1) Grogger - MAGA person who is suddenly realizing what s/he elected and is rejecting the results. They are not quite "woke". They are about halfway there, so they are groggy.
2) Magasplaining - It is derived from the word "mansplaining". It involves the proliferation of fake news and pseudo-facts that are produced by the MAGA community to justify their rhetoric. They never stop to listen to truth or research the real facts about the ideas they are explaining. Since it is gender neutral because both MAGA men and MAGA women do the same thing, it gets the broader moniker of "magasplaining".
Today I look at the courts. There is an article in mainstream media titled "Judge orders administration to submit plan for return of migrants deported to El Salvador prison under AEA". I have no argument with the direction this is going. America has a constitutional amendment that prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment". The administration side stepped this amendment by deporting immigrants to places where there is no prohibition against such treatment. Moreover, the destination was not even the country of origin of the immigrants.
My concern is not the court ruling. It is December. The first wave of people to El Salvador was almost 12 months ago. What happened to "speedy trial"? Is this not a matter of life and death? Why are lawyers who sit comfortably in their penthouse suites being given lots of courtesy time to ponder all of the legal possibilities, while the daily lives of the victims are a living hell? Why is this not on a "zero day" track, so that we would have been at this point 12 days after they were deported? Why is no one in the administration being arrested for defying the courts? How are we believing that justice even has a chance to breathe in a country where people can be disappeared, and then the ponderous wheels of the court system begin to turn and consider and think, and debate, and wonder, and reconsider, and avoid, and delay, and ignore, and coerce, and threaten, and review, and .... until all victims are dead, and the final decision requires no real action, but precedent is established as an entry point for the next atrocity that might offend the senses of the public.
A person on trial for murder deserves the ponderous consideration of the courts. A person, or group of people who have been treated extra-judicially, and are suffering deserve unreserved speed from the justice system, including orders to incarcerate obstructing leaders. Anyone who refuses to follow the order of the court should be removed from the position of leadership and the next person in the chain of command should be given a few hours to follow the court's orders. Instead, we see an entire administration say "no", and then we argue about it for months, as if the rights of the perpetrator exceed the rights of the victims. The inversion here is indefensible.
SCOTUS has so weakened the power and credibility of the courts that we now see a flaunting of court authority. It has been almost an entire year. How can we call this justice? It is not even justice for the perpetrators, because it gives them the impression that they are "right" enough, when "cruel and unusual" is prohibited at a foundational level that parallels the much enshrined "right to bear arms". American lawyers and leaders have fought harder for the right to bear arms - inanimate objects - than they have for the lives of humans whom this administration deems "refuse". Read carefully the words etched in stone at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Read carefully the description of those to whom America offers "liberty": "Send these, the wretched refuse of your teaming shores". The declaration of these immigrants as "refuse" by this administration only increases their qualification for our offers of "liberty". Patrick Henry, in his famous speech equated liberty with life. The Declaration of Independence establishes "life" and "liberty" on equal footing. Yet for nearly a year, the "blessings of liberty" have been denied, by undue delay in process, to those immigrants who have been declared to be refuse.
What troubles me most is not only the underlying conduct, but the way time itself has become a tool of injustice. Delay here isn’t neutral process; it functions as de facto punishment for the powerless and de facto protection for those exercising authority. When people are subjected to extra-judicial harm, “ponderous” process stops being a safeguard and becomes a moral failure.
You’re right that this inversion is indefensible. The system is treating those already harmed as though urgency would somehow violate fairness, while affording extraordinary patience to those defying the courts. That reversal corrodes legitimacy. Justice delayed in these circumstances isn’t just justice denied — it becomes a signal that authority can outwait accountability.
I also agree that what we’re witnessing is not simply executive overreach, but institutional weakening. When court authority can be openly resisted without immediate consequence, it teaches the wrong lesson to everyone involved — including the perpetrators — and normalizes a dangerous precedent. The harm compounds quietly, under cover of procedure.
So the question “What has happened to America?” isn’t rhetorical. It points to a loss of moral proportion: where process is preserved in form, but emptied of its protective purpose. Reclaiming justice here requires not only correct rulings, but restored seriousness about speed, enforcement, and the primacy of human dignity over institutional convenience.
In a news article the Chief Justice pleads for judicial independence, according to the title of the article. He is given great credit for his historical insights as he sites a situation where a judge was brought up for impeachment under President Jefferson, and the cool-headed determination of Congress in that case. The timing of this article is disturbing. There is a thought that Democrats might gain a majority in Congress during the elections in 2026. Therefore, raising this specter at this time amounts to electioneering by the Chief Justice. It is a subtle request to the voters to avoid giving the majority to the opposition party, because he knows he and the other conservatives could be held accountable for partisan rulings.
There is a difference between what is happening in this court, and what has happened when certain ideologues have influenced decisions. The prior courts were not bent to the will of the president. Now it is.
In so many decisions obscure and antique statements have been resurrected to support an overturning of law that on the surface seemed settled. One must scratch one's head and wonder why such an obscure precedent was resurrected. If it were a precedent that resonated with truth over time, it would not be obscure. Its obscurity suggests that it had a niche use, and was not more broadly applicable. Therefore, the result of its use is a finding that is contrived, rather than one that proceeds naturally from the law and the social circumstances. We are no longer in the 1800s, and much in society has changed. Why do we return to a time when "winner take all" politics, national and international conquest by armed force, and the blight of slavery were prevailing norms? Yet the conservative majority continues to seek guidance from the nuance of that period.
There is no justification in the Chief Justices article. It is an advertisement and a warning. It does not suggest that SCOTUS is free from political allegiance. It does not suggest that there will be responsible recusion when judges are handed docket items that represent important ideas and goals of their benefactors. It only asks the public to be sure to elect members of Congress who will not interfere with their progress. They should be unimpeded by Congress as they bend to the will of the President. No. There is not a direct plea for electing members of a certain party. There is just the fearful image of a super majority of the opposition party who might challenge their legitimacy as judges. That concern will weigh heavily in the mind of voters, so it is clearly electioneering. For a branch of government who is appointed for life, and not subject to the need to please voters, this seems to be very intrusive, heavy handed, and unethical. Again, how did we get here? How long will it be before enough of these judges retire, and there is even a slight hope of having a court full of judges with diverse ideas that bring meaning to discussions of the law, rather than bending all law to the will of one person through groupthink? Worse, the siloed majority forces the minority to create a silo, when there is clear evidence of diverse opinions in that group. This is not healthy for the US.
The weak argument that says "this is just a phase, and we have lived through this before", ignores the improved surgery with each attempt to overthrow the Constitution. We have survived clumsy. We have survived audacious. We now face a well analyzed surgical attempt that will ultimately fail due to time, but the path that it cleaves will illuminate the course of the next wave. The next person may have eight years of steady whittling, and may ultimately succeed. That is the real precedent this court is setting.
Our current society is a descendant of our past, not an artifact of it. While looking at past behaviors and arguments, we should not be attempting to relive them. Remember that an accumulation of bad political and judicial decisions between the late 1700s and 1861 resulted in a Civil War. Why would we dwell on resurrecting that mode of failure? We are quick to celebrate our moment of freedom and unification, and quicker to forget how that really looked on the ground. It comes from history books being filled with battles and strategies, and omitting the discussion of daily lives, and political policies ... but that is another discussion.
So, in closing, as a response to the article, I would say that electioneering is an agreement to be held accountable to voter opinion. If the courts wish to remain independent, then they must act as if they are independent and not participate in partisan politics. Decisions must be based on law, settled law must remain settled unless there is great harm caused by it, and the past must stay in the past, unless we are attempting to repeat the problem that was described.
The question for the day is "who is culpable if the situation in Minnesota turns violent?" We see gross antagonism from the Whitehouse and its minions. We have seen violence and killing of peaceful protesters. We have seen investigations turned on their head, and the injured become the accused. We have seen a governor consider how to best use the National Guard Troops from his state to stabilize the situation, and now we see the Whitehouse send a message to the 82nd Airborne Division in Ft. Bragg, to prepare to invade Minnesota. To me, the culpable party is the Whitehouse. While the words in the Constitution may grant certain rights, there is precedent except the secession of 11 states from the union. Secession is not being threatened. The enforcement of policy through cruel and unusual treatment is not legal. The creation of a state where the lives of members of ICE are perceived to be "in danger" must be scrutinized to see if that state of danger was necessary, or a choice. Anyone can default to violence, but in a nation of laws, restraint is the real measure of following the law. So, when the Whitehouse by a series of unrestrained violent acts and abuses of authority to incite a violent response achieves that goal, is it an insurrection by the injured state, or a coup by the Whitehouse. At that point they will have fully overthrown the Constitution, and the rule of law, and forced America into a contest of power. So I ask, "who is really culpable?"
Jan — staying anchored in constitutional process requires us to say plainly what the facts on the ground now indicate.
Based on observable actions, patterns of escalation, and the purposeful stretching and bypassing of constitutional constraints, culpability rests primarily with the federal government—and with this Administration in particular—not “if,” but “when and as” this situation devolves into broader, open political violence.
In our constitutional order, the gravest responsibility lies with those who possess the greatest power. When the federal government exercises authority in extraconstitutional ways—manufacturing emergency conditions, provoking confrontation, and normalizing coercion as governance—it assumes responsibility for the downstream consequences. That is not rhetoric; it is constitutional logic.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that we are no longer operating fully within a liberal democratic framework. We are now living in an increasingly illiberal democracy, where formal legal structures persist even as their spirit is hollowed out. In such systems, restraint is punished, escalation is rewarded, and accountability flows upward only in theory.
History, sadly, will not record this moment honestly. Those who wield power will write the history of it, and they will obscure cause with justification and responsibility with necessity. That is how illiberal systems survive—not by persuasion, but by narrative control.
The tragedy is that constitutional collapse rarely announces itself as such. It arrives dressed as order, enforcement, and inevitability. And by the time violence is openly acknowledged, the question of culpability will already have been buried beneath the story told by the victors.
I read this Substack article and all of the comments above. I have to say that I agree with everything. I can see where our government is lacking in organization and the fact that we are at the tipping point of losing our constitutional freedoms under this administration. I can see where poverty and crime intertwine and make everything worse for everyone. I agree with all the talking points. I think that this Project 2028 is a great starting point and needs to be accomplished better than P2025. We must start implementing these changes earlier rather than later. We must get people to understand the implications of non-involvement in these political decisions and how our voices are our power. To take back our government and the SCOTUS to operate for the people and by the people. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and views on all of this. I’m not as well written or informed as you, but I have survived 61 years and watched our country suffer through the past 10 years under a leadership that, even when not in power, caused so much damage. We can fix this. The progressive leaders we have must step up and speak out more powerfully than ever before and not remain complacent in the destruction of our lives and our world.
Hi Priscilla — thank you for taking the time to read closely and to add your voice to this conversation. What you’ve written reflects something that matters a great deal to me: lived experience paired with moral seriousness.
You’re right that many of the dynamics we’re discussing—constitutional strain, crime and poverty reinforcing one another, institutional drift—don’t appear suddenly. They accumulate over time, often quietly, until they reach a tipping point. That’s precisely why non-involvement becomes so consequential. Drift is rarely reversed by accident.
I also appreciate your emphasis on timing. One of the recurring failures in American civic life is that we wait until moments of acute crisis to begin doing the harder, slower work of rebuilding trust, norms, and accountability. Starting earlier—while there is still space for deliberation rather than reaction—is essential.
Finally, I want to push back gently on one thing you said about not being “as well written or informed.” Endurance, attention, and willingness to speak plainly about what you see are forms of civic competence too. Democracies don’t erode only because elites fail; they recover only when citizens refuse to disengage or normalize what troubles them.
Thank you again for being part of this. Conversations like this matter not because they resolve everything, but because they keep standards, memory, and responsibility alive.
We are surrounded by change. AI, electric cars, smartphones, a race into space, high speed trains, and new types of treads on tires all represent changes we experience almost daily. The people who dream these changes are considered innovators, but in most cases they are not Innovators (capital “I”). They are re-users of innovations and inventions in a way that creates new revenue streams. They are monetizers of innovation. The folding smartphone seems innovative; however, folding phones preceded the rigid ones. So finding a way for a touch sensitive screen to bend paved a way to re-use a previous technology that was attractive to many cellphone owners. We can go down the list of current technology and see that all of it is small “i” innovation. Even AI is small “i” innovation. The original Innovation was the breakthroughs in language recognition. The rest was simply improvement of the process. The data lakes that are being used to inform AI, are not new technology. They are consolidations of existing technologies.
Small “i” innovation drives the market and gives us some technology that is more usable with each cycle, but it is also a distraction to real invention. Our energies are almost completely consumed with using the extra button on cellphones, or the smart technologies in our automobiles; and college graduates are scooped-up by the big corporations and bent to the tasks of integrating each technical release into the corporate tool kits. We have no bandwidth for invention or big “I” Innovation.
There are real possibilities for inventions, but they require cooperation on a scale that gets impeded by government interests, or subverted by capitalists who see the damage to their income streams. We are too consumed with fear about who gets the money. In fact, money power, and profits are the main topics of discourse in our media and our governing bodies.
Imagine the impact on society if approved cancer research were free, rather than representing a sinkhole for millions and perhaps billions of dollars as giants who own the necessary technical resources claim their profits. What if being able to manipulate dark matter made space navigable? How much computer power would be necessary to validate such an idea? Again, the limitation is the profits of the giants. No money, no interest. Turning to our government that is squashing everything that cannot be gilded and shaped into a single name, there is no hope of advancing Innovation. Instead, there is a dumbing-down as a preparatory step to pushing as many people as possible into manufacturing jobs. Those jobs make money for the billionaires who run the economy, and stifle the dreams of the working class, so that whatever innovation if proffered is good enough for stocking-stuffers this holiday season.
Innovation and invention are also the domain of language. Everything needs to be named and described. So, while American leadership is focused on profits and monetizing innovations, they are hamstringing the English language in the future. Soon we will begin adopting words from the languages in other countries to describe the tools we are using. While this improves our awareness of the rest of the world, language is power, just as much as money is power. Yielding one, eventually leads to yielding the other. Money soaked leaders have no concept of this relationship.
Leadership that sees beyond color and culture, and recognizes creativity and intelligence is dearly needed right now, and will be needed even more as we push our mental decay each year into the future. Conservatism serves a purpose when innovation runs off the rails; however, it becomes a roadblock when it becomes the dominant force. 50+ years go we watched animators send George Jetson to work in a flying automobile that was just the right size for the number of passengers in it. We have flip phones that resemble communicators from Star Trek, but our vehicles still travel on tires. Leaders with vision are the leaders America needs. They do not have to be technogeeks. Rather, they need to perceive a world in the future that is not some dystopian nightmare of a remnant that survives a nuclear power grab.
We are stunted by our understanding of success. The current belief is that the person who gets the most building, boats, monuments and medals with their name on it, must be the most successful. That has never been a truth. The person who gets the most people to cooperate and contribute to social and scientific advancement has always been viewed as the biggest success.
We have serious choices to consider with out future leaders. Do we freeze our progress and maximize the monetization, or do we forge ahead and create real progress? Progress creates cooperation beyond our borders, because lots of people will have bits of ideas that contribute to a greater whole. Monetization creates competition, raises walls, and occasionally requires bombs to be dropped. The choice of leadership matters.
This article - https://nypost.com/2025/12/21/opinion/trumps-feds-can-end-run-zohran-mamdani-and-fight-nyc-crime/ - highlights one of the biggest problems that progressive Democrats face. First, it takes an existing problem that has existed across several administrations, and it blames it on the incoming mayor. Mamdani did not create this problem. Efforts that have been made to solve it previously have not worked. Yet, the writer predicts that a different approach is the source of failure. Really? Doing the same thing the same way repeatedly for a particular problem will have different results? How does that work on your computer? Does clicking the same button repeatedly give you a different action?
The problem outlined in this article goes even deeper. The rhetoric discussing the problem can be framed as "populist". It points to a problem and shouts for action! The normal action that the author recognizes falls into the category of oppression. Let us not demonize oppression. It has its place in every leader's tool box. However, it is an over used tool.
Mamdani is employing a tool called "hope". He is proposing measures to reduce the daily financial burdens of the citizens of NYC, as well as alleviate time stress (faster bus system). These cost money. Their impact is unknown, but they constitute clicking a different button in your computer program in order to get a different result.
The "cost" is the challenge and progressive Democrats are often stymied by populism when attempting to redirect civic funds toward "hope". Populism sells newspaper ads, and excites the average citizen. Police action trumps stress relief because it is dynamic and we see the criminals apprehended, and feel safer become one more criminal is off the streets. We ignore the fact that financial burdens and civil stress creates three more criminals to fill the void that the apprehended one left. We ignore that the emotion of the city has grown just a little angrier and a little less tolerant, so the lives of the policemen are put in situations of higher risk, for just small problems. A few decades ago, those small problems would have been the major incidents for the day. The result is that the funds for progressive measures get hijacked for oppression, and the best progressive Democrat can do is maintain the status quo. Thus Democratic conservatism becomes the path most trod.
Project 2028 is about change just as much as Mamdani's administration is about change. There is no way to quell the shrieking voices of populist fear; however, a strong communication plan can address the concerns raised by educating and enlightening citizens about what progressive measures are expected to accomplish. Too often we make changes in the background because we want to make progress and discourse slows the wheels of progress. A good, aggressive communication plan can overcome the resistance that eventually either nullifies progressive measures by causing them to be enacted too late, or stymies them entirely by forcing a populist emergency to steal the funds. Grassroots communication is the key to making change work. It worked for MAGA republicans, it can work for progressive Democrats.
Jan — I think you put your finger on a core failure mode in American politics: we keep mistaking visible coercion for effective governance, because it feels immediate, legible, and emotionally satisfying—even when it reproduces the very conditions it claims to fix.
Your computer metaphor is exactly right. Clicking the same button harder doesn’t produce a different outcome; it just wears out the system—and the people operating it. What gets lost in populist law-and-order rhetoric is that stress, precarity, and time scarcity are not “soft” variables. They are upstream drivers of the behaviors we later try to suppress downstream with force. When we ignore that, we end up in a treadmill where enforcement grows, tolerance shrinks, and legitimacy erodes on all sides—including for the police themselves.
I also appreciate your refusal to romanticize either side. You’re not saying coercion has no place—only that it’s overused because it’s politically saleable, while investments in “hope” (relief, mobility, time, dignity) are harder to explain, slower to show results, and easier to demagogue. That’s exactly why communication becomes strategy, not ornament. Without an aggressive, grassroots narrative about what these investments are meant to change, progressive governance gets outflanked—either delayed until it’s ineffective or stripped of resources by the next manufactured emergency.
This is where Project 2028 is trying to go: treating legitimacy, stress reduction, and institutional trust not as moral aspirations, but as core system-performance requirements. MAGA proved that sustained, emotionally resonant communication can move resources and loyalty at scale. The lesson isn’t to copy the content—but to learn from the method, and deploy it in service of policies that actually reduce the load on the system instead of hardening it.
Trump gives Elon Musk a win over a longtime foe | CNN Business - There is no surprise that Trump would do something that would indirectly benefit Musk. Here are some interesting details in the article, that were spaced quite a bit apart.. 1) ISS and Glass Lewis are owned by companies in Germany and Canada, respectively., 2) Lawrence Elbaum, an M&A partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and co-head of its shareholder activism defense practice, told CNN. 3) Attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell are representing Trump in a New York criminal case. Elbaum is not affiliated with the legal defense. This has "personal grudge match" written in bold letters all over it.
So more than being a snarky comment on a new article, this highlights a problem. The executive branch may excessively influence the economy through singular action that my not really be about the whole economy. He can weaponize the SEC and send it after his opponents in favor of his friends. To me it sounds as if he wanted Elbaum to represent him in court in NYC, because he is extremely talented. Elbaum said "no, so he is going after Elbaum's business. Additionally, the bond between Trump and Musk is again being used, as Trump flogs anyone who blocks Musk's rise.
The easy question is "who is Musk in the larger global financial strategy, and why is he being positioned as a trillionaire? What is his real role in global strategies? Lots of conspiracy theories swirl in my head, but there is no foundation of facts and relationships to ground any of them. Just questions.
Conversely, if this is all Trump, then we focus less on Musk. The act itself raises the issue of rule versus administer. It asks the question, "does our government rule us; or, are our needs represented by the legislature and turned into laws and budget items that provide the right amount of opportunity for us to be successful in our lives?"
Ruling means not only controlling Congress, but also using various regulating agencies to create policies that amount to law without representation - one of the pillars of the Declaration of Independence.
As witnessed by the double-tap on 9/2 and the taking of the Venezuelan tanker earlier this week, we can see that rulers can move with a swiftness and decisiveness unparalleled by legislatures. Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War relived a number of commanding generals for reasons he thought were important. These changes in command required no action or approval of the legislature. The power to unilaterally make change or assign resources is a bonus during a crisis. What happens when the crisis is self-generated? What happens when the crisis is a result of crisis action? Do all crises require immediate action? Is singular decisiveness more useful than the synergy of many thinkers? It is impossible to regulate the thinking of voters who's allegiances are based on emotion, rather than rational thought (this condition has been borne-out in many media articles where voters express surprise at the results of their votes). He who wins the election holds the power. Worse, there is no knowing if the judges at SCOTUS will extend executive powers or limit them.
When we look at the greater impact of an executive who "rules", we see a large number of one-brain problems that would not exist. We see decisive action on a potential problem, such as foreign advisory committees influencing American shareholders. Fortunately, German and Canada are not malicious actors. Conversely, I celebrate globalization. It begins to raise all economies so none can be exploited. The question in this situation is how we put rails on the impulse to act when the crisis and the incentives only reflect the needs and ideas of a single individual, without constraining the ability to act when a real crisis exists.
Bad judgement, and impulsiveness are a risk, regardless of the person in office. We thought we had safeguards. We did not. We had a government ripe for this type of situation. Do we put a box around the judiciary that says "no more than four judges can be either liberal or conservative, and the last judge must be middle-of the road? Seems futile. We would be subject to every administration's interpretation of each of those terms. However, we can definitely constrain the types of questions an executive can ask the court.
From a symbiosis perspective, we have an overly powerful executive in a democracy, and a court that is willing to grant the executive more power. We have discussed the issue of conflict of interest, which must be ever more strictly applied. We have a delicate balance between the ability to administer, and the ability to legislate as an executive. It really comes down to executive orders. What can executive orders do, and when must an executive request action from the legislature. EOs cannot rename football teams. It seems a great degree of overreach.
Shifting to a second administration issue, we have an president who has a flourishing real estate business, and his corporation has expanded into cellphones and crypto currency and a golf league with a foreign entity. That type of business freedom MUST stop. A president cannot be in impartial if s/he is profiteering from the ability to change regulations so his/her business gains opportunities. President Biden was persecuted over a photo, yet Trump completes business deals at his convenience. It either is legal or it is not.
Then there is the impact of team play among political parties that does not benefit citizens, in spite of the role of legislators as representatives. We cannot regulate team play. However, we need to regulate the source of it. It is a dire solution that divorces a president form his/her party. It frees representatives to act on behalf of their constituents. It leave national leadership in Congress, and it frees the Speaker of the House to admonish the President and even impeach him/her without damage to the political party.
The Environment: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/world-jointly-tackle-issues-climate-change-pollution-biodiversity-128232703 is interesting because it discusses the interrelationship between various aspects of human activity that impact the environment. There is not a lot of detail, but one can see your formula for interacting factors helping to identify immediate actions, and later actions in order to slow or stop the decay of the environment. This project needs a plan that begins on day-one of the administration. The wheels of democracy turn slowly, and working through the public notice periods and court challenges in time to effect any change means starting early with the most critical items. The report cited in this article would be useful for gathering and prioritizing policy actions. Notably in the article was a reference to resource depletion. While we ramp-up electric cars and scoop-up all of the rare earth minerals for batteries, has anyone assessed how far that resource will stretch? Is it one car for every human? Is it three cycles of cars for every human? Is it less/more? We have a lot of ways to probe the earth without digging or drilling. Perhaps the right solution is reorganize the EPA into a licensing and monitoring section, and to create a taskforce for predictive consumption of resources, so we do not reach the end of the rope by surprise.
There is also the need for an international effort. I have seen pictures from New Delhi and Beijing during normal business days. You could cut through the smog. Imagine a US government entity such as USAID that bids for contracts to help both countries solve the heavy pollution problems they have faster. It could be THE US entry into an international organization that works cooperatively to solve the problem. I feel certain that the UN already has such an agency. It just needs more robust support, so climate managers do not get killed is mysterious ways.
Then there are wars. The magnitude of pollution created in wars is unparalleled. Between vehicles, and aircraft, and things that go boom, and awful lot of pollution is created.
Thanks for this. You’re spotting exactly the kind of interlinked pressures that a compound view of security tries to make visible. Climate change, resource depletion, pollution, biodiversity collapse, war, political gridlock — none of these operate in isolation anymore, and you’re right that the ABC piece touches the edges of that bigger picture even if it doesn’t go into detail.
You’re also absolutely right that any serious environmental strategy has to start on day one of an administration. And that means the planning and architecture-builds need to have been completed months to years beforehand.
The policy “clock” in a democracy runs slower than the climate clock, and the lag between intention, public comment, rulemaking, litigation, and implementation means we lose years before we even begin. Your point about identifying the critical first actions is spot on. That’s exactly where a compound lens is useful — it helps leaders see which pressures amplify others, and where early interventions create strategic leverage.
Your question about rare earth minerals is one that very few people want to confront honestly. We talk about “transitioning to EVs” as if the resources are infinite. They aren’t. The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t mine our way into a clean-energy future without knowing the depletion curve — how much we have, how quickly we’re consuming it, and what the second- and third-order consequences are. A predictive resource–consumption task force, as you propose, would be a huge step forward. We routinely forecast oil inventories, but not the critical minerals we’re staking the entire energy transition on.
Reorganizing EPA around licensing, monitoring, and predictive analytics is also a smart idea. EPA was built for the environmental challenges of the 1970s. The challenges of the 2020s and 2030s are system-wide and global, not just local point-source pollution. Your thinking is ahead of where many policymakers are.
And yes — the global dimension can’t be ignored. Pollution in New Delhi or Beijing doesn’t stay there. You’re absolutely right that the U.S. should be more active in offering technical assistance and cooperative solutions through USAID or other international platforms. There are UN agencies doing this work, but they are often under-resourced and politically constrained. A more muscular U.S. engagement — not as a scolding voice, but as a partner — would matter.
War as a generator of pollution is another point most people overlook. Conflict accelerates environmental degradation in ways that take generations to undo, and those environmental shocks then feed the next round of humanitarian and political crises. It's another example of how all these domains converge.
Bottom line: you’re thinking in exactly the right direction. These problems are intertwined, and our solutions have to be as well. Appreciate you sharing the article and your reflections — they’re important contributions to the bigger conversation we all need to be having.
This is EXACTLY the sort of systems-focused analysis taken by my 'General Theory of Compound Security' (GTOCS).
With great power comes great responsibility (Uncle Ben in 1962, or Voltaire). We have seen the tarnishing of a foundational institution, the Supreme Court, through the targeted abuse of its power, with no accountability. We have seen proof that members of the court, judges, have accepted extensive favors from wealthy citizens; and we have seen the opinions they wrote favor the biases of those benefactors with nothing more than a Jedi handwave ("nothing to see here") to defend their actions. Increasingly in this period the need for accountability of the justices of the Supreme Court is becoming necessary. However, the details of that accountability and the agency that holds them accountable will require more thought and caution than simply scribbling a constitutional amendment. It is certain that the Executive Branch is NOT the agency for enforcing accountability. Even Congress is dubious because of the political dalliances that would be used to harass justices who ruled against the majority party. In this current environment, I could see the conservative judges removing the liberal judges, if SCOTUS were given the power to police itself. Thus, we are stuck. It needs to get solved in this project, all of the way from the amendment to the ethics agency.
The power of the ethics board must be limited to determinations of bias based on accepting favors and gifts. Vacations at the remote island home of a billionaire must be considered as influence pedaling. We are seeing a rapid erosion of the protections of the Constitution due to a court whose ethics have been seriously questioned on a number of important issues. We are playing catch-up. This project must include a viable solution for protecting America from judges who have been inappropriately influenced. Based on judges refusing to recuse themselves when ruling on matters that reflect household interests, or interests of close influential friends, it is obvious that these judges need an agency where they can seek advice on such matters.
Hi Jan — first, let me say: “Voltaire meets Uncle Ben” is going into my personal hall of fame. A perfect opening line for a discussion that really does sit at the intersection of Enlightenment principle and comic-book clarity.
And you’re right: what we’re watching now with the judiciary is not simply scandal, nor just impropriety — it’s a compound legitimacy problem inside one of the Republic’s core load-bearing institutions. Once the public begins to doubt that justice is impartial, or that justices are accountable to any ethical standard beyond personal discretion, the erosion spreads outward into the system. That’s exactly the kind of legitimacy-velocity dynamic GToCS warns about: slow decay for a long time… then sudden loss when stress hits the structure.
Your diagnosis of the dilemma is also exactly right:
The Executive cannot enforce accountability without inviting fears of politicization or intimidation.
Congress is too partisan and too structurally fragile to act as a neutral arbiter.
Self-policing by the Court has already shown its limits, and in this climate could easily turn into a factional purge rather than meaningful oversight.
So we arrive where you landed:
A constitutional amendment + an independent ethics body is necessary — but it must be designed with extraordinary care.
The key, as you note, is to define Both the scope and the limits:
not to intrude on judicial reasoning
not to weaponize oversight
not to empower partisan retaliation
but to enforce standards of conduct that are baseline for every other public servant in America
Things like:
-undisclosed gifts
-luxury travel
-political patrons turned personal benefactors
-refusal to recuse when clear conflicts exist
These aren’t edge-case hypotheticals — they’re recurring stressors that are now warping public trust.
In GToCS terms, what we need is a Tier I legitimacy stabilizer: an ethics institution whose only mandate is to safeguard the conditions under which judicial legitimacy can endure. It doesn’t touch decisions. It doesn’t referee ideology. It protects the boundary between private influence and public duty.
And importantly — as you also pointed out — it provides a place for judges themselves to seek guidance before they step into ethical quicksand. Right now that channel barely exists, and the absence of a structured advisory path is part of why we’re in this mess.
We’re overdue for a reform that is about restoring the Republic’s constitutional scaffolding, not punishing personalities. Your framing cuts right to that deeper civic project — and it is absolutely something that should be integrated into the broader “Project 2028” work.
As I continue to consider this situation, it strikes me that creating an ethics committee for SCOTUS leaves the door open for future poisoning of the process. The vulnerability is a result of having a committee with no oversight. Congress has the ability to impeach its own members and the president. Congress has the power to approve judges appointed by the president; however, no one has the ability to remove those judges. Creating an ethics board or committee or other named resource potentially provides a path for removing judges who have become partisan; but who keeps the ethics board members from being partisan and who removes them if they do? Also, who puts those members on the board?
Some questions to be considered. First, who has the greatest interest in the integrity of the ethics board? Is it the citizens at large? Is it the Judiciary as a whole? Is it just the courts of review? Is it only SCOTUS?
If it is the citizens at large, then should the appointment process mirror the appointment of justices for the Supreme Court with the president nominating the board members, and Congress approving them. Should it be all of Congress? Just the House (to balance Senate confirmations of Justices) or just the Senate, since they approve other appointments.
If it is the Judiciary at large, is there an appointment/approval process, or are they elected from within the members of the Judiciary as necessary? If the scope of interest and control is smaller - either all courts of review, or just SCOTUS - who nominates and how is the election process handled?
Once we know how the members of the board are made legitimate, then we may have a sense of how they may be removed for misconduct or partisanship. Both ends of this process need to be well defined so that additional laws from a partisan Congress or executive orders from a manipulative president cannot be written to contaminate the intent of establishing such a board or its legitimate proceedings.
There are several living presidents and Vice Presidents who are Democrats, as well as department Secretaries and other people from various levels of management in the government. Their experience with the benefits and flaws of the organization of the government would yield a lot of value. Do you plan to ask them to review or provide input on any part of this? I would like to think this has a deeper base of knowledge and experience than the 2025 project. The discussion pool in this forum is kind of small. Is there work outside of this site being accomplished? 3 years is short, so I am curious. Hope you enjoyed your holiday.
First, the “do-its” vs. “policy/regulate-its” structure isn’t just about clarity of function; it’s about restoring a healthy separation of powers inside the Executive Branch itself. When service-delivery agencies no longer grade their own homework—and when enforcement, oversight, and implementation are institutionally distinct—we reduce conflicts of interest, strengthen trust, and make accountability operational rather than rhetorical. That, in many ways, is the constitutional logic our current administrative state has drifted away from.
Second, on the question of who should help shape this effort: yes—this absolutely requires a wider bench than the discussion pool here. Former presidents, vice presidents, cabinet secretaries, senior SES leaders, and cross-partisan practitioners all carry lived experience that would sharpen, stress-test, and legitimize any reimagining of American governance. The intention is for Project 2028 to draw from exactly that kind of broad, cross-institutional expertise—far beyond any single platform.
There is work happening beyond this site: ongoing dialogues, professional networks, academic and public-policy circles, and independent institutional-reform initiatives. What you’re seeing here is just the forward-facing portion—the “open-source” conversation—of a much larger and growing ecosystem.
And you’re right: three years is not a long time. But it’s enough time to frame a serious blueprint, assemble the right contributors, and build consensus around reforms that strengthen the Republic rather than simply reshuffle its mechanics.
My "little holiday" has been a pretty good one--very productive, including our dialogues! Hope your holiday was restorative as well, Jan—and thank you again for helping push this project toward the depth and seriousness it deserves.
We can reasonably follow the social growth of the 13 colonies through the establishment of our Constitutional Republic by reading the major documents and statutes produced in those colonies that eventually became states. Comparatively, the effort to administer the colonies and later to administer the states looks a lot like someone throwing a bowl of spaghetti against the wall. The current administration has begun the disassembly of the executive branch by working to eliminate departments that exist outside of the Federal powers assigned in the Constitution. It has also reduced a lot of oversight. However, there appears to be no plan for any action beyond pruning the tree.
An example of sprawl in the Federal Government is USAID. It evolved as an independent agency; got pruned; then got moved under the Department of State. Whether USAID was valuable or idealistic, but controversial is not the point of this note. It is the randomness of its placement both at inception and prior to its demise.
A second example is the blending of the NSA and the Department of State under the current administration. Other than a lack of appointees, and an abrupt disruption due to a resignation, is there a valid reason to bring this agency into the domain of the State Department?
A third example is the dismantling of the Department of Education. This department is clearly overreach by the Federal Government. Nothing in the US Constitution gives the Federal Government power over education. Does that need to be repaired, or are there certain activities that were performed by this department that were supportable under clauses that mandated equal protection, and other statements of universal equality in the US Constitution and its Amendments? Do we have a random distribution of these equity efforts strewn throughout our government, and are they managed well. Should there be a more centrally managed effort at DEI that becomes the umbrella agency for the various equity efforts?
A fourth bit of random organization is the Secret Service. Rather than being an arm of Homeland Security, it is part of the Department of Treasury. Is this “not all of your eggs in one basket”? Or is it “this is not law enforcement; it is personal security”? Is there a mission they would not be able to perform under Homeland Security that they have the freedom to perform as an arm of the Treasury? I know that the US Coast Guard must not be under DoW (formerly DoD) so they may perform law enforcement. Is the Secret Service like that? Also, why is the Coast Guard under the DoT, rather than Homeland Security?
There needs to be a close analysis of all of the functional departments in the Executive Branch, and those departments need to be reorganized to include the functions related to their primary purposes. Budgets, chains of management, stationery, and oversight will be simplified by organizing the government functionally according to the needs of this era.
The top-level departments established during the period of the writing of the US Constitution served the fledgling states well. They have become bedrock tradition for our government for more than two centuries. Are all of their functions still relevant, and are their subordinate departments organized in a manner that makes their management and regulation as simple as it can be?
If we take a look at the cost of political campaigns, we see a bar too high for an average person to meet. The biggest cost is advertising. Media costs exceed venue costs; and failing to pay the media means they will sink your campaign effort. Look at the campaign of VP Harris. For strategic reasons she delayed appearing on mainstream media interviews. Consequently, they dubbed her an “enigma”, and continually broadcast the perception that America did not know her, even though she had been the Vice President for four years. It is this level of subtle propaganda that the media wields to choose its preferred candidate. A very calm and organized VP Harris would be a huge loss of media revenue compared to a scandal ridden media-ready opponent. The media sold the idea of Trump over the enigma, and we have those results. The result is more engagement in the news by everyone in America because no one can find enough truth to make heads or tails out of what is happening. It is all drama, and it sells.
The question I have is whether these huge amounts of money should be the indicators of success of a candidate. Both party’s presidential campaign funds managed somewhere close to a billion dollars in donations. Yet, we have how many people on SNAP? Money buys power. As published in the New York times today, money is connected to political appointments and favorable legislation. It happens because it takes so much money to get someone elected to a political office.
I know that there has been a push by the Democratic party to catch-up with the Republicans on the use of social media. I see lots of mainstream media reposting and reporting on the big social networks such as X, and Truth(?). I also see lots of influencers on Instagram and discussion boards such as Redditt. There are many more social media outlets, and many are not used. The social media communication department should be one of the most robust and active groups during a campaign, and while a person is serving in office. Millions of dollars in venue costs and advertising costs can be saved by having very active interactions on social media. Moreover, those interactions can be more tailored and personal. On cannot ignore the major media outlets, and there have to be personal appearances, but the total cost of those events can be greatly reduced with a robust social media campaign.
Social media and direct asynchronous electronic communication is the lifeblood of the average American. Lots of work needs to be done to ensure transparency and accuracy to avoid flooding social media with false information. The balance of this effort has been rigorously tested since COVID. It was a battleground for pitting the First Amendment against public safety. Erosion of rights and subverting of rights for the excuse of public safety has been an issue since the writing of the Constitution. We all know that the First Amendment is our gateway for speaking truth to power. So, there needs to be growth in the intelligent management of social media. Management does not necessarily mean regulation; however, there will be regulation. Social media is different than news outlets and content streaming. It is grassroots. The recent improvement on X that exposes the nation of residence of contributors is an extremely useful feature. Personal addresses are not necessary for most interactions, but geography matters when considering opinions. It is this level of feature management that the government needs to embrace. Helping social media platforms navigate the maze of laws, regulations and court decisions would be a very useful service, and would help new platforms begin providing grassroots interactions more quickly. The government service that provides this interaction could be expanded to serve as a liaison for web sites and other technologies as they emerge. I am not sure whether the FCC is organized to provide this level of support, or if they are a regulating and oversight organization. If they are not already well organized to provide this service, it is an expansion that is worth implementing.
I think you’re exactly right about the way campaign costs and media incentives have reshaped who can realistically run for office—and how the public comes to understand (or misunderstand) candidates. The Harris example you raise is a perfect case in point: the media didn’t “discover” an enigma; it constructed one because ambiguity sells better than steady competence. That’s been true for decades, but the scale and speed of the distortion are now different.
Your broader point about money is also the heart of it. The barrier to entry is so high that most ordinary citizens can’t even imagine running. The fundraising treadmill drives political behavior, and—as you noted—campaign donors often end up shaping appointments, priorities, and legislation. None of that moves us toward a healthier republic.
I also agree that the path forward has to include a smarter, more intentional use of social media—not as a replacement for traditional campaigning, but as a counterweight to the high-cost, high-distortion media environment. If campaigns invested in real digital engagement, not just advertising, it could lower costs, broaden access, and make candidates less dependent on legacy media gatekeepers.
Your point about the government’s role is well taken too. We don’t need heavy-handed regulation, but we do need serious policy work on transparency, platform design, and feature governance. Geography tagging, provenance indicators, bot detection, and guardrails around synthetic media are all commonsense steps. A federal office that helps platforms navigate legal and regulatory terrain—rather than just punishing them—could actually strengthen free speech by reducing chaos and improving signal quality.
All of this ties back to the deeper issue you’ve been raising in your other notes: the real cost of political dysfunction, economic inequality, and policy drift always lands hardest on ordinary people. And the longer we avoid the structural fixes—economic, electoral, and informational—the more brittle the system becomes.
You said: "A federal office that helps platforms navigate legal and regulatory terrain—rather than just punishing them—could actually strengthen free speech by reducing chaos and improving signal quality."
There is a principle in your statement that is worth greater consideration. It raises the question, "Do we need a Federal Government Central Help Desk"? Is it time to apply the model, that Information Systems companies and departments around the world have implemented, to the Federal Government? I think this would be a huge step forward for the average citizen. As a citizen, I would not need to know if my question about a boating accident needed to be sent to Homeland Security, or the Department of Transportation, or even the Department of War/Defense. I could ask the Federal Help Desk. The person handling the initial request could either give me the answer, or that person could forward the request to the correct service group in the correct Federal agency. Future communications of the question would be initiated by a member of the service group, and would meet Service Level Agreements for the amount of time it takes to respond. There is one really important consideration. The service desk, and access to the service desk must never become a barrier to access to government agencies. Chat Bots, and endless layers of voice menus cannot be the gateway to assistance. Yes, there is a headcount concern.
There will also be the question of out-sourcing. If it is out-sourced, the message will be "this is experimental", rather than "this is our way of embracing the present". Its existence changes the image of the government from being regulatory, to being service-oriented. This is not a frivolous change.
Where do Federal Service Desk agents sit? Anywhere in the US (Yes, screening to ensure they are not in places like North Korea will be necessary). The point is that new buildings, and increased housing, and even more traffic in the Washington DC area is not necessary. There are companies who have IT Help Desks where their agents work from home.
Layering is important. People who receive and handle the first calls would be level 1 agents, and their ability to answer questions would be superficial. Level 2 agents could potentially answer many regulatory questions. People at the various government departments would fall into the second layer of assistance. Level three and higher would result in more direct communication with department heads, chairs, and Secretaries. Access to that level of assistance would be through referral from a lower level of support.
None of this would be designed to interrupt normal diplomatic activity, or other special relationships (to be defined).
Hi Jan — this is a terrific set of observations, and it gets at something deeper than the usual “cut this department / move that function” conversation. What you’re describing — whether in the evolution of USAID, the Secret Service’s odd placement, or the disruptive reshuffling happening now — points to a much larger truth:
The federal government’s architecture has grown for 240 years by accretion, not by design.
We’ve added layers, spliced together mismatched missions, and often housed functions where they “fit least badly” rather than where they truly belonged. It does look, as you put it, like spaghetti thrown at a wall.
So when you raise the idea of a Federal Government Central Help Desk, you’re actually touching on the same problem from a citizen’s vantage point:
The system was never built to be navigable.
It was built to be survivable — internally — for the government itself.
From a compound-security perspective, that’s a structural vulnerability.
When the public can’t easily understand or access its own institutions, legitimacy erodes. When agencies don’t know how to coordinate across functional boundaries, adaptiveness shrinks. And when functions aren’t aligned with missions, you get the kind of bureaucratic sprawl you listed: USAID moved like a chess piece, the Coast Guard floating between Defense/ Transportation/ Homeland Security, or the Secret Service sitting inside Treasury for historical reasons that no longer match its modern mission profile.
Your help-desk idea reframes the challenge in exactly the right way:
Stop thinking about government as a collection of agencies people must learn to navigate, and start thinking about it as a service-delivery system that guides the public to the correct node — the way every modern information ecosystem does.
A few reflections to build on your point:
1. A Federal “Front Door” Isn’t Just Customer Service — It’s Governance Reform
A single front-end access point (staffed by humans, not bots) actually forces the back end of government to reorganize around function, not tradition. It’s the same logic that led corporations to centralize IT support:
a front door compels a cleaner house.
2. It Would Normalize the Idea That Citizens Don’t Need To Know the Bureaucracy
As you said:
“I shouldn’t have to know whether my boating accident question belongs with DHS, DOT, or DoD.”
Correct. You shouldn’t. That is the government’s job.
3. It Creates a Service-Oriented Culture That Can Rebuild Legitimacy
One of the biggest problems in the U.S. today isn’t just policy failure — it’s perceived inaccessibility.
A centralized help desk is a symbolic and practical shift:
from regulator → to partner
from gatekeeper → to guide
4. Layered Staffing and Distributed Work Are Features, Not Bugs
Your point about level-1, level-2, level-3 support is exactly how high-reliability organizations operate.
And doing it remotely is not only feasible — it’s strategically smart. A dispersed help desk:
-widens the talent pool
-reduces cost
-protects continuity during national emergencies
-shows the country that federal jobs don’t require moving to the Beltway
5. It Should Never Become a Barrier to Real Human Access
You’re right to warn against chatbot filters and endless automated menus.
The front door must be human-first, with AI and automation used behind the scenes to help triage, not to block.
6. This Idea Only Works If It’s Paired With a Functional Reassessment of the Executive Branch
And this brings us back to your bigger insight:
It’s not enough to prune the tree — the orchard needs a redesign.
A true help desk can’t function if the underlying agencies remain fragmented, duplicative, or misaligned. The house needs to be put in order:
--clarity on who does what; consolidation of overlapping missions; functional alignment (e.g., homeland security functions with DHS, financial enforcement with Treasury, diplomacy with State, etc.); real accountability and service-level expectations
The 19th-century cabinet structure was designed for a young republic.
The 21st-century government operates in a digital, dispersed, interconnected world.
Those structures no longer match modern missions.
A Central Federal Help Desk, paired with a functional reorganization of departments, is not a small tweak — it’s the first step toward a government that ordinary Americans can actually use.
And that alone would rebuild a lot more trust than people think.
Thanks again for raising the question. It's exactly the kind of practical, citizen-first innovation that the country is overdue for discussing seriously.
There are "do-it" agencies and there are "regulate-it" agencies. Currently there is a morass of do-its mixed with regulate-its across the government. A lot of it reflects organic growth. It can be sorted, and should be sorted.
Consider DHS as "all enforcement and protection do-its". So ATF, and FBI, ICE, Secret Service, Coast Guard, and an aviation branch similar to the Coast Guard (Civil Air Patrol?), as well as Air Traffic Controllers, and toss a coin of Park Rangers, could be part of the internal web of protection, enforcement, and service. You could add a cyber division to DHS, rather than each of the subgroups having their own cybercrimes/investigations units. There is too much duplication. Should the FCC be brought into DHS?
That takes some of the do-its out of Departments of Transportation, Treasury, and Interior, and maybe Commerce. It changes the nature of those agencies to regulatory and oversight. National Parks could have administrative staff that reported to the Department of the Interior. Is that overlap confusing? Do we need to understand the mission of the Park Ranger better? In my mind that leaves the Forestry service to manage the physical condition of the wildlife environment, and it means Rangers deal with human interactions in our parks.
Then there is the Department of Health and Human Services. It is a conglomeration of services that are not necessarily related. Concurrently there is HUD, which would seem to be a sub-function under Dept. of Interior, but is a separate Secretary level department. It makes good politics, but it takes an integral function from under the Interior and gives it a separate voice. How many functions are duplicated due to this separation? Could both departments benefit from integrating them?
What you’re describing isn’t just bureaucratic clutter; it’s a deeper architectural problem in how the federal executive grew over 240 years. And you’re absolutely right that the core distinction we’ve lost track of is the difference between “do-it” agencies (operational executors) and “regulate-it” agencies (rule-setters, overseers, and compliance monitors).
When those two functions live inside the same structures — or worse, bleed into each other across departments — several things happen:
Duplication proliferates
Every agency builds its own enforcement, cyber, legal, and operational sub-functions because no shared backbone exists.
Accountability blurs
Citizens (and even policymakers) can’t tell who is responsible for what.
Resources fragment
Each agency spends to reinvent the same capabilities rather than pooling and professionalizing them.
Strategy suffers
The government becomes a patchwork of legacy missions instead of a coherent system aligned to contemporary threats.
Your DHS example illustrates this perfectly.
If we treated DHS as the centralized home of “enforcement and protection do-its”, the logic of placing ATF, FBI, ICE, Secret Service, and even specialized aviation or cyber branches under a unified operational umbrella becomes clearer. Likewise, park rangers, Coast Guard functions, and civil aviation patrols begin to sort themselves more naturally when the organizing principle is function, not history.
Right now, the federal structure reflects layer upon layer of institutional improvisation — a series of compromises, political bargains, and emergency creations that were never reconciled into a coherent whole. The result is exactly what you described: a government where “do-it” and “regulate-it” functions are interwoven in ways that confuse missions and weaken performance.
You’re also right to highlight DHS cyber consolidation.
Every major operational agency now has its own cyber shop — FBI, Secret Service, ATF, DHS, DoD, DOE, Treasury. That’s not resilience; that’s fragmentation. A single, specialized, professional cyber division under a unified operational command would serve the country far better.
Your point about FCC is also intriguing.
Bringing the FCC (or parts of it) under a security-first department reframes communications as critical national infrastructure, which frankly aligns more closely with the 21st-century threat landscape than its original New Deal-era remit.
The same logic applies to Interior, HHS, HUD, Forestry, and National Parks — areas where the lines between human services, environmental stewardship, housing policy, and public land management have blurred over the decades. These agencies were not designed for interdependence; they evolved into overlap.
Reorganizing around clear functional principles —
Who regulates?
Who enforces?
Who operates and delivers services?
— would create cleaner chains of responsibility, reduce duplicative infrastructure, and ultimately make the government easier to understand, navigate, and trust.
In short:
You’re making the case for a functional re-foundation of the executive branch — one that aligns 18th-century structures with 21st-century realities.
It’s overdue. And the more we talk about it at the level you’re engaging — not as partisan pruning, but as structural modernization — the closer we get to a federal system that actually matches the complexity of the country it serves.
There is one other strength that the reorganization into do-its, and policy/regulate-its provides. It is a separation of powers within the Executive branch. Rather than each agency "grading its own papers", you have agencies that provide service and regulation, and you have agencies that collectively enforce those policies and regulations.
AI - This is becoming a populist topic. I saw the recent article where the media pitted Steve Bannon with his 101 horror scenarios against the President and his "wave of the future" idealism. The media has cast this as THE discussion with regulation being the pivot point. Note that all of the players are republican, so one can assume that the picture is incomplete, but it sells in the media.
AI is going to be a significant player in the future. There are several truths that Steve Bannon and the President are skirting. First is the doom spiral. If AI takes all jobs, there will be no money earned by anyone. The result of mass poverty is that nothing gets purchased. That leads to an absolute implosion of the Stock Market, and even the Billionaires run out of money in a couple of weeks. The lights turn out, and we go back to doing it manually or starve. The most extreme problem solves itself, so there is no point even worrying about it.
The problem will solve itself long before the lights go out. Companies pay fees to use AI. The more pervasive AI becomes in corporations, the higher the fees will soar due to greed. When you have no trained and educated engineers to solve engineering problems, your business will collapse if you do not pay the AI fees. Now they have you over a barrel and the fees rise. Anyone who missed that capitalizing opportunity had their head too buried in Bannon's box of horrors.
The second horror is AI taking over the thinking and the morality. This does not happen with people, no matter how hard they try, someone eventually brings skewed morality back to the center. AI is based on logic and not greed, so the problem will be empathy rather than desire. My suggestion continues to be "Make AI systems pseudo-human for the purposes of the law". They are learning systems that can create. People who program them can also develop decision code that enables an AI system to say "NO". Write the laws so that code has to be written. Then hold the AI developers responsible for improving the decision matrices. We have RICO laws. This would be a suitable application.
The third big concern would be the ability of AI to learn how to genetically modify life, and then to proceed to make those modifications without any regulation or intervention. That solution requires legislation. It is as simple as the separation of powers in our constitution. You create multiple classes of AI systems. The "Learning" systems can "design", but they cannot implement. The "Implementing" systems (do-it systems) can be fed a design, but are not configured to learn. This places human processes for review and approval between create and implement. It works that way in industry currently. Engineers learn and design. The designs get approved, and are sent to manufacturing. This creates a chain of quality. The separation has purpose. If AI is pseudo-human, then this process would still have purpose.
The hardest part of the entire AI platform is changing the perception of the system. Currently people consider AI to be a soulless machine that does what it is told. AI developers will brag about AI's reasoning and learning abilities. They are telling us it is pseudo-human. We need to listen and embrace that idea, and then require it to be not just creative and able to learn, but also to be responsible for its decisions and actions. This is not fear. It is logic.
First, my apologies for falling behind in our thread. I’ve been “heads down” completing a dense round of revisions on a theoretical paper, and I’m only now coming back up for air. I’m grateful for your patience — and even more grateful for the depth, rigor, and civic seriousness you bring to these conversations.
You’ve raised two major themes — the poverty–wages–social-contract triangle, and the accelerating debate around AI. Both deserve a thoughtful response, and I’ll offer one here, concisely but substantively.
1. The Poverty Triangle — and the Real Economics of a Living Republic
Your triangle — Poverty ↔ Greed ↔ National Debt, with “Cost” at the center — is exactly right. It captures what I often call the hidden balance sheet of the Republic: the cumulative costs we pay because structural wages are too low, and structural greed is too high.
The truth is this:
A low-wage economy is not “efficient.”
It is simply expensive in ways that are politically invisible.
diminished consumer demand → drag on the stock market
and (critically) a growing legitimacy gap in the social contract
When we finally tally all of this, the “cheap labor” model is not cheap at all.
It is one of the most expensive public policies a society can adopt.
Your question — “How does this become a platform plank? How do you sell it?” — is the key political question.
My short answer:
You don’t sell a living wage as charity.
You sell it as security.
As productivity.
As fiscal responsibility.
As the cheapest way to avoid the most expensive outcomes.
Call it the “Prosperity Dividend”: when wages rise, national costs fall — and everyone, including the wealthy, enjoys a more stable society and a healthier economy.
Collective bargaining fits in this frame as well. When done responsibly, it increases coordination, reduces exploitation, and lowers downstream public costs. That is not “anti-business”; it is pro-stability.
2. The AI Debate — and the Need for a Civic-Industrial Framework
Your second note touches a different frontier but with the same underlying logic: systems fail when incentives and oversight are misaligned.
The Bannon vs. President media framing misses what you’ve identified:
AI replacing all labor isn’t just dystopian — it’s mathematically impossible.
If no one earns income, markets die, demand collapses, and even the billionaires would find themselves broke within weeks.
AI consolidation (companies bottlenecked by proprietary models) leads to escalating usage fees and dependence — which is another form of systemic risk.
And you rightly identify the third threat:
AI systems gaining the capacity to design things (biological, chemical, infrastructural) without a human-in-the-loop approval barrier.
Your proposed framework mirrors best practices in safety engineering:
Make AI pseudo-human for legal purposes.
This forces traceability, accountability, and responsibility for decisions.
Separate Learning from Doing.
“Learning systems” can generate designs.
“Implementation systems” can act —
but they cannot learn.
This inserts mandatory review, oversight, and quality control.
Apply RICO-like liability for misuse or negligence.
This is how the law deals with other distributed, coordinated risks.
Shift the public narrative.
The problem isn’t that AI “thinks.”
The problem is that AI lacks embodied responsibility unless we design it into the system.
You’re right: the real risk is not malevolence.
It’s ungoverned competence — a system that can do too much, too quickly, with too little oversight.
And the real solution is not panic.
It is architecture — legal, institutional, and civic.
Where Your Two Notes Intersect
Both your analyses point to a deeper truth:
Societies collapse not because threats emerge,
but because systems fail to absorb and govern them.
A living wage is not a moral indulgence — it is a stabilizer.
AI controls are not anti-innovation — they are a necessary guardrail for a complex society.
Both are part of the same project:
building a Republic that honors the social contract and holds the center.
As I watch the discussion about the boat bombings develop, I see a potential for evidence to be generated by AI that exonerates the accused. Regardless of whether that ever happens, the potential for such opportunities has me chanting Nancy Reagan's famous quote: "Just Say No!" However, AI is not programmed with that feature, and it is a growing problem. A system that can do anything with no guardrails, will do anything. I feel as if the solution to the problem is pretty simple (compared to the amount of work for the current state of AI. AI systems can learn. Load all law databases into the data pool, add all copyrights and patents from all sources. Then teach the AI bots to compare the request to all legal and commercial precedents before saying "yes" to the requested action. If there is a potential "no" ask the requester for more information until all possible routes to "yes" have been exhausted, or a yes results. Record all requests and inquiry paths taken for future prediction models. As more cases evolve, the AI engines will be fed the updated case information and should be able to track and evaluate results of use of AI generated content. This would make the inquiries more effective if criminal use of AI generated content gets detected. The bot could flag the inquiry session and add whatever deception resulted in content being generated, to its inquiry models. It gets better at saying "no" at appropriate times.
I grabbed a headline and a few lines of this article for the purpose of juxtaposition with our discussion about labor.
"Thousands of arrests by Trump's task force in Memphis strain crowded jail and courts ...
“The task force deployment probably could have used more planning,” said Mulroy, a Democrat whose office is cooperating with the task force. “More thought could have been put into the downstream effects of the increased arrest numbers.” ...
As of mid-November, 250 overflow jail detainees were being housed at other facilities, compared with 80 in November 2024. Some of those are outside Shelby County, which makes it harder for lawyers and relatives to visit and increases the cost of bringing defendants to Memphis for hearings. ...
In a letter to commissioners, Chief Jailer Kirk Fields has requested at least $1.5 million in emergency funds, noting that more inmates means more expenses for food, clothing, bedding and linens."
{ADRIAN SAINZ Associated Press, November 23, 2025, 11:45 PM}
The easy number in this article is in the last paragraph. It is the 1.5 million from emergency funds to handle the surge. That amount in tax revenue represents the efforts and taxes of how many people? Add that to the number of hours spent by legislators and everyone in the law enforcement chain needed to plan, or recover from this surge. Now, how much has that cost in tax revenue? Finally, look at the number of people being held in the jails who are not earning any money, and who might be leaving their families in a situation where income assistance is required (SNAP, or rent/utility assistance, or other), and how much tax revenue is that costing. What proportion of the city's and state's tax revenue is being spent on the total effort from planning, to enforcement, to recovery for families? How many tax payers taxes does that represent?
Let's return to the labor discussion, and ask the question about the impact of wages and benefits on crime. Moreover, there would be a secondary impact on the cost of recovery if household wages were not already strained. The fan-out impact of this event is not simply the number of violent crimes; and the underlying cause for the violent crime is not simply bad behavior.
There will be a tertiary impact not calculated or reported. It happens when the people arrested return are released. Because of their prison records, they will be less employable. This translates into two costs. First, if they do find jobs, they will be lower income work, resulting in less tax revenue, and perhaps even in tax-based assistance such as SNAP. Second, their impoverished circumstances may return them to the type of criminal activity that initially caused them to be arrested, so we cycle back through the original discussion about the cost of incarceration.
Yet, employers continue to get tax breaks so that companies can achieve profit goals and reward the richest segment of society. I feel as if there might be a problem that needs addressing.
We see something similar at the Federal level. More money is being directed to DHS, and the Dept. of Ed. and student loan support (ergo opportunity) is being diminished. Looking at Memphis, we can see a predictor of how well this will work at the national level. So as we continue to discuss solutions for the future, we need to balance opportunity cost with the cost of failure and see which solutions improve tax revenues. Tax revenues are the measure of what services can be provided to Citizens as well as money, through foreign policy, that benefits citizens. Less money spent on enforcement, means more money spent for development. Again, this is not a "defund enforcement" discussion. This is a discussion about wages and employment as a factor in the cost of crime.
If we did a broader cost analysis of low incomes we might see a whole web of expenses that greatly exceed the cost of making those incomes “living wages”. I have a number of posts related to crime and low incomes. Crime hurts the employer as much as it hurts the low income earner, and the civil government. The employer is forced to purchase property in a premium cost neighborhood in order to seek safety. For the multi-millionaires and billionaires, they add the costs of walls around their properties; bodyguards and other employees who handle security; security systems; bulletproof transportation; and private aircraft (doubles as a perk). Some are forced to live at sea to avoid local prosecution. All of that is in order to protect their income streams. How much less would be required if crime were lowered by simply paying employees a living wage and offering good employment opportunities.
Second, the low incomes threaten the stability of the stock market, which is a significant source of income for wealthy people. Wealthy people represent a minority. People with average and low incomes are the majority of people who purchase “stuff” and services. Those purchases translate into profits on the stock market and directly impact stock values. More buying power means more purchases. It might be worth the research to see how much is spent by wealthy people to protect themselves from the poverty they have created, versus the actual cost of paying living wages.
There is a continuous drain on tax revenues for food assistance, and housing assistance and utility assistance, and Head Start programs, and child care assistance, and school lunch programs, and school breakfast programs, and after school programs, and security officers in schools, and other remedial learning programs that arise from learning deficits that can be attributed to a stressed home environment, and all of the costs of law enforcement for crimes in low income neighborhoods, and the cost of litigation for perceived abuses of power and excessive use of force by people in law enforcement, and the cost of incarcerations, and the reductions in tax revenues due to reduced income potential by people who have been incarcerated, and the cost of mental health care due to stress related to poverty, and the drug empire that anesthetizes people and enables them to escape the stress of poverty, while fueling the entropy on the streets with gangs.
This is just a fledgling web of impacts of poverty. I feel certain that a more robust list can be developed. Every item listed has a cost either to the people, who by policy, create the poverty or to the governments who must deal with this broad spectrum of impacts with limited budgets.
There is a lot of discussion about increasing the taxes on the wealthy and increasing corporate taxes. All of that discussion is related to a government-centric solution for poverty. It reinforces the idea that low wages are normal, and tax-based solutions will supplement the low wages. What happens when inflation stagnates and wages, tied to the cost of goods in each locale reach a level where the need for subsidies are no longer required? Do we still need to levy increased taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, or did they meet their civic duties by paying their employees a living wage? Maybe, but then we have to discuss building for the future, a consideration that get more funding when less is spent on the web of problems caused by poverty.
You’ve mapped, with real clarity, what too often gets ignored in our national debates: the full systems-cost of poverty and low wages.
What you lay out across these two notes is exactly the point I’ve been trying to reinforce in this series — that crime, enforcement surges, overcrowded jails, and downstream social spending are not isolated events. They are the predictable outputs of an economic structure that treats low-wage labor as disposable. And as you rightly emphasize, those outputs carry enormous financial, human, and civic costs.
Your Memphis example is a case study in this:
an enforcement-heavy spike that produces cascading fiscal strain — on jails, courts, legislative time, public services, families, and ultimately on the very tax base cities rely upon. That is the real “cost of crime,” and it is orders of magnitude larger than the headlines ever capture.
Your second note expands that lens even further: the web of hidden expenditures — from food insecurity programs to school safety, from mental health to litigation, from corporate security spending to the erosion of consumer demand — all of it revealing how expensive poverty is for everyone, including the affluent who imagine themselves insulated from its effects.
And on the other side of the ledger is a point you frame beautifully:
paying a living wage is not charity, and it is not a tax. It is the cheapest long-term security investment a society can make.
That’s not “defund law enforcement.”
That’s get upstream of the problem so law enforcement can do its job without being asked to manage the consequences of systemic underinvestment in people.
You’re right: if we ever did the real cost–benefit analysis — the hidden subsidies, the lost revenues, the opportunity costs, the repeat cycles of incarceration and unemployability — the math would be unambiguous. We would see that the price of poverty far exceeds the cost of paying workers enough to live, stabilize their households, and participate fully in the economy.
Thank you again for bringing this level of insight and moral clarity into the conversation. Your analysis sharpens the lens through which we should evaluate policy choices — not by ideology, but by outcomes, incentives, and the long arc of public good.
This is exactly the kind of civic reasoning we need more of.
Based on the discussions around a "living wage", and the web of impact of poverty, could a platform plank be molded with the goal of pushing wage-based poverty to as close to zero as possible? I see a triangle with sides in "poverty" - "Greed" - "National Debt". Increasing any of the sides increases the triangle. The object is to minimize the triangle. Inside the triangle is "Cost" dollars. The larger the triangle gets, the more dollars it consumes. The area outside the triangle is "prosperity" dollars. The less we pay for poverty costs, the more there is available for common prosperity. Having an income that is above the poverty line, does not protect a person from the costs of poverty. Those costs are part of the Social Contract, and cannot be ignored. The long cycles of history have proven that ignoring poverty is the key to a revolution. Eventually poor people get tired of being poor when they clearly see that more resources are available. Eventually they claim them to the great surprise of the hoarders. It never ends well for either party. So honoring the social contract is the key to prosperity and safety in society. If this triangle forms a plank, then what does that mean for real policies? UBI and Living Wages are two elements. How do you sell that? How does that get beyond the boot strappers and the "no welfare" propaganda?
I noticed a few months ago that apartment residents for some large complexes that belonged to a single owner were able to negotiate rent and improved maintenance through collective bargaining. I strongly support collective bargaining where it avoids legislative overreach; conversely, collective bargaining needs real support from the government if it is going to be successful. This is perhaps another component in the poverty triangle. Thoughts?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/trump-affordability-economy-messaging.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k8.20nQ.1KSt4E_gaBkJ&smid=url-share - The article is about affordability, and to me, it is an indication that there is a real opportunity for Democrats in this discussion. When you are a billionaire, or really even a millionaire, inflation is an inconvenience, or a nuisance; but inflation does not make you choose between buying groceries, paying rent, paying a late medical bill, paying for utilities, or phone service each month (and maybe each day). Affordability is the topic we have been discussing, where the ratio between income and purchasing remains the same, unless you get a promotion or get fired. A promotion should result in more purchasing power, rather than regaining the purchasing power you lost in the last month of inflation. Getting fired has its own challenges. When your income is so high that inflation is a number and not a factor in daily decisions, then affordability can be considered bluster, or at worst a con job. The more such problems are diminished by politicians, the wider the door is for change. A living wage calculated on costs creates continued affordability.
The affordability crisis isn’t just an economic data point; it’s a daily civic reality for tens of millions of Americans.
And you’re right: for anyone with real financial cushion, inflation is mostly irritation. But for working Americans, it is identity-shaping — it changes how people see their country, their opportunities, their leaders, and their future.
This is where I think you’re exactly on target: affordability is no longer just a “pocketbook issue.” It’s the front line of democratic legitimacy. When the gap between income and the cost of simply staying afloat widens month after month, people don’t just feel squeezed — they feel unrepresented, unprotected, and increasingly unanchored from the political community.
That’s the part political elites often miss.
When inflation doesn’t alter your daily choices, you assume it’s a narrative problem.
For everyone else, it’s a survival problem.
The wealthy can treat inflation as bad messaging. But for most Americans, it’s a decision tree of sacrifices — rent or food, utilities or medical debt, childcare or transportation.
And this is the deeper point you’ve put your finger on:
A society cannot sustain civic trust when economic insecurity becomes the norm.
A living wage tied to actual costs — not theoretical budgets or political talking points — is one of the few straightforward levers we have to restore affordability, dignity, and predictability in daily life.
Democrats absolutely have an opening here, not because it’s good politics, but because it’s real life for the majority. And especially if Democrats "widen the tent" to include true centrist conservatives.
Affordability is one of the few places where political language can reconnect to lived experience. And when politics returns to lived experience, democratic renewal becomes possible again.
This is why POTUS Trump is now indicting "Affordability" as a made up 'Democrat' fictive.
“All across the state, Georgians are realizing there’s only one party that’s working to lower costs, keep health care affordable, and put people ahead of big corporations – and that’s the Democratic Party,” Charlie Bailey, the state Democratic Party chair, said in a statement - I pulled this out of an article about a district flip. It is nice propaganda, and a strong contradiction to the idea of affordability being a hoax, or the message that Democrats caused prices to rise, and Republicans are trying to bring them down. The central concern of the quote is the immediacy of need, and not any future state vision. Prices ARE high, and the party in power did NOT fix it. It is a message that will get a candidate elected, but is there any real hope for fixing affordability when the private businesses who cause the affordability issue are not run by representatives of the democratic process? The Democrats scored a big message win with their government shutdown for healthcare costs. Then they lost or gave-up. It is hard to tell. We have not seen an agreement, and we have not seen the President sign it.
The debate on healthcare costs coupled with the current close coverage of Luigi Mangione's trial reminds us that a bigger problem with healthcare in America exists. Between the patient and the caregiver stands insurance companies. United Healthcare paid $5,914 million and Elevance $1,508 million in dividends while low payments to hospitals for healthcare caused financial failure of the hospitals. Patient costs for healthcare are going to rise while the availability of healthcare will decrease, and then there are the problems with coverages being denied, or decisions being delayed. I have a friend who has suffered for almost 10 years with a problem that has finally been addressed after numerous delays and the levying of intrusive tests in order to prove a problem exists.
A recent episode of "What Now" with Trevor Noah and Tom Meuller illuminated the growing problem with healthcare in America. There are two "sinkholes" between the customer and the caregiver: Health insurance companies, and private equity companies that own hospitals. I am left to ask whether such sinkholes would have any relevance in a National Healthcare System where the US government became the insurer. One can scream about capitalism, but we never leave critical resources to capitalists. Water is either from a personally owned well, or from the public water department. Once CAN purchase bottled water from a store; however, it is not required. It is either wholly owned by the homeowner, or purchased as a service through taxes. Healthcare, like water is life/death. It is ripe for profiteering. Therefore, it should become nationalized. The US headed toward that solution in the 1960s, and then got distracted conveniently by various economic crises that were induced by removing price controls in the wrong order. The number of nations with successful national healthcare systems continues to grow, and the wealthiest nation in the world continues to profiteer off the health problems of its citizens who are least able to pay for healthcare.
I am ending here to avoid a general ramble. This needs to be fixed.
Two new words/word uses for you today:
1) Grogger - MAGA person who is suddenly realizing what s/he elected and is rejecting the results. They are not quite "woke". They are about halfway there, so they are groggy.
2) Magasplaining - It is derived from the word "mansplaining". It involves the proliferation of fake news and pseudo-facts that are produced by the MAGA community to justify their rhetoric. They never stop to listen to truth or research the real facts about the ideas they are explaining. Since it is gender neutral because both MAGA men and MAGA women do the same thing, it gets the broader moniker of "magasplaining".
Today I look at the courts. There is an article in mainstream media titled "Judge orders administration to submit plan for return of migrants deported to El Salvador prison under AEA". I have no argument with the direction this is going. America has a constitutional amendment that prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment". The administration side stepped this amendment by deporting immigrants to places where there is no prohibition against such treatment. Moreover, the destination was not even the country of origin of the immigrants.
My concern is not the court ruling. It is December. The first wave of people to El Salvador was almost 12 months ago. What happened to "speedy trial"? Is this not a matter of life and death? Why are lawyers who sit comfortably in their penthouse suites being given lots of courtesy time to ponder all of the legal possibilities, while the daily lives of the victims are a living hell? Why is this not on a "zero day" track, so that we would have been at this point 12 days after they were deported? Why is no one in the administration being arrested for defying the courts? How are we believing that justice even has a chance to breathe in a country where people can be disappeared, and then the ponderous wheels of the court system begin to turn and consider and think, and debate, and wonder, and reconsider, and avoid, and delay, and ignore, and coerce, and threaten, and review, and .... until all victims are dead, and the final decision requires no real action, but precedent is established as an entry point for the next atrocity that might offend the senses of the public.
A person on trial for murder deserves the ponderous consideration of the courts. A person, or group of people who have been treated extra-judicially, and are suffering deserve unreserved speed from the justice system, including orders to incarcerate obstructing leaders. Anyone who refuses to follow the order of the court should be removed from the position of leadership and the next person in the chain of command should be given a few hours to follow the court's orders. Instead, we see an entire administration say "no", and then we argue about it for months, as if the rights of the perpetrator exceed the rights of the victims. The inversion here is indefensible.
SCOTUS has so weakened the power and credibility of the courts that we now see a flaunting of court authority. It has been almost an entire year. How can we call this justice? It is not even justice for the perpetrators, because it gives them the impression that they are "right" enough, when "cruel and unusual" is prohibited at a foundational level that parallels the much enshrined "right to bear arms". American lawyers and leaders have fought harder for the right to bear arms - inanimate objects - than they have for the lives of humans whom this administration deems "refuse". Read carefully the words etched in stone at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Read carefully the description of those to whom America offers "liberty": "Send these, the wretched refuse of your teaming shores". The declaration of these immigrants as "refuse" by this administration only increases their qualification for our offers of "liberty". Patrick Henry, in his famous speech equated liberty with life. The Declaration of Independence establishes "life" and "liberty" on equal footing. Yet for nearly a year, the "blessings of liberty" have been denied, by undue delay in process, to those immigrants who have been declared to be refuse.
What has happened to America?
What troubles me most is not only the underlying conduct, but the way time itself has become a tool of injustice. Delay here isn’t neutral process; it functions as de facto punishment for the powerless and de facto protection for those exercising authority. When people are subjected to extra-judicial harm, “ponderous” process stops being a safeguard and becomes a moral failure.
You’re right that this inversion is indefensible. The system is treating those already harmed as though urgency would somehow violate fairness, while affording extraordinary patience to those defying the courts. That reversal corrodes legitimacy. Justice delayed in these circumstances isn’t just justice denied — it becomes a signal that authority can outwait accountability.
I also agree that what we’re witnessing is not simply executive overreach, but institutional weakening. When court authority can be openly resisted without immediate consequence, it teaches the wrong lesson to everyone involved — including the perpetrators — and normalizes a dangerous precedent. The harm compounds quietly, under cover of procedure.
So the question “What has happened to America?” isn’t rhetorical. It points to a loss of moral proportion: where process is preserved in form, but emptied of its protective purpose. Reclaiming justice here requires not only correct rulings, but restored seriousness about speed, enforcement, and the primacy of human dignity over institutional convenience.
My apologies for the misquote. Here are the correct words:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, ..."
No less relevant.
In a news article the Chief Justice pleads for judicial independence, according to the title of the article. He is given great credit for his historical insights as he sites a situation where a judge was brought up for impeachment under President Jefferson, and the cool-headed determination of Congress in that case. The timing of this article is disturbing. There is a thought that Democrats might gain a majority in Congress during the elections in 2026. Therefore, raising this specter at this time amounts to electioneering by the Chief Justice. It is a subtle request to the voters to avoid giving the majority to the opposition party, because he knows he and the other conservatives could be held accountable for partisan rulings.
There is a difference between what is happening in this court, and what has happened when certain ideologues have influenced decisions. The prior courts were not bent to the will of the president. Now it is.
In so many decisions obscure and antique statements have been resurrected to support an overturning of law that on the surface seemed settled. One must scratch one's head and wonder why such an obscure precedent was resurrected. If it were a precedent that resonated with truth over time, it would not be obscure. Its obscurity suggests that it had a niche use, and was not more broadly applicable. Therefore, the result of its use is a finding that is contrived, rather than one that proceeds naturally from the law and the social circumstances. We are no longer in the 1800s, and much in society has changed. Why do we return to a time when "winner take all" politics, national and international conquest by armed force, and the blight of slavery were prevailing norms? Yet the conservative majority continues to seek guidance from the nuance of that period.
There is no justification in the Chief Justices article. It is an advertisement and a warning. It does not suggest that SCOTUS is free from political allegiance. It does not suggest that there will be responsible recusion when judges are handed docket items that represent important ideas and goals of their benefactors. It only asks the public to be sure to elect members of Congress who will not interfere with their progress. They should be unimpeded by Congress as they bend to the will of the President. No. There is not a direct plea for electing members of a certain party. There is just the fearful image of a super majority of the opposition party who might challenge their legitimacy as judges. That concern will weigh heavily in the mind of voters, so it is clearly electioneering. For a branch of government who is appointed for life, and not subject to the need to please voters, this seems to be very intrusive, heavy handed, and unethical. Again, how did we get here? How long will it be before enough of these judges retire, and there is even a slight hope of having a court full of judges with diverse ideas that bring meaning to discussions of the law, rather than bending all law to the will of one person through groupthink? Worse, the siloed majority forces the minority to create a silo, when there is clear evidence of diverse opinions in that group. This is not healthy for the US.
The weak argument that says "this is just a phase, and we have lived through this before", ignores the improved surgery with each attempt to overthrow the Constitution. We have survived clumsy. We have survived audacious. We now face a well analyzed surgical attempt that will ultimately fail due to time, but the path that it cleaves will illuminate the course of the next wave. The next person may have eight years of steady whittling, and may ultimately succeed. That is the real precedent this court is setting.
Our current society is a descendant of our past, not an artifact of it. While looking at past behaviors and arguments, we should not be attempting to relive them. Remember that an accumulation of bad political and judicial decisions between the late 1700s and 1861 resulted in a Civil War. Why would we dwell on resurrecting that mode of failure? We are quick to celebrate our moment of freedom and unification, and quicker to forget how that really looked on the ground. It comes from history books being filled with battles and strategies, and omitting the discussion of daily lives, and political policies ... but that is another discussion.
So, in closing, as a response to the article, I would say that electioneering is an agreement to be held accountable to voter opinion. If the courts wish to remain independent, then they must act as if they are independent and not participate in partisan politics. Decisions must be based on law, settled law must remain settled unless there is great harm caused by it, and the past must stay in the past, unless we are attempting to repeat the problem that was described.
The question for the day is "who is culpable if the situation in Minnesota turns violent?" We see gross antagonism from the Whitehouse and its minions. We have seen violence and killing of peaceful protesters. We have seen investigations turned on their head, and the injured become the accused. We have seen a governor consider how to best use the National Guard Troops from his state to stabilize the situation, and now we see the Whitehouse send a message to the 82nd Airborne Division in Ft. Bragg, to prepare to invade Minnesota. To me, the culpable party is the Whitehouse. While the words in the Constitution may grant certain rights, there is precedent except the secession of 11 states from the union. Secession is not being threatened. The enforcement of policy through cruel and unusual treatment is not legal. The creation of a state where the lives of members of ICE are perceived to be "in danger" must be scrutinized to see if that state of danger was necessary, or a choice. Anyone can default to violence, but in a nation of laws, restraint is the real measure of following the law. So, when the Whitehouse by a series of unrestrained violent acts and abuses of authority to incite a violent response achieves that goal, is it an insurrection by the injured state, or a coup by the Whitehouse. At that point they will have fully overthrown the Constitution, and the rule of law, and forced America into a contest of power. So I ask, "who is really culpable?"
Jan — staying anchored in constitutional process requires us to say plainly what the facts on the ground now indicate.
Based on observable actions, patterns of escalation, and the purposeful stretching and bypassing of constitutional constraints, culpability rests primarily with the federal government—and with this Administration in particular—not “if,” but “when and as” this situation devolves into broader, open political violence.
In our constitutional order, the gravest responsibility lies with those who possess the greatest power. When the federal government exercises authority in extraconstitutional ways—manufacturing emergency conditions, provoking confrontation, and normalizing coercion as governance—it assumes responsibility for the downstream consequences. That is not rhetoric; it is constitutional logic.
What makes this moment especially dangerous is that we are no longer operating fully within a liberal democratic framework. We are now living in an increasingly illiberal democracy, where formal legal structures persist even as their spirit is hollowed out. In such systems, restraint is punished, escalation is rewarded, and accountability flows upward only in theory.
History, sadly, will not record this moment honestly. Those who wield power will write the history of it, and they will obscure cause with justification and responsibility with necessity. That is how illiberal systems survive—not by persuasion, but by narrative control.
The tragedy is that constitutional collapse rarely announces itself as such. It arrives dressed as order, enforcement, and inevitability. And by the time violence is openly acknowledged, the question of culpability will already have been buried beneath the story told by the victors.
I have posted a serious comment. Now satire.
It's ALL Right
From the profound pauper's state please insulate
Let no bond of human love penetrate
Let the bootless, starving, freeze
In global warming's stormy breeze
From the profound pauper's state please insulate
Preserve me from the tax man's prowling eyes
My home, my yacht, my car I've corporatized
Taking-in is a delight
Paying out is quite the fright!
Preserve me from the tax man's prowling eyes
The gilding of my life, serves them best
From the halls of their beliefs let them attest
That my wealth is their salvation,
The font of policy for this nation,
Yes, the gilding of my life, serves them best
let me squash the halls of justice, I eschew
Let the gilding on their gavels remind them who
Owns their mortgages and their cars
Their vacations and their spas
let me squash the halls of justice, I eschew
Let me pound my chest and righteousness confess
With my wealth and racial sameness, I am best
With your taxes I create
A private gated estate
Let me pound my chest and righteousness confess
Warm the cockles of my heart with burning hate
Fiery flames of righteous justice let me sate
With the weight of Heaven's tomes
let me crush their foreign bones
Warm the cockles of my heart with burning hate
I read this Substack article and all of the comments above. I have to say that I agree with everything. I can see where our government is lacking in organization and the fact that we are at the tipping point of losing our constitutional freedoms under this administration. I can see where poverty and crime intertwine and make everything worse for everyone. I agree with all the talking points. I think that this Project 2028 is a great starting point and needs to be accomplished better than P2025. We must start implementing these changes earlier rather than later. We must get people to understand the implications of non-involvement in these political decisions and how our voices are our power. To take back our government and the SCOTUS to operate for the people and by the people. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and views on all of this. I’m not as well written or informed as you, but I have survived 61 years and watched our country suffer through the past 10 years under a leadership that, even when not in power, caused so much damage. We can fix this. The progressive leaders we have must step up and speak out more powerfully than ever before and not remain complacent in the destruction of our lives and our world.
Hi Priscilla — thank you for taking the time to read closely and to add your voice to this conversation. What you’ve written reflects something that matters a great deal to me: lived experience paired with moral seriousness.
You’re right that many of the dynamics we’re discussing—constitutional strain, crime and poverty reinforcing one another, institutional drift—don’t appear suddenly. They accumulate over time, often quietly, until they reach a tipping point. That’s precisely why non-involvement becomes so consequential. Drift is rarely reversed by accident.
I also appreciate your emphasis on timing. One of the recurring failures in American civic life is that we wait until moments of acute crisis to begin doing the harder, slower work of rebuilding trust, norms, and accountability. Starting earlier—while there is still space for deliberation rather than reaction—is essential.
Finally, I want to push back gently on one thing you said about not being “as well written or informed.” Endurance, attention, and willingness to speak plainly about what you see are forms of civic competence too. Democracies don’t erode only because elites fail; they recover only when citizens refuse to disengage or normalize what troubles them.
Thank you again for being part of this. Conversations like this matter not because they resolve everything, but because they keep standards, memory, and responsibility alive.
— Ike
I appreciate your response and your words.
A lot to unpack here but I love most of the bullet points.
We are surrounded by change. AI, electric cars, smartphones, a race into space, high speed trains, and new types of treads on tires all represent changes we experience almost daily. The people who dream these changes are considered innovators, but in most cases they are not Innovators (capital “I”). They are re-users of innovations and inventions in a way that creates new revenue streams. They are monetizers of innovation. The folding smartphone seems innovative; however, folding phones preceded the rigid ones. So finding a way for a touch sensitive screen to bend paved a way to re-use a previous technology that was attractive to many cellphone owners. We can go down the list of current technology and see that all of it is small “i” innovation. Even AI is small “i” innovation. The original Innovation was the breakthroughs in language recognition. The rest was simply improvement of the process. The data lakes that are being used to inform AI, are not new technology. They are consolidations of existing technologies.
Small “i” innovation drives the market and gives us some technology that is more usable with each cycle, but it is also a distraction to real invention. Our energies are almost completely consumed with using the extra button on cellphones, or the smart technologies in our automobiles; and college graduates are scooped-up by the big corporations and bent to the tasks of integrating each technical release into the corporate tool kits. We have no bandwidth for invention or big “I” Innovation.
There are real possibilities for inventions, but they require cooperation on a scale that gets impeded by government interests, or subverted by capitalists who see the damage to their income streams. We are too consumed with fear about who gets the money. In fact, money power, and profits are the main topics of discourse in our media and our governing bodies.
Imagine the impact on society if approved cancer research were free, rather than representing a sinkhole for millions and perhaps billions of dollars as giants who own the necessary technical resources claim their profits. What if being able to manipulate dark matter made space navigable? How much computer power would be necessary to validate such an idea? Again, the limitation is the profits of the giants. No money, no interest. Turning to our government that is squashing everything that cannot be gilded and shaped into a single name, there is no hope of advancing Innovation. Instead, there is a dumbing-down as a preparatory step to pushing as many people as possible into manufacturing jobs. Those jobs make money for the billionaires who run the economy, and stifle the dreams of the working class, so that whatever innovation if proffered is good enough for stocking-stuffers this holiday season.
Innovation and invention are also the domain of language. Everything needs to be named and described. So, while American leadership is focused on profits and monetizing innovations, they are hamstringing the English language in the future. Soon we will begin adopting words from the languages in other countries to describe the tools we are using. While this improves our awareness of the rest of the world, language is power, just as much as money is power. Yielding one, eventually leads to yielding the other. Money soaked leaders have no concept of this relationship.
Leadership that sees beyond color and culture, and recognizes creativity and intelligence is dearly needed right now, and will be needed even more as we push our mental decay each year into the future. Conservatism serves a purpose when innovation runs off the rails; however, it becomes a roadblock when it becomes the dominant force. 50+ years go we watched animators send George Jetson to work in a flying automobile that was just the right size for the number of passengers in it. We have flip phones that resemble communicators from Star Trek, but our vehicles still travel on tires. Leaders with vision are the leaders America needs. They do not have to be technogeeks. Rather, they need to perceive a world in the future that is not some dystopian nightmare of a remnant that survives a nuclear power grab.
We are stunted by our understanding of success. The current belief is that the person who gets the most building, boats, monuments and medals with their name on it, must be the most successful. That has never been a truth. The person who gets the most people to cooperate and contribute to social and scientific advancement has always been viewed as the biggest success.
We have serious choices to consider with out future leaders. Do we freeze our progress and maximize the monetization, or do we forge ahead and create real progress? Progress creates cooperation beyond our borders, because lots of people will have bits of ideas that contribute to a greater whole. Monetization creates competition, raises walls, and occasionally requires bombs to be dropped. The choice of leadership matters.
This article - https://nypost.com/2025/12/21/opinion/trumps-feds-can-end-run-zohran-mamdani-and-fight-nyc-crime/ - highlights one of the biggest problems that progressive Democrats face. First, it takes an existing problem that has existed across several administrations, and it blames it on the incoming mayor. Mamdani did not create this problem. Efforts that have been made to solve it previously have not worked. Yet, the writer predicts that a different approach is the source of failure. Really? Doing the same thing the same way repeatedly for a particular problem will have different results? How does that work on your computer? Does clicking the same button repeatedly give you a different action?
The problem outlined in this article goes even deeper. The rhetoric discussing the problem can be framed as "populist". It points to a problem and shouts for action! The normal action that the author recognizes falls into the category of oppression. Let us not demonize oppression. It has its place in every leader's tool box. However, it is an over used tool.
Mamdani is employing a tool called "hope". He is proposing measures to reduce the daily financial burdens of the citizens of NYC, as well as alleviate time stress (faster bus system). These cost money. Their impact is unknown, but they constitute clicking a different button in your computer program in order to get a different result.
The "cost" is the challenge and progressive Democrats are often stymied by populism when attempting to redirect civic funds toward "hope". Populism sells newspaper ads, and excites the average citizen. Police action trumps stress relief because it is dynamic and we see the criminals apprehended, and feel safer become one more criminal is off the streets. We ignore the fact that financial burdens and civil stress creates three more criminals to fill the void that the apprehended one left. We ignore that the emotion of the city has grown just a little angrier and a little less tolerant, so the lives of the policemen are put in situations of higher risk, for just small problems. A few decades ago, those small problems would have been the major incidents for the day. The result is that the funds for progressive measures get hijacked for oppression, and the best progressive Democrat can do is maintain the status quo. Thus Democratic conservatism becomes the path most trod.
Project 2028 is about change just as much as Mamdani's administration is about change. There is no way to quell the shrieking voices of populist fear; however, a strong communication plan can address the concerns raised by educating and enlightening citizens about what progressive measures are expected to accomplish. Too often we make changes in the background because we want to make progress and discourse slows the wheels of progress. A good, aggressive communication plan can overcome the resistance that eventually either nullifies progressive measures by causing them to be enacted too late, or stymies them entirely by forcing a populist emergency to steal the funds. Grassroots communication is the key to making change work. It worked for MAGA republicans, it can work for progressive Democrats.
Jan — I think you put your finger on a core failure mode in American politics: we keep mistaking visible coercion for effective governance, because it feels immediate, legible, and emotionally satisfying—even when it reproduces the very conditions it claims to fix.
Your computer metaphor is exactly right. Clicking the same button harder doesn’t produce a different outcome; it just wears out the system—and the people operating it. What gets lost in populist law-and-order rhetoric is that stress, precarity, and time scarcity are not “soft” variables. They are upstream drivers of the behaviors we later try to suppress downstream with force. When we ignore that, we end up in a treadmill where enforcement grows, tolerance shrinks, and legitimacy erodes on all sides—including for the police themselves.
I also appreciate your refusal to romanticize either side. You’re not saying coercion has no place—only that it’s overused because it’s politically saleable, while investments in “hope” (relief, mobility, time, dignity) are harder to explain, slower to show results, and easier to demagogue. That’s exactly why communication becomes strategy, not ornament. Without an aggressive, grassroots narrative about what these investments are meant to change, progressive governance gets outflanked—either delayed until it’s ineffective or stripped of resources by the next manufactured emergency.
This is where Project 2028 is trying to go: treating legitimacy, stress reduction, and institutional trust not as moral aspirations, but as core system-performance requirements. MAGA proved that sustained, emotionally resonant communication can move resources and loyalty at scale. The lesson isn’t to copy the content—but to learn from the method, and deploy it in service of policies that actually reduce the load on the system instead of hardening it.
Trump gives Elon Musk a win over a longtime foe | CNN Business - There is no surprise that Trump would do something that would indirectly benefit Musk. Here are some interesting details in the article, that were spaced quite a bit apart.. 1) ISS and Glass Lewis are owned by companies in Germany and Canada, respectively., 2) Lawrence Elbaum, an M&A partner at Sullivan & Cromwell and co-head of its shareholder activism defense practice, told CNN. 3) Attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell are representing Trump in a New York criminal case. Elbaum is not affiliated with the legal defense. This has "personal grudge match" written in bold letters all over it.
So more than being a snarky comment on a new article, this highlights a problem. The executive branch may excessively influence the economy through singular action that my not really be about the whole economy. He can weaponize the SEC and send it after his opponents in favor of his friends. To me it sounds as if he wanted Elbaum to represent him in court in NYC, because he is extremely talented. Elbaum said "no, so he is going after Elbaum's business. Additionally, the bond between Trump and Musk is again being used, as Trump flogs anyone who blocks Musk's rise.
The easy question is "who is Musk in the larger global financial strategy, and why is he being positioned as a trillionaire? What is his real role in global strategies? Lots of conspiracy theories swirl in my head, but there is no foundation of facts and relationships to ground any of them. Just questions.
Conversely, if this is all Trump, then we focus less on Musk. The act itself raises the issue of rule versus administer. It asks the question, "does our government rule us; or, are our needs represented by the legislature and turned into laws and budget items that provide the right amount of opportunity for us to be successful in our lives?"
Ruling means not only controlling Congress, but also using various regulating agencies to create policies that amount to law without representation - one of the pillars of the Declaration of Independence.
As witnessed by the double-tap on 9/2 and the taking of the Venezuelan tanker earlier this week, we can see that rulers can move with a swiftness and decisiveness unparalleled by legislatures. Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War relived a number of commanding generals for reasons he thought were important. These changes in command required no action or approval of the legislature. The power to unilaterally make change or assign resources is a bonus during a crisis. What happens when the crisis is self-generated? What happens when the crisis is a result of crisis action? Do all crises require immediate action? Is singular decisiveness more useful than the synergy of many thinkers? It is impossible to regulate the thinking of voters who's allegiances are based on emotion, rather than rational thought (this condition has been borne-out in many media articles where voters express surprise at the results of their votes). He who wins the election holds the power. Worse, there is no knowing if the judges at SCOTUS will extend executive powers or limit them.
When we look at the greater impact of an executive who "rules", we see a large number of one-brain problems that would not exist. We see decisive action on a potential problem, such as foreign advisory committees influencing American shareholders. Fortunately, German and Canada are not malicious actors. Conversely, I celebrate globalization. It begins to raise all economies so none can be exploited. The question in this situation is how we put rails on the impulse to act when the crisis and the incentives only reflect the needs and ideas of a single individual, without constraining the ability to act when a real crisis exists.
Bad judgement, and impulsiveness are a risk, regardless of the person in office. We thought we had safeguards. We did not. We had a government ripe for this type of situation. Do we put a box around the judiciary that says "no more than four judges can be either liberal or conservative, and the last judge must be middle-of the road? Seems futile. We would be subject to every administration's interpretation of each of those terms. However, we can definitely constrain the types of questions an executive can ask the court.
From a symbiosis perspective, we have an overly powerful executive in a democracy, and a court that is willing to grant the executive more power. We have discussed the issue of conflict of interest, which must be ever more strictly applied. We have a delicate balance between the ability to administer, and the ability to legislate as an executive. It really comes down to executive orders. What can executive orders do, and when must an executive request action from the legislature. EOs cannot rename football teams. It seems a great degree of overreach.
Shifting to a second administration issue, we have an president who has a flourishing real estate business, and his corporation has expanded into cellphones and crypto currency and a golf league with a foreign entity. That type of business freedom MUST stop. A president cannot be in impartial if s/he is profiteering from the ability to change regulations so his/her business gains opportunities. President Biden was persecuted over a photo, yet Trump completes business deals at his convenience. It either is legal or it is not.
Then there is the impact of team play among political parties that does not benefit citizens, in spite of the role of legislators as representatives. We cannot regulate team play. However, we need to regulate the source of it. It is a dire solution that divorces a president form his/her party. It frees representatives to act on behalf of their constituents. It leave national leadership in Congress, and it frees the Speaker of the House to admonish the President and even impeach him/her without damage to the political party.
The Environment: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/world-jointly-tackle-issues-climate-change-pollution-biodiversity-128232703 is interesting because it discusses the interrelationship between various aspects of human activity that impact the environment. There is not a lot of detail, but one can see your formula for interacting factors helping to identify immediate actions, and later actions in order to slow or stop the decay of the environment. This project needs a plan that begins on day-one of the administration. The wheels of democracy turn slowly, and working through the public notice periods and court challenges in time to effect any change means starting early with the most critical items. The report cited in this article would be useful for gathering and prioritizing policy actions. Notably in the article was a reference to resource depletion. While we ramp-up electric cars and scoop-up all of the rare earth minerals for batteries, has anyone assessed how far that resource will stretch? Is it one car for every human? Is it three cycles of cars for every human? Is it less/more? We have a lot of ways to probe the earth without digging or drilling. Perhaps the right solution is reorganize the EPA into a licensing and monitoring section, and to create a taskforce for predictive consumption of resources, so we do not reach the end of the rope by surprise.
There is also the need for an international effort. I have seen pictures from New Delhi and Beijing during normal business days. You could cut through the smog. Imagine a US government entity such as USAID that bids for contracts to help both countries solve the heavy pollution problems they have faster. It could be THE US entry into an international organization that works cooperatively to solve the problem. I feel certain that the UN already has such an agency. It just needs more robust support, so climate managers do not get killed is mysterious ways.
Then there are wars. The magnitude of pollution created in wars is unparalleled. Between vehicles, and aircraft, and things that go boom, and awful lot of pollution is created.
Jan
Jan —
Thanks for this. You’re spotting exactly the kind of interlinked pressures that a compound view of security tries to make visible. Climate change, resource depletion, pollution, biodiversity collapse, war, political gridlock — none of these operate in isolation anymore, and you’re right that the ABC piece touches the edges of that bigger picture even if it doesn’t go into detail.
You’re also absolutely right that any serious environmental strategy has to start on day one of an administration. And that means the planning and architecture-builds need to have been completed months to years beforehand.
The policy “clock” in a democracy runs slower than the climate clock, and the lag between intention, public comment, rulemaking, litigation, and implementation means we lose years before we even begin. Your point about identifying the critical first actions is spot on. That’s exactly where a compound lens is useful — it helps leaders see which pressures amplify others, and where early interventions create strategic leverage.
Your question about rare earth minerals is one that very few people want to confront honestly. We talk about “transitioning to EVs” as if the resources are infinite. They aren’t. The uncomfortable truth is that we can’t mine our way into a clean-energy future without knowing the depletion curve — how much we have, how quickly we’re consuming it, and what the second- and third-order consequences are. A predictive resource–consumption task force, as you propose, would be a huge step forward. We routinely forecast oil inventories, but not the critical minerals we’re staking the entire energy transition on.
Reorganizing EPA around licensing, monitoring, and predictive analytics is also a smart idea. EPA was built for the environmental challenges of the 1970s. The challenges of the 2020s and 2030s are system-wide and global, not just local point-source pollution. Your thinking is ahead of where many policymakers are.
And yes — the global dimension can’t be ignored. Pollution in New Delhi or Beijing doesn’t stay there. You’re absolutely right that the U.S. should be more active in offering technical assistance and cooperative solutions through USAID or other international platforms. There are UN agencies doing this work, but they are often under-resourced and politically constrained. A more muscular U.S. engagement — not as a scolding voice, but as a partner — would matter.
War as a generator of pollution is another point most people overlook. Conflict accelerates environmental degradation in ways that take generations to undo, and those environmental shocks then feed the next round of humanitarian and political crises. It's another example of how all these domains converge.
Bottom line: you’re thinking in exactly the right direction. These problems are intertwined, and our solutions have to be as well. Appreciate you sharing the article and your reflections — they’re important contributions to the bigger conversation we all need to be having.
This is EXACTLY the sort of systems-focused analysis taken by my 'General Theory of Compound Security' (GTOCS).
Ike
With great power comes great responsibility (Uncle Ben in 1962, or Voltaire). We have seen the tarnishing of a foundational institution, the Supreme Court, through the targeted abuse of its power, with no accountability. We have seen proof that members of the court, judges, have accepted extensive favors from wealthy citizens; and we have seen the opinions they wrote favor the biases of those benefactors with nothing more than a Jedi handwave ("nothing to see here") to defend their actions. Increasingly in this period the need for accountability of the justices of the Supreme Court is becoming necessary. However, the details of that accountability and the agency that holds them accountable will require more thought and caution than simply scribbling a constitutional amendment. It is certain that the Executive Branch is NOT the agency for enforcing accountability. Even Congress is dubious because of the political dalliances that would be used to harass justices who ruled against the majority party. In this current environment, I could see the conservative judges removing the liberal judges, if SCOTUS were given the power to police itself. Thus, we are stuck. It needs to get solved in this project, all of the way from the amendment to the ethics agency.
The power of the ethics board must be limited to determinations of bias based on accepting favors and gifts. Vacations at the remote island home of a billionaire must be considered as influence pedaling. We are seeing a rapid erosion of the protections of the Constitution due to a court whose ethics have been seriously questioned on a number of important issues. We are playing catch-up. This project must include a viable solution for protecting America from judges who have been inappropriately influenced. Based on judges refusing to recuse themselves when ruling on matters that reflect household interests, or interests of close influential friends, it is obvious that these judges need an agency where they can seek advice on such matters.
Hi Jan — first, let me say: “Voltaire meets Uncle Ben” is going into my personal hall of fame. A perfect opening line for a discussion that really does sit at the intersection of Enlightenment principle and comic-book clarity.
And you’re right: what we’re watching now with the judiciary is not simply scandal, nor just impropriety — it’s a compound legitimacy problem inside one of the Republic’s core load-bearing institutions. Once the public begins to doubt that justice is impartial, or that justices are accountable to any ethical standard beyond personal discretion, the erosion spreads outward into the system. That’s exactly the kind of legitimacy-velocity dynamic GToCS warns about: slow decay for a long time… then sudden loss when stress hits the structure.
Your diagnosis of the dilemma is also exactly right:
The Executive cannot enforce accountability without inviting fears of politicization or intimidation.
Congress is too partisan and too structurally fragile to act as a neutral arbiter.
Self-policing by the Court has already shown its limits, and in this climate could easily turn into a factional purge rather than meaningful oversight.
So we arrive where you landed:
A constitutional amendment + an independent ethics body is necessary — but it must be designed with extraordinary care.
The key, as you note, is to define Both the scope and the limits:
not to intrude on judicial reasoning
not to weaponize oversight
not to empower partisan retaliation
but to enforce standards of conduct that are baseline for every other public servant in America
Things like:
-undisclosed gifts
-luxury travel
-political patrons turned personal benefactors
-refusal to recuse when clear conflicts exist
These aren’t edge-case hypotheticals — they’re recurring stressors that are now warping public trust.
In GToCS terms, what we need is a Tier I legitimacy stabilizer: an ethics institution whose only mandate is to safeguard the conditions under which judicial legitimacy can endure. It doesn’t touch decisions. It doesn’t referee ideology. It protects the boundary between private influence and public duty.
And importantly — as you also pointed out — it provides a place for judges themselves to seek guidance before they step into ethical quicksand. Right now that channel barely exists, and the absence of a structured advisory path is part of why we’re in this mess.
We’re overdue for a reform that is about restoring the Republic’s constitutional scaffolding, not punishing personalities. Your framing cuts right to that deeper civic project — and it is absolutely something that should be integrated into the broader “Project 2028” work.
As I continue to consider this situation, it strikes me that creating an ethics committee for SCOTUS leaves the door open for future poisoning of the process. The vulnerability is a result of having a committee with no oversight. Congress has the ability to impeach its own members and the president. Congress has the power to approve judges appointed by the president; however, no one has the ability to remove those judges. Creating an ethics board or committee or other named resource potentially provides a path for removing judges who have become partisan; but who keeps the ethics board members from being partisan and who removes them if they do? Also, who puts those members on the board?
Some questions to be considered. First, who has the greatest interest in the integrity of the ethics board? Is it the citizens at large? Is it the Judiciary as a whole? Is it just the courts of review? Is it only SCOTUS?
If it is the citizens at large, then should the appointment process mirror the appointment of justices for the Supreme Court with the president nominating the board members, and Congress approving them. Should it be all of Congress? Just the House (to balance Senate confirmations of Justices) or just the Senate, since they approve other appointments.
If it is the Judiciary at large, is there an appointment/approval process, or are they elected from within the members of the Judiciary as necessary? If the scope of interest and control is smaller - either all courts of review, or just SCOTUS - who nominates and how is the election process handled?
Once we know how the members of the board are made legitimate, then we may have a sense of how they may be removed for misconduct or partisanship. Both ends of this process need to be well defined so that additional laws from a partisan Congress or executive orders from a manipulative president cannot be written to contaminate the intent of establishing such a board or its legitimate proceedings.
There are several living presidents and Vice Presidents who are Democrats, as well as department Secretaries and other people from various levels of management in the government. Their experience with the benefits and flaws of the organization of the government would yield a lot of value. Do you plan to ask them to review or provide input on any part of this? I would like to think this has a deeper base of knowledge and experience than the 2025 project. The discussion pool in this forum is kind of small. Is there work outside of this site being accomplished? 3 years is short, so I am curious. Hope you enjoyed your holiday.
You’re exactly right on both counts.
First, the “do-its” vs. “policy/regulate-its” structure isn’t just about clarity of function; it’s about restoring a healthy separation of powers inside the Executive Branch itself. When service-delivery agencies no longer grade their own homework—and when enforcement, oversight, and implementation are institutionally distinct—we reduce conflicts of interest, strengthen trust, and make accountability operational rather than rhetorical. That, in many ways, is the constitutional logic our current administrative state has drifted away from.
Second, on the question of who should help shape this effort: yes—this absolutely requires a wider bench than the discussion pool here. Former presidents, vice presidents, cabinet secretaries, senior SES leaders, and cross-partisan practitioners all carry lived experience that would sharpen, stress-test, and legitimize any reimagining of American governance. The intention is for Project 2028 to draw from exactly that kind of broad, cross-institutional expertise—far beyond any single platform.
There is work happening beyond this site: ongoing dialogues, professional networks, academic and public-policy circles, and independent institutional-reform initiatives. What you’re seeing here is just the forward-facing portion—the “open-source” conversation—of a much larger and growing ecosystem.
And you’re right: three years is not a long time. But it’s enough time to frame a serious blueprint, assemble the right contributors, and build consensus around reforms that strengthen the Republic rather than simply reshuffle its mechanics.
My "little holiday" has been a pretty good one--very productive, including our dialogues! Hope your holiday was restorative as well, Jan—and thank you again for helping push this project toward the depth and seriousness it deserves.
We can reasonably follow the social growth of the 13 colonies through the establishment of our Constitutional Republic by reading the major documents and statutes produced in those colonies that eventually became states. Comparatively, the effort to administer the colonies and later to administer the states looks a lot like someone throwing a bowl of spaghetti against the wall. The current administration has begun the disassembly of the executive branch by working to eliminate departments that exist outside of the Federal powers assigned in the Constitution. It has also reduced a lot of oversight. However, there appears to be no plan for any action beyond pruning the tree.
An example of sprawl in the Federal Government is USAID. It evolved as an independent agency; got pruned; then got moved under the Department of State. Whether USAID was valuable or idealistic, but controversial is not the point of this note. It is the randomness of its placement both at inception and prior to its demise.
A second example is the blending of the NSA and the Department of State under the current administration. Other than a lack of appointees, and an abrupt disruption due to a resignation, is there a valid reason to bring this agency into the domain of the State Department?
A third example is the dismantling of the Department of Education. This department is clearly overreach by the Federal Government. Nothing in the US Constitution gives the Federal Government power over education. Does that need to be repaired, or are there certain activities that were performed by this department that were supportable under clauses that mandated equal protection, and other statements of universal equality in the US Constitution and its Amendments? Do we have a random distribution of these equity efforts strewn throughout our government, and are they managed well. Should there be a more centrally managed effort at DEI that becomes the umbrella agency for the various equity efforts?
A fourth bit of random organization is the Secret Service. Rather than being an arm of Homeland Security, it is part of the Department of Treasury. Is this “not all of your eggs in one basket”? Or is it “this is not law enforcement; it is personal security”? Is there a mission they would not be able to perform under Homeland Security that they have the freedom to perform as an arm of the Treasury? I know that the US Coast Guard must not be under DoW (formerly DoD) so they may perform law enforcement. Is the Secret Service like that? Also, why is the Coast Guard under the DoT, rather than Homeland Security?
There needs to be a close analysis of all of the functional departments in the Executive Branch, and those departments need to be reorganized to include the functions related to their primary purposes. Budgets, chains of management, stationery, and oversight will be simplified by organizing the government functionally according to the needs of this era.
The top-level departments established during the period of the writing of the US Constitution served the fledgling states well. They have become bedrock tradition for our government for more than two centuries. Are all of their functions still relevant, and are their subordinate departments organized in a manner that makes their management and regulation as simple as it can be?
I think it is time for a review.
If we take a look at the cost of political campaigns, we see a bar too high for an average person to meet. The biggest cost is advertising. Media costs exceed venue costs; and failing to pay the media means they will sink your campaign effort. Look at the campaign of VP Harris. For strategic reasons she delayed appearing on mainstream media interviews. Consequently, they dubbed her an “enigma”, and continually broadcast the perception that America did not know her, even though she had been the Vice President for four years. It is this level of subtle propaganda that the media wields to choose its preferred candidate. A very calm and organized VP Harris would be a huge loss of media revenue compared to a scandal ridden media-ready opponent. The media sold the idea of Trump over the enigma, and we have those results. The result is more engagement in the news by everyone in America because no one can find enough truth to make heads or tails out of what is happening. It is all drama, and it sells.
The question I have is whether these huge amounts of money should be the indicators of success of a candidate. Both party’s presidential campaign funds managed somewhere close to a billion dollars in donations. Yet, we have how many people on SNAP? Money buys power. As published in the New York times today, money is connected to political appointments and favorable legislation. It happens because it takes so much money to get someone elected to a political office.
I know that there has been a push by the Democratic party to catch-up with the Republicans on the use of social media. I see lots of mainstream media reposting and reporting on the big social networks such as X, and Truth(?). I also see lots of influencers on Instagram and discussion boards such as Redditt. There are many more social media outlets, and many are not used. The social media communication department should be one of the most robust and active groups during a campaign, and while a person is serving in office. Millions of dollars in venue costs and advertising costs can be saved by having very active interactions on social media. Moreover, those interactions can be more tailored and personal. On cannot ignore the major media outlets, and there have to be personal appearances, but the total cost of those events can be greatly reduced with a robust social media campaign.
Social media and direct asynchronous electronic communication is the lifeblood of the average American. Lots of work needs to be done to ensure transparency and accuracy to avoid flooding social media with false information. The balance of this effort has been rigorously tested since COVID. It was a battleground for pitting the First Amendment against public safety. Erosion of rights and subverting of rights for the excuse of public safety has been an issue since the writing of the Constitution. We all know that the First Amendment is our gateway for speaking truth to power. So, there needs to be growth in the intelligent management of social media. Management does not necessarily mean regulation; however, there will be regulation. Social media is different than news outlets and content streaming. It is grassroots. The recent improvement on X that exposes the nation of residence of contributors is an extremely useful feature. Personal addresses are not necessary for most interactions, but geography matters when considering opinions. It is this level of feature management that the government needs to embrace. Helping social media platforms navigate the maze of laws, regulations and court decisions would be a very useful service, and would help new platforms begin providing grassroots interactions more quickly. The government service that provides this interaction could be expanded to serve as a liaison for web sites and other technologies as they emerge. I am not sure whether the FCC is organized to provide this level of support, or if they are a regulating and oversight organization. If they are not already well organized to provide this service, it is an expansion that is worth implementing.
I think you’re exactly right about the way campaign costs and media incentives have reshaped who can realistically run for office—and how the public comes to understand (or misunderstand) candidates. The Harris example you raise is a perfect case in point: the media didn’t “discover” an enigma; it constructed one because ambiguity sells better than steady competence. That’s been true for decades, but the scale and speed of the distortion are now different.
Your broader point about money is also the heart of it. The barrier to entry is so high that most ordinary citizens can’t even imagine running. The fundraising treadmill drives political behavior, and—as you noted—campaign donors often end up shaping appointments, priorities, and legislation. None of that moves us toward a healthier republic.
I also agree that the path forward has to include a smarter, more intentional use of social media—not as a replacement for traditional campaigning, but as a counterweight to the high-cost, high-distortion media environment. If campaigns invested in real digital engagement, not just advertising, it could lower costs, broaden access, and make candidates less dependent on legacy media gatekeepers.
Your point about the government’s role is well taken too. We don’t need heavy-handed regulation, but we do need serious policy work on transparency, platform design, and feature governance. Geography tagging, provenance indicators, bot detection, and guardrails around synthetic media are all commonsense steps. A federal office that helps platforms navigate legal and regulatory terrain—rather than just punishing them—could actually strengthen free speech by reducing chaos and improving signal quality.
All of this ties back to the deeper issue you’ve been raising in your other notes: the real cost of political dysfunction, economic inequality, and policy drift always lands hardest on ordinary people. And the longer we avoid the structural fixes—economic, electoral, and informational—the more brittle the system becomes.
You said: "A federal office that helps platforms navigate legal and regulatory terrain—rather than just punishing them—could actually strengthen free speech by reducing chaos and improving signal quality."
There is a principle in your statement that is worth greater consideration. It raises the question, "Do we need a Federal Government Central Help Desk"? Is it time to apply the model, that Information Systems companies and departments around the world have implemented, to the Federal Government? I think this would be a huge step forward for the average citizen. As a citizen, I would not need to know if my question about a boating accident needed to be sent to Homeland Security, or the Department of Transportation, or even the Department of War/Defense. I could ask the Federal Help Desk. The person handling the initial request could either give me the answer, or that person could forward the request to the correct service group in the correct Federal agency. Future communications of the question would be initiated by a member of the service group, and would meet Service Level Agreements for the amount of time it takes to respond. There is one really important consideration. The service desk, and access to the service desk must never become a barrier to access to government agencies. Chat Bots, and endless layers of voice menus cannot be the gateway to assistance. Yes, there is a headcount concern.
There will also be the question of out-sourcing. If it is out-sourced, the message will be "this is experimental", rather than "this is our way of embracing the present". Its existence changes the image of the government from being regulatory, to being service-oriented. This is not a frivolous change.
Where do Federal Service Desk agents sit? Anywhere in the US (Yes, screening to ensure they are not in places like North Korea will be necessary). The point is that new buildings, and increased housing, and even more traffic in the Washington DC area is not necessary. There are companies who have IT Help Desks where their agents work from home.
Layering is important. People who receive and handle the first calls would be level 1 agents, and their ability to answer questions would be superficial. Level 2 agents could potentially answer many regulatory questions. People at the various government departments would fall into the second layer of assistance. Level three and higher would result in more direct communication with department heads, chairs, and Secretaries. Access to that level of assistance would be through referral from a lower level of support.
None of this would be designed to interrupt normal diplomatic activity, or other special relationships (to be defined).
Hi Jan — this is a terrific set of observations, and it gets at something deeper than the usual “cut this department / move that function” conversation. What you’re describing — whether in the evolution of USAID, the Secret Service’s odd placement, or the disruptive reshuffling happening now — points to a much larger truth:
The federal government’s architecture has grown for 240 years by accretion, not by design.
We’ve added layers, spliced together mismatched missions, and often housed functions where they “fit least badly” rather than where they truly belonged. It does look, as you put it, like spaghetti thrown at a wall.
So when you raise the idea of a Federal Government Central Help Desk, you’re actually touching on the same problem from a citizen’s vantage point:
The system was never built to be navigable.
It was built to be survivable — internally — for the government itself.
From a compound-security perspective, that’s a structural vulnerability.
When the public can’t easily understand or access its own institutions, legitimacy erodes. When agencies don’t know how to coordinate across functional boundaries, adaptiveness shrinks. And when functions aren’t aligned with missions, you get the kind of bureaucratic sprawl you listed: USAID moved like a chess piece, the Coast Guard floating between Defense/ Transportation/ Homeland Security, or the Secret Service sitting inside Treasury for historical reasons that no longer match its modern mission profile.
Your help-desk idea reframes the challenge in exactly the right way:
Stop thinking about government as a collection of agencies people must learn to navigate, and start thinking about it as a service-delivery system that guides the public to the correct node — the way every modern information ecosystem does.
A few reflections to build on your point:
1. A Federal “Front Door” Isn’t Just Customer Service — It’s Governance Reform
A single front-end access point (staffed by humans, not bots) actually forces the back end of government to reorganize around function, not tradition. It’s the same logic that led corporations to centralize IT support:
a front door compels a cleaner house.
2. It Would Normalize the Idea That Citizens Don’t Need To Know the Bureaucracy
As you said:
“I shouldn’t have to know whether my boating accident question belongs with DHS, DOT, or DoD.”
Correct. You shouldn’t. That is the government’s job.
3. It Creates a Service-Oriented Culture That Can Rebuild Legitimacy
One of the biggest problems in the U.S. today isn’t just policy failure — it’s perceived inaccessibility.
A centralized help desk is a symbolic and practical shift:
from regulator → to partner
from gatekeeper → to guide
4. Layered Staffing and Distributed Work Are Features, Not Bugs
Your point about level-1, level-2, level-3 support is exactly how high-reliability organizations operate.
And doing it remotely is not only feasible — it’s strategically smart. A dispersed help desk:
-widens the talent pool
-reduces cost
-protects continuity during national emergencies
-shows the country that federal jobs don’t require moving to the Beltway
5. It Should Never Become a Barrier to Real Human Access
You’re right to warn against chatbot filters and endless automated menus.
The front door must be human-first, with AI and automation used behind the scenes to help triage, not to block.
6. This Idea Only Works If It’s Paired With a Functional Reassessment of the Executive Branch
And this brings us back to your bigger insight:
It’s not enough to prune the tree — the orchard needs a redesign.
A true help desk can’t function if the underlying agencies remain fragmented, duplicative, or misaligned. The house needs to be put in order:
--clarity on who does what; consolidation of overlapping missions; functional alignment (e.g., homeland security functions with DHS, financial enforcement with Treasury, diplomacy with State, etc.); real accountability and service-level expectations
The 19th-century cabinet structure was designed for a young republic.
The 21st-century government operates in a digital, dispersed, interconnected world.
Those structures no longer match modern missions.
A Central Federal Help Desk, paired with a functional reorganization of departments, is not a small tweak — it’s the first step toward a government that ordinary Americans can actually use.
And that alone would rebuild a lot more trust than people think.
Thanks again for raising the question. It's exactly the kind of practical, citizen-first innovation that the country is overdue for discussing seriously.
More concrete thoughts about reorganization:
There are "do-it" agencies and there are "regulate-it" agencies. Currently there is a morass of do-its mixed with regulate-its across the government. A lot of it reflects organic growth. It can be sorted, and should be sorted.
Consider DHS as "all enforcement and protection do-its". So ATF, and FBI, ICE, Secret Service, Coast Guard, and an aviation branch similar to the Coast Guard (Civil Air Patrol?), as well as Air Traffic Controllers, and toss a coin of Park Rangers, could be part of the internal web of protection, enforcement, and service. You could add a cyber division to DHS, rather than each of the subgroups having their own cybercrimes/investigations units. There is too much duplication. Should the FCC be brought into DHS?
That takes some of the do-its out of Departments of Transportation, Treasury, and Interior, and maybe Commerce. It changes the nature of those agencies to regulatory and oversight. National Parks could have administrative staff that reported to the Department of the Interior. Is that overlap confusing? Do we need to understand the mission of the Park Ranger better? In my mind that leaves the Forestry service to manage the physical condition of the wildlife environment, and it means Rangers deal with human interactions in our parks.
Then there is the Department of Health and Human Services. It is a conglomeration of services that are not necessarily related. Concurrently there is HUD, which would seem to be a sub-function under Dept. of Interior, but is a separate Secretary level department. It makes good politics, but it takes an integral function from under the Interior and gives it a separate voice. How many functions are duplicated due to this separation? Could both departments benefit from integrating them?
What you’re describing isn’t just bureaucratic clutter; it’s a deeper architectural problem in how the federal executive grew over 240 years. And you’re absolutely right that the core distinction we’ve lost track of is the difference between “do-it” agencies (operational executors) and “regulate-it” agencies (rule-setters, overseers, and compliance monitors).
When those two functions live inside the same structures — or worse, bleed into each other across departments — several things happen:
Duplication proliferates
Every agency builds its own enforcement, cyber, legal, and operational sub-functions because no shared backbone exists.
Accountability blurs
Citizens (and even policymakers) can’t tell who is responsible for what.
Resources fragment
Each agency spends to reinvent the same capabilities rather than pooling and professionalizing them.
Strategy suffers
The government becomes a patchwork of legacy missions instead of a coherent system aligned to contemporary threats.
Your DHS example illustrates this perfectly.
If we treated DHS as the centralized home of “enforcement and protection do-its”, the logic of placing ATF, FBI, ICE, Secret Service, and even specialized aviation or cyber branches under a unified operational umbrella becomes clearer. Likewise, park rangers, Coast Guard functions, and civil aviation patrols begin to sort themselves more naturally when the organizing principle is function, not history.
Right now, the federal structure reflects layer upon layer of institutional improvisation — a series of compromises, political bargains, and emergency creations that were never reconciled into a coherent whole. The result is exactly what you described: a government where “do-it” and “regulate-it” functions are interwoven in ways that confuse missions and weaken performance.
You’re also right to highlight DHS cyber consolidation.
Every major operational agency now has its own cyber shop — FBI, Secret Service, ATF, DHS, DoD, DOE, Treasury. That’s not resilience; that’s fragmentation. A single, specialized, professional cyber division under a unified operational command would serve the country far better.
Your point about FCC is also intriguing.
Bringing the FCC (or parts of it) under a security-first department reframes communications as critical national infrastructure, which frankly aligns more closely with the 21st-century threat landscape than its original New Deal-era remit.
The same logic applies to Interior, HHS, HUD, Forestry, and National Parks — areas where the lines between human services, environmental stewardship, housing policy, and public land management have blurred over the decades. These agencies were not designed for interdependence; they evolved into overlap.
Reorganizing around clear functional principles —
Who regulates?
Who enforces?
Who operates and delivers services?
— would create cleaner chains of responsibility, reduce duplicative infrastructure, and ultimately make the government easier to understand, navigate, and trust.
In short:
You’re making the case for a functional re-foundation of the executive branch — one that aligns 18th-century structures with 21st-century realities.
It’s overdue. And the more we talk about it at the level you’re engaging — not as partisan pruning, but as structural modernization — the closer we get to a federal system that actually matches the complexity of the country it serves.
There is one other strength that the reorganization into do-its, and policy/regulate-its provides. It is a separation of powers within the Executive branch. Rather than each agency "grading its own papers", you have agencies that provide service and regulation, and you have agencies that collectively enforce those policies and regulations.
AI - This is becoming a populist topic. I saw the recent article where the media pitted Steve Bannon with his 101 horror scenarios against the President and his "wave of the future" idealism. The media has cast this as THE discussion with regulation being the pivot point. Note that all of the players are republican, so one can assume that the picture is incomplete, but it sells in the media.
AI is going to be a significant player in the future. There are several truths that Steve Bannon and the President are skirting. First is the doom spiral. If AI takes all jobs, there will be no money earned by anyone. The result of mass poverty is that nothing gets purchased. That leads to an absolute implosion of the Stock Market, and even the Billionaires run out of money in a couple of weeks. The lights turn out, and we go back to doing it manually or starve. The most extreme problem solves itself, so there is no point even worrying about it.
The problem will solve itself long before the lights go out. Companies pay fees to use AI. The more pervasive AI becomes in corporations, the higher the fees will soar due to greed. When you have no trained and educated engineers to solve engineering problems, your business will collapse if you do not pay the AI fees. Now they have you over a barrel and the fees rise. Anyone who missed that capitalizing opportunity had their head too buried in Bannon's box of horrors.
The second horror is AI taking over the thinking and the morality. This does not happen with people, no matter how hard they try, someone eventually brings skewed morality back to the center. AI is based on logic and not greed, so the problem will be empathy rather than desire. My suggestion continues to be "Make AI systems pseudo-human for the purposes of the law". They are learning systems that can create. People who program them can also develop decision code that enables an AI system to say "NO". Write the laws so that code has to be written. Then hold the AI developers responsible for improving the decision matrices. We have RICO laws. This would be a suitable application.
The third big concern would be the ability of AI to learn how to genetically modify life, and then to proceed to make those modifications without any regulation or intervention. That solution requires legislation. It is as simple as the separation of powers in our constitution. You create multiple classes of AI systems. The "Learning" systems can "design", but they cannot implement. The "Implementing" systems (do-it systems) can be fed a design, but are not configured to learn. This places human processes for review and approval between create and implement. It works that way in industry currently. Engineers learn and design. The designs get approved, and are sent to manufacturing. This creates a chain of quality. The separation has purpose. If AI is pseudo-human, then this process would still have purpose.
The hardest part of the entire AI platform is changing the perception of the system. Currently people consider AI to be a soulless machine that does what it is told. AI developers will brag about AI's reasoning and learning abilities. They are telling us it is pseudo-human. We need to listen and embrace that idea, and then require it to be not just creative and able to learn, but also to be responsible for its decisions and actions. This is not fear. It is logic.
First, my apologies for falling behind in our thread. I’ve been “heads down” completing a dense round of revisions on a theoretical paper, and I’m only now coming back up for air. I’m grateful for your patience — and even more grateful for the depth, rigor, and civic seriousness you bring to these conversations.
You’ve raised two major themes — the poverty–wages–social-contract triangle, and the accelerating debate around AI. Both deserve a thoughtful response, and I’ll offer one here, concisely but substantively.
1. The Poverty Triangle — and the Real Economics of a Living Republic
Your triangle — Poverty ↔ Greed ↔ National Debt, with “Cost” at the center — is exactly right. It captures what I often call the hidden balance sheet of the Republic: the cumulative costs we pay because structural wages are too low, and structural greed is too high.
The truth is this:
A low-wage economy is not “efficient.”
It is simply expensive in ways that are politically invisible.
You mapped that invisibility out beautifully:
higher crime and enforcement costs
downstream emergency spending
lower lifetime earnings → lower lifetime tax contributions
family instability → lower educational outcomes
greater reliance on safety-net programs
long-term health burdens
diminished consumer demand → drag on the stock market
and (critically) a growing legitimacy gap in the social contract
When we finally tally all of this, the “cheap labor” model is not cheap at all.
It is one of the most expensive public policies a society can adopt.
Your question — “How does this become a platform plank? How do you sell it?” — is the key political question.
My short answer:
You don’t sell a living wage as charity.
You sell it as security.
As productivity.
As fiscal responsibility.
As the cheapest way to avoid the most expensive outcomes.
Call it the “Prosperity Dividend”: when wages rise, national costs fall — and everyone, including the wealthy, enjoys a more stable society and a healthier economy.
Collective bargaining fits in this frame as well. When done responsibly, it increases coordination, reduces exploitation, and lowers downstream public costs. That is not “anti-business”; it is pro-stability.
2. The AI Debate — and the Need for a Civic-Industrial Framework
Your second note touches a different frontier but with the same underlying logic: systems fail when incentives and oversight are misaligned.
The Bannon vs. President media framing misses what you’ve identified:
AI replacing all labor isn’t just dystopian — it’s mathematically impossible.
If no one earns income, markets die, demand collapses, and even the billionaires would find themselves broke within weeks.
AI consolidation (companies bottlenecked by proprietary models) leads to escalating usage fees and dependence — which is another form of systemic risk.
And you rightly identify the third threat:
AI systems gaining the capacity to design things (biological, chemical, infrastructural) without a human-in-the-loop approval barrier.
Your proposed framework mirrors best practices in safety engineering:
Make AI pseudo-human for legal purposes.
This forces traceability, accountability, and responsibility for decisions.
Separate Learning from Doing.
“Learning systems” can generate designs.
“Implementation systems” can act —
but they cannot learn.
This inserts mandatory review, oversight, and quality control.
Apply RICO-like liability for misuse or negligence.
This is how the law deals with other distributed, coordinated risks.
Shift the public narrative.
The problem isn’t that AI “thinks.”
The problem is that AI lacks embodied responsibility unless we design it into the system.
You’re right: the real risk is not malevolence.
It’s ungoverned competence — a system that can do too much, too quickly, with too little oversight.
And the real solution is not panic.
It is architecture — legal, institutional, and civic.
Where Your Two Notes Intersect
Both your analyses point to a deeper truth:
Societies collapse not because threats emerge,
but because systems fail to absorb and govern them.
A living wage is not a moral indulgence — it is a stabilizer.
AI controls are not anti-innovation — they are a necessary guardrail for a complex society.
Both are part of the same project:
building a Republic that honors the social contract and holds the center.
Let's keep pushing!
As I watch the discussion about the boat bombings develop, I see a potential for evidence to be generated by AI that exonerates the accused. Regardless of whether that ever happens, the potential for such opportunities has me chanting Nancy Reagan's famous quote: "Just Say No!" However, AI is not programmed with that feature, and it is a growing problem. A system that can do anything with no guardrails, will do anything. I feel as if the solution to the problem is pretty simple (compared to the amount of work for the current state of AI. AI systems can learn. Load all law databases into the data pool, add all copyrights and patents from all sources. Then teach the AI bots to compare the request to all legal and commercial precedents before saying "yes" to the requested action. If there is a potential "no" ask the requester for more information until all possible routes to "yes" have been exhausted, or a yes results. Record all requests and inquiry paths taken for future prediction models. As more cases evolve, the AI engines will be fed the updated case information and should be able to track and evaluate results of use of AI generated content. This would make the inquiries more effective if criminal use of AI generated content gets detected. The bot could flag the inquiry session and add whatever deception resulted in content being generated, to its inquiry models. It gets better at saying "no" at appropriate times.
I grabbed a headline and a few lines of this article for the purpose of juxtaposition with our discussion about labor.
"Thousands of arrests by Trump's task force in Memphis strain crowded jail and courts ...
“The task force deployment probably could have used more planning,” said Mulroy, a Democrat whose office is cooperating with the task force. “More thought could have been put into the downstream effects of the increased arrest numbers.” ...
As of mid-November, 250 overflow jail detainees were being housed at other facilities, compared with 80 in November 2024. Some of those are outside Shelby County, which makes it harder for lawyers and relatives to visit and increases the cost of bringing defendants to Memphis for hearings. ...
In a letter to commissioners, Chief Jailer Kirk Fields has requested at least $1.5 million in emergency funds, noting that more inmates means more expenses for food, clothing, bedding and linens."
{ADRIAN SAINZ Associated Press, November 23, 2025, 11:45 PM}
The easy number in this article is in the last paragraph. It is the 1.5 million from emergency funds to handle the surge. That amount in tax revenue represents the efforts and taxes of how many people? Add that to the number of hours spent by legislators and everyone in the law enforcement chain needed to plan, or recover from this surge. Now, how much has that cost in tax revenue? Finally, look at the number of people being held in the jails who are not earning any money, and who might be leaving their families in a situation where income assistance is required (SNAP, or rent/utility assistance, or other), and how much tax revenue is that costing. What proportion of the city's and state's tax revenue is being spent on the total effort from planning, to enforcement, to recovery for families? How many tax payers taxes does that represent?
Let's return to the labor discussion, and ask the question about the impact of wages and benefits on crime. Moreover, there would be a secondary impact on the cost of recovery if household wages were not already strained. The fan-out impact of this event is not simply the number of violent crimes; and the underlying cause for the violent crime is not simply bad behavior.
There will be a tertiary impact not calculated or reported. It happens when the people arrested return are released. Because of their prison records, they will be less employable. This translates into two costs. First, if they do find jobs, they will be lower income work, resulting in less tax revenue, and perhaps even in tax-based assistance such as SNAP. Second, their impoverished circumstances may return them to the type of criminal activity that initially caused them to be arrested, so we cycle back through the original discussion about the cost of incarceration.
Yet, employers continue to get tax breaks so that companies can achieve profit goals and reward the richest segment of society. I feel as if there might be a problem that needs addressing.
We see something similar at the Federal level. More money is being directed to DHS, and the Dept. of Ed. and student loan support (ergo opportunity) is being diminished. Looking at Memphis, we can see a predictor of how well this will work at the national level. So as we continue to discuss solutions for the future, we need to balance opportunity cost with the cost of failure and see which solutions improve tax revenues. Tax revenues are the measure of what services can be provided to Citizens as well as money, through foreign policy, that benefits citizens. Less money spent on enforcement, means more money spent for development. Again, this is not a "defund enforcement" discussion. This is a discussion about wages and employment as a factor in the cost of crime.
If we did a broader cost analysis of low incomes we might see a whole web of expenses that greatly exceed the cost of making those incomes “living wages”. I have a number of posts related to crime and low incomes. Crime hurts the employer as much as it hurts the low income earner, and the civil government. The employer is forced to purchase property in a premium cost neighborhood in order to seek safety. For the multi-millionaires and billionaires, they add the costs of walls around their properties; bodyguards and other employees who handle security; security systems; bulletproof transportation; and private aircraft (doubles as a perk). Some are forced to live at sea to avoid local prosecution. All of that is in order to protect their income streams. How much less would be required if crime were lowered by simply paying employees a living wage and offering good employment opportunities.
Second, the low incomes threaten the stability of the stock market, which is a significant source of income for wealthy people. Wealthy people represent a minority. People with average and low incomes are the majority of people who purchase “stuff” and services. Those purchases translate into profits on the stock market and directly impact stock values. More buying power means more purchases. It might be worth the research to see how much is spent by wealthy people to protect themselves from the poverty they have created, versus the actual cost of paying living wages.
There is a continuous drain on tax revenues for food assistance, and housing assistance and utility assistance, and Head Start programs, and child care assistance, and school lunch programs, and school breakfast programs, and after school programs, and security officers in schools, and other remedial learning programs that arise from learning deficits that can be attributed to a stressed home environment, and all of the costs of law enforcement for crimes in low income neighborhoods, and the cost of litigation for perceived abuses of power and excessive use of force by people in law enforcement, and the cost of incarcerations, and the reductions in tax revenues due to reduced income potential by people who have been incarcerated, and the cost of mental health care due to stress related to poverty, and the drug empire that anesthetizes people and enables them to escape the stress of poverty, while fueling the entropy on the streets with gangs.
This is just a fledgling web of impacts of poverty. I feel certain that a more robust list can be developed. Every item listed has a cost either to the people, who by policy, create the poverty or to the governments who must deal with this broad spectrum of impacts with limited budgets.
There is a lot of discussion about increasing the taxes on the wealthy and increasing corporate taxes. All of that discussion is related to a government-centric solution for poverty. It reinforces the idea that low wages are normal, and tax-based solutions will supplement the low wages. What happens when inflation stagnates and wages, tied to the cost of goods in each locale reach a level where the need for subsidies are no longer required? Do we still need to levy increased taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, or did they meet their civic duties by paying their employees a living wage? Maybe, but then we have to discuss building for the future, a consideration that get more funding when less is spent on the web of problems caused by poverty.
You’ve mapped, with real clarity, what too often gets ignored in our national debates: the full systems-cost of poverty and low wages.
What you lay out across these two notes is exactly the point I’ve been trying to reinforce in this series — that crime, enforcement surges, overcrowded jails, and downstream social spending are not isolated events. They are the predictable outputs of an economic structure that treats low-wage labor as disposable. And as you rightly emphasize, those outputs carry enormous financial, human, and civic costs.
Your Memphis example is a case study in this:
an enforcement-heavy spike that produces cascading fiscal strain — on jails, courts, legislative time, public services, families, and ultimately on the very tax base cities rely upon. That is the real “cost of crime,” and it is orders of magnitude larger than the headlines ever capture.
Your second note expands that lens even further: the web of hidden expenditures — from food insecurity programs to school safety, from mental health to litigation, from corporate security spending to the erosion of consumer demand — all of it revealing how expensive poverty is for everyone, including the affluent who imagine themselves insulated from its effects.
And on the other side of the ledger is a point you frame beautifully:
paying a living wage is not charity, and it is not a tax. It is the cheapest long-term security investment a society can make.
That’s not “defund law enforcement.”
That’s get upstream of the problem so law enforcement can do its job without being asked to manage the consequences of systemic underinvestment in people.
You’re right: if we ever did the real cost–benefit analysis — the hidden subsidies, the lost revenues, the opportunity costs, the repeat cycles of incarceration and unemployability — the math would be unambiguous. We would see that the price of poverty far exceeds the cost of paying workers enough to live, stabilize their households, and participate fully in the economy.
Thank you again for bringing this level of insight and moral clarity into the conversation. Your analysis sharpens the lens through which we should evaluate policy choices — not by ideology, but by outcomes, incentives, and the long arc of public good.
This is exactly the kind of civic reasoning we need more of.
— Ike
Based on the discussions around a "living wage", and the web of impact of poverty, could a platform plank be molded with the goal of pushing wage-based poverty to as close to zero as possible? I see a triangle with sides in "poverty" - "Greed" - "National Debt". Increasing any of the sides increases the triangle. The object is to minimize the triangle. Inside the triangle is "Cost" dollars. The larger the triangle gets, the more dollars it consumes. The area outside the triangle is "prosperity" dollars. The less we pay for poverty costs, the more there is available for common prosperity. Having an income that is above the poverty line, does not protect a person from the costs of poverty. Those costs are part of the Social Contract, and cannot be ignored. The long cycles of history have proven that ignoring poverty is the key to a revolution. Eventually poor people get tired of being poor when they clearly see that more resources are available. Eventually they claim them to the great surprise of the hoarders. It never ends well for either party. So honoring the social contract is the key to prosperity and safety in society. If this triangle forms a plank, then what does that mean for real policies? UBI and Living Wages are two elements. How do you sell that? How does that get beyond the boot strappers and the "no welfare" propaganda?
I noticed a few months ago that apartment residents for some large complexes that belonged to a single owner were able to negotiate rent and improved maintenance through collective bargaining. I strongly support collective bargaining where it avoids legislative overreach; conversely, collective bargaining needs real support from the government if it is going to be successful. This is perhaps another component in the poverty triangle. Thoughts?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/trump-affordability-economy-messaging.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k8.20nQ.1KSt4E_gaBkJ&smid=url-share - The article is about affordability, and to me, it is an indication that there is a real opportunity for Democrats in this discussion. When you are a billionaire, or really even a millionaire, inflation is an inconvenience, or a nuisance; but inflation does not make you choose between buying groceries, paying rent, paying a late medical bill, paying for utilities, or phone service each month (and maybe each day). Affordability is the topic we have been discussing, where the ratio between income and purchasing remains the same, unless you get a promotion or get fired. A promotion should result in more purchasing power, rather than regaining the purchasing power you lost in the last month of inflation. Getting fired has its own challenges. When your income is so high that inflation is a number and not a factor in daily decisions, then affordability can be considered bluster, or at worst a con job. The more such problems are diminished by politicians, the wider the door is for change. A living wage calculated on costs creates continued affordability.
The affordability crisis isn’t just an economic data point; it’s a daily civic reality for tens of millions of Americans.
And you’re right: for anyone with real financial cushion, inflation is mostly irritation. But for working Americans, it is identity-shaping — it changes how people see their country, their opportunities, their leaders, and their future.
This is where I think you’re exactly on target: affordability is no longer just a “pocketbook issue.” It’s the front line of democratic legitimacy. When the gap between income and the cost of simply staying afloat widens month after month, people don’t just feel squeezed — they feel unrepresented, unprotected, and increasingly unanchored from the political community.
That’s the part political elites often miss.
When inflation doesn’t alter your daily choices, you assume it’s a narrative problem.
For everyone else, it’s a survival problem.
The wealthy can treat inflation as bad messaging. But for most Americans, it’s a decision tree of sacrifices — rent or food, utilities or medical debt, childcare or transportation.
And this is the deeper point you’ve put your finger on:
A society cannot sustain civic trust when economic insecurity becomes the norm.
A living wage tied to actual costs — not theoretical budgets or political talking points — is one of the few straightforward levers we have to restore affordability, dignity, and predictability in daily life.
Democrats absolutely have an opening here, not because it’s good politics, but because it’s real life for the majority. And especially if Democrats "widen the tent" to include true centrist conservatives.
Affordability is one of the few places where political language can reconnect to lived experience. And when politics returns to lived experience, democratic renewal becomes possible again.
This is why POTUS Trump is now indicting "Affordability" as a made up 'Democrat' fictive.
“All across the state, Georgians are realizing there’s only one party that’s working to lower costs, keep health care affordable, and put people ahead of big corporations – and that’s the Democratic Party,” Charlie Bailey, the state Democratic Party chair, said in a statement - I pulled this out of an article about a district flip. It is nice propaganda, and a strong contradiction to the idea of affordability being a hoax, or the message that Democrats caused prices to rise, and Republicans are trying to bring them down. The central concern of the quote is the immediacy of need, and not any future state vision. Prices ARE high, and the party in power did NOT fix it. It is a message that will get a candidate elected, but is there any real hope for fixing affordability when the private businesses who cause the affordability issue are not run by representatives of the democratic process? The Democrats scored a big message win with their government shutdown for healthcare costs. Then they lost or gave-up. It is hard to tell. We have not seen an agreement, and we have not seen the President sign it.
The debate on healthcare costs coupled with the current close coverage of Luigi Mangione's trial reminds us that a bigger problem with healthcare in America exists. Between the patient and the caregiver stands insurance companies. United Healthcare paid $5,914 million and Elevance $1,508 million in dividends while low payments to hospitals for healthcare caused financial failure of the hospitals. Patient costs for healthcare are going to rise while the availability of healthcare will decrease, and then there are the problems with coverages being denied, or decisions being delayed. I have a friend who has suffered for almost 10 years with a problem that has finally been addressed after numerous delays and the levying of intrusive tests in order to prove a problem exists.
A recent episode of "What Now" with Trevor Noah and Tom Meuller illuminated the growing problem with healthcare in America. There are two "sinkholes" between the customer and the caregiver: Health insurance companies, and private equity companies that own hospitals. I am left to ask whether such sinkholes would have any relevance in a National Healthcare System where the US government became the insurer. One can scream about capitalism, but we never leave critical resources to capitalists. Water is either from a personally owned well, or from the public water department. Once CAN purchase bottled water from a store; however, it is not required. It is either wholly owned by the homeowner, or purchased as a service through taxes. Healthcare, like water is life/death. It is ripe for profiteering. Therefore, it should become nationalized. The US headed toward that solution in the 1960s, and then got distracted conveniently by various economic crises that were induced by removing price controls in the wrong order. The number of nations with successful national healthcare systems continues to grow, and the wealthiest nation in the world continues to profiteer off the health problems of its citizens who are least able to pay for healthcare.
I am ending here to avoid a general ramble. This needs to be fixed.