Minor proposals - even crackpot! - for a Newer Deal

 My ten part series on a Newer Deal for Americans and the world offered 35+ proposals for the Democrats to include in their electioneering agenda, at least a dozen of which could be enacted even while Trump remains in the Oval Office, and others he might veto at tremendous political cost to himself and to his party.

Some of you might deem these proposals -- listed all together in Part 3 and broken down in detail, in parts 4-10 -- as giving short-shrift to many of the top items wished-for by the U.S. liberal-and-moderate majority, and that's true! Relegating things like monopoly-breakup and housing to the end, along with protecting women's sovereignty over their own bodies...

...not because these are unimportant! But because it will take a lot of political process and negotiation capital to get them. And - as we learned from the failures of Clinton and Obama to legislate... and the successes of Biden/Pelosi/Sanders - you gain that kind of political capital by passing the more-easily passable things first!

Anyway, negotiating with the undead zombie that is today's Republican Party, whose top levels are utterly foreign suborned and likely blackmailed, is - by their own choice under the Dennis Hastert Rule - completely forbidden. 

We'll have to fix Democracy's structure first! Shatter that subornation and lure decent, honorable, grownup conservatives back to the bargaining table, before anything lke 'negotiation' can ever return to American public life.

See a pathway to accomplish all of that here.

       == I've tried this before ==

The IGUS concept and the Subpoena Gambit are among the most potentially transformative of my earlier “political suggestions.” [1]   In fact, way back in 2006, as it was beginning to seem possible, even hopeful, that the benighted Bush Era might draw to a close, I offered a list of proposals, shorter and less comprehensive than the Newer Deal, though several would have helped to prevent our present situation! If passed when Democrats had - (and squandered on failed Hail Mary passes) - brief power in 2009.

Then, in 2019, I did it again! This time in a whole nonfiction book!  POLEMICAL JUDO: Memes for Our Political Knife-fight: A Brazen Guide for Sane Americans To Bypass Trench Warfare And Win Our Life or Death Struggle  for Civilization.   

Much more extensive, Polemical Judo included detailed methods for getting around John Roberts's rationalizations to support gerrymandering, for example. And why folks should overcome their reflexive rejection of blackmail's likely role in the DC quagmire, when it's been the core method used by Russian security services, since the era of the czars.

I was pleased to see that in 2021, the Democratic Party leadership under Biden-Pelosi-Schumer-Sanders-Warren chose not to repeat the Clinton/Obama mistakes and pressed hard to pass a series of excellent bills in that miracle year... though they addressed not a single one of the structural flaws that I had discussed in my book... nor any of the weaknesses that Donald Trump later exploited, in his current all-out attack upon the American Experiment.

Okay, I've now tried again, in 2025-2026, with the Newer Deal list.  And I expect the same response. Crickets from Democrats, many of whom are smart, decent, honest, modernist grownups who want the American Experiment to thrive and move forward, continuing its mostly (not entirely) beneficent leadership of the world. Alas, they all share the same mania. 

"If it's not invented here, then don't bother."

Still, I'm a completist. So let let me indulge my wish fantasies one more time!  What follows - cribbed from Polemical Judo - is a wish-list of minor or lesser items that never made it into the Newer Deal list. And yet, they are still pertinent! 

Indeed, if you'll just pass a couple of them, you will build your political capital, instead of frittering it away.

              == My Newer Deal Crackpot Addenda! ==

 Let's start with...

Minor but significant stuff.

First a few items that’d be worthwhile, even if not huge or sexy.

– At some point when gas prices are low, take an advantage of an opportunity to switch from a cents-per-gallon tax to a percentage tax.

– Every other major country has replaced its currency by now, with important positive effects for honest taxpayers. The rationalizations offered by opponents – who claim the greenback is forever special, different, and sacred – are getting ridiculous and awfully long in the tooth. Just think of all the drug lords and Mafiosi who would be discomfited. And the American greenback is now way too easily counterfeited and filthy.[2]

– Tell all Americans to update their computer security packages, because a bill is about to refine data tort law, making responsibility similar to public health codes. If you neglect hygiene and your device becomes a hijacked ‘botnet” source of harm to others, then you’ll share in paying the civil damages that result. Oh, yeah. That actually is one of the Newer Deal items, already.

-- Folks occasionally talk about invoking the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, which sets up procedures to neutralize an incapacitated president. But most dismiss the notion, because no matter how off the rails Donald Trump tumbles, he stocked his cabinet  this round with utter 'loyalists' who give whole new meaning to that word. (I believe he ensures that loyalty in a special, mobster way; but no one seems to want to ponder that.) Alas those who shrug off the 25th, thinking that only the cabinet may invoke it, are too lazy to actually read the amendment, which allows a route to entirely bypass the cabinet.

I know that at least one prominent Democrat did read the 25th, way back in 2019 during Trump's first term. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) - among the smartest House members - proposed a bill to create the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity to fill a role that is actually outlined (or at least sketched-in) by the 25th. Raskin wanted to provide a specific ‘body’ comprised of 10 physicians, psychiatrists and retired former leaders – like presidents and vice presidents – chosen by House and Senate leaders of both parties. 

Note that I alluded to this in the Newer Deal's proposal for a neutral Executive Branch Manager. Too soon?  Seriously?

Some more-crackpot suggestions.

All right, we’re about to tip into notions that are more than just “unusual” or “judo.” These crackpot ideas may yet have their day, though. [3]  And I want to be on record proposing them.

– Provide basic firearms safety training in all high schools, along with Driver's Ed and comprehensive sex education. Think about it! Isn’t this one of those positive-sum, win-win scenarios? It lets us judo past the NRA’s trenches by offering one thing they claim that they want - the one item on their agenda that might actually help reduce gun violence![4]  While forcing them into a deal that would also help reduce teen pregnancy, STD and abortion rates by empowering girls and women with knowledge.5] 

Think it through. Better yet, ponder how MAGAs will react when they think it through! Every kid from a liberal family, every feminist girl, every minority kid in every city getting the gun safety (and use) training that the NRA claims it wants all kids to have! And every son or daughter of the NRA exposed to concepts of liability, insurance and every other parallel with owning and using motor vehicles.

A head scratcher? You don't yet see how it's a win-win? Well, just let it sit there, among less busy neurons at a corner of the mind. It'll comce to you how it could be a win-win-win, outmaneuvering the nuts.

– As of mid 2019, Bernie Sanders came aboard supporting this proposal that long predates even my own interest[6]… a small tax on financial transactions. As low as 0.01%, it would not even be noticed by average human investors! But it could stymie the AI programs at major Wall Street firms that make tens of billions of trades a day. Advantages include a way to limit volatility, plus helping to control a “churn-hungry” financial caste. But I have a bigger reason: it could diminish the likelihood of those cryptic, unscrupulous Wall-Street firms unleashing artificial intelligences that are by design voracious, parasitical, predatory, amoral and utterly insatiable potential “skynets.”[7]  

And yes, I wrote that in 2019.

– Ban interlocking corporate directorates among a narrow CEO caste of golf buddies voting each other vast compensation packages. The Greatest Generation wisely forbade this conniving incest. They also banned massive stock buybacks. They were smarter than we are. And yes, they also adored Jonas Salk.

– Give capital gains tax breaks only to long held and voted stock. Or else... (more radical, but justifiable) ... only to new issues that actually raise new money for companies. Since older equity does nothing to raise investment capital for the company. (Ponder that! Older equities base their value on the existing capital and dividends of the company and have absolutely no basis for tax preference, while NEW issuances might merit encouragement by taxpayers.)

– Revise "corporate democracy" to reward involved, long-term actual human stockholders and purchasers of new issues, while limiting the power of passive proxies and shell companies, especially those shells who don’t devolve within one layer to real human owners.

– Nukes. More mind-blowing still, even though techno-liberals like Stewart Brand have pushed it for years, and it might help reduce carbon emissions significantly… consider making new allies and crucial support for environmental action in exchange for accelerated development of two or three of the truly impressive new types of ultra fail-safe nuclear power plants?

– Establish an Institute for Verification and Re-test. One problem with modern science – it emphasizes new discoveries over the verification process upon which the whole thing relies. Postdocs and professors don’t find it sexy to merely check out or replicate a recent finding, nor does that lead to prizes and fame. Necessary for the peer review process to work, we need some way to encourage tests to reproduce results. A possible role – if properly set up – for burgeoning networks of amateur scientists?

== Even more crackpotty! ==

Okay, you were warned… have nearby several grains of salt…

– Revive air travel the simplest way. 

   One sign of our spiral toward levels of class war last seen in 1789 France is how the rich are abandoning us to our fates in deteriorating airports and airlines, fleeing from First Class into charters and corporate and private jets, thus avoiding all the frisking and hassles. History is clear. When elites abandon a mode of transportation (e.g., railroads and ocean liners in the 1950s) that utility starts to die! Moreover, the gulf between the mighty and little people widens to unsupportable levels. (See David Rothkopf’s book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.) 

This can be solved with some decent agitation, followed by the right taxes and fees so that private and corporate air at least pay their own way, and ideally subsidize the airways.

 Metaphorically speaking – and so far I am still talking only in metaphors! – we must lift torches and pitchforks, picket the private, no-TSA airports and chase those elites and moguls "Back into First Class, where you belong! Sit there with your tablecloths and mimosas and champagne. But fly with us!  Just you watch how quickly air travel (including TSA) improves for everyone.

                     == The crack-pottiest! ==

– Ban the undergraduate business major. Let them go for an MBA after four years spent creating or delivering goods and services. You think I’m joking? Ten years later, you’ll think we entered a Golden Age. (The Chinese leadership consists almost entirely of managers who were promoted from their start as engineers. Consider what happened to Boeing, when they stopped doing that.)

– Stop letting taxpayer-subsidized companies "shout" into space. All right, this one sounds super-crackpot. But as we speak, private companies using dishes that were paid for by the U.S. taxpayer are beaming commercial stunt messages – for everything from snack food companies to Craig’s List – into outer space – supposedly to sell music videos and garage sale items to aliens! 

Sure, it sounds harmless, and it might be. But that’s the problem, we just don’t know. And at minimum it violates laws against amateur interference in diplomacy with foreign powers.[8]

And while we're at it... will at least some of you finally grow up about UFOs?

...and finally...

– Revive rural ghost towns as slightly-subsidized havens of all kinds. Seriously, does anyone look for win-win solutions, anymore? There are rural villages dying all across America. Luring giant vulture companies to come and snap up vast tracts in a crushing steamroller of restored peonage that calls to mind the 1932 Dust Bowl, leaving Karl Marx rubbing his hands, in expectant glee for what comes next.

Sure some of those small towns are showing leadership and verve, adapting, experimenting and thriving with new models… and we must help those, generously! Yay that. Incentives might encourage folks in - say - four small, dying towns to ingather and consolidate with the one that has real prospects.

Only then what to do with those abandoned other three? Where local farmers workers and merchants just couldn’t quite make a profit? Once we’ve helped those folks get profitable on their own feet in a newly-consolidated, vibrant town -- perhaps slightly-subsidizing mom n' pop stores that aren't Walmart? What to do with the other three? 

Are there modern problems that might be helped by offering the bought-out or abandoned ones to certain groups across America? Offering those groups a completely voluntary, subsidized life in fresh air, gardening or farming, or running businesses that (with modest subsidies) need merely to break even, not make a profit?

You can guess I am talking about groups who are already receiving aid (or expensive care-taking or else restricted movement) far more expensively in cities or shelters or minimum security facilities. In a village, taxpayers need only underwrite a marginal bit, for the garden-farm or restaurant or fix-it shop to crest at viability. 

If you can’t imagine half a dozen potential uses and constituencies in just a minute or two – from purely voluntary homeless redoubts to safe places for refugees to do their paperwork, to… well… just try again. There are dozens.

Okay, there are lots of these items that may seem marginal or crackpot today… like votes for women, back 120 years ago. Meanwhile,  I hope one thing above all. That sane American voters – and in other nations allied for the future – will give us the power to wrangle over these things, and enact a lot of them.

---

[1] Political suggestions from 2006 and earlier. http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/suggestions4congress.html

 

[2] The 2019 “Ig Nobel” Economics Prize was awarded for testing which country’s paper money was "best at transmitting dangerous bacteria" (the Romanian Leu won, but the US Dollar was a finalist).

 

[3] A blog on crackpot notions! http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/crackpotsuggestions.html

 

[4] Envision every elementary school kid encouraged to tattle on Uncle Bob’s unsafe and unsecure shed fulla bazookas, while praising dad for the responsible rifle safe. Oh, the NRA would split over this! Then imagine red skulls imploding as liberal and minority kids learn weapon basics.

 

[5] Abortion rates decline more in blue than in restrictive red states, why? All studies attribute it to sex education. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/761753866/u-s-abortion-rate-continues-long-term-decline

 

[6] Transaction taxes might save us all. http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/transactionfee.html

 

[7] The amount of money in the top three investment funds alone is now equal to the GDP of China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-asset-management-in-decline/

http://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php

https://www.pionline.com/article/20190221/ONLINE/190229952/fidelity-sees-record-revenue-operating-income-despite-dip-in-aum

 

[8] See my evaluation of the cult phenomenon called METI or "Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence." http://www.davidbrin.com/meti.html

 

Can we get practical? Is utilitarianism the basis of our society? (And fixing our House)

Writing this during the month after D-Day commemorations, I want to start by linking to a fine essay about how the world changed after World War II, spreading (more widely, though unevenly) the notion and reality of a largely educated and comfortable and free middle class, a dream and partial reality that Karl Marx never imagined possible... 

...only the world then changed then again, when the 6000 year disease of oligarchy began re-asserting itself, dissolving the social contract set up by the Greatest Generation and - ironically - reviving Marx from the dustbin where middle-class society had tossed him. 

The author of that article is slightly to the left of my "Maher-Liberalism," but makes strong points - sometimes citing me - about why today's oligarchy never does anything practical to benefit the ill-educated whites who are their ground troops in a re-ignited confederacy. 

As in the 1860s, and every other phase of the ongoing U.S. Civil War, those poor whites are propelled far more by resentment and revenge, than they are by practical considerations. Especially resentment of every 'nerdy' or fact-using profession... those high IQ stoopid people derided by an Ivy League graduate with a fake-folksy accent. 

Hatred of the very same professions who created all the wealth and technologies and social advances that 'made America great.' The same nerds - from science to law to medicine to journalism, teaching and civil service, all the way to the civil servants and officer corps - who block re-imposition of feudalism.

The Weekly Sift essay includes my comparisons of Asimov's psychohistory to the astonishingly effective sci fi self-preventing prophecies of Karl Marx.

Science fiction authors tend to notice such things. Which is why most of us lean mostly-progressive. Very few of us speak up for a return to those 60 centuries of lobotomized feudal oppression, the way that Orson Scott Card does, with utter-dogmatic repetitiveness. In fact, the unfairly-maligned Robert Heinlein's most vehement denunciations were aimed at America's recurring dalliance with fascist racism, aristocratism and anti-intellectual rage.

I say all that, even though I am also unabashed in pointing out - now and then - the countless, loony tactical errors - often driven by egoistic sanctimony - that cripple the partisans of progress. Errors that keep giving varied versions of fascism yet another chance, then another...

No, we can only serve future generations if we are practical about our tactics and designs, re-assessing what works and building the sort of broad coalitions that defeated naziism and Stalinism and Klanism. And so...

== Points about utilitarianism ... ==

1) The Enlightenment Experiment (EE) of the last 300 years involved many, many theoretical discussions of ethics… and almost none of them interest me! Because I know that I am a delusional ape, transfixed by ornate-sounding incantations! Indeed I have seen what delusional incantations have done in the past, even when well-intended.  

I care about outcomes, especially those that increase the likelihood that this ape’s descendants will deal with all the hifalutin quandaries and questions and big-matters, far better than I can. 

Even utilitarianism – which comes closest – misses the mark with the cliché phrase ‘greatest good for the greatest number.’

Whose good? By whose standards? 

2) What the Enlightenment Experiment has accomplished that is of pragmatic utility is providing systems that maximize critical input from an ever-widening pool of perceptual participants! 

This broadening of empowered input reduced the greatest crime of feudalism… waste of talent.  It also led (barely just in time) maximizing discovery of delusional errors. 

These two endeavors resulted in by far the most successful – by any measure – civilization in all history. And the most self-critical, with millions determined not to repeat mistakes of past generations. And to denounce every new one!

3) This expansion of empowered participation required more than simply feeding and educating more children, expanding inclusive rights, flattening hierarchies and encouraging criticism. 

It also required the creation of systemically regulated. Arenas within which creative adversaries can compete. But that means replacing the brutal forms of competition seen in nature and in feudalism with regulated competition - like how sports leagues operate in tightly umpired ways that maximize positive sum outcomes, by reducing cheating and minimizing blood on the floor.

 (Nature also uses competition and is fecundly creative - it made us. But Nature's competitive creativity is also spectacularly bloody and inefficient. Regulated arenas seem capable of getting competition's benefits in much more positive sum and gentler ways.)

These highly-creative arenas of ritual competition are markets, democracy, science courts and (as I just said) sports. (Some might add journalism). I describe the process here: "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition." (This early version appeared as the lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000.)

As I said, by regulating competition to keep it flat, open, fair, these arenas become positive sum. But maintaining them and suppressing the recurring poison of cheating requires constant attention, fine tuning and hard work

Cynics claim that this dynamic may have worked well for a while (the Rooseveltean social contract) and somewhat for 250 years, but it cannot be maintained: 

“Once the technological/ developmental gap is sufficiently large those dynamics which operate largely under our control and in our favor can quickly change, and former allies become the new masters”. 

But I answer twofold:

1- Yes the odds have always been against the Enlightenment Experiment! Human nature pushes toward the feudalism trap and escapes are rare.

2- Despite that, there is NO such cause effect imperative or automatic outcome! 

Oh, sure, there is always an attractor, in each of the arenas, for cheaters to find ways around the rules, often conniving together. The feudal attractor state is driven by primitive male reproductive strategies that pervade not just Homo sapiens but nearly all species...

And yet, so? Preventing that failure mode is one of the jobs of open, enlightenment politics… sincere negotiation of the incentives and regulations that keep those arena playing fields ever-more flat-fair-creative. Indeed, for feudalism to be restored, the world oligarchy’s top priority must be to destroy “politics” as a means of deliberative negotiated problem solving, especially in the United States.  

And boy, that plot has been successful! So far!

What many neglect is the long history of successful efforts to control and stymie that attractor tendency... 

...including the way that YOU and YOUR VALUES fit into it all, since you are a product of the most extensive propaganda campaign ever waged. Called Hollywood.  

I find it bizarre how many folks - bright ones - seem addicted to the smug notion that "I and just a few others invented suspicion of authority!"

Not. You suckled your values from the teat of Hollywood, same as all your neighbors.  See Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood. So let's fight for that Enlightenment Experiment that may give our heirs the stars! 

Just have some calm sense of proportion, will ya? Gandhi and MLK and Franklin and Douglass weren't just righteous... they were tacticians!  They built coalitions.

== Making at least one house democratic ==

Want the simplest and best and easiest U.S. congressional reforms that aren’t to be found in Polemical Judo?

1.)  Repeal the 1929 Permanent Apportionment Act. It permanently set the maximum number of members in the House of Representatives at 435. Hence a lot of the distortions in proportional representation, since each state gets at least one representative.

2.)  Then legalize a Wyoming Rule, where the number of representatives each state gets is proportional to the population of the least populous state (aka Wyoming with 578,803) which gets one representative. California (population 39,237,836) gets 68 representatives, an increase of 16 over its current 52. That increases the total number of representatives to 573.

3.) This would take just a majority law, needing no amendments.

4.)  Then, more ambitiously, also make both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states (both have more population than Wyoming). DC would get one representative and Puerto Rico would get 6, further increasing House membership to 580.

A decent contractor can expand the hall of congress to seat the additional reps and provide them office space - or these reps can work remotely based on seniority (which is how they assign office space anyways). Have you seen how cramped the UK House of Commons is?

This would also reduce some (not all) of the obscene distortions to proportional representation in the electoral college.

This Washington Post article by constitutional scholar Danielle Allen - ‘The House was supposed to grow with population. It didn’t. Let’s fix that’ offers arguments for the same change that are less partisan, more mature and grownup. And those reasons should suffice! The author’s point? Historically this enlargement would actually be consistent with the framers’ original intent! Which was clearly stated in many places.  

I am less calm and mature and perhaps more angry. The Confederacy has an inherent advantage in the Senate already. It should nt in the House, where every citizen's vote should have equal value.

Period.