by Gary Griffin
It’s not enough to simply establish a vision and a strategy map for America in the twenty-first century. We must measure our progress toward accomplishing the strategy, which means we must put into place a means of measuring the tactical execution of the strategy. As alluded to previously in chapter 2, the object we have created called American society and supported by the existing social, philosophical, political, and economic social structures cannot stop at this crossroads and simply exist within the time-space continuum in its current form. America must move forward. However, in its current form, the object is too heavy, and we lack the power to make the changes that will apply the force that is needed to propel it forward toward prosperity. Unfortunately, the gravitational forces will pull this object downward toward poverty, if we let it.
The changing social structure of the twenty-first century has already proven that we don’t have to be in a specific physical location at a specific time. That is to say, when you can pick up your cell phone and call someone today on the other side of the world tomorrow, you know that the constraints of time and space no longer apply. We can leverage social networking to keep track of friends, family, and professional networks all over the world. These same three macro-level trends must be applied to and woven into the very social fabric of social life. That means that such things as urban centers are no longer necessary, if production processes are decentralized and individuals are now the owners of the means of production. It’s no longer necessary to get into an automobile and commute into the cities for two plus hours a day. A community-based approach must be implemented that creates jobs, skills, and workforce development and education delivery utilizing this same approach. Social policies around such community-based social structures are necessary, and the types of measures to ensure that this happens would be the percentage of the workforce working from home; the percentage reduction in commute time to work; the percentage of income earned from Internet-based work activities; the percentage of workers engaged in knowledge-based jobs; and the percentage of high school graduates who remain in the local community workforce. Such measures would logically force a redesign of education to support this type of social structure.
A redesign of America’s education system must be driven by a changing philosophical system. Work is no longer strictly a physical activity; it’s a mental activity. As an information society with a knowledge-based economy, the education system must embrace this type of change by implementing methods of teaching and learning that are more rationalized and rely heavily on abstract thinking skills. Education programs must shift away from a posteriori knowledge transferred that is experiential to a priori knowledge that is transferred independent of experience. We must be able to know that something is true even if we can’t rely on the five senses to prove it. All children must be taught to think abstractly and rationally with the ability to apply such knowledge in all aspects of life, especially work. That is to say, they must always be able to know that 2 + 2 = 4 in every aspect of life and work. This type education model would be a dramatic paradigm shift, but it’s absolutely essential for the twenty-first century style of living. Social policies must drive this type of transformational education paradigm shift. The types of measures that must be utilized are the percentage of students who are enrolled in virtual schools, the percentage of teachers engaged in virtual teaching, the percentage of students with electronic book devices, the percentage increase in electronic textbooks, the percentage of postsecondary programs designed for knowledge-based careers, and the percentage of students enrolled in knowledge-based career programs.
The changes in our political system are probably the most difficult. These changes must come from a number of constitutionally based pieces of legislations. The reason such reforms are so difficult is that we need to strip away the power of elected officials and return it into the hands of American citizens. Clearly, no politician from either party will vote for such legislation. The measures of success in changing our political structure must start with the election of at least one new constitutionally based party that represents the interests and voices of middle-class America. This party must be the majority party in control of the House, Senate, and the presidency by 2013. Legislation must be passed that provides citizens the ability to recall any elected official at anytime with a majority vote of all registered voters within that elected official’s district. A second piece of legislation must be passed to set term limits of no more than eight years for both the Senate and the House. A third piece of legislation must restrict everyone to the use of public funds of no more than $100,000 per election—no more campaign contributions. The initial measure here is the number of these pieces of legislation that are put into law by 2014. Upon accomplishing this measure, other measures could be used such as the percentage of elected officials with voting scorecards available online, percentage of elected officials who can securely cast votes for legislation online, and percentage of voters who can cast ballots online by 2016.
Similarly, the changes in our economic structure must begin with social policies put into place by the new political party. The first piece of legislation would be the elimination of the current system of taxation that is based on income, and the adoption of a new system based on consumption. The second piece of legislation would require that all government entities have balanced budgets—no more borrowing from future generations. Excluding citizens with current entitlements in Social Security and Medicare, all citizens would receive a lifetime allotment of public funds assistance in the amount of $100,000. A fourth piece of legislation would be the creation of a new governing body that was responsible for the e-commerce regulation of the Internet. The fifth would be to change the role of the Federal Reserve from the lender of last resort to the guarantor of last resort with special, controlled powers to enforce and protect American citizens’ economic interests in the virtual world of the Internet. The sixth would be the establishment of new economic policies that eliminated the use of GDP and instituted new measures of economic health based on Gross Domestic Productivity and Gross Domestic Consumption. The measure of success here would be the number of these new policies instituted by 2014.
These changes to the major social structures of American society would provide the foundational pillars that would support America in the twenty-first century. With these accomplished, then we could focus on the other objectives of the strategy map and start to execute those as well.
We must continue to build and leverage an advanced technical infrastructure that can support the mass of the American population in the twenty-first century. Although some of these are already measured, we must continue to do so to ensure that everyone has equal access to the technology. The type of measures that we need here are the percentage of American who have highspeed access to the Internet; the percentage of wireless access towers per square mile; the percentage of Americans who have wireless access; and the percentage of children with access to the Internet within their homes. With an increase in reliance on technology and an advanced technical infrastructure, we would have even greater needs for electricity. Our current internal processes around education, energy, and the economy cannot meet this need.
I’ve already talked about the need for a new education model that will support the social and philosophical structures around a community-based approach, so I won’t repeat it here. The major thrust of social policies must be around energy for the twenty-first century. If we institute a community-based social and philosophical approach, we would also decrease the need for oil and gas because millions of people would no longer have to commute such distances to work. However, the technical infrastructure that would be required would increase the need for electricity. One major area of change that must be measure is the percentage of homes using solar power, and the percentage of businesses using solar power. Our goal should be to transform 100 million American home to run off of solar power by 2020. By doing this, we can transform every American family into energy producers and
not just energy consumers. Such changes would have a dramatic direct impact on our economy, as it would allow us to move from a consumer only society to a producer society. The excess electric and oil and gas energy could be redirected to meet our needs around the technical infrastructure of a twenty-first century society.
These changes would have a dire effect on the organization of America society. It would be different. It would be a different style of living. However, with such changes, this new style of living would allow us to direct more power to the productivity of work activities that would then result in a drastic rise in everyone’s standard of living. It is only through the increases freedom of choice brought about through social, philosophical, political, and economic systemic changes that we can achieve economic growth and prosperity for all in the twenty-first century. The final measure would be the percentage of American citizens living above absolute poverty line, and the percentage of Americans with incomes 100 percent above the absolute poverty line. Our objectives here are to increase both of these, of course.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The gravitational pull will be toward poverty seems very strong in America. We must through our own force of will chart a new course. If we don’t make the changes and start to execute a new strategy, then just like the apple that falls from the tree, we will hit the ground very hard. It’s unnecessary. We must stop politics as usual. We need the power to move forward quickly; this need seems to totally elude our current political and economic leaders, as well as many American citizens.
If the people who collectively represent the baby boom generation don’t get out of the way and let my generation do what we need to do, then the next generation, their grandchildren, will hate them and curse their names because they’ll be forced to become nothing more than serfs in a country set free by our forefathers and destined to beg for bread in the streets of despair and lack. Poverty in America will freely reign. We must defeat this monster in order to revel in the glory of prosperity for the next generation and generations to come.
Speaking to my father to tell him it’s time to retire isn’t an easy thing. From his perspective, I’m still just a child. What do I know? I couldn’t possible have any worthwhile ideas. Speaking on behalf of my generation, it’s okay to turn over the reins of power. We’re all grown up now, and you can trust us to do the right things. Let us take what we’ve learned and begin to build a new America that will usher in prosperity for future generations. It is a new day. We’re not being disrespectful, but it’s time. We need fresh, new ideas that can move America forward in the twenty-first century and sustain the country for many generations to come.
America the beautiful, land of the free, and the home of the brave—oh, how I love her. She is still the greatest nation on planet Earth. She is a shinning beacon of hope on a hillside. Let us not hide her light under a bucket. I live and breathe to restore her to her greatness. GOD BLESS AMERICA, please.
NOTES
(Endnotes)
1. A belief is a psychological state of mind in which an individual holds a premise or proposition to be true. A set of beliefs may be more appropriately defined as a philosophy or an ideology. Fundamental to the arguments I make in chapter 4, is the fact that beliefs can be either true or false.
2. I’m referring to the financial meltdown that began under the Bush administration in 2008 with many large banks going under, massive infusions of cash from the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, and culminated in a large bailout of Wall Street banks.
3. This is also known as the Year 2000 bug or simply Y2K. The problem stemmed from programming computers with two digit years instead of four digit years, that is, 99 instead of 1999. When the millennium changed to the twenty-first century, it was feared that major systems would break down and stop working correctly on January 1, 2000. This fueled major investments in fixing the problem and helped to create the dot-com bubble, which officially burst on March 10, 2000.
4. This excerpt is from George W. Bush’s State of the Union Address delivered on January 29, 2002. It was over a year before the actual invasion of Iraq.
5. I must admit that I subscribe to the just war doctrine espoused by St. Thomas Aquinas and embraced by the Catholic Church. Wars are sometimes necessary, and this fact can’t be ignored. However, I believe that they must be for defense only, and therefore the reasons for waging war on another country must completely justify military action. With the just war doctrine, the first criteria that has to be satisfied is that a country must establish the right to go to war. The evidence and reasoning used by the Bush Administration to justify the Iraq Invasion in 2003 don’t satisfy this criterion.
vi. On January 26, 1998, the Neoconservatives sent a letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, thereby removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Some of the key people listed as signatories were John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams, and Richard L. Armitage—all were key people in the Bush Administration.
7. The original Social Security Act was signed into law in 1935 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. Poverty rate among senior citizens was around 50 percent at that time.
8. Medicare was added to the Social Security Act in 1965 by Lyndon B. Johnson as part of his Great Society program. It was during this time that Social Security was changed to withdraw funds from the independent trust fund and put it into the general fund for additional congressional revenue. As is true of all politicians, they just couldn’t resist tapping into that big pot of money. The government uses extra Social Security funds just like any other tax revenue—they spend it. They justify this by issuing IOUs that will be paid in the future through the collection of taxes. What a scam! See John, 2004.
9. If the history of man on planet Earth is one that is defined by different stages of development, this time period must be the age of accountability. This includes the U.S. government and the politicians we elect to office.
10. The Great Depression is considered the great economic depression of the twentieth century. Generally, it started around 1929 with the stock market crash and ended around 1942 with America’s entry into World War II. Unemployment in the United States rose to 25 percent during the Great Depression.
11. On Monday December 1, 2008, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared what everyone else knew—the United States was in a recession at the end of 2007. It took a year for the government to acknowledge what main street already knew. See “It’s Official,” MSNBC.com, 2008.
12. Parillo, Stimson, and Stimson, 1996, 5.
13. Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia, 2008. This article on poverty was reviewed by Dr. Thomas J. Corbett, assistant professor, School of Social Work, and associate director, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
14. Ibid.
15. Unemployment in the United States is reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of October, 2009, the Bureau reported unemployment at 10.2 percent.
16. It certainly is not an exclusive characteristic of the Democrat Party to put large-scale social programs into place. However, most of the ones that seem to persist over time and push us toward socialism always come from this party.
17. I subscribe to the idea that money is a medium of exchange only. (See Marx, 1906).
18. It certainly would make no sense to make an unqualified statement that everyone must work. Children, the elderly, those ill, etc. may not be in a position to work. However, everyone that can work must work.
19. Natural law or the law of nature is a theory that posits the existence of a law whose content is set by nature and that therefore has validity everywhere. The phrase natural law is opposed to the positive law (which is manmade) of a given political community, society, or nation-state, and thus can function as a standard by which to criticize that law. Natural law theories have exercised a profound influence on the development of English common law, and
have featured greatly in the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, and John Locke. Because of the intersection between natural law and natural rights, it has been cited as a component in United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. These are discussed in more detail in chapter 5.
20. This is based on the Pauli Exclusion Principle formulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1925. It is one of the most important principles in physics because all particles that make up ordinary matter—electrons, protons, and neutrons—are subject to it. It is the characteristic property of matter to occupy space that makes it stable.
21. Immanuel Kant was an influential eighteenth-century philosopher whose ideas were used in the theory of knowledge. He believed that people use time and space to define human experience. He also thought that the principle of causality could not be applied outside of experience. This, for example, prevented metaphysics from answering such questions as whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. This prevents science from accumulating knowledge, because all sciences are controlled by the laws of the mind. I will argue in chapter 4 that this is incorrect if we consider math a science.
22. For the purpose of this book, social change is defined as the change in a social structure including the nature, the social institutions, the social behavior, or the social relations of a society. Social structure is a common use term in sociology to describe a political, social, economic, or philosophical system. It was first used by Alex de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, and then by many social thinkers such as Karl Max, Herbert Spencer, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Emile Durkheim.
23. I will discuss in more detail in chapter 3 how this principle applies to American society during a time of transition. That is to say, we can use the transition of American society during the 20s and 30s as a baseline of reference to know the future state of America based on our current state in the transition from an industrial society to an information society.