I once said to a Native American friend that I thought that the Golden Rule was a perfect expression of social ethics, and before I could put the period on my sentence, he shot back, “No, it’s not because, if you’re a misanthrope who hates people and just wants to be left alone, you can behave that way in clear conscience. In my tribe, I have responsibilities to widows, orphans, and the ill. I have to hunt for those who can’t. That’s mutuality.”
Lack of mutuality could be described as the core ailment of contemporary American society. Balkanized by various ideologies and political agendas, by gender, sexual inclination, political party, wealth, urban and rural dimensions, we, the people, have somehow lost track of the larger organism of which we are a part—The United States of America, currently under dire threat. Great freedoms should bear great responsibilities.
Three books describe this dilemma graphically.One by Pulitzer Prize winning Journalist Craig Unger, is titled House of Trump, House of Putin. The second by Malcolm Nance, an intelligence and security contractor in Iraq, Afghanistan, the UAE and North Africa, and founder of a respected anti-terrorist think tank, is named The Plot To Destroy Democracy. The Third, by Stephen Brill is called Tailspin.The first two books make it indisputably clear that America has been the target of a long-term, nuanced, and subtle intelligence operation by the Russian State which has succeeded in placing a compromised President in our highest office and entangling many of our political leaders in webs of Russian money.
The Russians have analyzed the flaws in our system and exploited them ruthlessly to their advantage, and because those flaws unequally benefit wealthy and powerful American elites nothing is done to close them. For example, Russian conglomerate Alfa paid two million dollars to Barbour, Griffith, and Rogers, a powerful lobbying firm run by former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. Senator Majority Leader Trent Lott and John Breaux became the main lobbyists for Gazprombank, and as recently as 2016, millions of dollars of Russian money were funneled to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other high-profile Republicans to finance GOP senatorial candidates.
Because there is no distinction in Russia between State interests, legitimate business and the mob, they are inextricably intertwined. It does not take a rocket scientist to determine that when Mitch McConnell accepts $2.5 million for his Senate Leadership fund from Len Blavatnik’s Alfa-Access-Renova Group, distinctions as to whether the money is clean, tarnished, or filthy are moot, when one is dealing with wealth from a criminal state that could not be earned without the permission of its President and mafias.
It’s important that we look at our own part in making our Nation vulnerable to Russian Mafiosi, oligarchs, and Russian intelligence. The core of our vulnerability lies in our worship of individual liberty as the highest goal of human achievement. The third book, Tailspin, by Stephen Brill, delineates clearly how merit based systems which opened higher education to poor and unpedigreed students of great talent has, due to rampant individualism, actually become counter progressive. Warned by schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that these students did not possess great family fortunes, they were urged to capitalize on their gifts and education to make their fortune. Many went into finance and hedge funds. The problem was that they were smarter than the regulators and used their great gifts to vanquish any and all institutions that sought to limit their wealth. If you were to query them about it, they would say they are success stories of the American way, and remind us that the basis of our American system is that if each individual pursues their own ends and desires, the maximal good for all is achieved. The current state of affairs reveals how flawed that assumption is, and how dangerous freedom without commensurate responsibility can be.
Our Congress is populated with individuals, each seeking their own best interests which in the first instance means their re-election. Forced to raise $40,000 or more a day, they take money where they can find it, and assume obligations to their donors, no matter the cost to the country. No one is thinking beyond the next quarter in the stock market, or the next election. I generally vote Democratic, but this party is as guilty of self-service at the expense of the public as the Republicans.
In the meanwhile Putin has been playing a long game of subtle and masterful chess— attacking democracies and the Western Alliance on every front— bombing civilian hospitals and schools in Syria, creating immense refugee flows to destabilize European democracies, knowingly empowering far right authoritarian politicians to weaken their democratic institutions to eject immigrants, while we are chowing down, and discrediting our own agencies and institutions charged with protecting us.
Congress has not passed a budget in over four years.What are they doing?
Congress has not upgraded the cyber-security of our government, nor has it taken seriously the threat to our election system.In the Bush vs. Gore election of 2000,(18 years ago) BlackBoxVoting.com highlighted extraordinary numbers of voting irregularities with electronic voting machines. Statisticians from Stanford concluded that votes in New Mexico were indisputably rigged, and yet, since that time, nothing has been done to protect the integrity of our vote. We are blithely informed, after admitting that Russians hacked voter rolls in 2016, that “No votes were changed.” How could they possibly now?” That announcement was made before any review of registered voters had even taken place. It was a save-my-butt announcement, and only served to keep the Nation asleep.
Our voting systems are proprietary (thank major tech companies for resisting all open-source systems that could be easily checked). Why do we need electronic voting at all? It is not our job to subsidize the national news and insure that everything is ready for the nightly broadcast, thank you very much. Paper ballots counted by hand and monitored publicly would suffice and we would have to wait until the results were in. All of these examples are directly related to focusing on individual success and paying no mind to the collective glue which binds us to our country and our citizens to one another. However there is a voting system called OpenSource which is transparent, currently being used in a number of cities, that makes it very easy to determine if any hacking has occurred.
Our entire electoral system (including the media whose hunt for eyeballs hoisted Donald Trump to the Presidency with billions of dollars of free air time) is organized around money and access to it. We have privatized our elections. It is time for the people to demand full Federal Funding of elections, as it is done across Western Europe, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia.
We should demand public debates as to why Corporations are allowed to spend tax-deductible dollars to influence public policy for the benefit of their shareholders. Full Federal funding would make Citizens United and its tsunami of invisible black money swamping our elections obsolete. If we need to raise the salaries of legislators, we should, and then we should bar them from accepting any emoluments, highly paid speeches, tours in private jets, etc. etc. There are plenty of ways to educate the public without them.
Unless we examine and practice the mutuality that mimics the way the universe operates, we are lost. Not a single one of us has ever been “independent” of Oxygen, of Water, Sunlight, microbes in the soil that grow food, pollinating insects, or the labors of others who plant, sow, mill, sew and sell our clothing. One can extend this model out to infinity, and therefore it is as true to say that we are all part of one-big-thing, as it is to say that the Universe is composed of isolated integers. If we are bound to this planet and one another, doesn’t it follow that we have responsibility to care for them, to voluntarily limit our own freedoms at the point where they impinge on the health and well-being of others?
We praise freedom, but where is the public discussion, the education training, the ideologies about responsibility? Where is space in our daily life made for it? We celebrate millionaires, but not the day-care workers who tend our children, or the people cleaning our offices, and struggling to survive as if they were dispensable. When was the last time you saw a white man shot in the back by police while running away? We are all in this together, like it or not.We might very well lose this precious experiment that the United States represents, and if we do, it was because we failed to protect it…and nurture each other.