices from earlier? The one that peaked in the mid 2000's?I told you: that graphs aren't supposed to look like that. Easy credit was withdrawn in 2008. Millions of Americans lost their homes and hit a debt ceiling. Look at that graph again. It's in the millions.And here we are today.No more hours to work.Polygamy is still illegal so couples are limited to two; cluster marriages are out.We can't really borrow much more money.Apple keep releasing I-phones every year.The problem is that there seems to be no limit to the greed of the top 1% who, despite being the first to crow about how patriotic they are, don't really seem to want anything from their country other than a constant reduction of their own contributions.There's a serious question here: Why the hell are there any tax cuts at all? I mean, America is in something of a crisis!Check out the debt clock. As I'm writing this at 02/12/2015 it stands at 18.773.013, 489U.S. National Debt Clock : Real TimeThat's 18 trillion dollars and in the time it took me to write this paragraph it's jumped up by about a million dollars. And as people might note from all my typos, I tend to write very quickly.And it's no good just blaming the Republicans for all this:What about the evil corporations?Yeah, they suck too. Big surprise.Corporations won't pay, the rich won't pay and the poor can't pay. Every graph, every figure you look at shows that the USA, still the richest country in the world, has turned political ignorance to new levels. In order to get elected in the USA you have to pander to the very wealthy. Obama is no savior, he's more like a less odious Republican on heavy sedatives. To make things worse, as the government tries to squeeze more and more money out of the hard working middle class opportunities to stay in the middle and not get demoted are becoming increasingly difficult.THE WAGE FREEZEIncrease in real value of the minimum wage since 1990: 21%Increase in cost of living since 1990: 67%One year's earnings at the minimum wage: $15,080Income required for a single worker to have real economic security: $30,000And we can go on painting a crappy picture, because Americans fight so so hard to make sure that the USA is not what it should be. You know the word they use: Socialism.Republicans and Democrats join together to condemn Unions because...Median yearly earnings of:Union workers: $47,684Non-union workers: $37,284Unionized workers get paid more.They growl at the idea of paid leave and vacations because...They know that if you get this, then the top 1% won't be able to buy that third private jet they have been yearning for. They will always say the same thing. They will always state that if Americans are given any of these rights, if women are given equal pay, if the minimum wage is raised it will 'cost jobs'. Look at those countries in dark blue. It's no sea of Soviet-like states, it's not a map of crumbling economies. Germany, Japan, Russia, Norway; prosperous, rich countries filled with an actually middle class. No, these states aren't paradises but I'll say one thing: you sure as hell don't lose your house in Germany regardless of how hard you are working.The above map is of a world where all of these things can be afforded because somebody let the Gini Coefficient out of the bottle.At the top, taxes have been cut way, way too much and the American people have lapped it up. We can already see many, many corporations in America paying 0% tax and it won't be long before some Republican candidate stops sipping Mock-Turtle Soup from fine china long enough to tell the American people that if the rich don't have to pay any tax at all it will help 'create wealth'.They all say taxes are too high and they are lying. Not wrong; lying. They know --and most undergraduate politics students know-- that the gap between the rich and the poor is reaching a breaking point. Maybe a repeat of 1776's legitimate outrage is still way off but it seems to me that Americans are beginning to wake up to the idea that income inequality is a serious issue. There are only two ways of dealing with a deficit --cuts and taxes. What the hell is there left to cut in the USA? Citizens get basically nothing as it is. Taxes are the only options and there is only one group in America who can still afford to pay. That untapped pool of money can be re-distributed; let the government pay your health insurance, let them offer subsidies to low paid jobs so that small business can thrive without almost killing their staff. Lower taxes for Middle America so they can spend more, save more and, in doing so, actually start putting their own money into the economy. Raise the minimum wage, cap tuition fees for college... I mean: you have to educate your population so making education affordable --not free, just affordable-- just seems... logical.The USA doesn't need Socialism and it doesn't need Communism; all it needs is a capitalistic system that is politically restrained. The politicians should always have one hand wrapped around the balls of industry, ready to give a tight squeeze whenever they get out of line. Do that and problems are solved, not overnight, but a more equitable society is nevertheless the key. There's really no stopping an America that has had this kind of political cold shower.But how to do this?Well, I can think of a few things.1) Support Bernie Sanders if you can. He's the only political candidate I know of who would at least attempt to address the Gini Coefficient.2) A Lobbying Bill. I know the right to petition is important but here's the thing. Make it illegal for any institution with assets in excess of a fixed sum to lobby Congress. Make it a Federal offence for any individual citizen to lobby Congress on behalf of those same institutions.3) Cap spending on elections. That's right: make it so you don't need to be super rich to run for office and make it so you don't have real-life Dark Lords of the Sith like Rupert Murdoch reaching into the corporate coffers in order to buy candidates.4) Make a political education mandatory. Yes, I know, politics is boring, but if everyone received a political education then there would be no way US labour laws and earnings could have got this bad. I mean, seriously: how many Americans reading this genuinely feel like they live in the richest country in the world?5) Having achieved those things, make it a priority to increase pay for ordinary Americans. Raise the minimum wage, pass bills guaranteeing mandatory paid vacations, maternity leave and so on. Put money in American pockets. You're a consumer society, so: consume! This is true wealth creation.So, yes, it is wrong for the top to have so much, but only because they have left the rest so little.Nothing I can think of could be worse than a Donald Trump Victory.You can follow me daily at Liberalamerica.orgFor general musings or indeed if you want to contact me/ yell at me or ask for my phone number, you can contact me via twitter.Disclosure: This answer links back to an article I wrote.