Generation Gap, A New/Old Message for Muslims in America: It’s Justice, not “Just Us”

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

I.  What’s the Point?

      On May 7th, the International Institute of Islamic Thought is holding a one-day seminar in Herndon, Virginia, of senior Islamic scholars to address the problem of identity as an update on a similar seminar a year ago.  The themes are how the younger generation of Muslims can learn from the experience of the older generations so that the Muslim youth in America will not be drawn into extremism and thereby provoke counter-extremism.

    A parallel theme is how the older generation can learn from the youngsters.  Young Muslims face problems much worse than the older Muslims had to face in the 1960s to 1990s, but the old solutions of “circle around the wagons” may no longer work.

    This second theme includes the wisdom that Muslims in America should stop voting and working politically only to protect themselves from Islamophobia.  Americans will respect Muslims only when we focus on the universal moral issues and human rights enshrined in the maqasid al shari’ah as a framework for thought and action, because this best expresses the traditionalist thought that gave rise to the Great American Experiment in self-government more than two centuries ago.  It doesn’t matter what specific positions we take, as long as we show concern for the well-being of everyone.

    This means that Muslims should not attempt to vote as a bloc in order to achieve ephemeral political power, because we should be as free as everyone else to vote our conscience on what we think is morally right for America.  Nothing else matters.  Unless and until we get that straight, we will deserve the fate of the Jews in Nazi Germany.  After thirty years of preaching this message, some of the younger generation of Muslims in America are beginning to get the point that “it’s justice”, not “just us”.

II.  The Bankruptcy of the Tea Party Activists

    In April, 2011, Americans had experienced several months of political deadlock between the Republican dominated House of Representatives and the Democrat controlled U.S. Senate on cutting the budget, with weekly stop-gap budgeting to keep the federal government operating.  House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, a Tea Party supporter, wants to rebuild an economy ravaged by prolonged recession and “relentless government spending, taxing, and borrowing”.  He wants to cut $6 trillion out of President Obama’s long range proposed budget of $40 trillion during the next decade and at least $60 billion out of next year’s.  The Democrats object that the Republicans are trying to balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable Americans.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi summarized this as “a path to poverty for America’s seniors and children and a road to riches for big oil”.

    The problem is that neither party is planning for a long-range future where all Americans, not merely those who currently live on the profits of their investments rather than on the decreasing role of labor in an increasingly capital-intensive economy, can benefit from the trillions of dollars of future wealth that will be produced in the years ahead.  Nor does either party appreciate the fact that no government is ever going to be able to cover the escalating costs of retirement, health care, and education.

    The essential error of both parties is the Keynesian assumption that consumption will drive production and it is the government’s responsibility to provide the cash and credit for consumption.  This may be partly true for an economy in which the vast majority of potential consumers do not own the profits of production and therefore cannot consume what is produced.  If we reverse this assumption, so that every citizen has an investment account designed to produce ownership of productive capital, then there are no limits to growth for everyone other than the need to avoid wasteful use of the earth’s resources and the need to augment them by using our intelligence to multiply the bounties of a merciful God.

    Why do the the Tea Partiers not want to understand this?  The answer is that they want “freedom”, not justice.  America’s founders, following Edmund Burke and the Scottish Enlightenment, wanted order (peace), prosperity (based on private property ownership), and then freedom (not liberty).  Together (and only together) they produce justice, which demands that every citizen have equal access to all three and an elected government of leaders led by God to protect these universal human responsibilities and rights.

    If the Tea Party leaders would read Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order (Regnery, 1991, 540 pp) and his magnum opus, The Conservative Mind (Regnery, 1953, 566 pp), they would understand why we need the new paradigm of a Just Third Way, not socialism based on envy or capitalism based on greed at the expense of everyone else.  They are faux conservatives, closer to anarchists.  Their leaders may soon learn that they have lost their sheep (the voters), like Little Bo Peep, and won’t know where to find them.

III.  What’s the Solution?

    On April 3, 2011, Geoffrey B. Gneuhs, who is a board member of The Center for Economic and Social Justice (http://www.cesj.org), wrote in the Yale Alumni Magazine that instead of seeking top-down solutions to intractable problems of economic injustice, there is “a practical tool that could be the basis of systemic change in our atrophied capitalist system.  This has not been reformed by President Obama, since the very players who brought this crisis on are still involved in policy and decisions, for example, Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary, Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve, and the members of Congress.

    “In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act by which any citizen could have 160 acres of land to farm; after ten years they became the owners.  In other words, ownership was broadened for all citizens.

Likewise today, the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ), founded by Dr. Norman Kurland, who developed the legislation in the early 1970s for ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), and the late Fr. William Ferree, promotes Capital Homesteading Accounts (CHAs).  These are qualified interest-free loans for every man, woman, and child to invest … and be paid back by future earnings [i.e., credit not based on past wealth accumulations but on future growth].

    “Presently, under Section 13 of the Federal Reserve Act these accounts could be set up if the President and Congress had the will.  Each year loans would be made to these accounts.  In other words credit becomes available for all (right now there is no credit, and when banks start lending again it will not be to the storekeeper, the small farmer, and so on.  Capital Homesteading Accounts address this gross inequity.

    “Hannah Arendt in her essay ‘Thoughts on Politics and Revolution’ in Crises of the Republic bluntly pointed out: “Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society [now technological] in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property.  For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false—not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats’.

    The details are available electronically in several publications, including Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen, by Norman G. Kurland, Dawn Brohawn, and Michael D. Greaney, 2004, 231 pages, available at http://www.cesj.org with an executive summary.

“Expanded capital ownership can help build economic democracy within a free market system.  It’s the just third way”.

IV.  The Reaganomics of Economic Justice

    President Reagan never took adequate leadership in pushing for his views on economic justice as the central problem in America and as essential for any truly pro-life movement, as developed by the Research Director of the Center for Social and Economic Justice, Mike Greaney, in his recent book, In Defense of Human Dignity.  This is why Ronald Reagan has been subjected to so much misunderstanding. 

    Ronald Reagan has been attacked even for appealing to Presidents Abraham Lincoln and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his mentors.  Critics are right that Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act distributed land at the expense of the Native American nations, but their lands had already been taken by the European Americans before Abraham Lincoln became president, except for the Apaches and Lakota Sioux, who were butchered after he was president.  Actually he advocated for Native Americans in disputes in Illinois when he was a lawyer there.  Lincoln broadened ownership of the major source of wealth at the time by encouraging people to settle on the lands that had already been taken from their original inhabitants.

    Democrats have taken to attacking Ronald Reagan as a mentor of the Tea Party activists.  In fact, such activists do not seem to understand that his governing policy paradigm was not freedom from government but justice through wise government, which by definition reduces the need for centralized, top-down control.  If Reagan were alive today, he would not advocate merely reducing reliance on centralized government, but would focus on reforming government so that it can reduce its own power in ways that produce economic justice as the key to devolving political power to every citizen.  His policy proposals are just as important today as they were thirty years ago.

    Many times he made clear his solutions to the most critical problems in America and around the world, including the following quotes collected by the National Committee of America’s Independent Party:

Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man.  They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise, and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed.  And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country.  The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.

Could there be anything resembling a free enterprise economy, if wealth and property were concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great majority owned little more than the shirts on their backs?  Could there be anything but widespread misery, where a privileged few controlled a nation’s wealth, while millions labored for a pittance, and millions more were desperate for want of employment?

It should be clear to everyone that the nation’s steadfast policy should afford every American of working age a realistic opportunity to acquire the ownership and control of some meaningful form of property in a growing national economy.  This is not to say that the government should confiscate from the “haves” and bestow upon the “have-nots”, beyond the requirements of a compassionate welfare program to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.  Far from it.  But it is to say that our duty is to foster a strong, vibrant wealth-producing economy which operates in such a way that new additions to wealth accrue to those who presently have little or no ownership stake in their country.
— From unpublished Reagan letter sent to New Orleans Times Picayune, based on note from John McClaughry, Senior Policy Advisor, Reagan Bush Committee, 10/31/80.

Some years ago a top Ford official was showing the late Walter Reuther through the very automated plant in Cleveland, Ohio, and he said to him jokingly, “Walter, you’ll have a hard time collecting union dues from these machines and Walter said, “You are going to have more trouble trying to sell automobiles to them.”  Both of them let it stop there.  There was a logical answer to that . . . the owners of the machines could buy automobiles and if you increase the number of owners you increase the number of consumers.

Over one hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act.  There was wide distribution of land and they didn’t confiscate anyone’s privately owned land. . . . We need an industrial Homestead Act.
— Speech to Young Americans for Freedom, July 20, 1974.

More than 100 years ago, Abe Lincoln signed the Homestead Act making it possible for our people to own land.  This was a revolutionary development.  Ownership of land in most of the world had not been possible for the ordinary citizen…. The Homestead Act set the pattern for American capitalism…. Now we need an Industrial Homestead Act, and that isn’t impossible.
— Radio commentary, “Tax Plan No. 1,” Viewpoint with Ronald Reagan, February 1975.

Could there be a better answer to the stupidity of Karl Marx than millions of workers individually sharing in the ownership of the means of production.
— Radio commentary, “Tax Plan No. 1,” Viewpoint with Ronald Reagan, February 1975.

I can’t help but believe that in the future we will see in the United States and throughout the Western World an increasing trend toward the next logical step, employee ownership. It is a path that benefits a free people.
— Speech on Project Economic Justice, 8/3/87.

I’ve long believed one of the mainsprings of our own liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the expectation that anyone’s child, even from the humblest of families, could grow up to own a business or corporation.
— Speech on Project Economic Justice, 8/3/87.

Meanwhile, what about the workers in those state monopolies that are being put up for sale? I am reminded of a technique for employee ownership that has worked well for many U.S. companies.  It goes by various names, but the best known as “Employee Stock Ownership Program,” or ESOP.
— Address at the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 9/17/90.

Our economic assistance must be carefully targeted, and must make maximum use of the energy and efforts of the private sector.  ...Economic freedom is the world’s mightiest engine for abundance and social justice. ... Developing countries need to be encouraged to experiment with a growing variety of arrangements for profit sharing and expanded capital ownership.
— Speech on foreign policy presented to the American Legion, February 22, 1983.

The people of Central America—and, in a broader sense, the entire developing world—need to know first-hand that freedom and opportunity are not just for the elite, but the birthright of every citizen; that property is not just something enjoyed by a few, but can be owned by any individual who works hard and makes correct decisions; that free enterprise is not just the province of the rich, but a system of free choice in which everyone has rights, and that business, large or small, is something in which everyone can own a piece of the action.
— Speech on Project Economic Justice, 8/3/87.

V.  Immediate Action

    On April 15, 2011, several gatherings in which Muslims should be active in America are taking place.  Two of them are within walking distance of each other near the U.S. State Department.  One of these two is Radwan Masmoudi’s one-day 12th Annual Conference of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, entitled “Tunisia’s and Egypt’s Revolutions and Transitions to Democracy”, at George Washington University’s Jack Morton Auditorium. 

    The missing dimension in the transitions to democracy as self-government is the end goal, namely, economic justice, which alone can sustain political justice in a capital intensive world.  Freedom from autocrats will bring more autocrats unless the defective economic system is reformed in an economic revolution designed to devolve ownership of productive wealth to every cirtizen. 

  Aristotle said that democracy is the worst form of government, because whoever can manipulate the mob has ultimate power.  The Founders of America condemned democracy as the road to anarchy and oppression, as in the French Revolution.  America’s founders, with few exceptions, said they were founding a Republic, in which the ultimate source of authority is transcendent, not man-made, and comes from God.  The duty of the legislature is to derive all laws from the guiding principles of natural law, known in Islamic jurisprudence as the maqasid al shari’ah, as determined through human intellectual effort, guided by divine revelation.  The job of the Executive Branch is to apply the legislative guidance, and the responsibility of the Judicial Branch is to make sure that the Execurtive does this.  Otherwise, “If one does not know where one is going, any road will take you there”. 

    The other gathering to be held during the CSID’s lunch break is the Coalition for Capital Homesteading’s 7th Annual “Own the Fed Rally” to be held from noon to 1:30 in front of the Federal Reserve Building opposite the Lincoln Memorial, following a march at 10:30 from the White House.  The theme of these annual CESJ rallies is “Every Citizen an Owner”.  The theme of this rally in 2011 is “Financing the Future”.  This is to be followed the next day from 9:30 to 1 in Falls Church, Virginia, by CESJ’s Annual Strategy and Planning meeting, and from 1:30 to 4:30 by CESJ’s Twenty-Seventh Annual Celebration and Luncheon.

    The theme of this planning session is Buckminster Fuller’s wisdom: “We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims”.

    Today many people fear what the future will bring, and feel powerless to do anything about it. The recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that struck Japan wrought devastation on one of the world’s wealthiest
and most technologically advanced nations.  Haiti, one of the poorest, has yet to recover from its own disaster.

    Meanwhile, economic, political, and social systems throughout the world are facing an historic time of chaos and upheaval.  Amidst rising joblessness, home foreclosures, bankrupt households, cities, and nations, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots, our global financial systems are teetering on collapse.

    Yet with great crisis comes great opportunity.  The moment has arrived for leaders and citizens to reassess our old paradigms, long-cherished assumptions, and entrenched systems, and think anew about how we should
proceed into the future.

    We need to rethink and rebuild our physical and institutional infrastructure, energy and transportation systems, modes of production - in more sustainable and environmentally responsible ways.  We need to reverse the rising costs of government and remove the crushing burden of government debt on future generations.  We need to figure out how each of us can earn a decent living in a world where technology is constantly reducing the demand for our labor.  We need to enable every citizen to afford high-quality education and health care.  And, we need to ask, where’s the money going to come from?

    “Financing the Future,” the focus of the April 15th rally, presents a just, market-based economic agenda called “Capital Homesteading for Every Citizen.”  This agenda offers a positive and citizen-based solution for financing such basic needs as economic reconstruction, development of our cities, infrastructure, and new energy systems.

    Unlike the growing popular movements of angry Americans who want to end the Fed or have it controlled by Washington politicians and bureaucrats, the Coalition for Capital Homesteading” wants every citizen to “Own the
Fed.”  The Coalition held its first rally at the Fed in 2005 to mobilize, transform, and democratize the Fed and its money-creating powers in order to bring about a more productive, participative, and just free market economy.

    The specific legislation being called for by the Coalition for Capital Homesteading, the “Capital Homestead Act,” would enable every citizen to gain an ownership share of productive assets and future economic growth. This comprehensive package of monetary, tax, and ownership-broadening reforms, would not involve deficits, government debt, or taxpayer dollars.

    During the April gatherings, speakers and participants will discuss community, national, and global demonstrations of capital homesteading, as part of a step-by-step strategy timed for the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862.  Featured presentations will include representatives from the Harris Neck Land Trust of Georgia.  This is owned by the Melungeons on the Atlantic Coast near Atlanta, Georgia, who are the last of the former slaves to maintain at last some of their former Arabic language and culture.  These representatives will describe this initiative and their campaign to gain support of President Obama, the Congress, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to establish the first community-based model of citizen ownership through capital homesteading.

VI.  A Global Vision

    The necessary vision was suggested by Former President Richard Nixon, who always opposed the ideological concept of an inevitable clash of civilizations.  During the Cold War, he regarded Communism as a heresy peculiar to and part of Western civilization.  He saw Islam as the most powerful force against Communism, but he also saw it more constructively as a major civilizing force in the world. 

    Shortly before he died in April 1994, Richard Nixon wrote in his last book, Beyond Peace, “The twentieth century has been a period of conflict between the West and the Muslim world.  If we work together we can make the twenty-first century not just a time of peace … but a century in which, beyond peace, two great civilizations will enrich each other and the rest of the world”.

    “With the end of the Cold War,” Nixon urged, “we must ask ourselves what we stand for in addition to national strength and prosperity.  Democracy and Capitalism are just techniques unless they are employed by those who seek a higher purpose for themselves and for society”.

    “Today”, Nixon asserted in his last book, “Our enemy is within us.”  “The real threat in the world”, Nixon told his fellow Americans, lies in the fact that, “Our country may be rich in goods, but we are poor in spirit.  Poor-quality secondary education, rampant crime and violence, growing racial divisions, pervasive poverty, the drug epidemic, the degenerative culture of moronic entertainment, a decline in the notions of civic duty and responsibility, and the spread of a spiritual emptiness have all disconnected and alienated Americans from their country, their religions, and one another”.  Drawing on the imagery of Muslim and Christian saints, Nixon cried out that, “Our crisis of values at home, coupled with our lack of a coherent mission abroad, has created ‘a dark night of the soul’.”

    Another great visionary who was caught in the meat-grinder of Washington politics is Ronald Reagan.  Together with Charles DeGaulle of France, who helped liberate Algeria, and Winston Churchill of Great Britain, he was one of the twentieth century’s “grand strategists”.  Reagan laid the ideological groundwork for his Task Force on Economic Justice in 1983 in his first major foreign-policy pronouncement.  President Reagan laid out his vision of economic jusice in the two books resulting from his Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice in 1985-86, in which I was Chairman of the Financial Markets Committee.  Reagan laid out the ideological groundwork for this Task Force three years earlier in 1983 in his first major foreign-policy pronouncement.

    His basic thrust was to emphasize our “responsibility to work for constructive change, not simply to preserve the status quo”.  “History”, he declared, “is not a darkening path twisting inevitably toward tyranny. … It is the growing determination of men and women of all races and conditions to gain control of their own destinies”.  In this foreign-policy manifesto, President Reagan showed his courage by recognizing the Palestinian nation and asserting that satisfaction of this “people’s legitimate rights is a fundamental objective of our foreign policy”.

    President Reagan called American policy-makers, both Republican and Democrat, to recognize, as he put it, ”the central focus of politics – the minds, hearts, sympathies, fears, hopes, and aspirations not of governments, but of people – the global electorate”.  He concluded, “The American dream lives – not only in the hearts and minds of our own countrymen, but in the hearts and minds of millions of the world’s people in both free and oppressed societies who look to us for leadership.  As long as that dream lives, as long as we continue to defend it, America has a future – and all mankind has reason to hope”.

    Now that the leadership of Muslims in America is passing from one generation to another, this is the old/new message for all Muslims in America.  It’s justice, not “just us”.