I wrote my book, Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism for publication in 2015 after three years of research and writing. You can still order a copy at Amazon.com (https://www.amazon.com/Political-Catsup-Economy-Fries-Opportunism/dp/0996541713).

At that time, most people didn’t talk about neoliberalism as much as they do now. Most people thought that the politic was someone else’s job to worry about. Most people didn’t talk about Washington D.C.’s corruption which is now a daily topic. At the time, I was worrying about harms to our economy and the politic that happened during and after the Great Recession that was caused by derivatives. Derivatives also were undermining the global economy. I was interested in American history as a treasure trove of information about how we got to our then current state of affairs. I was investigating from primary source materials.

I looked carefully to see what influences could be problematic in our great American political experiment. Since then, I have continued observing the politics and economics of these United States. More recently I purchased a copy of Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon Haunted World, because Sagan was proposing that Americans were losing their ability to think using scientific reason and he was worried that powerful groups would use people’s ignorance of basic science to cause harms.

Parts of Carl Sagan’s book are a little dated now because it was published in 1995. Yet, the premise is still good and has proven to be accurate. People in America have mostly lost the skills to understand basic mathematics and science enough to realize that they are being conned in the twenty first century. We were threatened and conned during the Covid years and conned by derivatives during the run-up to the Great Recession and now there is an effort to con us with digital currency in order to steal everything that people have and enjoy. Threats against free speech are happening whenever those who are capable of doing basic math and science or who understand politics and economics try to explain truths to those that others in power are trying to dupe.

We have come a long way since 1995 and since 2015 toward a better understanding about what is causing our problems. Nowadays, you can find fantastic essays describing and explaining what is happening in politics and economics across the United States and globally. For example, T.J.Harker’s essay 2024: “The Stand of the Based Americans,” (from mansworldmag.online) and “Wake Up Call,” an essay by James Howard Kunstler (kunstler.com). These essays are efficient ways to catch up on the worries that beset us all today.

The outrageousness of our position is becoming more clear. We see the corruption in media, monopolies, and in government at the highest levels. So now you and I have to choose either to hope or to despair. I choose hope.

Hope can lead to a better tomorrow eventually. I’m hoping for a future reconciliation between the current bad guys and good guys that have found each other and formed separate alliances. The social predators vs. the social prey have begun to relate to each other differently because of social media, another technology with surprising and destructive potentials that most of us don’t understand all that well.

Social media has proven to be a powerful agglomeration tool to group people with similar interests into camps that don’t see a common social interest because they don’t get the same information and also because there is no assumption in social media that good can exist as a force in the world at all… instead just a kind of venal avarice and hunger to better oneself at any cost. That isn’t a Christian viewpoint but it is a neoliberal one.

I hope for kindness. I hope for a renewal of representative government where elections aren’t stolen and people have a strong voice in their government’s actions which are limited in scope and accountable to the people. I hope for concern and regret about harmful consequences to others. I hope for rule of law to reestablish consequences for harm. I hope for educating people more about how to assemble a better social system that isn’t gamed for the few social predators at control points. I’m hoping for less political centralization. I am hoping for fewer social predators in positions of power since we can see more clearly now the danger that they pose. I am hoping that the addiction to easy money will fade just as I’m hoping that social imbalances will get fixed so that other addictions will not undermine people’s chance to live a healthy and fulfilled lifespan.

In appreciating all the wrong things that are happening today, I am optimistic that we can accomplish certain improvements. Improving how people live together by resolving to care about consequences has been known and appreciated over the timespan of human beings on this earth. You can find concern for the welfare of other people in various world religions. You can find it in rational humanism, the belief that people can choose better outcomes through a rational means. We can find it in open discourse where problems are recognized and discussed and rectified. You can find concern for others in applying the rule of law so that harms have consequences for those that harm others. We can live more harmoniously than we currently are doing.