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  A Prophetic American Voice provides a Blueprint for Citizens to              Restore Their Power and Diminish the Influence of Corporations and         Financial  Institutions and Create a Just and Life-Affirming Society

America’s Future: Requiem or Renaissance? An Agenda for the Transformation of Our Nation and Ourselves, a new book by Bernard Gluckstern, has just been released by RoseDog Books.

In America’s Future: Requiem or Renaissance? An Agenda for the Transformation of Our Nation and Ourselves, Bernard Gluckstern has articulated both a vision and a strategic approach to its implementation. He explores the various tactics and mechanisms which those at the summit of our financial pyramid deploy to ensure that we remain a society that is exhausted, apprehensive, and in conflict, as the result of our deteriorating financial circumstances. His antidote to these afflictions is contained in a comprehensive plan of action that rewards ethical business enterprises and compels mammoth companies to reform their negative behaviors or face extinction. These objectives can be achieved by citizens who will no longer permit the current injustices.

“At its core this book is a humanistic appeal for sanity in a world where the playing field has grown increasingly inequitable. The premise is Great Power Heal Thyself, in other words as American citizens we have the capacity to reform our country, first of all and the “spread effects” could be enormous. The U.S. could rightfully reclaim the global respect it once had as the model of a true functioning democracy.” Edward C. Green, Ph.D. Director, The New Paradigm Fund

About the Author
Bernard Gluckstern has devoted much of his professional career to the mitigation of poverty and the empowerment of the poor in such locales as Watts (Los Angeles), Appalachia, New York City, and Washington, D.C. He is the recipient of a M.A. degree in Political Science from Brown University and a B.A. degree in Philosophy from Alfred University. In addition, Mr. Gluckstern served in the United States Marine Corps Reserve during the Vietnam era. He resides in Washington, D.C., with his extraordinary wife, Lisa.

America’s Future: Requiem or Renaissance? An Agenda for the Transformation of Our Nation and Ourselves is a 152-page paperback with a retail price of $15.00. The ISBN is 978-1-4809-6377-1. It was published by RoseDog Books of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For more information, or to request a review copy, please go to our virtual pressroom at http://www.dorrancepressroom.com or our online bookstore at http://www.rosedogbookstore.com. For Merchandising Coordinator call 1-800-788-7654 or send email to: bookorders@rosedogbooks.com

During the month of June, 2015, my publisher Rose Dog Press shall disseminate in both a soft cover and e-book format a literary effort to which I have devoted much of 2014 and the winter and spring of this year as well, ” America’s Future: Requiem or Renaissance?” An Agenda For The Transformation Of Our Nation And Ourselves.

This effort in activist scholarship was animated by the desire to provide a comprehensive course of individual action that our citizens might undertake to be responsive to so much of our current economic, political, and social circumstances that are both enormously dysfunctional and cause moral injury and material suffering to so many among us, particularly those who reside in the dungeons of poverty as well as those whose tenuous grasp on a middle class status is becoming ever more compromised and impaired.

Though there are numerous texts which have found their way to the American public in recent years that have set forward multi-tier critiques athat are reflective of a sophisticated and trenchant analysis of our contemporary cultural afflictions and the companionate unraveling of the efficacy and the influence or so many of our populace who are not members of the miniscule class of our plutocratic elite,  few of these efforts have provided a strategic approach to the amelioration of these intensifying destructive forces that are consuming so much of our national heritage and the democratic normative predicate on which our country was constructed.

As a result, what has animated my undertaking has been two fundamental desires.   The first is the wish to present a contemporary portrait of the current horrific social reality with which so many of our fellow Americans and being overwhelmed and diminished.   The second objective is a fervent commitment to formulate and  distribute  both a vision and a strategy and the modalities and procedures for its total implementation that possess the potential to ameliorate the tragic current  political apathy, impotence, and economic inequality that in which an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens are imprisoned.

This document is a blueprint to restore the efficacy of our population by augmenting  the magnitude and success of ethical business enterprises, and compelling mammoth corporate enterprises both public companies and private financial institutions and others, to recind and reform their negative and culturally deforming behaviors or face extinction. These goals can be achieved by the commitment and exertions of our citizens who will no loonger permit the continuation of the current injustices for which these entities are responsible.

Recently, the newly installed CEO of Goldman Sachs recounted the struggles he confronted in acquiring an education.  Moreover, he relayed the fact that one of his teachers during his adolescence suggested to his parents that with his meager intellectual capacities he would be fortunate to obtain a position as a truck driver.

Obviously, he has demonstrated that prediction was grieviously in error given his accomplishments in the world of investment banking. He further proclaimed that the principal antidote to the rampant and escalating inequality that has characterized our nation’s contemporary economic circumstances was the acquisition of various educational credentials which would enable their recipients to consign their interminable periods of residence in the dungeons of poverty in the U.S. to a regrettable personal history and enter the ranks of the thriving and robust American middle class.

Oh that this might be the future that those who implement his recommendations would be afforded.   The realities surrounding this prediction are however,  grieviously flawed and the prospects for its attainment are statistically grim and anemic at best.

At the moment approximately 70% of our nation’s population are bereft of college degrees of all and any character and level of accomplishment. The resources required to undertake various courses of study to acquire skills within a vocational or community college setting are beyond the capability of the overwhelming majority of these high school drop-outs/graduates who receive in most instances little more the minimum wage.

Moreover, many courses of study both within the public educational arena and the not for profit, non-profit and for profit arenas at the culmination of these academic efforts lead to very few job opportunities and thus the overwhelming majority of those who have become burdened with loan obligations to pursue these credentials find themselves unemployable and substantially in debt.

Those who are enrolled in degree programs whether it be within private colleges and universities or state institutions of higher education who successfully complete the acquisition of the various undergraduate degrees they have sought to acquire, nonetheless have discovered that our nation’s current economic climate is most inhospitable, i.e. in excess of 42% of current graduates are rewarded with job offers that pay little more than the minimum wage, or are in areas of the economy in which they have no interest, and/or are internships for which no compensation is provided.

As a result many of these students return to their parents homes and embark upon years of  a schedule of loan repayments to the institution that provided the funds for their collegiate journey, delaying marriage and child rearing and experiencing a most spartan existence in which little but the bare necessities are affordable.

During the previous four decades in which the ideology of the neoconservatives has been in the ascendancy, globalization, the continuing replacement of employees by technological innovations, the dominance of the use of part-time contractors and “at will” staffing to achieve greater cost reductions in the wages provided to workers, the departure of many corporate headquarters from the U.S. to other nations as the result of mergers with foreign corporate entities which have reduced their tax obligations,

In addition, does there exist  the  unwillingness of corporate behemoths to repatriate the trillions in profits that reside outside the U.S., and the depredations that “activist investors”  have inflicted with their obsession to compel boards of public companies and their senior management to continuously strive to increase the value of the equity they possess in these public companies.

Furthermore, these groups of investors also insist on ever augmented dividend payments, and a companionable demand that the increases in profitability which technological innovations attain must be allocated to the senior executives rather than to the employees of this company, have cumulatively conspired to greatly minimize the importance, relevance, and most importantly the capability of educational attainments to afford its recipients with a meaningful and significant access to the middle class.

At the moment approximately 4 million jobs are vacant, and approximately 23 million Americans are either unemployed, underemployed, so discourage that after months or years of seeking a position have in a state of discouragement and exhaustion ceased their efforts to obtain employment, and perhaps most tragically the numbers of those who fall within the category of the poor and the near-poor in our society exceeds 100 million.

What is required is a multi-tier comprehensive national program to both create those jobs necessary to rebuild our infrastructure, improve our public educational systems, and ensure that every American has access to an employment circumstance that is adequately compensated and provides for the use of their talents, training, and energies.