Dear Ger,
I have only read the Table of Contents to your new book, "From Medical Care to Mangled Care." Clearly, it is very well written.
You know your stuff inside-out, and not just academically.
You have an abundance of real-world knowledge, including your illustrious career at Bonadio & Co., and your up-close, on-site study of single payer health systems in Montreal (Canada), London (England), Paris (France) and Moscow (Russia).
Even without reading your manuscript, I'm sure the final edition will be GREAT.
I doubt there would be any benefit were I to comment on the specifics of what you've written.
However, one of my strengths is contextualizing "things" from overlooked points of view.
As I like to say, "The fullness of truth is only found in rich contextualization."
I may be wrong, but I feel confident you have not ventured very deeply into the domain of "policy recommendations," particulary as future policy might benefit from securing the monetary wherewithal to afford a re-designed socio-political-economy that would actually embody the transformation of America's economy, society and politics, so that we would, in fact, be able to provide top-notch health care and dental care to every American.
Late in life, Dad "took me aside" to say that I was "his boy."
Clearly his love for all five of us was extraordinary, and he did not stint in the love he showered on us all.
But I think my venturesomeness -- both geographically and politically -- appealed to him, just as Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party Candidate for president in 1948 attracted Dad enough that he voted "Socialist."
Mind you, he did not vote "Social Democrat." He voted straight-up socialist, 78 years before Bernie and AOC came on the scene.
If my surmise is correct, I think Dad recognized the same "visionary" in me that resided in himself.
Here is Norman Thomas' Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Thomas (Notably, Thomas was Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "unofficial policymaker" for much of Roosevelt's "New Deal.")
Please read this Google AI overview in response to my inquiry, "To what extent was Norman Thomas foundational to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal?" https://share.google/aimode/9l0345Wy9kJUicL0l
By word count 1.2% of your autobiography was written by me - my reflection on Dad and Mom's bedrock teaching that we siblings always contemplate the difference between "need" and "want."
I am not asking that you dedicate 1.2% of textual space to my proposed contribution to your new book.
I am only asking that - as a postscript - you include a link to my blog post below.
As I turn 80 next August, it is clear that I am nearing the end of my life.
Only a month ago, I experienced an epiphany that America is vanishingly unlikely to emerge from its current political quandary in one piece, even if Democrats win resoundingly in this year's mid-terms.
And even if we "donkeys" go on to win the Presidency in 2028.
You can even change the title of this blogpost to suit your own purpose.
In summary...
It might be beneficial to include reference to my blog post, How To Insure Prosperity For Every American (As Norway Has Already Done With Its Citizens): Our Need For A New Social Contract Under Aegis Of "Promoting The General Welfare." https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-slightly-modified-version-of-my-blog.html
What do you say?
Include a postscript of 28 words?
Such inclusion would, I think, fill an important gap in your exceptionally well-done book on "Mangled Care."
Thanks for reading my writing below.
And thanks for thinking it over.
This is NOT socialism.
It is Common Wealth.
I have decided to re-write the following essay as a pronunciamiento.
If we do not redistribute wealth by deliberate policy-making, a social breakdown will force civil-war/chaotic-revolution on the "United" States.
In the grand scheme of things, those outcomes - baked in the current cake - may be what we need to purge ourselves of the evil that befouls our land.
But I don't want to go there.
And I don't want my children to suffer such turmoil, chaos and pain.
Consider the heart of the matter.
Norway has succeeded in redistributing wealth by determining that massive amounts of wealth are "common-wealth." For nearly 50 years, Norway has made every Norwegian man, woman and child wealthy - all 5.9 million of them - by dedicating the nation's North Sea oil profits to a Sovereign Wealth Fund.
Excerpt from Google AI's overview of Norway's "Sovereign Wealth Fund":
- Purpose: Established in 1990 to invest surplus revenues from Norway's North Sea oil and gas production, shielding the economy from oil-price swings and saving money for future generations. [1, 2]
- Size & Scope: Valued at over $2.2–$2.3 trillion, Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund owns roughly 1.5% of all listed shares in the world, holding stakes in more than 7,000 to 10,000 global companies (including tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Nvidia). [1, 2, 3]
We Americans have been conditioned by unregulated, winner-take-all, "Cowboy" Capitalism, to accept - and even champion - psycho-social degradation and widespread economic pauperization by Ultra-Wealthy oligarchs, plutocrats and kakistocrats. These fundamentally exploitative people are "true believers" in an essentially heartless system: “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work together for the benefit of all.”
We have ALL been bamboozled by Dominance-Submission Hierarchies to accept our cruel colonization at the hands of people who "love money," and by supporting Donald Trump approve his Cruelty, both murderous and mundane.
"The Love Of Money Is The Root Of All Evil" - An Open Invitation To Christian Conservatives
(Even if you despise Christianity, St. Paul cuts to the quick of our crisis
by observing that "the love of money is the root of all evil.")
Here is where unbridled greed -- "the love of money" -- has gotten us:
The Normalization Of Cruelty During Donald Trump's Administration: A Compendium
All of us -- yes, even we liberals, progressives, radicals and revolutionaries -- remain relatively quiet about the bottomline Horror - The Grotesquerie - as long as our "numbers" come up... as long as WE have health insurance, as long as WE have IRAs and 401(k)s, so long as we have Social Security payouts that enable us to "get by" if we really must tighten our belts.
But at bedrock, we overlook tens of millions of Americans whose numbers did not "come up" - Americans without proper healthcare, nor dental care of any kind, nor money to get them through even tiny setbacks, not to mention major crises.
- Jimmy Carter: "The measure of a society is found in how they treat their weakest and most helpless citizens."
- Tolstoy: "I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possilbe means - except by getting off his back." (Or, in the United States of America, by getting our knee off his neck.)
I have siblings -- every one of them extraordinarily good people -- who have been so conditioned to believe (and understandably so) that "the poor must always be with us." And so, they refuse, pretty much unconsciously, "to take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them." https://poets.org/poem/hamlet-act-iii-scene-i-be-or-not-be
Almost all of us - myself included - have been systematically conditioned by piggish people -- squeaky clean, well-dressed people fundamentally indistinguishable from Donald Trump -- to accept the overarching oppression, submitting ourselves to the craven assumption that "it's just the way it is."
Ritual Purity and Yeshua's "Whited Sepulchers"
And so, we do not even champion the poor and the marginalized, nor those people who have fallen off the edge of our increasingly flat world - people who find themselves in never-ending freefall.
Like Charlie Kirk says, "Prove me wrong."
We are running out of time to do something bold and decisive to accomplish the doable goal of "saving the world" before people -- degraded by the poverty, despair, and resignation wrought by grotesque wealth inequality -- give up and go along with the plutocratic (and increasingly kakistocratic) takeover of The American Experiment.
This takeover has been enabled by the chronic decline of virtue, -- and now the precipitous decline of virtue as defined and deemed indispensable by The Founding Fathers.
Consider AI Google's review of Virtue's indispensable role: Jeffrey Rosen, head of the United States Constitution Center, has written an enlightening book about the central role of "virtue" in the political thought of America's first revolutionaries:
"Hostile Takeover Capitalism" as practiced in the United States of America is hell-bent on political, social, economic, and environmental dystopia.
Note well.
Elon Musk has become the world's first trillionaire. And like other ultra-rich Americans, he holds an automatic free pass that places him above the Law, just like his partners-in-crime, Trump, Zuckerberg and Bezos
"Of the 195 economies tracked by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), 174 countries have a nominal GDP of less than $1 trillion." (Here is AI's entire reply to the question, "How many countries have less than $1 trillion dollars in Gross Domestic Product?"
Elon Musk plays a decisive role in Russia's war on Ukraine
Starlink should be nationalized. The company can remain under Musk's control, but at least 5% of its annual profits will be put in a Common Wealth Fund for the benefit of the American people.
See:
Compendium Of Best Pax-Barbaria Posts About Abraham Lincoln (... And The J-6 Insurrection That Lincoln Prophesied)
Abraham Lincoln
WikiQuotes
Abraham Lincoln
WikiQuotes
Abraham Lincoln
WikiQuotes
Note well.
Time is running out.
If the "left side of the aisle" continues affirming our current liberal (and neo-liberal) model, then winning the White House in 2028 will be as disastrous as Joe Biden's remarkably decent and productive presidency,
It is astonishingly easy to overlook the obvious:
Biden gave way directly to Trump -- a second time! -- because the simple people who make up Trump's Base realized one fundamentally true thing: common folk (most of whom derive from farm families, blue-collar workers and manual laborers) have been systematically excluded from the left-wing's vision of prosperity, a vision disproportionately focused on academic accomplishment, a vision that did not accommodate "formally uneducated" blue-collar workers, or the underclass, or "suicidally disenfranchised opioid users" whose lives were cut short by an epidemic of "deaths by despair." These are the very people desperate enough to want Donald Trump to "shake things up," thus tossing the nation from the frying pan into the fire. https://www.fau.edu/newsdesk/articles/deaths-of-despair-study.php
All these desperate people were systematically left behind.
Now, to prevent their desperation from "killing us all" (with democracy being the first casualty), we need to build a new world based on the assertive assumption that a modicum of real prosperity will be everyone's portion, and that by looking upon all wealth as Common Wealth, everyone will enjoy the third of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms: "Freedom from Want." https://share.google/aimode/weo6nBJ8jnSpsRLvi
A "commonwealth" is a traditional English term (dating to the 15th century) meaning the "common well-being" or public welfare.
I propose that the name of the evolving Democratic Party be changed to "The Common Wealth Party," and that its motto be excerpted from the Preamble to the United States Constitution: "Dedicated to Promoting the General Welfare." (Retiring Illinois Senator Dick Durbin observed that the current motto of the Republican Party is, "We are all in this...... alone.")
For decades -- at least since "The Greatest Generation" returned from its antifascist/antifa victory over Hitler -- the uneducated for whom Donald Trump regularly professes his love, have been dumbed down by craven acquisitiveness, at the behest of a System that impels us to "buy things we don't need, with money we don't have, to impress people we don't like."
Cowboy Capitalism (which is to say oppressive, exclusionary, winner-take-all Capitalism) has transformed formerly "responsible citizens" into Pavlovian "consumer units."
"The Greatest Generation: Labor, Capital And Betrayal Of The Social Contract"
George Carlin: Everything You Need To Know About American Society And Politics: "Just Promise The Doofuses New Gizmos"
Couple America's passion for mostly meaningless possessions with the nation's persistent anti-intellectual contempt-for-learning -- and we end up with Know-Nothing Christian Nationalists taking their cues from bottom-dwelling televangelists like Joel Osteen, Franklin Graham and Tammy and Jim Bakker, all of them completely surrendered to their unshakable belief in "sola fide" ("salvation by faith alone"), and their corollary belief that Jesus is "coming back to save them."
And Lo!!! They need not lift a finger to make the world a better place. Jesus is going to take away all the boo-boos, make everything nice-and-bourgeois and indistinguishable from their bogus vision of the kick-ass carpenter, which is to say their view of heaven will be filled with people just like them.
Jim Bakker Resurrected: If This Doesn't Scare The Bejesus Out Of You, Repent For Your End Is Near!
Google AI's elaboration of Fuller's insight:
Fuller frequently critiqued what he viewed as dysfunctional, obsolete governance structures (such as politics, politicians, and rigid national borders), arguing that humanity should treat Earth like a unified system ("Spaceship Earth"). He believed that direct opposition to broken systems only exhausts our energy and reinforces their defenses, whereas designing a superior alternative naturally renders the old system irrelevant. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
Other Notable Quotations with the Same Core Vision
If you are looking for similar quotes by notable thinkers that advocate for building entirely new visions rather than trying to fix or fight broken governance, these quotes align perfectly:
Albert Einstein:"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
Thomas Kuhn (on systemic paradigm shifts):"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
A Sovereign Wealth Fund, or what I would call a Common Wealth Fund, (right alongside "The Common Wealth Party" as the next "incarnation of the Democratic Party) is not the only way to finance a modicum of universal prosperity.
What I envision (in conjunction with new tax initiatives like Bernie Sander's 5% tax on corporations, below) is a top-to-bottom, stem-to-stern re-working of the inheritance tax so that every every billionaire will die a billionaire, and every multi-billionaire's wife and every multi-billionaire will inherit a billion dollars.
Bernie's Annual Billionaire Tax in detail:
(This talk is informative throughout, but for brevity's sake, I encourage you to watch the first 16 minutes.)
Crucially, we must understand that any kind of wealth tax must take into account that for the Ultra-Rich, income is trivial. The lion's share of wealth held by the Ungodly Rich is held in investments that come under the rubric of "unrealized capital gains," a sadly problematic phenomenon. Fortunately, Trevor Noah has provided a precise and humorous definition of "unrealized capital gains. https://share.google/aimode/3h70yAxreVtu7t5NL
In similar vein, the CEO of United Airlines is now proposing a near 100% Inheritance Tax:
United Airlines CEO says he’d pay near-100% inheritance taxes
By way of conclusion...
Ken Burns' documentary, "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History" is indispensable viewing for understanding our historical moment and our historical quandary.
Fortunately, it is every bit as dramatic as acclaimed, Oscar winning dramas.
Too Much And Never Enough
I support gradual renaming of the Democratic Party as “The Common Wealth Party.”
I mean by gradual renaming that Democratic politicians all start using the phrase Common Wealth as a way of accustoming American citizens to think of wealth generation has a community effort, and not a heroic effort by a few ultra rich individuals who pretend that they deserve ALL the profits arising from the system that they themselves have rigged, without sharing it in ways that ensure a modicum of prosperity for ALL citizens.
Basically, it is the Democratic parties task to start calling capitalist pigs, “pigs” without using the word.
Once use of the phrase, Commonwealth (Common Wealth) becomes commonplace, it will be obvious to Americans that some equitable distribution of wealth is a good thing, whereas winner-take-all capitalism is a criminal enterprise that infects all society with the sicknesses of poverty, consequent degradation, and psychosocial-
-economic pauperization.
FINIS
