26. February 2017

How to see anything correctly about social organization and quality of governance requires a new paradigm. What that paradigm is and how it will work is what The Action Manual is all about. he recognizes that we need a new social ethos and set of public values. It emphasizes that public citizens (a large majority of Americans) need to assert themselves against the private ones.

25. November 2016

Philosopher, Richard Rorty, in 1998 described with great prescience the elements which have led to the populist "uprising" which has electrified our American political sphere. (See the commentary on the book by New York Time's critic, Jennifer Senior, dated November 21, 2016. http://nyti.ms/2fjlHdk) The "little people" have been misunderstood and/or ignored by the political elite, progressives, and the "rational" political analysts who have promulgated strategies which indeed would have 9or...

01. October 2016

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen articulates why Americans are in an "Age of Distrust."(See link below.) He knows that many Americans see the current system as rigged in favor of a political elite. Their role as participants in a democracy is bogus. The political elite no longer has the trust of the general public but that distrust has evolved now into revulsion and opposition, even if that opposition is irrational and counterproductive. This is true, not only in America, but in much of the...

09. July 2016

Like Farhad Manjoo in his July 7, 2016 column in the New York Times (ow.ly/prsT100dEeu) Neil deGrasse Tyson laments the state of reason and science in the way Americans govern themselves. Although he doesn't state it as such, we do indeed govern ourselves by 18th-Century principles and institutions. Other nations, especially the European Community, have progressed way beyond what we do in America. However, they, too, have not come close to reaching their potential. What is needed is a new...

18. May 2016

1000 to zero! That's roughly the ratio of recent (post-Great Recession) calls from all kinds of prominent people for significant change of our economic-political system to new, practical programs to make those changes happen. That’s too bad, but when we have an increasingly dysfunctional society for most of us and a very long history of disappointments, it’s understandable that new ideas are rare. Some people are still proposing tweaks to the system like simplifying voter registration...