Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government

By H. John Lyke and Kathryn L. Robyn

In writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, our Founding Fathers established a democratic republic with a solid political basis. What they wrote was the political map that future representatives would need to follow to conduct the people's business in an efficient and effective manner. As long as they faithfully carried out the people's will, our democracy and republic would function in a way congruent with our forebears' wishes.

What in the world happened?

H. John Lyke, a board-certified psychologist and professor emeritus at Metropolitan State College of Denver, and the author of multiple political psychology books, suggests that ever since George Washington retired as captain of our ship of state, subsequent presidents and members of Congress have failed to use the sailing chart of the Constitution. Instead, they've chosen to pursue their own and their political parties' self-interests.

Lyke uses psychological principles to explore the reasons why our government has fallen so low, and in the voice of a kind but determined therapist, he offers simple and viable solutions to get us back to following our map.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491787755

H. John Lyke

Dr. Lyke earned his master's degree in clinical psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia and his doctorate at Michigan State University. He is a board-certified psychologist and professor emeritus at Metropolitan State College of Denver, and was a clinical psychologist for the State of Colorado for many years. He has written the political psychology books The Impotent Giant and What Would Our Founding Fathers Say: How Our Leaders Have Lost Their Way, and co-authored a psychology self-help book, Walking on Air without Stumbling. He lives in Denver and has three grown children and four grandchildren. To find out more, please visit lykeablebooks4u. com, where you can read more about him as well as follow his current and archived blog posts. More important to John, however, is that you join the discussion at lykeablebooks.wordpress.com, where the blog originates and you can post your comments.

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Copyright © 2016 H. John Lyke.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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iUniverse rev. date: 2/24/2016

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

The Stark Reality Is This ...

There Are Solutions

Chapter 1 Better Times for America Were Earlier in Its History

The Simple Truths of Life

Blame My Father for My Obsessions with Democratic Principles

The Principles for Running a Family Are the Same as for Running a Government

Government and Economics Are Different Things

Chapter 2 Why Understanding Our Nation's History Is So Important for Each of Our Lives

Our Nation's Integrity Is Lost when the Constitution Is Violated

Integrity Is What Life and Governing Alike Are All About

Integrity: Always in the Forefront of Washington's and Lincoln's Minds

Chapter 3 Are There Specific Reasons for Our Government Being Broken?

Democracy Is a Political System; Capitalism Is an Economic System

What Has Happened to America's Classless Society?

Three Simple Truths for Politicians and Non-Politicians to Live By

Washington Disliked Political Parties: Was He Right about Them?

The Birth of Political Parties

Chapter 4 Today's Political Parties Pose a Threat to Our Democracy and Republic

Our National Survival Is Dependent on Compromise

Relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

You May Have Legislation Passed Into Law without Compromise Taking Place

The Vietnam War Marked the Beginning when Things Went South ... Most Recently

US Government More Broken and Dysfunctional Over Time

Twenty-First Century Violation of a Presidential Candidate's Integrity

An Example of How Private and Public Virtues Are Violated by Our Politicians

Chapter 5 Encouraging Wisdom & Fresh Ideas, Warning of Bad Ones

Some Interesting Facts about Our Founding Fathers and the 1700s

Politicians Must Use Not Only Their Heads but Also Their Hearts

Reflecting the Common Man's Thinking Was Critical

Chapter 6 The Four Foundations of Freedom in our Constitution Have Been Severely Abused

Private Virtue

Public Virtue

Transferring Public Service to Personal Gain

Park Avenue: Money, Power, and the American Dream

Awarded Lucrative Speaking Contracts and Lobbyist Positions after Leaving Office

Widespread Public Education

Auxiliary Precautions

Gerrymandering the Electoral College

The Imbalance Caused by Unchecked Party Control

Market Forces Are Not One of the Four Foundations

What? Professor Seidman Says the Constitution Is No Longer Relevant?

Chapter 7 The Difference between Working Together Like a Smoothly Oiled Machine and Operating within a Machine

E Pluribus Unum vs. In God We Trust

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Chapter 8 Correct Mindset Is Required to Do Extraordinary Things

Tapping the Very Best Our Personalities Can Offer

Should I Follow the Conservative Yellow Brick Road or My Integrity?

Actions Speak Louder than Words

Chapter 9 Political Potpourri

The Bill of Rights

States' Rights

Integrity Revisited

A Very Effective Means of Conducting Terrorism with Little Cost Involved in the Act

The Second Amendment---Right to Bear Arms---Was Needed Earlier, But Needs Revision Today

What Would Our Forefathers Do About Our Second Amendment?

The NRA and Police-State Tactics Overruling Democratic Principles

Wouldn't Our Forefathers Say the NSSF Is Abusing the Second Amendment's Intent?

Protecting Americans from Gun Violence Is Protected under the Constitution

Chapter 10 Recommended Nonpartisan Solutions

The Twenty-Eighth Amendment: Equal Application of the Law

The Twenty-Ninth Amendment: Term Limits

The Thirtieth Amendment: Campaign-Finance Requirements

The Thirty-First Amendment: Restrictions on Corporate Definition as People

Chapter 11 The Psyche of Our Country

Gandhi's Seven Dangers to Human Virtue (Plus One)

Extremism Is Frequently Reflected in the Words Used to Describe the Plight Before Us

Chapter 12 If Stages of Personal Development Apply Equally to National Development Is Despair Imminent?

A Revolution of Practicing the Heart

When Political Revolutions Are indicated

Chapter 13 What I Learned from My Writing---Some Important Factors That May Help You Navigate through Life Whether or Not You're a Politician

Cognitive Dissonance

Frustration Automatically Leads to Anger

The Importance of Reflection in Our Lives

Purposeful Existence vs. Chance Phenomenon, That Is the Question

Simple Truths Revisited

Chapter 14 Where I Stand on the Political Spectrum

Should Congress and the President's Public-Approval Ratings Really Matter?

Thomas Jefferson's Integrity Was Present in His Writings but Not in His Behavior

Chapter 15 A Summary of Some Salient Reasons Why Our Country Is Headed in the Wrong Direction and What to Do About It

Democracy Is a Political System; Capitalism Is an Economic Plan

Fairness Is Critical If Our Democracy Is Going to Survive in the Twenty-First Century

Economic Liberty Is Fine as Long as It's Fair and Equitable

Value of the Human Spirit Trumps Monetary Value Every Time

A Psychologist's Conclusions

The Expense Would Be Tremendous If We Were to Lose Our Freedoms

Acknowledgments

About H. John Lyke

About Kathryn L. Robyn

To my beloved brother Doug, a journalist who wrote about Truth as it is and will always be ...

Foreword

A foreword for a book is typically written by someone of celebrity, expertise, or professional notoriety regarding the topic and thrust of the work. I do not fit that mold, and later will discuss why I feel I was chosen to compose the foreword for this particular book.

First, briefly about myself. I am the grandson of Polish immigrants who came into this country via Ellis Island, New York, circa 1910. The son of Great Depressionera parents: a father honored by our country as a World War II war hero (Distinguished Service Cross) and a mother who toiled in the factories of the homeland during that same conflict as an iconic Rosie the Riveter. They met and married post-WWII and settled in their hometown of Toledo, Ohio, to make a better life for themselves and their children. And a better life they did indeed provide, as my siblings and I embraced the opportunities set before us and continue to enjoy the fruits of those labors.

I work as a skilled tradesman in the domestic auto industry. I am a voracious reader of nonfiction. I enjoy downhill skiing, golfing, and playing the piano. I have been married to a caring, loving wife for twenty-nine years. We are the very proud parents of two dynamic and talented young adults on the cusp of making their own way in the world.

Mine is not a unique story. I recognize that there are literally millions of American baby boomers with life stories and experiences similar to my own---and equally content to enjoy their stations in life. Yet there is something stressing the fabric of our wellbeing, a nagging notion that our existence of abundance and opportunity is proving illusive for succeeding generations. As good, decent, caring, and responsible people, we are troubled by this. And so we should be.

We recognize that the domestic and global problems of our time are equal in magnitude to that of any previous era but that the mechanisms for seeking resolution to the issues we face are failing us. As a nation, we have overcome immense obstacles in the past yet currently cannot seem to reach consensus on the simplest, most elementary issues. Even fellow citizens with scant awareness of current events and our political system seem to realize that something is amiss.

That, I feel, is why Political Straight Talk, A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government by H. John Lyke is so timely in its publication. An obviously well-researched work that emphasizes deference to the founding framework of our government---the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights---as the toolkit needed to restore our failing political machine to the effective system that the founders envisioned.

Having known John for the better part of my adult life, having collaborated with him on his first political book, The Impotent Giant, and having had numerous animated political discussions with him over the years, I can tell you that his passionate patriotism for our country is what has motivated him to get down into the trenches of our national history and develop a workable solution that attempts to break our political logjam. As a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology, combined with his innate compassion and empathy for his fellow man, John has afforded the reader a unique perspective into the cognitive mechanics of the body politic. His pithy and well-reasoned analysis of political positions serves as a catalyst for heightening our collective attention and political activism. It is a call to compel our politicians to represent our interests with the diligence, dignity, and integrity befitting the loftiness of their offices.

I surmise that choosing me to write this foreword was a matter of perspective. Perspective, in the sense that I am not immersed in this political system that has deteriorated and is in need of repair. I am not a famous politician or political pundit, but that is just the point. An endorsement from those who have presided over the erosion of our structural pillars would ring hollow to the senses of an anxious audience.

Enough about what I am not. What I am is a pretty common guy, maybe like you, living his notion of the American Dream and wishing the same for his countrymen of this and future generations.

Let us ensure that the promise of America is not lost to the ages, by engaging in the process, exercising our voting rights, and insisting that our interests be well represented.

---Randy Pozniak

July 2015

Perrysburg, Ohio

Introduction

I'm an eighty-one-year-old man, and I'm damn mad! Once again, our nation's integrity has been violated. I mention my age because I no longer feel as proud of my country as I felt growing up. Over the course of the past few decades, with a fair degree of consistency, our elected officials either have refused to hear or chosen to ignore what we, the People, have wanted them to do. How have they ignored the will of the people? Consider the Vietnam conflict: the men eligible for the draft clearly expressed their displeasure at going to war with Vietnam by vociferously demonstrating against it. Our elected leaders ignored them for far too long, and we paid a price of 58,209 lost lives of military personnel.

That was when I woke up. If my country had lost its way, I needed to start learning why and then speaking out.

In my dotage, I have written two books addressing the issues that have concerned me over the last decade or two. The first one was The Impotent Giant: How to Reclaim the Moral High Ground of America's Politics. In researching that book, I learned about our founding fathers in ways I never had in school, and then I wrote, What Would Our Founding Fathers Say? How Our Political Leaders Have Lost Their Way. This third volume might be considered a companion to those because it started as a blog subsequent to their publication, but it goes beyond them as well. I wanted to delve even more deeply into the values we have, to my mind, lost.¹ Some would say we have always veered off course from those values, pulled back time and again to a virtuous path. The more I learn, the more I might agree. But it is the vision of America that has moved me from the time I was a little boy. And I still believe that vision of a democratic republic for, by, and of all the people is our one true and righteous path. How do we get back on it?

When you consider we're now the only superpower in the world, which controls most of the world's economies, has a culture that has swept the globe and a military that, once smaller than Japan's prior to WWII, has grown ever bigger---opinions vary about how big, from bigger than the next seven countries combined to bigger than the next nine to bigger than the next fifteen, and so on, with some, such as former Utah governor Jon Huntsman (R), suggesting our military is bigger than the rest of the world's combined²---impotence might not be the first word that comes to mind. However, when we compare ourselves at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first with the first half of the 1900s, we can see that we have lost the appearance---or at least the feeling---of being as vital or potent and powerful as we are. Moreover, we seem no longer able to effect significant or even meaningful, much less permanent, change, either domestically or globally, as we were able to do prior to WWII.

Our ultimate impotency becomes clearer when we look at our country's battle against terrorism, despite having thrown trillions of dollars at the problem---to say nothing of the loss and maiming of human lives of both our military personnel and the many civilians and soldiers of the targeted countries where terrorism thrives. Is it any wonder I see our country as impotent? It seems any observer of the terrorist threat would agree.

What is so tragic about the Iraq War fiasco is that we can no longer depend on our president and Congress to make foreign policy decisions that will reflect the best interests of this country. Not that they have consistently made good decisions in the past, as evidenced by the Vietnam War misadventure; however, in comparison to other wars, the disastrous Iraq conflict is an especially bitter pill to have to swallow. No loss of life or limb is justified in an ill-advised war. The cost to our country's treasury has been astronomical and has put this country in serious debt for years to come. In Impotent Giant, I showed how the source of our ill-conceived militarism is multileveled but centers around money: "Our capitalistic pursuit of dependable energy sources has led to the dubious policy of attempting to impose democracy where it may not fit.³ Now I wonder whether it is democracy that we're trying to impose or just capitalism.

Going further, noted author and veteran political journalist Robert W. Merry explains in his book Sands of Empire that when the West intervenes in conflicts or attempts to shape the politics of those regions, we are often ignorant of the significance of a particular region's history and culture. Dismissing such information can lead to disastrous unintended consequences. He writes:

The historical and cultural ignorance that guided America in the Balkans led to unfortunate results far removed from what has been predicted by those policies' architects. But the stakes were low for America and the outcome of limited consequence. The stakes in the war with Islam are enormous, and policies guided by similar historical and cultural ignorance could lead to disaster." ⁴

After stressing that America's leaders lacked the necessary knowledge about the sentiments and goals surrounding Islamic culture, Merry refers to our democratization efforts in Iraq as probably the worst approach to a cultural clash that could be devised at such a stage of hostilities.⁵

Merry comments on the dangers of undertaking a new kind of war to spread Western-style democracy without regard for history and culture when he writes, Captivated by the Cold War mentality of his top advisors and intoxicated with the idea of spreading Western-style democracy throughout the lands of Arabia, Bush embrace[d] the post-9/11 foreign policy destined from the beginning to lead his country towards calamity.⁶

As we now know, as of February 3, 2016, the situation in Iraq has followed very closely to what Merry predicted.

Armed with additional information, I made as the main mission of my second book, What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Today's Leaders Have Lost Their Way, the task of further explaining why our nation had become so powerless in being able to function at its optimum, even though our Founding Fathers had established our homeland as a republic, founded on democratic principles. In it, I explain why, despite our worldwide reputation as the last-standing global bully, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution continue to be revered the world over. Partly that is because though our leaders seem to continuously lose their way throughout our brief history, our Constitution has mechanisms built into it that enable us to get back on track when we decide to.

In fact, these documents can bring us on track with our values even when we were off-track to begin with. By that I refer to such horrific decisions as the intentional genocide of the indigenous peoples who inhabited this land and the wholesale theft of their territories, the institution of slavery which built the country on the forced labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants, the refusal of suffrage to blacks and women, the betrayal of sovereignty to the Indian nations, the parceling off of rights and responsibilities to certain groups and not to others, and so on. These are examples of how our own Founding Fathers started us off wrong, and the list goes on of the many ways the need for power repeatedly corrupts our leaders into justifying the taking of what belongs to the people---or some of the people---away from us time and again. A few more examples of our leaders having lost their way, most of which has not been redressed even yet: the Civil War, the Robber Baron Era, the Hoover FBI period, McCarthyism, segregation, and on. Like so many civilizations, ours began its history with some very serious disfigurements of its integrity or its character. But still, we have this document, where the best of what we can be has foundation, with mechanisms built into it whereby we have brought ourselves back on track in the past and put an end to many of these unconstitutional abuses, even amending the thing itself to clarify that these rights and responsibilities of citizenship are universal to citizens and shall not be denied by any power or any amount of money.

The big question this time, here in the twenty-first century, is this: will these same mechanisms continue to function optimally to protect our nation's---hence, our people's---integrity? Will these mechanisms, with their general overview of the meaning of liberty for everyone and their specific guarantees and limitations of individual rights and government rights, continue to operate as written so that this nation survives and prospers as it's meant to under our more-enlightened principles, and we, as a people, continue to develop our individual moral characters in regard to our fellow Americans as we have before? Only if the answer is yes can we safeguard our nation's democracy and republic from total destruction. And the answer will only be yes if we get on with addressing some of the underlying problems hiding within our Constitution that need to be corrected---but again, it is constructed with the means to make these corrections as they arise.

And that's what this book, Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government, is all about. I will approach these issues from a a variety of directions---as psychologists are wont to do when faced with what appears to be an intransigent problem for a patient. For I am not a political scientist, nor an investigative journalist, nor a historian or an activist; I'm not a political animal of any sort. I am just a man, which is not to say I do not have many identities that qualify me to explore these issues crucial to the future of our country. My education and work, for fifty or more years, has been as a clinical psychologist, which explains why I approach politics through a psychological lens. But even before that, I am a human being on this planet, though one with a particular view: I'm a white, male American, a father, and a grandfather with more than eight decades of experience. I've lived through a world war, at least a score of world conflits, massive industrial, economic, cultural, and technological changes that have fertilized the growth of an American Empire that has expanded to epic proportions, while individuals here and around the world---particularly those not white and not male, which comprise the majority of the world, but yes, those of us who seem to dominate it as well---feel less and less empowered personally and politically.

The psychological and perceptual problems that engineer those feelings do not belong to the individuals, but rather to the value system, in all its manifestations, that has taken over this country, the United States of America, via its leaders, elected and non-elected alike. This growing system might be likened to a Hydra, the mythical serpent with a seemingly endless supply of regenerating heads, lurking in the waters beneath our ship of state and devouring our originating, democratic values. This book takes on this Hydra-headed values killer in many of its manifestations, approaching them as separate things that emanate from the same monster (in archetypal terms), or disease (in psychological terms), of values. If I seem to repeat myself, the reasons are twofold: history repeats itself when it is not understood, and this monster's heads are many, though its heart is illusory. Solutions cannot be offered until these manifestations are thoroughly explored and weighed against the missing heart. We're going to examine quite a few of them, in hopes that readers learn to recognize the beast as a whole and stop getting fixated on each head that arises to distract us from the underlying, heartless system.

We must remember that our democracy was formed and our Constitution was written on the basis that the will of the people would determine the republic's political direction and which issues needed resolving. More and more people are seeing that other forces than the will of people have taken over making those decisions.

In writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, our Founding Fathers established our democratic republic on a firm and solid political basis. What our forefathers had written in those marvelous documents was the political map that would need to be followed if future generations of politicians would not appear impotent and powerless to conduct the People's business in an efficient and effective manner. As long as the people's representatives faithfully carried out the people's will, our democracy and republic would function in a way congruent with our Founding Fathers' wishes. But that is not what happened.

I might even suggest that it has been ever since George Washington served as our country's president and retired as captain of our ship of state that our ship began to veer off course of serving all Americans, because the subsequent captains (presidents) and crew (Congress) failed to use the sailing chart, which was the Constitution, that Washington and his crew used when he was president. Instead, future presidents and Congress allowed their integrity to be compromised by ignoring bits and pieces of the Constitution in favor of their own and their political parties' self-interests.

Initially, the veering off course was minor, for white male citizens at any rate, and many infractions would be corrected over time; however, as political parties and industry became more established and the formation of lobbies became more entrenched in government affairs, the self-serving direction that our ship of state was headed became more severe and less responsive to the people's needs. It wasn't long before things in the capital became more in favor of the needs of the politicians, political parties, and the lobbyists who helped finance the elections of the political candidates. Incumbent politicians then returned the favor by helping the lobbyists get bills passed that favored the interests of the corporations the lobbyists represented. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the veering off course became very severe, the direction being determined by the political winds of whatever party was dominant in Congress at the time---the negative congressional influence reaching its apex by the year 2008, when President Barack Obama became the first Black captain of our ship of state, and the crew (Congress) were filled with antipathy toward him---the opposing political party, the Republicans, feeling a decidedly stronger dislike for him than their Democratic counterparts. The oddest thing being that the crewmembers of both political parties were expressing the feeling that the direction country was sailing was going to end up being the ruin of our country's way of life. The rancor that continues to prevail with Captain Obama at the helm is so great that by the year 2015, it had reached almost mutinous proportions. As a result, the direction our ship of state is sailing appears as erratic and directionless as a ghost ship.

Since the beginning of the turn of the century, most of our politicians began using only their heads (but hardly their reason) and not their hearts when making political decisions. It is not even clear that they have been using our founding documents as the blueprint for our government to follow. One of the biggest reasons for that is allowing individual and political parties' selfish interests to dominate their thinking to such a degree that working toward something greater than themselves---such as our country---has fallen by the wayside.

More than two centuries ago, Washington himself was concerned about that possibility with the intrusion of party politics, but that battle was lost before he left office. It turned out he was right, and the country has slipped further and further away from the idea of one people, many perspectives, ever since.

That's not going to do it if we expect our nation to survive the political climate that we are currently experiencing in our century. Instead, our rudderless ship of state will continue to get bandied about by the forces and directions of the capriciously prevailing political winds. Consequently, the tried-and-true course---the ship's chart, drawn by our Founding Fathers, will have been discarded, and much like the pirates of old, today's politicians will continue to seek fame, power, and fortune for themselves and their political parties at the American taxpayers' expense.

What we don't seem to understand as a country, as citizens, is that we all have the necessary ingredients to embrace life in general and our country in particular, just as our Founding Fathers did, way back there in the 1700s. But how can that happen, if our politicians continue to act like pirates rather than statesmen?

It didn't take me long to realize I needed to write a companion to What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Today's Leaders Have Lost Their Way. In that book, I focused on the ways our governmental process has become dysfunctional and the reasons it has occurred historically. This book goes further, demonstrating that the blame for that dysfunction lies squarely with the political process and the types of people who are shaping it. In both books, I have provided the reader nonpartisan solutions to help fix our broken and dysfunctional system of government so that we once again can say, I am proud to be an American.

The Stark Reality Is This ...

Our government is broken and dysfunctional. Its laws and judicial decisions have contributed to a huge income gap between rich and middle income, to say nothing of the poor. Congress cannot come to agreement on any issue that is causing suffering in our country or the world. There seems to be a double standard in the way laws are enforced across the board---the old steal a little and you go to jail, steal a lot and they make you king has been codified into both law and culture: Punishments are meted out in opposite fashion depending on whether the lawbreaker is white or black. Prisons are fast becoming privatized profit machines filled with people of color convicted of drug crimes, when we know that white people use (and deal) drugs to a much greater degree than do people of color, but they rarely get punished for it.⁷ And the very idea that government is here to serve the needs of the people, to address the problems all of society faces, to come up with solutions that make it better for everyone, and that a conflict of needs among the people requires a compromised solution that doesn't leave anyone in a world of hurt does not even seem to be on anyone's mind anymore.

The even starker reality is that if we don't rectify the causes of our government's broken and dysfunctional state, and if our twenty-first-century political leaders continue to present a caricature of leadership, debating the issues with childish arguments, and only being interested in zinging the opposition with deceitful one-liners, by the end of this century, if not before, the United States will join the historical list of fallen empires. What will stand in its place? Exxon-Mobil? Koch Industries? Monsanto? If it's some multinational board of directors, they will not be elected by you and me, that's for sure.

There Are Solutions

Our politicians, in particular, need to understand why they must abandon their narcissistic and selfish interests in favor of being other-centered. After all, they are our public servants and they are supposed to serve. Then, with love of country---and the planet on which it sits---in their hearts, they can begin to respond to our individual and national needs more congruently with the philosophy written in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This point must be made again and never forgotten, because therein is written the formula for the kinds of freedom and responsibilities that this democratic republic is supposed to guarantee to us and require of us---private citizens and public servants, alike. Only then does the whole become greater than the sum of its parts, which is what our name, the United States of America, is supposed to reflect. Well, it's all about maturing, isn't it.

If we do not mature, like all living organisms, we will die young as a nation. The collapse of our democracy and our republic will occur. Something else will take its place, but it will not be anything our Founding Fathers envisioned as colonists, fought a revolutionary war to defend and protect, and finally put down on paper, signed, and ratified state by state.

It is because of this danger that you, me, and our fellow Americans need to act now. If we don't respond to this urgent clarion call, a quickening of the ongoing erosion of our stated principles and moral doctrines---as expressed through our freedoms---will be furthered instead.

The threats to our system of government are real and, specifically, come from within. If the erosion of our democracy continues unabated, where the wealthy continue to get richer, the poor continue to live more miserably, and the middle class falls further and further behind a comfortable standard of living, ultimately something will have to give. Such a state of disequilibrium cannot stay that way indefinitely, particularly if these conditions continue to worsen. When the boiling point, the critical mass of discontent, is reached, all it would take would be a charismatic leader with a lot of fear and marketing prowess on his side to light the metaphoric match, and bang---let the revolution begin! Or perhaps worse, we won't even notice when the president has become a spokesmodel and Congress a clearinghouse for consumer complaints, while the CEO and board of directors that run everything around the world, through means both militaristic and marketing, are unknown to us. Perhaps that has already occurred. But let's just say, for the sake of our humanity, that we still have a chance to pull back from the brink.

We must remember that the founding of our country was based on the motto E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. This motto was proposed for the Great Seal of the United States by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson in 1776. This Latin phrase offered a strong statement of America's determination to form a single nation from a collection of states.

In recent years, its meaning has come to suggest that out of many peoples, races, religions, languages, and ancestries has emerged the single people and nation that represents the concept of the melting pot as it applies to our beloved country the United States of America.

I emphasize United so you don't miss it. I don't want it to be overlooked, although it is hardly how we view the red and blue states that make up---shall I say white?---America today. In other words, we have created these false divisions that keep us apart, not attending even a little bit to the realities of our multicolored skins or perspectives, as would be suggested by our mantra E Pluribus Unum. The reason our United States of America are anything but united is because they are at continual loggerheads with one another rather than putting our heads together for the good of all. The thought of the two political parties cooperating is the furthest thing in the politicians' political minds; consequently, their wish to accommodate one another in a way to further respond to the needs of all Americans is not even under consideration. I mention all of this to emphasize that if our system of government is destroyed, the destruction will come from within and the symptoms, not the cause of such demise, will look like economic ruination.

Let us remember, our current system of capitalism had yet to be adopted as an economic system when the country was formed. But financial or economic inequality has put a strain on our democracy over time, pulled from the brink more than once over unfair practices of the owner class: during the Industrial Revolution period of the robber barons and during the Great Depression. An argument might also be made that the Civil War was fought over unfair inequality of labor and wealth---what is more unfair than slavery and the ownership of human beings? Strong leaders in each of these cases have been necessary in order to pull us back from the brink or what could have precipitated the demise of our democracy and our republic. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt come to mind. The reason for the disparity of income between the three social classes in the past are instructive for us today: those who were wealthy controlled our nation's purse strings and, over the years, from one generation to the next, did not observe the democratic principles of being fair and equitable in the right to self-determination of and the disbursement of monies to those who should be properly paid for the fruits of their labor.

Then as now, it is this inequality of income that is the clearest external symptom of a broken system of government. The cause for the breakdown was the political authorization of those who have monetary power to disregard the democratic principle of being fair and equitable in the distribution of monies to their employees.

As its title asserts, Political Straight Talk: A Prescription for Healing Our Broken System of Government aims to tell it straight, without rhetoric or prevarication. In fact, it has already done this job, as it is a compilation of previously posted articles and blogs where I have exposed how today's politicians routinely violate various dictates of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Violating these precepts is how the system breaks; continuing to violate them ensures our broken system of