Politico-Economic Justice, Part II: The Only Cure for the Wealth Gap and Terrorism

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  The wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana, according to Nicholas D. Kristof’s article, “A Hedge Fund Republic?”, in the New York Times of November 17, 2010.

  He writes, “The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.  In Argentina in the 1940s the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes. That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.  Since then, we’ve reversed places. The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007”.

  Kristof asks: “Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?  Oops! That’s already us.  The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.  That also means that the top 10 percent controls more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth”.

  Professor Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality, notes that for most of American history, income distribution was significantly more equal than today. And other capitalist countries do not suffer disparities as great as ours.  He concludes that, “There has been an increase in inequality in most industrialized countries, but not as extreme as in the United States”.

    The solution to the rapidly and inevitably growing wealth gap is simple.  Do not dismantle existing ownership from the top down, which would be theft, but build new ownership of future wealth from the bottom up.  This would gore some political oxen, but it is easy to do as a means to preserve the sacredness of private property, free enterprise, and the free market, none of which are respected in practice today in America nor, partly through its influence, in much of the rest of the world..

  Since the time of the caveman, ownership in every society has always determined political power.  This is why in a globalized world the NeoCons mimetic scam of “democratic capitalism” makes America universally laughable. 

  The delegitimizing of America as a model for the world is a major cause of global terrorism and terroristic counter-terrorism.  No-one respects a nation that worships order as a false god by refusing to reform and transform counter-productive institutions (the ancien regime).  A return to America’s Jeffersonian roots by pursuing order and freedom through justice, would be worth more than all the guns in the world.

  The link between terrorism and politico-economic injustice is treated in many dozens of my articles published in Sheila Musaji’s Ezine, http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, and in various print journals over the past decade since 9/11 and going back many decades further.  The electronically most accessible include: “Economic Justice: A Cure for Terrorism”, September 29, 2002; “New Frontiers in Conflict Management: A Grand Strategy to Wage Jihad Against Terrorist Muslims”, September 24, 2004; “Taproot to Terrorism”, June 19, 2005; and on November 21, 2005, “Why Are Muslims the Dregs of the World, Mere Scum at the Bottom of the Barrel?”

  Some scholarly treatises are in such journals as the Arches Quarterly, published by the Cordoba Foundation in London.  See the lead article “The Islamic Social Principle of the Right to Freedom (haqq al hurriyah): An Analytical Approach” in the special issue of Summer 2009, entitled, “Islam, Democracy, and the USA: The Audacity of a Common Ground”; and “Thank God for Justice,” presented at a Thanksgiving Day celebration in a Jewish synagogue and published in the Arches Quarterly issue of Winter 2008 entitled “Religion and Secularism”.

  Addressing justice as conceived by America’s founders, who believed in a republic where truth is sought and not decreed, rather than in a secularist democracy where there is no truth and therefore no higher authority to guide the legislators, would be a worthy cause for the Fed, as explained simply in Part I of this series on Political-Economic Justice through Subsidiarity and Personalism, and also in detail at http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us and at http://www.cesj.org