WENDELL WARANEN, BENEVOLENT DICTATOR discusses THINGS TO THINK ABOUT: A humanitarian's fantasy

By M B.A. M.A. Hillstrom PBK

At a time when our nation is tumbling down the rabbit hole of plutocracy and autocracy, this unusual book is a much-needed cry for sanity and a call for ordinary Americans to rebel against what the author terms “organized lust for money and power by controlling corporations.” Read. Rebel. Organize. Mobilize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LitFire Publishing
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640450745

M B.A. M.A. Hillstrom PBK

Jim Hightower, author, nationally syndicated columnist, radio commentator, public speaker and editor of the progressive populist newsletter The Hightower Lowdown. A lifetime avid reader on finding early on that "most everything is interesting," J. K. Hillstrom became increasingly concerned on observing this beloved nation's demonstrably backward path brought about primarily by the relentless decades-long pursuit for money and power by controlling individuals and business entities. Also a published writer, he decided to express his concerns in this book for the citizenry's consideration while also suggesting sometimes drastic, yet rational corrections for them that developed into a work somewhat comparable to two semi-iconic predecessor fantasies also written in times of national stress and both well-received by the public, Thomas More's Utopia of 1516 and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1887.

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WENDELL WARANEN, BENEVOLENT DICTATOR,

discusses THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

A humanitarian’s fantasy

Copyright © 2017 by J. K. Hillstrom

ISBN: 978-1-64045-074-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

Printed in the United States of America

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WENDELL WARANEN, BENEVOLENT DICTATOR,

discusses THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

A humanitarian’s fantasy

J. K. Hillstrom, B.A., M.A., PBK, M

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DEDICATION

For the millions of good people

compared to the wingnuts, crudies, and

greedies of this wonderful but lapsed nation.

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Everything needs to be as simple as possible—but not simpler.

- Albert Einstein

AUTHOR’S NOTES

My credentials for writing this book are a farm upbringing, blue collar jobs as a youth, military service, extensive travel within this nation and the world, an excellent Phi Beta Kappa education, and professional employment in the public, private, and academic sectors while living in six of the nation’s major cities. This variegated experience together with steady and diverse reading has provided a broad understanding of this nation’s proceedings in most every arena as well as of its people from poor to prosperous thereby providing immediacy and legitimacy to what the book presents. The M is for the additional blessing of longtime membership in Mensa.

The book’s content is based entirely on personal observations, conclusions, and suggestions resulting from this diverse experience together with information gained from a wide variety of books, magazines, and newspapers and presented under the free speech provision of the United States Constitution. It is primarily a plea for the betterment of this nation that would benefit its people. Further, it was conceived and written well before the somewhat surprising result of the nation’s 2016 Presidential election and has no connection whatsoever to this occurrence.

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I. INTRODUCTION

The Election

It would not have happened but for this nation’s marvelous young people, the 18 to upper 20s demographic. They connected at once with our platform and responded enthusiastically to our objectives regarding fractured governance, failing schools and failed neighborhoods, controlling corporations, taxes, lawyers, lobbyists, overdone advertising and overpriced sports and more, commending our proposed changes and cheering our assertions that they could be achieved. They believed in our New Nation Party, believed our intentions sincere, believed in the goodness of America. Other individuals and factions were of course horrified by some of our declarations, politicians and bureaucrats, corporate executives, various stripes of ideologues, especially the wealthy and ultrawealthy and those aspiring to achieve such a financial nirvana, also the ever-present pessimists and most of the out-of-touchers whose feet and thinking float steadily above the firmament. As an eleventh-grade teacher named Ben Gelb once commented regarding the latter, a statement I often recall, It takes all kinds of people to make a world – and they’re all here. But given facts and valid rationales, the vast majority of people are reasonable.

Soon after the appearance of my third book, A Senator’s Suggestions, that summarized our nation’s forlorn condition and offered realistic steps for correcting its wayward paths, they began coalescing and acting. From Bangor to Miami and San Diego to Seattle they organized and petitioned, door-knocked and e-mailed, tweeted and telephoned in increasing numbers as their activities became nearly a daily feature on the national news broadcasts. They embraced and publicized our mantra of The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, taken directly from Jeremy Bentham, in contrast to the situation currently dominating our nation of seemingly seeing to the Greatest Good for a Tiny Number while politicians and progressives continued to babble about equality and opportunity and plutocrats focused as always at further feathering their fabulous nests. The young crusaders repeated their slogan of Old Bats Out, soon shortened to OBO until it lost its luster, referring to the thousands or millions of entrenched legislators and bureaucrats throughout the land most of whom had held positions for years and decades while steadily turning them into well paid sinecures until beginning to collect pleasant pensions. They distributed leaflets and pamphlets, organized debates, gave speeches at city and village gathering places though brief ones to keep the message succinct and focused. Famously effective were the Tobey Twosomes, named after nineteen-year-old Tommy Tobey of Lorain, Ohio, whose organized boy and girl couples going door-to-door to declaim the opportunity for genuine changes took hold for a time throughout the nation. Middle-aged and older people also began to participate in what pundit Carl Tungay named the Change Crusade, the older ones particularly exemplified in 78-year-old grandmother Ruth Budoff walking with her cane and a carrying bag along the sidewalks of neighborhoods in Oklahoma City and ringing every doorbell or at the least leaving literature at front doors about the new New Nation Party and its resolve to bring about needed changes in government, in education, in the ways of Wall Street and the ways too many corporations were controlling and manipulating too many proceedings in too many facets of this nation’s affairs.

There is no denying that considerable impetus to our campaign was provided by the anonymous and heroic whistle blower who three months after we organized as a party revealed a series of secret meetings periodically taking place at plush venues by a group of corporate potentates and over-amiable Congressional leaders for discussions about purchasing the national government. The proposed plan was to distribute approximately four trillion dollars to the states to acquire it, appoint top business people and politicians among the amiables to major offices of the executive branch from the Presidency on down with salaries and bonuses commensurate with corporate levels, and next appoint business executives also to head significant government departments and high level corporate lawyers to replace the justices of the Supreme Court. It may be, as hastily claimed by the potentates and legislators when the discussions were revealed, that the meetings were mere speculative game-playing by powerful individuals who to good measure had already bought the votes of many members of Congress with large donations and other quiet generosities in return for various cooperations. In any event, the disclosure elicited a loud and steady uproar among the citizenry along with continuing commentary by newspaper columnists and talking heads on television. The meetings were immediately terminated, the Congressional amiables returned quietly to their bastions in the nation’s capital, and not a peep was heard from any of the potentates except for rumors that the whistle-blower had been identified, thoroughly vilified, ostracized, and sentenced to personal perdition. The citizenry did not forget, however, nor did they believe the game-playing claim as weeks after the revelation of the ploy, letters to the editor continued to appear in newspapers that essentially kept asking, How could they?

Finally came the nation-jarring election. From the initial returns it became evident that a colossal transformation was about to occur, to considerable extent because in contrast to their previous lethargic participation in national elections, an unbelievable 92 percent of voters in the 18-to-30 range voted of which an even more incredible 94 percent chose the candidates of our New Nation Party, a count right up there with the most corrupt dictatorships. The 93 percent of the electoral votes our party gained also obliterated all records while our 83% plurality was simply stupendous. The counts for state candidates were likewise phenomenal throughout the country as voted out of office were 363 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives and all but three of the one-third of senators seeking re-election. Also gone were forty-one governors and hundreds of state legislators. The nation had never seen such widespread and emphatic disfavor of this nation’s leadership – or, correction, seen anything remotely like it. In voters among young persons it was a quadrupling of the fervor they had displayed in Barack Obama’s election to his first term in 2008.

From the start of our election campaign discussion developed about a possible dictatorship, no doubt engendered by my half-joking comment in Suggestions that probably only such leadership could end the endless wrangling and lobbying and can-kicking displayed by our government during recent decades as well as the enormous power and influence held and exercised by scores of wealthy corporations. This radical comment did not deter voters from voting for us, however, after which the discussions increased. These did not bring about a dictatorship – not yet. This was the United States of America, after all, an ostensible democratic republic that despite the wide-ranging and ever growing imbalances that had begun to run amok, remained a City on the Hill, a nation renowned and yearned for throughout the world for its opportunities, its freedoms, its variety and its wealth, even for its excesses. For the first time in the nation’s 248-year history, a third-party Presidential nominee and the hundreds of candidates who flocked to his party in seeking to take part in forming a better nation did not merely win the White House but both houses of Congress, most governorships and state legislatures but waltzed away with them, in doing so steam-rollering both the ponderous Republican elephants and the braying Democratic donkeys off the political highway into ditches throughout the country. And about time, many said during the subsequent days of jubilation among millions of voters.

After the prognosticators were proved correct that our party would win the election by a landslide, a national poll conducted by the Public Broadcasting System found that 82% of the electorate, and 94% of the 18-to-30 age group, would accept a benevolent dictatorship with the proviso that its continuance be voted for or against every two years during the usual national elections. On the basis of this vote, our party leaders agreed at a late November meeting that if approved by the citizenry we would function as a dictatorship at some point after we took office while irrevocably agreeing to comply with the two-year votes to continue or not continue it. The title of all elected and appointed officials would remain the same – President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and so on – but their authority would be greater. The authority of the Supreme Court would be placed in abeyance, this provision deemed needed and found acceptable when the PBS poll also revealed a considerable loss of public trust in the Court ever since a 5-to-4 decision based on what many considered a gross misinterpretation of the Constitution in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission enabled corporations and wealthy persons to donate millions of dollars to favored candidates and causes during elections, followed by a second ruling that inexplicably allowed them to donate even more. The majority of the electorate, the poll also found, saw these rulings as disregarding both average people and common sense as well as the definitive statement in the Declaration of Independence that our government’s powers were to derive from the consent of the governed. The same disregard in other political actions pointed out by columnist Carl Tungay also seemingly played a significant role in the populace voting for what many other writing heads claimed would be a large risk. However, the vote counts of the election and the results of the PBS poll indicated most people thought otherwise.

Background

Little did I, Wendell Waranen, imagine when at age fifteen I decided on a career in politics that I would be elected a state congressman only three years after earning a master’s degree in political science following a baccalaureate in history, both at the University of Wisconsin, nor that that was the beginning of a steady progression – to the United States Congress four years later, to the Senate four years after that, also amazingly to a Senate leadership position at the beginning of my second Senate term, and finally to becoming the President-elect of this nation. Yet without an ounce of hauteur in saying this but only to be candid as is my practice, it does track, actually. I was born blessed with the genes of an able individual for which I have ever been grateful. Raised in a loving home, the third of four children of an architect father and a music teacher mother, I learned to read at age four and have continued to read widely, over these years absorbing a fair amount of the acclaimed literature of the recent centuries with an emphasis on political history. I learned quickly and realized already in middle school that I could organize, I could lead, I could write, I could analyze and inspire. Further, I was blessed with both energy and resolve, broadly intelligent with a definite practical bent, and curious about most everything though too with a tendency to question things. I tend to be impatient with nonsensical people, by which I refer to those with unrealistic and untenable beliefs of which I believe there are too many in this nation, and I think I know why. Despite a tendency to take charge of proceedings already in grade school, people who know how I think and function enjoy my company, no doubt because I enjoy most people and especially learning to know them. Early on I realized more or less intuitively the importance of acceptance – of people as they are, of events as they occur, of the world as it is, and as a result have seldom concerned myself with the should-bes and if-onlys that in my opinion interfere with clear thinking even by many highly intelligent individuals. I do soon become impatient, however, with egotists and narcissists and others full of themselves as well as blowhards and close-minded extremists. I do not relate any of this to boast or judge but only to candidly describe myself. In sum, I have been gifted with the ability to lead and contribute and have led and contributed. Now I look forward to leading a most significant contribution in an effort to achieve improvements in the nation’s welfare, or more specifically the welfare of great numbers of its often short-changed and over-maniplated citizens as I have concluded upon observing scores of developments from minor to major in most every sphere of our society during my years of participation in public proceedings.

I wrote A Senator’s Suggestions to bring together and expand upon ideas I had formulated during my terms in the House and Senate for restructuring many of the ways this nation functioned for the simple reason that it was not functioning well. Some that have already appeared in published writings, such as the unsatisfactory state of public education, are dealt with in far more detail in this fourth book. Somewhat surprisingly because of what had seemed to me a complacent citizenry, Suggestion’s readers generally voiced a unified agreement that most of the changes proposed were called for including several drastic ones. Especially surprising was the reaction to my passing comment that probably only a dictatorship could accomplish the changes, especially in countering the powers of large corporations some of whose practices, as most people know, I have often questioned. I did suspect the book might be something of a nation-shaker, yet did not expect it would create the attention it did including in the notion that a dictatorship or a form of it might be tried as the nation’s political processes had achieved next to nothing in recent decades to turn the nation from continuing rancor and divisiveness to a more balanced state of affairs. Consisting of office and blue collar workers, teachers and farmers, academics and professionals, small business owners, newspaper columnists, citizens of every age and especially the young, a wave of sorts began to reverberate throughout the nation as people began to form groups and coalitions that promptly developed into the New Nation Party and soon following that, the campaigning that ran practically on greased wheels and within eleven months resulted in our astounding grand victory. Those of us who had put the wheels in motion and the thousands who helped propel our machine of change have been rewarded beyond belief. Personally I am grateful to the absolutely nth degree for the opportunity, with the determined help of our capable New Nation Party team and the support of most of our citizenry, to seek to put right a lengthy variety of proceedings in this nation that in our collective judgment have gone seriously awry. I now avow to make every effort during the time I will have in office to get well along with achieving the needed changes.

Not surprising was the agreement expressed by so many readers, campaigners, voters, and those who sought participation in our New Nation Party with our contention in Suggestions that a large percentage of the shortcomings and imbalances that have overtaken this nation stem from an overwhelming obsession not only with money but with an organized lust for it that now rules the land. The relentless and ruthless pursuit has penetrated every nook and notch of the nation upon becoming the primary consideration of already wealthy individuals and nearly every undertaking of the country’s wide network of large and concomitantly already wealthy corporations. The question is whether this intense focus and power that money and its seekers have been allowed to gain is good or not good, a matter we will examine from a number of perspectives in the pages that follow. A related aspect is the unreasonable imbalance that has developed between the nation’s wealthy individuals and the vast majority of citizens many of whom labor week after week to scrape out meager livings, a circumstance that continues to creep to larger imbalances. It is a given that nearly always there have been and will be several wealthy and many not wealthy individuals and families in a society, the latter including the outright poor. Those who have achieved the top of the fiscal Bell curve with their gifts of superior intellect and talents and energy and ambition are naturally able to learn, perform, and lead activities that bring higher incomes compared to the far more so-called average individuals who come to life with modest intellectual and other endowments, some of whom in addition are genetically apathetic or disabled including with low intelligence compared with the gift of superior or simply better than average intelligence. But must there be such wretched variances as is currently the case between the very fortunate and the not fortunate? Again, too, one must ask whether such imbalances can align in any way with the humane mantra of The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number.

In our view, these imbalances have resulted in almost a dismissal of much of humanity by those blessed with gifts that have enabled them to have achieved the Greatest Good for a Tiny Number. In any event, achieving this stage of our objective has been a marvelous experience. I am humbly pleased and proud to have played a leading role in bringing about the promise of a renaissance within this nation. I am further humbled at the vast approval given me and those who will strive with me in this quest for changes by both the thousands of individuals who worked diligently to campaigning for us and the millions who voted for us. I am vastly blessed at having been given the abilities to lead these changes and look forward with high resolve to the very many endeavors that lie ahead, difficult though some may be in view of the fierce resistance many will surely engender.

Our Party

Quickly formed and quickly up and operating, the New Nation Party is comparable to political parties everywhere in having a specific orientation, leaders, chains of command, advisors, strategists, publicists, specialists, organizers, fund-raisers, and numerous volunteers for the innumerable major and minor tasks required for any political organization to function. In our case the party has been fortunate in attracting thousands of capable people as its purpose and mission became known throughout the nation. Its leadership as chosen thus far includes such well-regarded individuals as retired Lieutenant General Wallace Tuthill, a superb leader and the nation’s new vice-president; Julius Lord, the conciliatory long-time Speaker of the House of Representatives who will continue in that office and the most notable of the many politicians holding office who changed their political affiliation; Johnson Jurmu, a financial realist who will head the Federal