CHAPTER 1 THE EIGHTY PERCENT SOLUTION: THE HOPE AND

ITS FRUSTRATIONS.

Hope, a faltering of hope is our greatest problem, political and

economic as well as moral and spiritual in the world today. To take hope as
the indispensable ally of insight - Roberto Ungar[i]

My aim is to lead us toward participation in the creation of GardenWorld. It

took me a few years to arrive at this point. I started with interviews across the
political spectrum that convinced me that people at the extremes have much more
in common than we are told about. I saw that their political anger, both left and
right, blue and red, was more a way of saying “no” to the trends and events than it
was an affirmation of ways to make things better. Obviously the legislation before
Congress or in political debates does not add up to an adequate response to our
problems.

I began to imagine that there exists a political program that 80% of the US
population would vote for, if it were offered, that would be attractive because it
was an adequate approach to the issues that confront us. But it is more the tone and
approach than specifics. People want realistic hope, pragmatism and some serious
working to reverse negative trends. What we have been offered - by both parties -
is militarism and fear and support for old industries, and a state-corporate
partnership that is hostile to the interests of everyone, and, if we include quality of
lived life and long term expectations, even to the owners of capital. There is
fortunately some move within both parties to deal more significantly with
underlying issues.

Such a program includes:

Available healthcare without bureaucracy

Jobs in a greener economy
Better distribution of participation in the work and benefits of society
 A more attractive and effective Diplomacy
Education that is fun and profound
Communities that are safe and connect well with nature

We each have our own list but these seem central to quality of life.

But the strong backroom tendency is for the Republicans to offer moral
outrage at the lesser sins, and the Democrats offer support to visible fragments of
the socially but not economically marginalized. Each is trying to tie together a
logical chain of issues in order to win the next election - but they actually avoid the
issues that most concern us. This does not add up to a sufficiently viable politics
for this century. Obama’s approach may allow a deeper resonance, but the task of
governance may overwhelm reformist goals.

I am proposing that there is a solution to the doldrums of the Democratic and

Republican parties’ inability to address the needs of most of - if not all - the
population. Such a platform - one that merely reversed the worst curves of wealth
and power concentration and was framed in the Founding Fathers’ values of life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - and the avoidance of tyranny - would be able
to gather 80% of the vote and return the country to a more virtuous path, and gain
the tolerance of the world and respect for ourselves. Many of the most wealthy
would support this approach. Remember that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both
have been against the elimination of inheritance taxes. The problem for the wealthy
is to leave their children a livable world, not just a pile of money in a bad context.
There are many proposals being published, in this period leading up to the
next election, and they cover aspects of the eighty percent proposal, but to my
surprise do not go far enough to get to the eighty percent, or even strike the voters
as practical. The Republican proposals tend to leave out the problem of income
distribution, and the Democratic proposals tend to leave out the need for vigorous
business. Making timely progress on the environment’s pollution and the threat of
climate change, as well as just creating good jobs, probably require all - vital
business, better distribution of income and wealth, with more participation in the
economy and society. If these are not integrated, both the business environment
(businesses that create both jobs and profit), and environmental restoration are
bound to fail – leaving the political process mired in the dumb momentum of the
times. For example, to make business more vital, tough environmental regulations
and energy independence would motivate innovative local and regional business.
The retrofitting of buildings for energy efficiency, habitability and aesthetics create
jobs which cannot be exported. Generally the population seems to be aware of this
general perspective and gives their leadership poor ratings for not going there and
finding ways to take us with them. Critiques of some of the published proposals are
in the appendix
As I got clear about the 80% solution I slowly came to realize that it would
be more effective if it were combined with a plausible vision of a better life. To
make the agenda more evocative, with empowering symbolism, it’s important to
have a vision of where we can go with our modern fruits of science, new Internet
connectedness, and new appreciation of worldwide cultures. GardenWorld is the
image of a world of continuous cultivation from the most awkward inner city to the
most remote wilderness, blending the organic and the technological. When our
good eye and creativity see the possibility of a GardenWorld enhancement, in food,
climate moderation, parks, aesthetics or sociability, we should attempt it. Keeping
GardenWorld as the goal in mind helps clarify choices.

Thus the title of the book, GardenWorld Politics: American values- toward
the 80% solution and a new politics of inclusion.

I start with the basic perception that American politics is not furthering
American values, while our own image of ourselves, and the world's image of us,
have become depressingly more negative. What happened to the promise? The
promise had evolved from the Declaration's “Life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness", to the post WW2 return to normalcy and a brighter future, to the
"peace dividend"? The American promise of the 1776 revolution gave way to the
“American Dream”, and Clinton even said “Each American deserves a shot at the
American Dream”. Not the promise, not even the dream, but a nightmare lottery of
“having a shot”. In the face of the outpouring of material goods we have forgotten
about the goal of a better life for all and a good environment to live it in. We need
more flexibility and experimentation. Making mistakes is OK providing we are not
stuck with them. The stickiness of bad solutions is a problem for modern society
since bad solutions have stakeholders who work hard, through lawyers, lobbyists
and congress, to maintain that stickiness.
In our time, the neo-liberal policy of globalization turned out to be "liberal"
for the owners of capital and property and their managers, but not generous
towards those who missed out on inheriting property and positioned opportunity
through connections and education. It is often said that globalization is lifting
many out of poverty. It might be true that the percentage of people in deep poverty
is declining, but there is good evidence that those who are left behind are actually
worse off, not better. Their poverty based income works a less well in a fast paced
and more polluted world.
The failure of the liberal and neo-liberal agendas, and the conservative and
neo-conservative agendas, to spread benefits, improve the natural environment,
and avoid armed conflict means that a new look towards the future will have to
emerge. Though the situation could continue to deteriorate in this "entropic age",
especially if elites continue to insulate themselves from the consequences of the
current system and keep benefits for themselves and their rest of the population is
encouraged to be fearful about everything. We live in a time when the economy is
doing well while the people are doing badly.

We live in a time when

the economy is doing well

while the people are doing badly.

Details count. The economy is doing well for a small number of people. For
those who know how to get wealth out of this economy and use it, it feels pretty
good. "Doing well" depends upon point of view. Language like "The US economy
had a good fourth quarter" hides any analysis of "for whom was it good?” "Rising
incomes" hides the current facts that an average, even a median, can rise, while,
after increased costs, much more than half the population is losing out, while a
very small number are doing amazingly well at accumulating the kind of cash that
leads to the 500,000 acre ranch where Cheney shoots quail. Gross measures, such
as increased national debt, and details, like the selling of ports to foreign country
corporations (because corporations in other countries have enough money to buy
U.S. assets) are symptoms of a widely acknowledged short sightedness.
For many of the rest of the population in the US the economy is not
completely terrible, and even has its satisfactions. People have cars, televisions,
Internet access (half of them have these things), but they commute longer, have
declining incomes. Home ownership, for the 60% of the families who “own” a
home is often vulnerably mortgaged as a way of increasing current income through
refinancing. Education is declining, jobs are more fragmented and stressful, and
social mobility is way down. The national policy is to protect the rich in a time of
national decline. There is no national policy to help the country cope with meeting
local needs with local jobs while acknowledging globalization. Pension funds are
under pressure, not just private but public, as the money given to the rich by the
functioning of law and tax in the midst of business activity must be obtained from
somewhere, a problem made worse by the costs of war and importation.

The national policy is to protect the rich

in a time of national decline.

There is no national policy

to help the country cope

with meeting local needs

with local jobs

while acknowledging globalization.

There are many good things going on in the world and in the US, but most
of the initiatives I know of are either at the level of the community (cooperative
projects and a willingness to face difficult questions of land development, water,
schools, and homelessness), or very grand, such as the Internet, or the increasing
quality of good writing about the current state of the world. The positive
developments are either at the local levels, or global. But not at the level of
national policy. Worse, national policy can get in the way of local initiatives which
might support GardenWorld, such as the recently announced EPA ruling denying
the right of the states to have tougher automobile emissions standards.
There are so many bad things happening, such as post cold war struggles for
power and position in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, worsening balance of
payments, further skewing of income distribution, energy policies and health
policies, and the loss of the culture of nuclear restraint. These are at the systems
level centered on the management of the nation state. A legal system that supports
prejudgment seizures, entrapment and plea bargaining is not delivering justice, but
deals. A legal system that has two and a half million in jail, and ten million who
have passed through jail, and lost voting rights, is not a legal system of a well
functioning society. An economy that cannot provide jobs is not a part of a
successful civilization. Relationships of parents with each other and their children,
not supported by community, are fragile. If you want to add a new horror story,
look at Guinea and the US struggle to maintain oil hegemony in the Nigerian Gulf.
The problem is, politics substantially supports the disastrous nation-centered
policies more than the helpful local or transnational ones. While we could have
national leadership that was looking to support the positive, we do not. Profit is at
the big systems level. Everything else is a feeder system.

Profit is at the big systems level.

Everything else is a feeder system.

Most people, right or left, progressive or conservative, are frustrated or

scared at best, and, at worst, cynical and hopeless. In the US the Democrats are
distressingly unable to emerge as a reasonable alternative to Bush and the
Republicans. Both Clintons and Kerry supported not just the war, but escalation in
order to win, and the Democrats seem much more afraid of being seen as soft on
security than positive about what the future requires. As of this writing the general
silence of the Democrats about Iran (and confusion built on complicity in Iraq) just
supports this fear, but without solutions. By the time you are reading this, much
will have evolved, unfortunately along predictable lines, as has the whole incursion
into Iraq.
 Politics, which seems to be a struggle between two parties, is really more a
story of two apparently divergent parties with leadership based in the similar
values of increasing corporate-state alliance to benefit from an economy which is
leaving out more and more people (if there is any doubt the latest Federal Reserve
Incomes report should be sufficient answer). Both parties raise the needed cash
from similar sources - people who want to protect deals and cash flow.
To the extent the leadership of governments and corporations is out of its
depth and having trouble governing, and need our compassion, we do not hear
about it. What we are given is a picture of short term greed and struggle for useless
power. It is clear that many politicians fear the public because they know that the
agenda supported by their financial donors is not converging on what’s good for
the whole population. An approach to community involvement in Langley,
Washington started with the idea that we could “help the government” rather than
be opposed to it.
The issues the voters seem to care about are the ones the leadership wants us
to care about: taxes, abortion, guns, fear, sexual roles, and crime. But these are not
the issues people actually care about. Three quarters of the advertizing for the 2006
elections was paid by corporations. [iii]
As I mentioned, for the last several years I have been interviewing “red and
blue” voters and thinking about what such voters really want, and surprisingly, the
values among even the hard core of both parties is very much the same; desire for
education, community, family, good jobs, attractive surroundings, safe world for
children, and less stress. The difference among voters is at the level of impulse,
based on education and local culture, and roughly divides them, as they look at the
world with the perspectives of local culture, between lashing out in anger as in “the
war on terror”, or trying to understand others and make friends where possible, the
“multilateral approach”.
Overwhelmingly people think the environment and its abuse is a major
issue, as is that income is in real decline for most of the population. These issues
are not on the national agenda of either party. I even suspect that the war in Iraq is
actually a smokescreen to hide from us the deeper issue of who is benefiting from
globalization. A major aim of this book, in moving us towards GardenWorld, is to
clarify why we don't get to the eighty percent solution.[iv] It is more than just a
lack of vision about GardenWorld or other desirable goals. It is structural. The guys
who are driving the empty bus (think Bush White House) know where they are
going, while the people milling around in the parking lot have leaders who just
want to buy the bus and keep it on the same route, even though fewer people want
to or can afford, to go there.. Everyone is stuck somewhere between feeling
uncomfortable and feeling afraid. Especially afraid of what the others would do if
they got power.
From what I've heard in the interviews I have done, I've interpreted this as
"The right fears big government, the left fears big business and a big military. Each
sees the other as supporting bigness which they have projected on the other. Their
critiques cancel each other out, and bigness wins."

The right fears big government,

the left fears big business and a big military.

Each sees the other as supporting bigness

which they have projected on the other.

Their critiques cancel each other out,

and bigness wins.

But the alternative,

a society based on what people want,

is completely feasible.

But the alternative, a society based on what people want, is completely

feasible. We have the money and the skills to create it. If you look at the ads
directed at the wealthy in the expensive magazines they show the house
surrounded by trees, children playing with the dog, no fences. Even those who
push for a more centrally controlled money generating economy and corporate -
government control want the same things as the majority of the country: a decent
life with family, friends, community, and a little more intimacy with nature, and
less stress. At this level there really is not much disagreement. GardenWorld. The
question is – GardenWorld for everyone – or is it only gated communities of
ranchettes? Are the rest of the people to be left “on the other side”, as in Kurt
Vonnegut’s essential 1956 book, Player Piano, which, as a metaphor, captures the
de- skilling of most of the population which live on the depressed side of the river,
while the technocrats live on the upscale side?
A recent article in the NYT describes this new class.

William P. Foley II pointed to the mountain. Owns it, mostly. A timber company
began logging in view of his front yard a few years back. He thought they were
cutting too much, so he bought the land.

Mr. Foley belongs to a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who
are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national
parks and national forests.

In style and temperament, this new money differs greatly from the Western land
barons of old -- the timber magnates, copper kings and cattlemen who created the
extraction-based economy that dominated the region for a century.

Mr. Foley, 62, standing by his private pond, his horses grazing in the distance,
proudly calls himself a conservationist who wants Montana to stay as wild as
possible. That does not mean no development and no profit. Mr. Foley, the
chairman of a major title insurance company, Fidelity National Financial, based in
Florida, also owns a chain of Montana restaurants, a ski resort and a huge cattle
ranch on which he is building homes.

But arriving here already rich and in love with the landscape, he said, also means
his profit motive is different.
''A lot of it is more for fun than for making money,'' said Mr. Foley, who estimates
he has invested about $125 million in Montana in the past few years, mostly in real
estate.

The rise of a new landed gentry in the West is partly another expression of gilded
age economics in America; the super-wealthy elite wades ashore where it will.[v]
 A very revealing article. That Insurance money had to come from
somewhere. And look at the use! Why don't we get what we want? Society
throughout history has always had a leadership that pays itself better than the rest
of the tribe’s or nation's people. Leadership has always had more property, money,
and political connections. But after WW2 there was the promise of spreading
benefits to everyone - not right away, but over a few decades. But in the last three
decades since we have increased economic disparities within and between
countries, narrowed ownership, undermined local and regional economies, and, out
of sight of the rich, devastated the environment. Race has been used to avoid issues
of class, making race a marker for poverty and non inclusion, from the native
Americans through slavery and "reconstruction" to the modern invisible but
palpable means of discrimination. Racism keeps alive the hideous scar of slavery
but also hides the invidious reality of class, and is really a policy of how to
"distribute poverty".

Democracy is peculiar. It is much more than a means. It is a developmental

strategy. It requires the development of everybody. Democracy without individual
development can easily turn to demagoguery and tyranny. Democracy requires that
most people have the capacity for critical thinking. Early tribes, everyone
agrees[vi], were led by strongmen, the strongest and the brightest. But survival
leads to larger tribes and the need for a council of elders who shared power and
needed to have the perspective of the whole. As these tribes became larger,
something like parliament’s developed, a larger ensemble sharing in power and
perspectives. Next, with further success and increase in population, came the shift
towards representative government, and the extension of voting (usually as an
inducement to participation in wars) to a larger part of the population, until it
includes everyone as participants. A major problem is that our theory of
government has not advanced to include that more inclusive participation, and we
are stuck with “representation” that has become too easy to manipulate, and the
human development aspect of democracy has become lost as education provides
skills for work and consumption, but not citizenship. The great promise of
democracy is the human development of all as the necessary condition for the
participation of all.
But complex change is in the air. The Internet, following on a few decades
of widely available television, has spread world wide, and into remote
communities, Images of "the other" are easier to identify with in the flow of
images and text, and the world of manipulated patriotism is coming apart under
this influence. Intention with each other, Comparison leading to Envy and
Identification leading to Compassion both increase under the Internet regime.
People are in many crucial ways much more aware and educated at a gut level. We
all are struck by the way teenagers in Iraq, Indonesia, Nepal, Venezuela, and main
street America all look the same, listen to the same kinds of music, and are clued in
to each other. So, why does the positive, based on a common humanity and
appreciation not happen?
We have been going through our own cultural revolution as the market
becomes the only reality. It is actually a replacement of culture with consumption
without participation. The Chinese characters, by the way, for Cultural Revolution
are “remove culture.”
We didn’t get here by “forces of history” but by people making decisions in
specific circumstances. Culture is man made, though largely unconscious most of
the time for most people. The result is manmade, not given by invisible forces
independent of society. After the Second World War, the increasing
industrialization and larger markets required, given that we allowed for
corporations, highly expanded by the war effort, large numbers of middle level
managers to control and communicate the increasing complexities. Since then the
broad availability of cheap computing and its connection to telephones (at first
telegraph started the process – or was it carrier pigeons?) replaced much of the
need for coordination through relationships. The result is that the wave of jobs that
was necessary for the wave of economic expansion post WW2 has subsided, while
the wave of expansion goes on with fewer middle level managers getting a good
income from the ride. And we fail to see that each generation goes through at least
one up and down cycle as one wave is being is replaced by another, through the
choices we make, and our leaders arrange to lead.
The resulting economy is like a merry-go-round. Dynamic and attractive, it
has not got places for everyone who has the energy and talent to want to
participate. For the merry-go-round to keep going it must generate money. It hires
only those people and sells only those products in which the circle of cash can be
kept going. Beyond a certain point, bringing in more people, especially poor,
would slow down the merry-go-round, and its current economic system of
ownership, investment, regulations and jobs.
 What I am calling Merry-go-round is really the collection of mostly large
corporations, the smaller serving corporations, and the professional associations –
all tied together by regulations (starting with charters for corporations and legal
rulings (in 1886) that “corporations” are legal persons, not subject to the charters
of the states.[vii]
This analysis has a long history. “Hardin compared the rich countries to a
flotilla of lifeboats at sea. The rest of humankind consisted of survivors desperately
treading water and begging for admission into the lifeboats. Take them all aboard,
said Hardin, and the boats are swamped. “Everyone drowns. Complete justice,
complete catastrophe, lake just the few aboard that you may have room for, and
you eliminate the safety factor. Besides, how can you choose which to save and
which to let die? (Thanks to Warren Wager for this quote. The Next Three Futures
p 80.) Artigiani writes

‘ …but civilized societies exercised top-down control over their human

components that was so unfair and cruel commentators from Hesiod and Genesis
through Rousseau to the Flower Children have condemned it. Civilization imposed
inequalities and injustices on the vast majority of their subjects. They forced the
many to work far more than had ever been the case in the “state of nature,” and
then lavished the products of their labors on a leisured elite that soon learned
wealth could protect privilege. [viii]

In our time, great sociologists like Max Weber, and it is not smart to forget
Marx, and historians like Spengler, saw the move towards the consolidation of
power in the hands of bureaucracy and elites.
The merry-go-round economy is not big enough to hold everyone, and any
move toward greater inclusion threatens the owners and operators of the merry-go-
round, either threatening that it will come apart through increased costs, or that the
profits and salaries to the owner/managers would be cut. What the owners really
like is increased “productivity” which means producing as much with fewer
workers, or more without increasing the number of jobs. Politics is the mechanism
of governance of those Republicans and Democrats who own property, manage
parts of the system, or serve it as professionals and media. Self-satisfaction in the
private space of office, home, and country retreat rules over hope for a better
civilization for self and others.
 Those who own, manage, or work for the Merry-go-round (which does
require lots of skilled and well paying jobs) don't take responsibility for those left
off. The CEO of Wal-Mart with one million employees, Lee Scott, writes: "To be
honest, most of us at Wal-Mart have been so busy minding the store that the way
our critics have tried to turn us into a political symbol has taken us by surprise."
Mind the store, neglect the rest! (NYRB April 7, 2005).
The problem is not just that individuals align themselves with the merry-go-
round why the problem but also countries do. China for example. The power of the
merry-go-round to demand alignment is very powerful. But at the same time while
10% of the population has cars, 90% do not. The 10% certainly feel in some kind
of an alignment while the others are left out, and we ignore their thinking to our
peril. Their very existence as “carless” hints at the illusion of Prius-ing the world.
So resources are stocked up into the merry-go-round leaving states and local
communities – or other countries if we consider globalization – increasingly
impoverished. Imagine if our resources were more equally divided between the
nation, the states, counties and towns, and individuals. There could be a flowering
of initiatives in the context of rethinking, reinventing, and remaking our local
environments under the twin goals of sustainability and livability.
Despite the wishes of most and the initiatives of many, there is no politics to
move towards a saner solution, no leadership of modest reform to help everyone
have work, home, family education, health, and an attractive environment. Those
who have the money to elect congressmen are the corporations with cash flow -
banks, real estate, insurance, oil, drugs (legal and illegal) at the core, and others at
the edges. There is no effort, no experimentation from the leaderships of the two
parties, to find a path to a new politics that supports the good and weakens support
for bad, a politics that actually believes in freedom, democracy, responsibility,
clean business, environmental remediation, employment, "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness," free from hyped fear and gross manipulation. Such a politics
is not even being tried. Bush's "freedom" is not freedom, but freedom for capital
disguised as freedom of markets. Bush's Democracy is not democracy, but media
manipulation and press releases. But Bush didn’t create this, he only exemplifies a
tendency that has been building for decades. Being anti Bush and not working to
change the system is just another avoidance.
Looking at efforts to reach a "centrist" politics, I’ve argued that there is
majority view, but it is not the average or a compromise between the two party
positions. The real majority view lies off to the side so to speak, because both party
leaderships are in agreement about maintaining the centrality of current power and
profit.
An example of appearing to seek the 80% solution, but actually trying to
merge the leaderships of the two parties, Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger from the
two sides of the country have been making an effort to find, not the center of the
country, but the center of the leaderships.. Dan Wood[ix] wrote an article in the
Christian Science Monitor looking at the effort.

First up was New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivering a scathing

admonition: "The politics of partisanship and the resulting inaction and excuses
have paralyzed decision making," he told a group of some 200 national politicos
and guests. We can turn around … our wrongheaded course, if we start basing our
actions on ideas [and] shared values … without regard to party."

The next day, his partner in taking to task the political climate, California
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), echoed: "There really is no more urgent issue
facing America today than … bridging the political divide."

Others, such as Mayor Bloomberg – the former Democrat-turned-

Republican-turned-independent – call it simply "nonpartisan leadership." The
emphasis is on ideas over ideology, building trust instead of enmity with opposing
politicians, embracing innovation with more regard to citizens than to which party
thought of it first – or who gets credit. The idea also plays into the yearning of an
increasingly frustrated voting public for another principle: Get it done.

Bloomberg, too, has reversed a dreadful job-approval rating, below 20

percent. After a series of get-it-done initiatives – from a crackdown on illegal guns
to bans on smoking and trans-fats to affordable housing initiatives – his rating is
now in the 70s.

The New York mayor and the California governor are hammering a note that
resonates with the public. Seventy-five percent like leaders who are willing to
compromise, and 60 percent like leaders whose positions are a mix of liberal and
conservative, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in
Washington.
The best records of reach-across-the-aisle politicians have been at state and
local levels, many experts say. Schwarzenegger has been leading the pack. After
several stumbles in his first two years, he appointed a Democrat as his chief of staff
last year. He has since made headlines with global warming and healthcare
initiatives, prison reform, and a state infrastructure overhaul.

One reason post-partisan ideas have a harder time gaining currency

nationally is that those who vote in nominating primaries are more liberal or
conservative than the general voting public. Eventual nominees feel beholden to
those who get them to office.

"I would argue that many of the likely party nominees for president –
especially Hillary Clinton – are almost certain to continue the deep partisan divide
that has characterized America through the Clinton and Bush terms," says Larry
Sabato, political scientist at the University of Virginia.

"But when these unifying governors run for president (like the cases of
Clinton and Bush), they have to take stands in the culture wars and on matters of
war and peace."

What strikes me is the lack of content. It really is compromise politics

around the most pubic issues, but not dealing with the problems the public is most
concerned about: the war in Iraq (Iran), jobs, the American position in the world, or
the nature of financial capitalism. The future of the economy and the distribution of
profit and pain will be central, but not centrally dealt with.
One can see that the Bloomberg - Schwartenegger kind of bipartisanship is
the attempt to hold together this economy in the face of mounting failure and
criticism - not to change the rules or outcomes significantly.[x]

How can we create a politics that reverses the trends (unsustainable and
ultimately leading to violence if allowed to continue) and raises incomes and
wealth for a much - much - larger share of the population (everybody), that spreads
political participation and makes the future interesting? Perhaps less centralized
 and more experimental? Even if we could use government only to support
education and health so as to build the capacity of everyone to participate, and
decreased the incentives for wealth accumulation among a small number of people
(say about 2% of the population, through slightly stiffer taxation and reverting to
old inheritance taxes), we would be making real and not terribly threatening
progress. These alone would increase hope and a feeling of national well-being that
would be good for us and encourage other countries.

Even if we could use government only to support education and health so as

to build the capacity of everyone to participate, and decreased the incentives for
wealth accumulation among a small number of people (say about 2% of the
population) through slightly stiffer taxation and reverting to old inheritance taxes),
we would be making real and not terribly threatening progress.

The small number among the rich who would not support this have given up
on the American Future and want the wealth to buy security and protect
themselves, the moderately rich by living in enclaves, while the richer are buying
land and assets overseas, and the very rich are buying islands. But this is not a
large number of people.
80% should be easy.
The 80% includes

1. Tax changes sufficient to reverse the trends toward wealth concentration.

2. Vigorous approach to energy independence, including subsidies for lower
income folks – who drive the most- and would be the last to afford hand second or
third hand hybrid cars. This would also redress the income imbalance in this
economy.
3. Greater attention to fairness in the justice system.
4. The use of a human development agenda approach to education, health and
justice that prepared people for participation in the economy as it is evolving.
5. A friendlier networking approach to foreign policy to replace the go-it-alone
brutal approach of this administration.
6. A national dialog to support local initiatives on resource use and infrastructure,
including energy, water, food, and land use generally.
7. A commitment to dialog and expertise mobilized for discussion of issues and
experimental approaches rather than a drive to be correct.

What counts is the spirit and tone of these proposals. My intent here is also
not to “get it right” but to get us to think that, “yes, an 80% solution IS possible.”
A deeper perspective might be that if any particular moment in any given
society certain interests are at the center. First is the question is self preservation,
providing for food and defense and enough social organization to get it. Second, is
the desire for more comfortable life which is supported by a trade and small-scale
industry. Third comes the desire for luxury and fame and with it the desire to put
down others, to dominate, to rob income from the poor and engage in wars for
resources and to keep the local population focused on the external events.
GardenWorld and the 80% solution are proposals to return to the second
scenario and avoid fascism or collapse.