Minor proposals - even crackpot! - for a Newer Deal
My ten part series on a _Newer Deal for Americans and the world_ offered 35+ proposals for the Democrats to include in their electioneering agenda, at least a dozen of which could be enacted even while Trump remains in the Oval Office, and others he might veto at tremendous political cost to himself and to his party.
Some of you might deem ithese proposals -- listed all together in Part 3 and broken down in detail, in parts 4-10 -- as giving short-shrift to many of the top items wished-for by the U.S. liberal-and-moderate majority, _and that's true!_ Relegating things like monopoly-breakup and housing to the end, along with protecting women's sovereignty over their own bodies...
...NOT because these are unimportant! But because it will take a lot of political process and negotiation capital to get them. And - as we learned from the failures of Clinton and Obama to legislate... and the successes of Biden/Pelosi/Sanders - you _gain_ that kind of political capital by _passing the more-easily passable things first!_
Anyway, _negotiating_ with the undead zombie that is today's Republican Party, whose top levels are uttly foreign suborned and likely blackmailed, is - by their own choice under the _Dennis Hastert Rule_ - completely forbidden.
We'll have to fix Democracy's _structure_ first! Shatter that subornation and lure decent, honorable, grownup conservatives back to the bargaining table, before anything lke 'negotiation' can ever return to American public life.
See a pathway to accomplish all of that here.
**== I've tried this before ==**
The **IGUS concept and the Subpoena Gambit** are among the most potentially transformative of my earlier “political suggestions.” [1] In fact, way back in 2006, as it was beginning to seem possible, even hopeful, that the benighted Bush Era might draw to a close, I offered a list of proposals, shorter and less comprehensive than the Newer Deal, though several would have helped to prevent our present situation! If passed when Democrats had - (and squandered on failed Hail Mary passes) - brief power in 2009.
Then, in 2019, I did it again! This time in a whole book! POLEMICAL JUDO MEMES FOR OUR POLITICAL KNIFE-FIGHT: A Brazen Guide for Sane Americans To Bypass Trench Warfare And Win Our Life or Death Struggle for Civilization.
Much more extensive, **Polemical Judo** included detailed methods for getting around John Roberts's rationalizations to support gerrymandering, for example. And why folks should overcome their reflexive rejection of _blackmail'_ s likely role in the DC quagmire, when it's been _the_ core method used by Russian security services, since the era of the czars.
I was pleased to see that in 2021, the Democratic Party leadership under Biden-Pelosi-Schumer-Sanders-Warren chose not to repeat the Clinton/Obama mistakes and pressed hard to pass a series of excellent bills in that miracle year... though they addressed not a single one of the structural flaws that I had discussed in my book... nor any of the weaknesses that Donald Trump later exploited, in his current all-out attack upon the American Experiment.
Okay, I've now tried again, in 2025-2026, with the _Newer Deal list._ And I expect the same response. Crickets from Democrats, many of whom are smart, decent, honest, modernist grownups who want the American Experiment to thrive and move forward, continuing its mostly (not entirely) beneficent leadership of the world. Alas, they all share the same mania.
"If it's _not invented here,_ then don't bother."
Still, I'm a completist. So let let me indulge my wish fantasies one more time! What follows - cribbed from _Polemical Judo_ - is a wish-list of _minor or lesser items_ that never made it into the Newer Deal list. And yet, they are still pertinent!
Indeed, if you'll just pass a couple of them, you will BUILD your political capital, instead of frittering it away.
== **My Newer Deal _Crackpot_ Addenda! ==**
Let's start with...
Minor but significant stuff.
First a few items that’d be worthwhile, even if not huge or sexy.
– At some point when gas prices are low, take an advantage of an opportunity to **switch** from a cents-per-gallon tax to a percentage tax.
– **Every other major country has** _**replaced its currency**_ by now, with important positive effects for honest taxpayers. The rationalizations offered by opponents – who claim the greenback is forever special, different, and sacred – are getting ridiculous and awfully long in the tooth. Just think of all the drug lords and Mafiosi who would be discomfited. And the American greenback is now way too easily counterfeited and _filthy._[2]
– **Tell all Americans to update their computer security packages,** because a bill is about to refine data tort law, making responsibility similar to public health codes. If you neglect hygiene and your device becomes a hijacked ‘botnet” source of harm to others, then you’ll share in paying the civil damages that result. Oh, yeah. That actually is one of the Newer Deal items, already.
-- Folks occasionally talk about invoking **the Constitution’s 25th Amendment,** which sets up procedures to neutralize an incapacitated president. But most dismiss the notion, because no matter how off the rails Donald Trump tumbles,he stocked his cabinet this round with utter 'loyalists' who give whole new meaning to that word. (I believe he ensures that loyalty in a special, mobster way; but no one seems to want to ponder that.) Alas those who shrug off the 25th, thinking that _only_ the cabinet may invoke it, are _too lazy_ to actually _read_ the amerndment, which allows a route to entirely _bypass the cabinet._
I know that at least one prominent Democrat _did_ read the 25th, way back in 2019 during Trump's first term. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) - among the smartest House members - proposed a bill to create the Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity to fill a role that is actually outlined (or at least sketched-in) by the 25th. Raskin wanted to provide a specific ‘body’ comprised of 10 physicians, psychiatrists and retired former leaders – like presidents and vice presidents – chosen by House and Senate leaders of both parties.
Note that I alluded to this in the Newer Deal's proposal for a neutral Executive Branch Manager.
Too soon? Seriously?
Some more-crackpot suggestions.
All right, we’re about to tip into notions that are more than just “unusual” or “judo.” These _crackpot ideas_ may yet have their day, though. [3] And I want to be on record proposing them.
– **Provide basic** _**firearms safety training**_**in all high schools,** along with Driver's Ed and comprehensive sex education.
Think about it! Isn’t this one of those positive-sum, win-win scenarios? It lets us judo past the NRA’s trenches by offering one thing they _claim_ that they _want_ - the one item on their agenda that might actually help reduce gun violence![4] While forcing them into a deal that would also help reduce teen pregnancy, STD and abortion rates by empowering girls and women with knowledge.5]
Think it through. Better yet, ponder how MAGAs will react when _they_ think it through! Every kid from a liberal family, every feminist girl, every minority kid in every city getting the gun safety (and use) training that the NRA cla _i_ ms it wants all kids to have! And every son or daughter of the NRA exposed to concepts of liability, insurance and every other parallel with owning and using motor vehicles.
A head scratcher? You don't yet see how it's a win-win? Well, just let it sit there, among less busy neurons at a corner of the mind. It'll comce to you how it could be a win-win-win, outmaneuvering the nuts.
– As of mid 2019, Bernie Sanders came aboard supporting this proposal that long predates even my own interest[6]… a _**small tax on financial transactions**_**.** As low as 0.01%, it would not even be noticed by average human investors! But it could stymie the AI programs at major Wall Street firms that make tens of billions of trades a day. Advantages include a way to limit volatility, plus helping to control a “churn-hungry” financial caste. But I have a bigger reason: it could diminish the likelihood of those cryptic, unscrupulous Wall-Street firms unleashing artificial intelligences that are _by design_ voracious, parasitical, predatory, amoral and utterly insatiable potential “skynets.”[7]
And yes, I wrote that in 2019.
– **Ban interlocking corporate directorates** among a narrow CEO caste of golf buddies voting each other vast compensation packages. The Greatest Generation wisely forbade this conniving incest. They also banned massive stock buybacks. They were smarter than we are. And yes, they also adored Jonas Salk.
– **Give capital gains tax breaks only to long held and voted stock.** Or else... (more radical, but justifiable) ... _only_ to _new issues_ that actually raise new money for companies. Since older equity does nothing to raise investment capital for the company. (Ponder that! Older equities base their value on the existing capital and dividends of the company and have absolutely no basis for tax preference, while NEW issuances might merit encourangement by taxpayers.)
– **Revise "corporate democracy"** to reward involved, long-term actual human stockholders and purchasers of new issues, while limiting the power of passive proxies and shell companies, especially those shells who don’t devolve within one layer to real human owners.
– **Nukes**. More mind-blowing still, even though techno-liberals like Stewart Brand have pushed it for years, and it might help reduce carbon emissions significantly… consider making new allies and crucial support for environmental action in exchange for accelerated development of two or three of the truly impressive new types of ultra fail-safe nuclear power plants?
– **Establish an _Institute for Verification and Re-test_. **One problem with modern science – it emphasizes _new_ discoveries over the _verification_ process upon which the whole thing relies. Postdocs and professors don’t find it sexy to merely check out or replicate a recent finding, nor does that lead to prizes and fame. Necessary for the peer review process to work, we need some way to encourage tests to reproduce results. A possible role – if properly set up – for burgeoning networks of amateur scientists?
== Even more crackpotty! ==
Okay, you were warned… have nearby several grains of salt…
– **Revive air travel the simplest way.**
One sign of our spiral toward levels of class war last seen in 1789 France is how the rich are abandoning us to our fates in deteriorating airports and airlines, fleeing from First Class into charters and corporate and private jets, thus avoiding all the frisking and hassles. History is clear. When elites abandon a mode of transportation (e.g., railroads and ocean liners in the 1950s) that utility starts to die! Moreover, the gulf between the mighty and little people widens to unsupportable levels. (See David Rothkopf’s book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.)
This can be solved with some decent agitation, followed by the right taxes and fees so that private and corporate air at least pay their own way, and ideally subsidize the airways.
Metaphorically speaking – and so far I am still talking only in metaphors! – we must lift torches and pitchforks, picket the private, no-TSA airports and chase those elites and moguls _"Back into First Class, where you belong! Sit there with your tablecloths and mimosas and champagne. But fly with us!"_
Just you watch how quickly air travel (including TSA) improves for everyone.
** == The crack-pottiest! ==**
– Ban the undergraduate business major. Let them go for an MBA after four years spent creating or delivering goods and services. You think I’m joking? Ten years later, you’ll think we entered a Golden Age. (The Chinese leadership consists almost entirely of managers who were promoted from their start as engineers. COnsider what happened to Boeing, when they stopped doing that.)
– **Stop letting taxpayer-subsidized companies "shout" into space.** All right, this one sounds super-crackpot. But as we speak, private companies using dishes that were paid for by the U.S. taxpayer are beaming commercial stunt messages – for everything from snack food companies to Craig’s List – into outer space – supposedly to sell music videos and garage sale items to aliens!
Sure, it sounds harmless, and it might be. But that’s the problem, we just don’t know. And at minimum it violates laws against amateur interference in diplomacy with foreign powers.[8]
And while we're at it... will at least some of you finally grow up about UFOs?
**...and finally...**
– **Revive rural ghost towns as slightly-subsidized havens of all kinds.** Seriously, does anyone look for win-win solutions, anymore? There are rural villages dying all across America. Luring giant vulture companies to come and snap up vast tracts in a crushing steamroller of restored peonage that calls to mind the 1932 Dust Bowl, leaving Karl Marx rubbing his hands, in expectant glee for what comes next.
Sure some of those small towns are showing leadership and verve, adapting, experimenting and thriving with new models… and we must help those, generously! Yay that. Incentives might encourage folks in - say - four small, dying towns to _ingather_ and consolidate with the one that has real prospects.
Only then what to do with those abandoned other three? Where local farmers workers and merchants j _u_ st couldn’t _quite_ make a profit? Once we’ve helped those folks get profitable on their own feet in a newly-consolidated, vibrant town -- perhaps slightly-subsidizing mom n' pop stores that aren't Walmart? What to do with the other three?
Are there modern problems that might be helped by offering the bought-out or abandoned ones to certain groups across America? Offering those groups a completely voluntary, subsidized life in fresh air, gardening or farming, or running businesses that (with modest subsidies) need merely to break even, not make a profit?
You can guess I am talking about groups who are already receiving aid (or expensive caretaking or else restricted movement) far more expensively in cities or shelters or minimum security facilities. In a village, taxpayers need only underwrite a marginal bit, for the garden-farm or restaurant or fix-it shop to crest at viability.
If you can’t imagine half a dozen potential uses and constituencies in just a minute or two – from purely voluntary homeless redoubts to safe places for refugees to do their paperwork, to… well… just try again. There are dozens.
Okay, there are lots of these items that may seem marginal or crackpot today… like votes for women, back 120 years ago. Meanwhile, I hope one thing above all. That sane American voters – and in other nations allied for the future – will give us the power to wrangle over these things, and enact a lot of them.
* * *
[1] Political suggestions from 2006 and earlier. http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/suggestions4congress.html
[2] The 2019 “Ig Nobel” Economics Prize was awarded for testing which country’s paper money was "best at transmitting dangerous bacteria" (the Romanian Leu won, but the US Dollar was a finalist).
[3] A blog on crackpot notions! http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/crackpotsuggestions.html
[4] Envision every elementary school kid encouraged to tattle on Uncle Bob’s unsafe and unsecure shed fulla bazookas, while praising dad for the responsible rifle safe. Oh, the NRA would split over this! Then imagine red skulls imploding as liberal and minority kids learn weapon basics.
[5] Abortion rates decline more in blue than in restrictive red states, why? All studies attribute it to sex education. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/761753866/u-s-abortion-rate-continues-long-term-decline
[6] Transaction taxes might save us all. http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/transactionfee.html
[7] The amount of money in the top three investment funds alone is now equal to the GDP of China.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2019-asset-management-in-decline/
http://statisticstimes.com/economy/projected-world-gdp-ranking.php
https://www.pionline.com/article/20190221/ONLINE/190229952/fidelity-sees-record-revenue-operating-income-despite-dip-in-aum
[8] See my evaluation of the cult phenomenon called METI or "Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence." http://www.davidbrin.com/meti.html
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Minor proposals - even crackpot! - for a Newer Deal My ten part series on a Newer Deal for Americans and the world offered 35+ proposals for the Democrats to include in their electioneering age...
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