At this crucial moment of our nation’s existence we at the Center For The Preservation of American Democracy (a subsidiary of the Fund For An Equitable America) , are formulating a contingency plan to ensure the survival of our democratic polity when the national plebiscite in November is concluded.

We are united in our belief that irrespective of the particular tactics and initiatives which Donald Trump and allies among the Republican and Conservative elements of his electoral base deploy be it voter suppression, the disruption of absentee balloting, grievously reducing both the number of locations at which voters may cast their ballots and the hours of their operation, as well as those decisions at the local, state, and federal levels to inhibit or disenfranchise former felons and other minority constituencies that comprise our populace.

The purpose of these strategies is to ensure both the retention of the current Republican majority in the U.S. Senate, secure the president’s reelection, recapture the House of Representatives, and displacement of Democratic governors throughout the United States.

Though it is our fervent hope that our fears are unfounded the behavior in which Donald Trump has engaged from the moment he was elected, that has inflicted enormous damage on both our federalist system and the constitutional provisions we have been historically afforded, conveys the unmistakable and uncompromising intention to retain his occupancy within the White House by any and all means necessary, regardless of the fatal wounds to our system of government which those actions shall instigate.

Thus in response to this threat of mortal harm to our republic we are assembling a coalition of Americans who by virtue of their expertise and experience shall prepare a comprehensive, multi-tier paradigm/protocol to both neutralize those threats that are currently manifesting, and any that may be introduced during the weeks and months that remain until the election is held on November 3.

Our agenda of activities will be unprecedented. It will mount legal challenges to efforts to disenfranchise voters, coordinate with former senior officials of the Justice Department to prepare for any eventualities to which a judicial response is required, maintain unceasing communications with those at the apogee of the leadership of the House of Representatives lest the fate of the presidency be determined by that body, and engage in continuous conversations with former Secretaries of Defense and retired flag officers, should their assistance to rescue our democratic system be necessitated.

We shall engage in dialogue with those who wish to maximize voter turnout, nonprofits, communities of faith, the LGBT universe, those who wish to achieve immigration reform and obtain formal citizenship for the cohort of “Dreamers.”

So too shall we solicit the commitment to our agenda of those who support prison reform and police accountability, and those who advocate the expansion of union membership in the both the private sector and among public service employees, and those entities who are engaged in protecting the environment, establishing public banks, and are converting private corporations within the energy and technology realms into public utilities, pursuing health care reform and augmenting educational opportunities.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly we shall identify the specific institutions and individuals who are providing financial assistance be they public companies or significant elements of the private financial structure, that seek to retain their oligarchic domination of our nation and impose a national boycott of these companies and the foundations that represent their interests to deprive them of the resources to fund these activities.

However, in the event that our spectrum of strategies is unsuccessful and the president retains his office by methods that are legally suspect and ethically compromised, we shall orchestrate a national campaign of unceasing demonstrations and civil disobedience and the simultaneous withdrawal by the nation’s workforce from the entirety of our economy and as the result of this general strike shall we accomplish the literal suspension of all productive activity throughout the nation. We shall remain in this posture of civil agitation and economic paralysis until a process of political legitimacy has lawfully removed Mr. Trump from the Whitehouse and we have witnessed the restoration of a fully functioning and vibrant democracy.

Among the ranks of our most competent public health experts are those who assert that the creation and maintenance of a national cultural environment in which we are released from the imprisonment of the pandemic which is currently wreaking such havoc on both our individual psyches and our economic institutions, may not be achieved before the advent of 2022.

It is at that moment they contend when a combination of vaccines, the attainment of ” herd immunity” and other associated social practices we have implemented to retard the expansion of this pathogen among our citizens, will have collectively denuded this biblical scourge of its capability to inflict great suffering and death.

Whatever the accuracy of their predictions obviously it will not be possible to either confirm or refute their presumptions for many months, surely our previous life as a society has been substantially altered and the probability that when we resume the operational dynamics and rhythms that were extant before the onset of this virus, its structural configurations and primary institutions may in some substantial regard be irrevocably altered.

Thus, as this interregnum lengthens and we remain the hostages of an involuntary quarantine beyond such obvious measures as deploying various safeguards against the contraction of this fatal malady on behalf of our families and ourselves, the question I wish to pose to those who encounter this essay is the following: “Are you content to return to an involvement in our diurnal activities that is a replication of those atmospheric influences and forces that were previously ascendant?”

More specifically, is it your wish when life resumes throughout America to be a participant in the strife and enmities that are rendering our republic asunder? Do you seek a reengagement in the conflicts and political and rhetorical combat that is so prevalent and injurious to the maintenance of our democracy?

In my view if we return to a societal reality that is nothing but the resumption of the hostilities and our re-immersion in uncompromising ideological doctrines in which we view those with whom we disagree not as opponents but as enemies, and the ultimate fate derived from that collective perspective will produce a national future that witnesses a dissolution of our democracy either in the form of secession or civil insurrection.

For under these circumstances our triumph over the coronavirus will justly be regarded as a hollow and most tragic accomplishment, given the equally lethal cultural circumstances in which our daily activities will once again resume.

In numerous recent conversations with those whose normative postures and intellectual acuity I value and respect one question continually resurfaces: In the absence of an alternative paradigm to the contemporary and ascendant structure of neoliberalism with all its grotesque moral defects, material inequalities and impoverishment, and the continued diminution of the potency and impact the majoritarian will of our citizens can obtain in the realm of those public determinations our elected officials formulate, what else is accessible to our polity but in postures of outrage and resistance to return to the struggles in which we have been embroiled for the past half-century.

Thus, beyond all else what is absent at this moment in our nation’s existence is both an ethical framework which delineates a humanistic vision of the optimal manner in which we should organize our society, and the political and economic instruments and institutions which shall translate that overarching moral construct that radiates and reflects as its ascendant reality, a seminal commitment to the principles of social justice and its vibrant and continuous presence at the epicenter of our nation that dwarfs all other concerns and considerations in its importance.

In the second installment of this exposition I shall provide the reader with both the current scholastic efforts that are transpiring beneath the banner of my organization, The Fund For An Equitable America, which is at the forefront of those endeavors our nation’s re-founding fathers and mothers are formulating; and subsequent to the completion of these efforts the political strategies and initiatives that will be imperative for our citizens to ferociously commit their unrelenting energies and volition, to achieve the implementation of a humanist alternative to our present system that is so replete with grievous authoritarian defects and mammoth moral deficiencies.

The final element of this crucial exercise in social scientific scholarship will be a comprehensive and particularistic tactical primer, that will fully delineate the requisite multi-faceted campaign we must deploy to accomplish the complete, systematic, political decapitation of this nation’s oligarchy, that by its dismemberment shall forever preclude the possibility of its recrudescence or resurrection.

Amidst the chaos and death the escalating trajectory of the virus is inflicting and the obscenity of a commander-in-chief who veers between the extremities of a colossal fecklessness and the incoherent and contradictory assertions of enormous progress and accomplishment his administration is compiling in the war against this pathogen, those of us who are irrevocably committed to the construction of an equitable America impervious to his mendacity and the brutal disregard for the suffering his premeditated neglect is inflicting upon those citizens who do not comprise his base, continue unrelentingly in the intellectual labors required to construct a paradigm which when implemented shall usher into being a society in which social justice is ascendant and continuous.

When ultimately this plague of biblical magnitude has spent its force we who are engaged in the herculean effort to both formulate the normative predicate and those institutional instruments to translate those humanistic values into an operational reality are hopeful that rather than a return to the lethal conflicts and internecine enmities that shall in the not too distant future be responsible for the terminal and fatal dissolution of our experiment in republican democracy, our populace will have at is disposal a prospective future in which as the result of both the substantial mitigation of inequality and the eradication of impoverishment, the poisoned contemporary atmosphere will yield to a cultural environment of robust fellowship and relative pacifity.

The sequence of scholarship in which we are engaged is to identify from among those traditions be they theological in character such as the touchstone of Judeo-Christian precepts or from among the community of philosophers such as Kant and Aristotle and more contemporary prescriptive notions such as those advocated by Abraham Maslow, Gar Alperovitz, John Rawls etc. about the optimal ordering of a democratic polity in which the fullest possible empirical expression of collective equity and self-actualization become possible.

Subsequent to the completion of this endeavor we shall then conduct a review of those prescriptions elucidated by various economists and political theorists whose conceptual frames of reference attempt the humanization of capitalism, the operationalisation of those mechanisms of social democracy/democratic socialism, and the systems, forms, and dynamics that both retains the inherent capability of entrepreneurial activity and the accumulation of personal affluence which the success in these endeavors permits and presupposses but circumcribes the political influence the accumulation of wealth currently translates into and requires the imposition of significant contributions by these individuals in the form of a national code of progressive taxation.

At this juncture of our preliminary exertions it is impossible to delineate the final products of our epistemological handiwork will assume, however, you may be certain that whatever these recommendations reflect be they renovated elements of our current federalist system, additional institutional structures, or civic obligations to ensure the further democratization of our nation will require, you may be certain that in some cumulative context what shall emerge from these labors in applied social science will be an infinitely more equitable American social organism.

The final and perhaps most crucial task is to formulate the strategic dynamic which shall be necessary to secure the implementation of this optimally democratic system. Once again though we are at the commencement of this speculative cognitive process surely what shall at the epicenter of this activity embody is the merging of innumerable individuals, organizations, and entities, that comprise the national community of progressive voices and their concerted and unceasing efforts in a campaign of moral education and ethical enlightenment throughout the entirety of our republic.

Thus, as you engage in the practices of social distancing and are consigned to your homes for a potentially protracted period of time in a posture of voluntary or involuntary quarantine, be aware that those who comprise our national conclave of re-founding fathers and mothers are assiduously engaged in those intellectual explorations that shall when completed and operationally deployed, shall inaugurate a cultural reality that will convert discord into comity, inequality into infinitely enhanced equity, and the contemporary array of social pathologies by which we are afflicted into a cultural atmosphere that is both sane and liberating.

Though Michael Bloomberg’s Greenwood Initiative represents the most comprehensive prospective antidote to the paucity of financial assets that this nation’s African-American complement have acquired, it is grievously deficient both as it relates to the emaciated breadth of its scope and the equally essential requirement that initiatives of this character that seek as their fundamental objective the mitigation of poverty and the equally urgent necessity of significantly diminishing inequality among our citizens, must be formulated and deployed to accomplish these goals on behalf of all those who are currently mired in circumstances of impoverishment irrespective of their racial identities, ethnic origins, or religious affiliations.

However, whatever its inadequacies it represents a quantum conceptual leap beyond the proposals which all other candidates who are seeking the presidency have articulated.

It proceeds from the recognition that the critically imperative ingredients of an explicit articulated commitment to this result and the political volition which flows from that irrevocable promise, the appropriate technical resources required to assist those who reside in these areas with the expertise to most efficaciously formulate and implement the paradigms and policies which these community residents formulate, and the financial resources to translate these proposals into operational reality, must be deployed in the quest to transform these locales from regions of material scarcity into geographic designations of self-sustaining economies that provide for those who reside there with membership in the comparative comfort of a middle-class existence.

For innumerable decades have those in our African-American communities been neglected by public servants who though providing the barest minimum of financial assistance to those who dwell in poverty in these areas; these programs and initiatives did little more than perpetuate the intrinsic symbiotic nature of this relationship, e.g. a politics of dependency which exchanged continued electoral support for those officials who ensured the meager flow of capital to these recipients.

Nowhere within this arrangement could there be found the dynamic that would provide a pathway for those in these neighborhoods to escape the clutches of poverty and create a life for themselves and their families as the result of their efforts and exertions to acquire those materials assets that would provide for an existence of that was self-sustaining and contained as well the capability to ensure a retirement of relative comfort and financial sufficiency.

We as a nation have not formally addressed the imperative objective of eradicating poverty as a national priority since the laudable efforts which Lyndon Johnson initiated more than half a century ago, and in the intervening decades the plight of our poor and our middle-class has deteriorated significantly as the affluent and oligarchy have continuously acquired obscene magnitudes of wealth and political efficacy.

It is imperative that the undertaking which Michael Bloomberg is proposing whatever its deficiencies be implemented should he emerge victorious in the struggle to obtain the nomination of the Democratic party and vanquish the current occupant of the White House.

However, it is equally important that all others who are engaged in the pursuit of the presidency formulate and declare their solemn intent should they be the party’s standard bearer this autumn to mount those activities and policies which are dedicated to this objective, i.e. an initiative that shall when successful greatly mitigate if not abolish the poverty and financial insecurity in which so many of our fellow citizens are currently engulfed.

I urge all who are engaged in this campaign to become our nation’s chief executive to most assuredly deploy these programs to alleviate the suffering of so many within the African-American community; but also regardless of their racial origins or ethnic identities extend this endeavor to all among us, i.e. Latinos, Caucasians, Asians, etc. who reside in the tragic circumstances of impoverishment irrespective of any other considerations or characteristics

For it is beyond all other factors in our contemporary cultural conflicts and escalating enmities the reality of both the declining financial prospects of our middle-class and the continued subjugation of our poor and the corresponding deprivation of our collective capacity to shape and impact governmental actions and determinations at all levels that is the primary cause of our current miseries and suffering.

Enlarging the scope of the Bloomberg proposal to include each individual among us who is imprisoned in the dehumanizing basements of penury and acute financial circumstances will (though far from a panacea for all our social ills and injustices) be enormously ameliorative and be but the first major initiative of many as a Democratic president seeks during their tenure to transform our current national reality of an unraveling plutocracy into an equitable nation where social justice is both vibrant and transcendent.

In a previous era new year’s resolutions were frequently formulated and in numerous instances discarded by many almost immediately subsequent to their implementation; casualties of a lack of discipline or overwhelmed by a resurgent wave of apathy or volitional paralysis.

In that they were almost entirely concerned with matters of personal improvement and the evolution of individual elements of consciousness. conduct, or behavior dispensing with their presence minimally impacted their lives and their welfare, of those so affected.

However, in this year of 2020 no such frivolity is permissible. We as a society are the collective captives of a culture that is unraveling; amidst the intensifying forces of ideological warfare, authoritarianism , racial animosity, and the recrudescence of a pernicious sentiment that rejects the legitimacy of those immigrants who wish so desperately to become residents of this country.

As a result what is required at this moment of our national life is to engage in an activity not of solipsistic considerations or the self-absorbed dynamic of introspection to appease our desires to become more attractive, affluent, or sophisticated in our intellectual observations, but rather to engage in the imperative collective endeavor that seeks as its crucial objective the construction of a political and social agenda that both heals our fractures and reflects a normative content that when implemented shall contain by the richness of those provisions and edicts of social and economic justice the capability to inaugurate an unprecedented era of mutual affirmation and a robust and expanding climate of comity among all who dwell within our borders.

At the epicenter of this agenda are concerns that are both macroeconomic and political in character and reflect the following specific considerations:

An explicit commitment by our populace and those major institutions in every sector of our society to the formulation and implementation of a ten- year strategic paradigm/process by which poverty shall be eradicated within the United States.

The accomplishment of this objective requires the formal inter-institutional collaboration of the philanthropic community, major public and private corporations, particularly those within the financial segment of our economy.

In addition, the specific participation of municipal, county, state, and federal echelons of activity and operation will be required, as will those entities that exist within faith-based environments both as public statements of support for this objective by those organizations that comprise these theologies, and the deployment of the financial and technical aspects of those nonprofit entities within their orbit that provide the gamut of social services to these impoverished constituencies.

So too will the engagement of those technology behemoths that sit astride our culture and those companies who are engaged in that dimension of our public life e.g. the components of our structure of electronic and print media. be crucially vital.

From this mammoth structure of the primary components of our nation will the energy, resources, commitment, and unceasing exertions be tirelessly forthcoming to accomplish the reality of a society which has eradicated poverty and as the result of this crucial accomplishment the promises inherent in the pronouncements of our forefathers at the moment of our founding as a political sovereignty shall become fully manifest in the daily operational reality of those dynamics that animate our cultural life.

The elimination of impoverishment within our nation shall reduce the current enmities which material insufficiency currently fuels. Its abolition will greatly diminish the efficacy of those forces that seek to obstruct the progress of African-Americans to accumulate the financial resources and assets which their Caucasian fellow citizens have acquired.

Its substantial diminution shall deflate the incendiary rhetoric of those who would prohibit immigrants of disparate races and religions from being admitted to our shores as members of our national populace.

Its significant decrease will negatively impact the incidence of social dysfunction, alcohol and drug addiction, and other forms of pathology to which they have succumbed in their desperate attempts to nullify the excruciating suffering and hopelessness which a life of chronic hunger and homelessness has percipitated.

Though there shall remain numerous points of contention and disagreement among our citizens that relate to substantive issues of political options and policy choices as well as a spectrum of social issues on which fierce and spirited debate will continue, they will not pose the threat to the maintenance of our democracy and our constitutional order which our current climate of rabid hostility and intolerance and the condemnation of perspectives and normative preferences that are escalating in both tone and intensity, which if they remain in their posture of ascendancy may cause our republic to unravel.

What I am asserting in some fundamental regard is that when reduced to its most irreducible ingredient, that which lies at the predicate of much of our current civil strife and mutual belligerency are the tragic realities of the apportionment of wealth within a calculus of unprecedented inequality where so few have amassed extraordinary fortunes and so many among us survive on an apportionment that is so meager. It is this stark and central fact from which so much of our unhappiness and despair emanate and when we have repaired this glaring moral abomination and rectified this ultimate source of conflict and injustice at the very epicenter of America the atmosphere and environment in which all our citizens coexist shall become a source of well-being and contentment, a provider of amicable social relationships and the fount from which we may behaviorally realize the equality of all men and women and their undeniable and immemorial right to lives of freedom, opportunity, and material adequacy.

It is to this activity we should be dedicated rather that the infinitely more modest and comparatively unworthy allocation of our energies in the pursuit of self-absorbed goals and intrinsically meaningless aspirations.

On Saturday the 5^th of October we at the Fund For An Equitable America joined with many others throughout this nation in observing the 5^th annual American assessment day’s agenda.  Those who participate in this evaluation devote the morning of this date to the formulation of a 12 month calendar of prospective patronage of those commercial enterprises in the United States whose operational policies and practices are equitable, sustainable, and enlightened.

 Moreover these corporations reflect in an intrinsic manner the elevation of concerns and priorities beyond the generation of income and corporate profitability that stimulate and enhance the economic welfare and other beneficent quality-of-life influences that exist in those communities which they serve

The exercise that absorbs the afternoon period of this day is reserved for an examination of those sources of interpersonal friction or convlict that exist within the individual nuclear families who undertake this effort, for the purpose of fashioning and implementing various alterations of these patterns that will alleviate the discomfort and resentments they produce, and usher in a vast improvement in the emotional environment from which all will benefit and evolve.

Thus the hemispheres of macro political and economic dimensions of life and the micro interpersonal are investigated and modified in order to achieve in both realms an existence which augments the quotient of social and economic justice in our nation, as well as a significant improvement within those critical human dynamics our personal lives reflect and the lives of those who are our most intimate relations.

Beyond these considerations we continue as a society to be imprisoned in an existential struggle that is becoming ever more intense and brutal, in which one component of this adversarial conflict  requires the maintenance of a social structure in which the ascendancy of a Caucasian patriarchy and Christian theology  and all that flows from that reality regarding the allocation of wealth and political efficacy.

Their opponents who argue in the name of equity and the fulfillment of those promises contained in the enunciations of our founding fathers regarding equality of opportunity, and demand the acknowledgement of those injustices of slavery and genocide whose legacies have produced those discriminatory practices and inequities that remain current impediments to the realization of these cherished ideals

We have since the election of 2016 witnessed the intrusion of foreign powers into our electoral processes; an escalating antagonism between the executive and congressional branches of our government as the result of  the 2018 midterm election and the ascendancy  of a robust Democratic majority in the House of Representatives; and most recently the introduction into our national political dialogue of an impeachment inquiry that whatever its ultimate result will exacerbate the tensions and fissures that are extant.

In the final analysis the question which our populace must confront in the period which extends beyond this date to that moment in approximately thirteen months when next we cast our ballots, is whether we possess the capacity to accomplish the creation of a political consensus and the policy and programmatic consequences that emanate from that determination to in some fundamental regard maintain elements of those normative and structural realities that are ascendant in our society at this moment, and the equally crucial requirement to achieve a sufficiently expansive modification of those institutions  that can incorporate the wishes and legitimate aspirations of so many among our populace who are the victims of inequality and discrimination and impoverishment.

Should we demonstrate a lack of capacity for this endeavor and in a state of unyielding obdurateness refuse to engage in those discussions and that dialogue which demand compromise, mutual respect, and a capacity for the empathetic consideration of opposing viewpoints and values, we will as a democratic polity that has endured for  almost 250 years begin the irreversible decomposition that will ultimately usher in irreconcilable civil strife or an equally pernicious eventuality; an authoritarian state and the incipient embrace of this society by the irretrievable dynamic of fascism.

Tragically, in this the autumn of 2019  is where our republic is situated on a terrain of mire and decomposition which if not arrested will crumble, and if it does the hopes and benevolent future inherent in a structure and process of democratic governance will evaporate as well.  My fervent hope is that we shall as a nation come to our senses and address this most urgent national challenge before the voices of intransigence and nihilism drown out a rational dialogue that can if we chose to embrace this imperative conversation, act as an antidote to our society’s dissolution.

At this moment throughout the 10,000 voting jurisdictions that exist in this nation virtually all of them suffer from deficient technology and antiquated software and as a result are vulnerable to cyber attacks upon their accuracy and reliability that foreign or domestic actors will assuredly  mount.

This horrifying reality presents the potential to subvert our most cherished constitutional privilege and extinguish our noble experiment in representative democracy that has endured for more than two centuries.

In a previous era of collaboration and negotiation the imperative solutions to this impending catastrophe would be hammered out in a process of bi-partisan compromise that would provide the funding and technical expertise this endeavor requires. Tragically, the current political environment is so divisive and awash in conflict and animosity that these remedies for this challenge to will not be forthcoming from this arena.

To those who have greeted the announcement by Senator McConnell that he would support the appropriation of 250 million dollars to mitigate the current extensive vulnerabilities to which our  2020 electoral cycle is currently exposed, the reality of what is being proffered by the Majority Leader is nothing more than in exercise in political subterfuge.

For in the absence of any specific requirements to dictate the precise manner  in which these funds must be expended to protect the security and integrity of our looming national plebiscite (and no such provisions are contained within this prospective legislative appropriation) this is yet another deceitful gesture that does virtually nothing to protect our citizens from the intrusion and potential alteration of those ballots we cast in a scant 13 months from this date.

Thus, at this moment the exclusive salvation to this lethal challenge to our democracy inheres in those mammoth technology companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere . They posses the expertise, technology, and  financial resources to ensure the integrity of democracy administration.

Sadly, as of this date these corporate behemoths who deliver the technology and services that are weaponized against our nation have  demonstrated a complete indifference to avert this prospective disaster.

Now is the moment for those individuals who have  profited so greatly from the opportunities our nation has furnished  to repay the debt they have incurred as the result of those benefits.

I am calling upon those CEO’s who provide leadership to these entities to convene a summit of  colleagues from the relevant technology companies to devise a strategic plan to address what can be accomplished in the short term to ensure the integrity and security of the 2020 election and in the longer term for elections thereafter. This plan should address both campaigns and electioneering as well as election administration and voting.

The happy circumstance is that many of the elements to construct this model already exist and may be found in organizations  such  as the OSET Institute, The Verified Voting Foundation,  and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, and at other organizations  such as Microsoft, who have begun exhibiting  patriotic leadership in responding to these challenges. The technical capabilities and the consulting expertise of these companies can significantly reduce the various vulnerabilities to which our archaic systems of election administration are currently subject.

These technology behemoths should collaborate with these defenders of our democracy as part of their summit to develop a holistic plan that would also confront the vulnerabilities and unintended consequences their social media platforms exhibit today. This multi-faceted agenda of innovation cannot commence or succeed unless those with the capability to accomplish it provide the critical resources to do so.

In addition to the preceding efforts these companies must immediately activate a cybersecurity triage initiative as a central element of the protective shield they will deploy prior to the 2020 electoral cycle.

Should you fail to heed your country’s desperate summons and neglect to assume this imperative responsibility such inaction may well induce the failure of our grand experiment in representative democracy.  Should that catastrophic  fate befall us it will become impossible for us to recover from that cataclysmic event because in this context “fail fast” is a totally impotent antidote.

America awaits your response and fervently wishes you to demonstrate your patriotism by undertaking this monumental challenge that no other segment of our society is capable of meeting.

MEMORANDUM

TO: THE CEO’S OF AMERICA’S TECHNOLOGY BEHEMOTHS

FROM: BERNARD GLUCKSTERN CHAIRMAN, CENTER FOR THE PRESERVATION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

SUBJECT:  A SUMMIT OF YOUR COLLEAGUES TO PREEMPT THE INTENSIFYING  POLITCAL AND JUDICIALFORCES THAT SEEK THE DISMEMBERMENT OR DEMISE OF YOUR COMPANIES

DATE:  September 15^th, 2019

           At this moment when the halcyon weather of an Indian summer envelops the nation, the atmosphere in which your corporations exist is awash in a poisonous and potentially lethal noxious brew.  You are beset from all quarters i.e. the Department of Justice, the House Judiciary Committee, and 48 states attorney generals that have initiated investigations to examine the total range of your business practices to determine whether you are culpable of activities that violate anti-trust regulations, or other anti-monopolistic policies, are guilty of exacting exorbitant fees for the provision of mediocre services, and in an unrestricted posture of data-gathering of virtually every salient fact in the lives of your customers have run afoul of various prohibitions which privacy laws dictate from which you derive enormous profits.

          Yet as of this date your companies (as it relates to a posture of publically observable behavior) are sitting on their collective haunches doing nothing to forestall the catastrophic fate which awaits you. To remain in this state of organizational paralysis will ensure that those herculean efforts you mounted to create these enterprises and the subsequent labor required to transform these entities into the mammoth structures they presently represent will become nothing more than a footnote in the history of failed commercial endeavors, a testament to results derived from a failure of vigilance and an abdication of leadership which the maintenance and expansion of these public corporations demands from those who sit at its helm.

          However, should you wish to protect the viability of these companies and ensure their continued existence as crucial elements of enormous importance to the welfare of our nation another course of action lies open to you, and it is a trajectory that I urge you with every fiber of my being to embrace and initiate.

          It is imperative that there emerges from among the ranks of your colleagues that sit at the apogee of these institutions an individual or individuals who shall immediately summon other CEO’s to a conclave; a summit if you will for the purpose of constructing a comprehensive strategic plan that has as its fundamental raison d’etre two critical objectives; e.g. A Statement of Ethical Business Practices For Global Digital Companies, which  both the senior executive leadership of each participating company embraces and adopts, as well as a formal resolution which the Boards of Directors of these corporations endorse and pledges fealty to as the preeminent ethos which from this point forward will guide and inform all activities and endeavors in which these organizations are engaged.

          The content of these ethical practices will address those actual or perceived infractions which have animated the previously cited coterie of federal and state bodies to commence their investigative processes.

           I am not advocating that contained in these principles should be admissions of  either ethical lapses  or illegal behavior  but rather as is a customary practice in the content of consent decrees the recognition that for various reasons; i.e. that regulatory guidance was sporadic and incomplete, that the intrusion of external foreign actors overwhelmed the capacity to adequately police the content of the dialogue which social media reflected, that the climate of laissez-faire which has prevailed since the advent of these technology companies in Congress and throughout much of our society; that inherent in that reality did ambiguity and uncertainty prevail as to those standards and practices that were most appropriate to implement in  the governance to which they adhered and the initiatives they embarked upon.

          However, what must reside at the epicenter of this statement of ethical principles is the admission that however unwittingly, as the result of the factors cited previously these corporations are of the collective perspective that missteps occurred and behaviors that were less than exemplary also transpired.   It is for precisely for those reasons that this summit was convened to compose  a template to both redress the legitimate criticisms that have been enunciated about various facets of their modus operandi and to ensure a uniformity of ethical behavior which will preclude the recurrence of these transgressions in the future.

          By these actions both the convening of this summit to address the contemporary state of affairs of the technology community and the subsequent admission of the statement of ethical principles, you may justifiably assert to our citizens and when you interact with the staffs of the Judiciary Committee, and those in the employ of the Justice Department and those who toil in the offices of the states attorney generals that you have both acknowledged the sins of the past and have embarked upon a path of ethical rectitude that will ensure that the various concerns which prompted their inquiries are no longer relevant and that the vast expenditure of human effort and substantial financial expenditures they represent are for all intents and purposes superfluous.

          One final determination by those gathered for this summit must be promulgated; the decision by the individuals gathered for this purpose to personally pledge the resources both technical and financial to protect the integrity of our nation’s electoral process both as it relates to the 2020 cycle and beyond to ensure that our most sacred constitutional privilege will not be compromised.

          This act will reflect beyond all other results which your conversations at this event produces that you are patriots and recognize that what you have amassed certainly due in significant measure to your talent and exertions but beyond those considerations that fact that you are citizens of this nation and as a result were afforded by that reality the inherent support, stability, and liberty required to undertake your exercises in entrepreneurship and the enormous wealth and influence you have accumulated.

*The technological deficiencies that are extant in our nation within many of our 10,000 voting jurisdictions and the recommendations to mitigate or eliminate those vulnerabilities that are presented in this proposal first appeared in an Op-Ed in the August 4th edition of the Washington Post. The author of that perspective that is entitled “Silicon Valley Can Help Rescue Election Security” is Charles Jennings

As the summer of 2019 lengthens in these the days of continued leisure and recreation for millions of Americans, the specter of a national catastrophe looms ever larger and proximate.

In a scant 14 months our republic will be asked to select an individual to lead us into the third decade of the 21^st century, and to designate our preferences for innumerable other subordinate officials at the federal, state, and local levels of government.

Throughout our history though we are an imperfect and flawed undertaking in representative democracy, until very recently we as a populace were of the unimpeachable perspective that our most fundamental and perhaps sacred right, i.e. the exercise of our individual  franchise during the election process would be duly recorded and thus reflect an inviolate political reality, that those who were entrusted with the power to govern were subject to the collective will of our electorate and that this principle was preeminent and could not be abrogated.

However, as the result of a series of disclosures and the dissemination of information which was the collective product of our intelligence agencies and other sources of data, we have been apprised of the systematic and continuing attempts by foreign governments and their intelligence apparatuses to wage an unrelenting campaign of cyberwarfare with the ultimate objective in the looming  electoral cycle of a massive disruption in this process, that if successful shall impair beyond its subsequent restoration the public’s confidence in the results.

Should that eventuality transpire that event will sound the death knell or our experiment in democratic government that has prevailed for more than two centuries, and the subsequent chaos and dissolution of our society that it will stimulate may produce an authoritarian  or fascistic political system and thus consign us to a dark and oppressive future from which the resurrection of our democracy will be impossible.

Since the activities of various governments (principally  Russian initiatives)  have been revealed regarding the 2016 presidential election, we have frequently heard from numerous sources within the political realm , pundits, think tanks, and other entities, that have sounded the alarm and called us to action in order to interrupt these continuing exertions and preserve the sanctity of the impending 2020 electoral cycle.

However, as of this date legislation that might address various facets of these prescribed antidotes languishes in Congress,  while others in positions of power either minimize or deny the existence of these perilous threats.

It is imperative that we acknowledge the following horrific reality; at this moment the vast majority of the approximately 10,000 voting jurisdictions currently employ Windows 7 software. In January, 2020 Microsoft will cease the provision of automatic security improvements for these antiquated operating systems. In the absence of these upgrades these systems are extraordinarily vulnerable primarily because the voting machine certification standards for these machines were formulated in 2005.  Thus, the ancient and wholly deficient defenses these systems can mount will be overwhelmed by today’s cyberwarfare arsenal replete with polymorphic malware, weaponized artificial intelligence, and ransomware.

Though local governments are attempting to bolster their defensive capabilities they have neither the resources nor expertise to protect the integrity of the process by which vote tallies  are computed, and more importantly to ensure that these compilations have not been tampered with or altered.

Nothing less than the survival of our noble experiment in republican democracy is at risk. Thus from my perspective given the critical necessity of this task, i.e. ensuring  the unerring accuracy and unadulterated status of the ballots that tens of millions of Americans shall cast in approximately14 months, and as importantly the contemporary nonexistence of any entity that has been created that reflects a sufficiently broad or sustained commitment to this mission, I am on this date the 8^th of August 2019 establishing the Center For The Preservation of American Democracy.

The mission this organization shall  discharge is to mobilize the entirety of those resources technological, legal, political, as well as the support of those corporate and voluntary elements of our citizenry to support and in fact to demand that the total spectrum of these recommendations  be fully implemented in every voting jurisdiction throughout the nation. It is only through this sequence of deployment that all citizens will be confident that whatever the results the various  electoral outcomes produce in 2020 they reflect the pristine preferences of our citizenry.

As our initial act it is our intent to recruit as members of the Advisory Board  of this center those individuals whose integrity, professional histories of accomplishment, and scrupulously nonpartisan sympathies and predispositions that are exemplary. Moreover, they shall reflect various portfolios of expertise and  lengthy involvements with the relevant sectors of our endeavor, i.e. technological, legal, political,  communications and public relations etc., those  areas of competence that reside at the heart of our agenda of prospective exertions.

When this board is assembled its first task shall be to formulate the strategic paradigm required to achieve our principal objective  and the chronology and content  of the activity to ensure the success of its deployment  prior to the electoral event of November, 2020.

At the epicenter of this document will such primary technological components/consulting expertise be delineated that reflect among other elements the provision to state and local election system operators of a complimentary upgrade by Microsoft of their Windows 10 software; the construction by Elon Musk or other equally brilliant visionaries at the forefront of computer science and their subsequent  provision at no cost, of the requisite artificial intelligence defense systems to the IT staffs of local election jurisdictions; to offer at no charge the security consulting services which such entities at IBM, Oracle, and Cisco are superbly equipped to furnish; the gratuitous gift of online cyber services, which FireEye, Sentinel One, and Symantec are eminently qualified to provide; and  finally  Intel and other microchip manufacturers must supply to all voting jurisdictions throughout the nation their “state of the art” processors which are equipped with “hardware enhanced” security capabilities.

In addition to this element of our strategic paradigm are the equally crucial capacities and activities to ensure that the technological aspects of our model are fully deployed in every voting jurisdiction, are those systematic and unremitting efforts by the Center in the realm of a communications/public education activity to generate the requisite public advocacy among our populace to demand the implementation of our paradigm.

An equally vital facet of our operational agenda will be the unceasing coordination and collaboration with the appropriate officials within these state and local systems as we proceed in this process of systemic improvement and transformation; the ability to initiate those legal initiatives when required to both defend against any challenges to our  initiative and to judicially neutralize any attempts  by these jurisdictions to  thwart or reject the requisite safeguards we are recommending  ( or equivalent systemic improvements ) to the integrity of the electoral process which our paradigm presupposes.

The final item our strategic plan will include is the unrelenting interaction and collaboration with all other entities in our society including agencies of the federal intelligence establishment, nonprofit organizations that are addressing various dimensions of this challenge to the integrity of our electoral process, and other corporate entities, think tanks, and universities whose scholastic inquiries and responses are focusing on this imperative  topic, to augment and intensify the efficacy of our initiative, to ensure that the most crucial capacity of all our citizens to select those officials at all levels of our governing apparatus via the exercise of their personal franchise remains sacrosanct and unimpeded.

It is our hope that the requisite financial resources to activate the center and its agenda shall be secured by Labor Day.  Discussions have already commenced with the prospective staff members who will discharge various facets of the agenda we have formulated.  The specific chronology of the duties and responsibilities to accomplish the goals and objectives  will be fully explicated,  and we shall immediately commence our efforts to preserve American democracy.

We recognize the urgency and vital importance of this task and we shall not fail in this endeavor

The Center For The Preservation of American Democracy

(An Operating Budget For This Fourteen Month Period)

This budget is most preliminary and  without question lacks the requisite specificity relative to such categories as personnel, leased space costs, consumable supplies expenditures, systems of technology and communications costs,  anticipated travel expenses, and an operational contingency category that are customarily included in these proposals.  An infinitely more complete budget will be prepared at the inception of our operations, however, given the urgency of our undertaking suffice it to state that we are requesting from predisposed donors a request to enable our activities from September, 2019 – November 2020, of  $500,000. 

The social landscape of our society is replete with a vast array of tools political, economic, technological, and cultural that cumulatively conspire to ensure the maintenance of the current arrangements of wealth and power that are operative in this nation.

In the political realm such devices as gerrymandering, judicial appointments, the massive and unceasing stream of contributions to those in the Congress and in other levels of subordinate governmental responsibility whose legislative agendas and executive decisions support the retention and expansion of the affluence and policy predispositions they embrace, remains unabated.

Continuing efforts of various state governments to suppress the capacity of minorities to exercise their constitutionally accorded capability to vote on behalf of those who govern them and those issues that require the electorate to determine their fate. The allocation of substantial financial resources to sustain and improve the quality of public education to those schools in affluent and middle-class locales and the provision of meager funds to sustain those institutions in geographical areas where poverty is extensive.

The sporadic and paltry efforts by many local governments to create and maintain those programs which equip the unemployed with the requisite skills to obtain employment in a society that continues its technological evolution. National policies which are designed to disenfranchise many who as the result of the health care legislation the Congress endorsed during the Obama administration gained access to uninterrupted medical services are deployed to deprive this initiative of the financial and administrative support for its maintenance.

The selective revision of numerous standards and indices which redefine poverty levels to permit this White House to trumpet its success in reducing the numbers of those who are impoverished in the U.S.. Census questions which are designed to discourage the participation in this decennial exercise to determine our nation’s population and thus diminish the fiscal allocation and political representation of those affected

The intentional rejection and discrediting of the massive body of scientific data that confirms the reality of “global warming.” The pervasive behavior of those senior administrators within the EPA to repeal, rescind, or disregard those regulations to protect our environment and thus enable the rapacious and unrestricted ability of mammoth corporate entities to expand the scope of their commercial activities at the irreparable expense of those wilderness areas and undeveloped expanses that comprise our collective national inheritance.

Via the mechanism of “continuing resolutions” Congress perpetuates the annual renewal of those policies relative to the distribution of federal resources that support corporate welfare and deprive those in the middle-class and the poor of those funds required to strengthen their membership in this quadrant of the economy and enable those imprisoned in the financial basement of this nation in a posture of collaboration and individual effort with various agencies and institutions both private and non-profit to exit the dehumanizing and cruel precincts of suffering and hopelessness their current existence reflects.

Within the private sector mammoth financial institutions that stand astride our economy provide credit instruments with usurious interest rates attached to the access of these funds, in many instances an annual percentage rate of approximately 25%. is de rigueur. Hedge funds and other components of the “shadow banking” entities which by design skirt important requirements of the various components of our federal regulatory system, are orchestrating the exponential increase of the debt corporations are assuming that is approaching the levels which were extant immediately prior to the Great Recession of 2008,

Fortune 500 companies continue in an unabated posture the allocation of enormous sums of capital for the purposes of repatriating their stock from public ownership, providing huge dividends to shareholders, and maintaining compensation packages to senior executives that in some instances exceed by a ratio of 300 to 1 the median wage of employees within these commercial institutions.

These entities are also responsible for an annual expenditure of approximately 3 billion dollars to engage the services of lobbyists in the nation’s capitol and in other states where legislatures preside over budgets and populations that are significant.

Moreover, a stream of revenue which emanates from these companies and private sources fuels the activities and initiatives of PACS, foundations, think tanks, and print and electronic media outlets to influence and shape public debate and the broader national dialogue regarding both a catholic support for policies and political decisions which expand and solidify the consensus of Americans to maintain the status quo and to refute and reject those proposals which mitigate their influence and wealth.

Cultural issues relative to immigration, racial supremacists, religious exclusion, abortion, anti-Semitism, and other contentious issues in a de facto regard serve the purposes of these plutocrats for their existence and intensification ensures that the civility and capacity for compromise which is inherent in the formulation and adoption of social policy cannot evolve.

Drug and alcohol abuse serve to distract and incapacitate those among us who have been excluded from viable and self-sustaining economic opportunities and educational options which could reintroduce them to lives of relevance and self-worth, and thus their energies and rage in these states of addiction and inebriation cannot fuel the requisite national campaign for the transformation of our society that is evolving.

Obsessions with social media and the mindless cable offerings innate to “reality television programming” such as wife swapping, the exploits of housewives in luxurious settings, and other programmatic vehicles that extol affluence and inflame the envy and desires of virtually all of us who do not live in these circumstances distract us from the tasks necessary and the sustained, focused, and disciplined efforts which the creation of a culture in which social justice is ascendant requires.

Video profiles of sexual deviation and pornographic opportunities have proliferated in both their abundance and exotic variations which the web provides, which further dilutes our consciousness and resolve for engagement with the world and its inhabitants

The preceding enumeration captures much of the total spectrum of the tools of oppression and conformity which the elites in this nation continuously deploy to ensure their perpetual hegemony at the apogee of the cultural structure that is America, though it is not exhaustive in rendering the totality of those mechanisms that they utilize in the service of the retention of the status quo.

In the next installment of this post I shall delineate a comprehensive recitation of those instruments of empowerment that we the populace of the United States have access to that can serve as efficacious antidotes to the previously rendered portrait of impotence and horrendous inequities.