EdBriggs.com

Guest Editorial by R. Edward Smith

(Roger makes his home in Asheville, North Carolina. He is an authority on the life and works of Truman Capote and is currently working to complete a new book about the author. Roger is a friend, and also a cousin on my father's side of our family.)

R. Edward Smith

Senator Bernard Sander’s speech in Phoenix on the evening of March 15, 2016, was so clear in its deliverance, so “American” in its voice and in the populist values that were articulated to protest the “rigged economy” his campaign platform opposes that the political orthodoxy of the Washington elites seems offensive and even foreign to the civic sensibilities of citizens who appreciate or support the presidential candidate from Vermont. But what might not seem so clear to the electorate, at large, is that the present economic mind-set of Wall Street, or of the soulless operatives who defend the oudated precepts that dominate America's financial destiny, goes far back in time, to the republic’s past and the early decades of the Industrial Revolution that preceded the disastrous War Between the States; to a time when growing opportunities for the rich and the well-heeled Northern Industrialists resulted in wild speculations fueled by an ever-increasing thirst for wealth and control. Over time, these so-called “Captains of Industry” who profited from the Civil War morphed into the “Robber Barons of the East." These powerful financial players, and the professional army of specialists hired to aid in a “rigged economy” system of enterprises headquartered at Wall Street, had gambled on mining, rail and shipping interests, and other ventures that hungered for natural and agricultural products–and especially for the Southern Aristocrats’ slave-produced cotton that was needed for the textile factories of the Northeast.

Prior to the war, the Wall Street plutocrats and their lobbyists in Washinton set about securing the control of "King Cotton" for their own enterprising purposes by influencing Congress to impose stiff tariffs upon the export of this raw material to the textile mills of England. “Throughout most of our history,” reported author Walter Williams in 2013, “the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s,” he noted, “tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What ‘responsible’ politician,” asked Williams, “would let that much revenue go?”[i] But, when the Landed Gentry of the South protested this targeted action against their low-country operations, the industrialists of the North recklessly contested the threat of secession. “In the presidential contest of 1860,” reported John Ashworth for The New York Times or February 2, 2011,  “southerners warned again and again that a Republican victory would mean secession. Hamilton Fish of New York declared that the ‘jails and lunatic asylums’ would be ‘of sufficient capacity to accommodate all the disunionists in the land.’ Lincoln for his part,” noted Ashworth in “What the North Got Wrong,” “dismissed all talk of secession as ‘humbug’.”[ii] When the Republican politicians in Washington lost the blinking game with the ruling class of the South, the Industrialists of the North and the federal government prepared for a war that would push the agrarian economy of the South off its tracks, but by action that was orginally believed would amount to a short campaign of military engagement. The President's miscalculation resulted in a "righteous" war that historians and civil war buffs continue to debate and even reenact. 

Scholarship of recent years argues that, contrary to the “saintly” image of Lincoln as commander in chief of an army of Christian soldiers marching off to war, he was “a model local politician, a loyal Whig standing for the protective tariff”; our 16th President, reported William Saffir (in quoting from Joel H. Silbey’s “Always a Whig in Politics" for his New York Times essay of February 14, 1986), "was a faithful practitioner of patronage to the White House” and “a total political operator.” In quoting at length, Saffir used Silbey’s reasoning about the antebellum political parties of the 1850s to critique the national politics of the mid-1980s and the congressional rancor of the day. “He was fully woven into the partisan fabric of his time,” asserted Silbey of Abraham Lincoln. “He was a total political operator—a party hack. But so what?” Saffir also appropriates Silbey’s remarks for the purpose of illuminating the inside affairs of a divided congressional body in 1986 (a Republican Senate and a Democratic House). “What emerged was a responsible party system,” opined Silbey for his view of Civil War-era politics; “the wiles and commitments of the party activist and regular are, therefore, not easily denigrated.” Saffir suggested that Silbey had reasoned correctly: that party loyalty and outspoken partisan opposition (using Saffir’s terms) “turn out men and draw issues in a way that may now be out of fashion but was vital in Lincoln’s day.”

Saffir went on to suggest that the compromising Lincoln, “working within the Whig and then the Republican Party to achieve power for great purposes, is rarely used as an exemplar by high-mindedly nonpolitical orators today. Just the opposite,” he opined: “we think of the political dissension in the North during the Civil War as divisive and harmful to the Union effort, with Lincoln having to jockey between the radical Republican abolitionists and the conservative Democratic civil libertarian Governor of New York. Most of us assume that party politics is a liability in warmaking, and that the one-party Confederacy had an advantage in mobilizing a national campaign. But the absence of a two-party system weakened the South,” reasoned Saffir. “Jeff Davis had no way of enforcing political obedience in the states, as Lincoln did,” he opined. “The clash of parties turns out to be the great instrument in protecting Lincoln’s ‘central idea’ of majority rule. That calculated internal activism needs a new birth today,” declared Saffir. “If Lincoln could speak at Springfield now, he would show us how a great politician is able to rise above the usual rising above politics.”[iii]

But since Saffir passed away in 2009 and is no longer present to comment upon the divided politics and dissension within the Republican Party of 2016, we are left to imagine what he might write for The New York Times about the polarized politics of today and the primary campaigns of a two-party system that has become ineffective in conducting the People's business. One might extrapolate from the essayist’s views of the mid-1980s in imagining what William Saffir would write today; that he would have a wild time in making sense of the current rancor within “the Party of Lincoln” which has led some to question if this might spell the end to Lincoln's "central idea" of majority rule—if not the end of the Grand Old Party itself.

But, because Lincoln was such a strict partisan, access to the Oval Office for the Captains of Industry was assured; and it is realistic to assume that the politics of that time followed the money, just as it does today. As such, it was the miscalculations of the Republicans and their party leader that led to conflict with the Southern planters and politicians–and to the disastrous military action against the aggrieved Confederate States. The horrific war, however, resulted in what is now commonly referred to today as “unintended consequences.” As it now stands, the American Civil War was the country’s bloodiest conflict, yet; the slaughter of America’s sons caused ruined lives and broken hearts for wives and children and mothers and fathers in every corner of the land; there were psychological and emotional wounds, too, for families and communities that have in some respects never healed. “Approximately one in four soldiers that went to war never returned home,” reported the authors at the Civil War Trust who wrote about the 1.2 million casualties. “At the outset of the war, neither army had mechanisms in place to handle the amount of death that the nation was about to experience.” In addition, the loss to the economy exacerbated conditions that inflamed resentments on both sides. “One in thirteen surviving Civil War soldiers returned home missing one or more limbs,” the authors noted. “Pre-war jobs on farms or in factories became impossible or nearly so.” But for many, the report declared, “there was no solution. Tens of thousands of families slipped into destitution.”[iv]

In Nicholas Marshall’s opinion article for The New York Times of April 15, 2014 (“The Civil War Death Toll, Reconsidered”), the author reported that the number of deaths was greater than had been estimated, and yet “it is not enough simply to speak about numbers.” In the effort to reassess the unintentional consequences and costs of the conflict, the authors suggest that the evidence from the period “makes clear that historians need to reevaluate the way we have come to understand the carnage of the Civil War. The war added to an existing demographic and cultural problem rather than creating an entirely new one. Given this milieu, the nearly ubiquitous use by historians of a set of factually correct, yet misleading, statistics need rethinking.”[v] One could argue that the present political climate is a continuing cultural disunity that has yet to be resolved, and that simple solutions recommended in the past are not enough to bring about reconciliation between political parties or regional societies that are currently splitting the party faithful into varying camps, each resentful of the Washington establishment. Indeed, it could be argued that the demands made by one group against the other only exacerbates the wounds that endure from the loss of life and loss of pride painfully subdued within the psyches of the millions of descendants whose forebears fought in that war. Indeed, the racial issues of 2015 that left cities such as Charleston, Ferguson, and Baltimore in question about “systemic” police brutality remain unhealed and unresolved for the nation, as a whole.

After Appomattox, political operatives loyal to the “special interests” of the North were in control of the federal government. But with the President’s assassination, the "Reconstruction South" was left to resolve its own strife and disorder, while the Robber Barons of the North turned the United States Military toward the West to wipe out or subdue Native American societies opposed to expansion beyond the Mississippi, and the threat of an unstoppable American Empire. “The Homestead Act of 1862 encouraged 600,000 families to settle the West by giving them land (usually 160 acres) almost free,” reported Wikipedia. “Before the Civil War, Southern leaders opposed the Homestead Acts because they feared it would lead to more free states and free territories. After the mass resignation of Southern senators and representatives at the beginning of the war, Congress was subsequently able to pass the Homestead Act.” But then, as the great cities of the East became swollen by immigrants who were invited to the New World to work the factories and build the growing network of ports and rails that carried away natural resources from the land, the corporate boards of the industrialists and their political stooges in the Nation’s capitol beat down the White and Black families of West Virginia and Kentucky to make of them economic slaves to coal mines from which cheap energy was extracted to fuel the dirty engines of commerce and the economies of the North—a serious game for money and power that has gone on and on, without end, to the present day.

“When you hear charges today that the federal government is overreaching, and the idea that the Constitution recognized us as a league of sovereign states—these were all part of the secessionist charges in 1860,” noted a CNN.com article in 2008 entitled “4 ways we’re still fighting the Civil War.” “The shutdown of the federal government, war in Libya, the furor over the new health care law and Guantanamo Bay—all have tentacles that reach back to the Civil War,” the report noted. “The Civil War took place during a period of pervasive piety when both North and South demonized one another with self-righteous, biblical language.”[vi] One only needs to reconsider the words from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” to understand how certain aspects of the War Between the States lives on in the present-day notions of honor and patriotism which in effect preserves old emotions for both Whites and African-Americans, no matter where they now reside within the country. What could ever possibly resolve this painful past and restore a national sense of trust in a future free from the depression of decline and a rigged economy that leaves many underemployed and without hope?

Writing for marketwatch.com on April 6, 2010, author Paul Farrell reported upon the danger signals enumerated by business guru Jim Collins “nine years ago” (more than half a decade before the Wall Street collapse that he predicted). Writing under the headline, “Mighty America’s 5 stages of rapid decline,” Farrell named the stages Collins had warned about: 1) Hubris born of success; 2) Undisciplined pursuit of “More”; 3) Denial of risk and peril; 4) Grasping for Salvation; and 5) Capitalization to irrelevance…or death. One’s very success, Collins had suggested, “might cover up the fact that you’re already on the path of decline.” People become arrogant, it was noted, and insiders see “success virtually as an entitlement.” Then, declared Collins, the belief that we’re so great that we can do anything drives many to “more scale, more growth, more acclaim, more of whatever those in power see as success”–and that, he suggested, justifies mega-bonuses. Those in power “begin to imperil the enterprise by taking outsize risks and acting in a way that denies the consequences”; elected representatives in 2007-2009, Farrell noted, surrendered “the keys to the U.S. Treasury over to Wall Street’s new soulless pseudo-capitalism.” The key to overcoming the decline, noted Farrell of Collin’s warning signs, is Great Leaders. “Does America have a Churchill in the wings, a leader who knows ‘the path out of darkness begins with those exasperatingly persistent individuals who are constitutionally incapable of capitulation’.”[vii]

In 1860, that great leader was the "party-hack," Abraham Lincoln. But, at what costs did the 16th President’s partisan decisions of 150 years ago bring upon the nation the unintended consequences that in both subtle and hostile ways continue to divide communities and the country, even at this very moment? It would seem that certain subtle emotions are deeply felt and might actually be at the root of fears that quietly reside in the psyche of the electorate for the present political cycle: Might Donald Trump become the “Great Leader” who will make the country great again? (But at what cost to the nation's destiny, or to the World's?) Yet, this same fear is reported to be present as a widely-shared concern about the warmongering rethoric in Hillary Clinton’s vocal abuse. “Do We Want a Chameleon or an Authentic Person,” asks Ralph West for his Reader Supported News article of February 21, 2016. “If you have read any of the postings of this semi-retired non-political English teacher, you know that I am 200% behind Mr. Sanders,” West admitted. In comparing the authenticity of Sanders to the chameleon-like “changeability of Hillary,” West suggested that she “will always be wearing the colors that suit her endless ambition.” In his view, if Clinton becomes President, “her lingering dedication to Goldman Sachs, etc., will water down all of her ‘commitment’.”[viii] But the same might be said of Donald Trump, of his chameleon-like character—which makes the choice between these two front-runners a matter of real concern for many Americans–and at a time when the nation and its citizens struggle on to recover from the financial wreck of Wall Street’s rigged system and the unintended consequences of speculation and greed which brought about the “Great Recession” that fuels the ongoing resentments over inequality, unfairness, and from racial and ethnic divides.

It could be argued that the cost of the Civil War was more, perhaps much more, than the loss of life itself; the psychological pain that seems to never end as a result of unintended consequences runs too deep to “shame” away. While one side denigrates the other by reminding it that it lost the war and that it should just get over it, the other reacts with indignation by promising to never forget what was done to impoverish the non-slave-holding families of the South whose homeland was invaded and whose farms were destroyed. The psychological wounds that were inflicted run too deep to brush away with insults intended to offend and harden positions long held to for emotional reasons related to lost property, lost livelihoods, and lost relatives. Within half a decade (within less than five years after the end of the Civil War) physicians in America were reporting upon a health phenomenon called “neurasthenia,” a disease identified as a direct consequence of modern life. “And it could only have happened in America,” reported Julie Beck in her Atlantic review of March 11, 2016. In her review of Professor David Schuster’s Neurasthenic Nation, Beck noted that the condition had “a certain American flavor” and that William James, an early psychologist, had termed it “Americanitis.” The journalist goes on to report that the psychological maladies came to be thought of as “an illness of the privileged—the white, Protestant, Northern privileged, mostly. Mental activity was thought to use more energy than physical activity,” Beck reported, and there were those who offered “racist explanations for why blacks and Native Americans didn’t get neurasthenia—because they didn’t overuse their minds.” No mention was made of the region-wide prejudice that has been perpetrated against poor white families of the South whose lives were disrupted and thrown into poverty by a war that left entire communities destitute and without security or the means of educating the next generation for a pathway toward transforming shattered lives. It is supposed that poor white southerners were among those who didn’t get "neurasthenia"–didn't contract Americanitis..

“If there is one sober lesson Americans seem to be taking out of the bathos of the Civil War sesquicentennial, it’s the folly of a nation allowing itself to be dragged into the war in the first place,” wrote Allen Guelzo for The Atlantic of August 23, 2015. “After all, from 1861 to 1865 the nation pledged itself to what amounted to a moral regime change, especially concerning race and slavery—only to realize that it had no practical plan for implementing it. No wonder that two of the most important books emerging from the Sesquicentennial years—by Harvard president Drew Faust, and Yale’s Harry Stout—questioned pretty frankly whether the appalling costs of the Civil War could be justified by its comparatively meager results. No wonder, either, that both of them were written in the shadow of the Iraq War, which was followed by another reconstruction that suffered from the same lack of planning.”[ix]

In an opinion article for the February 21, 2015 issue of The New York Times, entitled “What the North Got Wrong,” author John Ashworth began his piece as follows: “In the years and months preceding the Civil War, the Republicans in general and Abraham Lincoln in particular made many mistakes or misjudgments. And these errors were vitally important in bringing on the war.” The first mistaken, noted Ashworth, “was to underestimate the danger of secession.” The second mistaken “was to underestimate the danger, and the cost, of war, if and when it did come.” Essentially, noted Ashworth, the misconceptions “were the product of current northern social conditions” that bore the imprint (as he put it) “of the interests that were thriving in the free-labor North in the final years and months of the antebellum Republic.” Yet, the so-called “free-labor” doctrine as represented in the author’s account fails to connect the young nation’s economic and social conditions of the past to those that threaten to bring about an end to the two-party political system of the present—a system which, in truth, is actually a critical component of the same "rigged economy" that brought civil war upon the American People.

“Do you enjoy being forced to choose between one of two candidates,” asks author Eric Sanders in “Bipolar Politics: The Beginning and End of the Two-Party System.” “If we truly believe in democracy and freedom, and wish to do more than merely talk about them theoretically, then we have no alternative but to get rid of these archaic laws that force us to vote for only one candidate.”[x] Though the Constitution does not establish the party system we have inherited, it was the political climate of the years that immediately preceded the Civil War that gave rise to the two-parties that survive as a direct result of Lincoln’s “central idea” of “majority rule.” In truth, the stress put upon the electorate at that time was not dissimilar to what is being experienced today by individuals who are dismayed at the thought of having to choose between the front-runners in the 2016 Primary Cycle. There is no doubt but that the two-party system is an “establishment” device that directly supports the "rigged economy," a system that permits the Washington elites to better manage their chances of staying in power against the threat of "outsiders." If the electoral system permitted the people to vote for an Independent candidate in 2016, there is every reason to consider the likelihood that Senator Sanders would have run as an Independent (and not as a Democrat), and that he might even have reasoned that he would have a better chance of receiving more votes than either of the Super Tuesday frontrunners. There is also reason to believe that the shenanigans of both the Democrats and Republicans that helped to bring about the Great Recession might have been averted had the two-party system been reformed years before. There seems little doubt that the stress and financial wreck the American people are struggling to overcome has resulted from a political climate that leaves the electorate with having to choose between front-runners that Democrats, Republicans, and Independents feel they cannot trust.

“Too much stress, too little sleep, rushed meals, technology that seems to change faster than we can begin to keep up with,” wrote Greg Daugherty for the Smithsonian of March 25, 2015 to describe the effects resulting from the Great Recession of the present. “If those complaints sound familiar, chances are they’d have resonated with your great-great grandparents too,” he instructed his reader of the what took place generations ago. Medical practitioners in 1870, he reported, “suggested that the country’s legendary work ethic and go-getter spirit might be a form of mental illness they called Americanitis.”[xi] Some writers, it was noted, suggested that the condition was the result of “the hurry, bustle and incessant drive of the American temperament,” or “a consequence of the country’s incessant busyness.” But there was no mention of the psychological burden of guilt and shame or bitterness and hatred that arose from the years of war that took its toll on the families from both the North and the South. The horror of assassination and the aftermath of dark sorrow and psychological pain were unaccounted for in either of the articles named above.

Fast-forward to late March 2016, to two weeks after the election night speech in Phoenix where Senator Sanders addressed a large gathering of supporters who might otherwise have been dismayed by Secretary Clinton’s increased gain of delegates from Super Tuesday's turnout. Senator Sanders has since also gained significant numbers of delegates and added virgorous momentum to his campaign for the presidency by identifying the distress experienced by ordinary Americans, which he attributes to a “rigged economy” brought about by Wall Street speculators, banks too big to fail, and the Supreme Court’s disastrous decision in the “Citizens United” case–a ruling which granted evermore voice and personhood to the corporate entity. Yet there seems to be little voice for this view, that the present conditions of overwork and mental distress are connected in any way to the Americanitis of today that began when early financiers of the antebellum North pushed the country into civil war from which the nation has yet to recover its Revolutionary War identify and psyche. "Most of all," wrote Joel H. Silbey in describing the political life and times of Abraham Lincoln, "he fit a particular model endemic to his time: a new type of political activist that had replaced the great statesmen of the revolutionary era and their successors in the generations up to the 1830s." And though slavery was ended as an institution that had corroded the moral authority of the nation's character, it was not the economic cause that had brought about the conflict. Even Southern Aboltionists as early as 1795 were writing to General Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry to request that legislation be introduced to end the practice of slavery. There were numorous slave-holders who freed their slaves and voluntarily ended the practice for themselves decades before the war. As such, slavery was not the cause for the war. And, what is more, abolition of slavery failed to end segregation in the South and resulted in mass out-migration of African-Americans to the cities of the North where they also endured segregation, prejudice, and subsistance wages. Indeed, the power of the elites who pushed the nation into war was oppressive, as it continues to be so; and it is arguable that the economics of inequality has made financial slaves of the Middle Class itself, which, in effect, has been forced to sell its soul to the company store.

It could be argued that the Civil War of one-hundred and fifty years ago has morphed into the Global War Against Terror we have today, and that the same "rigged economy" and its unintended consequences will continue to influence Central Banks of the West to struggle with making policy shifts for a sputtering economy that seems destined to grow slowly for an indefinite number of years ahead. It could also be argued that, since the end of World War II, China and India (indeed, the rest of the World) have had to fall in line under the political and economic pressures wrought by a rigged system that was instituted a hundred years earlier, which caused the disastrous War Between the States. What took place in Brussels recently is but one more incident in a conflagration of opposing values between the East and the West that goes back millennia. But the peculiar economic realities of the West are of but a few centuries in the making, and have contributed to an escalating conflict for the World that has brought death and terror upon European and American soils. To make matters ever more intense, Americans are faced with the burden of costs for its longest war, with the inequalities that come with such a financial burden; at the same time, they are faced with having to choose sides in the current political cycle which seems to foreshadow the end to an outdated two-party system that is arguably overdue.

Now that the middle-class has become painfully aware that the company store is soulless, it becomes understandable why the Senator from Vermont is drawing such large and passionate crowds of citizens, young and old, who know first-hand why the candidate is presenting a radical platform. There is no question but that the Senator has been consistently honest in his unchanging assessment that the "rigged economy" threatens to destroy or diminish our democracy while it asks for a sacrifice of low-wage labor and unbearable debt for generations already burdened by the excesses of a moneyed-class of elites who reap unfair rewards. But what is strangely ironic is that the “socialist” from Vermont is fighting against a rigged economy that is, in truth, a “socialized” system made powerful by decisions that were made during the Great Depression in preparation for World War II. The “managerial capitalism” of the 1930s, reported Buckminster Fuller in 1980 for Critical Path, welcomed new designs brought about “in the form of many new armament designs.” Just before the war, instructed Fuller, the Wall Street lawyers approached the Roosevelt administration and made certain demands that would obligate the government to reward the corporations for their cooperation. Those corporations, reported Fuller, “earned an average of 10 percent on every [product] turnover. This meant that in World War II for every annual war budget—running at first at $70 billion per year—10 percent, or $7 billion, was earmarked for distribution to the stockholders of the corporations. Complete socialization of the stockholders of the prime U.S.A. corporations was accomplished.” This “discreditation,” wrote Fuller, “has been brought about without the U.S.A. people’s knowledge of the money-maker-world’s invisible cheating.”

This “cheating” game made public by Fuller's account has continued to this day by way of actions our government continues to make for trade agreements that profit the stockholders of the corporations at the expense of the taxpayer. “By 1953 it became apparent that the Wall Street lawyers were moving the major American corporations out of America,” reported Fuller. “Of the 100 largest corporation in America four out of five of their annual investment dollars in new machinery and buildings for 1953 went exclusively into their foreign operations.” In Fuller’s critically-acclaimed book of 1980, he reported that this “four-fifths rate persisted for a score of years.” In illuminating the invisible cheating scheme, as documented, Fuller went on to note that “each new year’s foreign aid bill had a rider that said that if American companies were present in the country being aided, the money had to be spent through those American companies.” Foreign aid, he insisted, “paid for all the new factories and machinery of all the American corporations moving out of America.”[xii]

Senator Sanders is courageous in that he has always made it clear as an Independent member of Congress that he is a “democratic socialist” and that he is strictly committed to the well-being of the American taxpayer and to the United States of America. This would help to explain why Sanders was so put off by Donald Trump’s false accusation that the senator from Vermont is “a communist.” “He’s a pathological liar,” Sanders responded. By contrast, it is clear why Sanders can call his opponent a liar while Hillary Clinton cannot use the term in attacking the businessman from New York. Clinton has her own cross to bear with regard to whether or not she can be counted on to tell the truth. Indeed, it is imagined that Trump would jump at the chance to debate her on the issue of trustworthiness. They both score embarrassingly low by that measure.

But is it any wonder that Donald Trump has been able to stymie the GOP by lying and capitalizing on the fear and insecurity that the “American Economic Model” has brought into the World? “But all republics and democracies in history do have something in common,” reported Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker of March 24, 2016. “They’re fragile,” he suggested. “That’s why Lincoln could speak so solemnly at Gettysburg of government of the people, by the people, for the people perishing from the Earth.” Gopnik went on to suggest that whether “moved by rich men’s recklessness or poor people’s fearfulness—or a little of both—strong social arrangements do fall too easily apart.” But one is reminded of the story about the author of the Gettysburg address, and of comments Lincoln is reported to have made soon thereafter. “When I left Springfield, I asked the people to pray for me; I was not a Christian,” he said. “When I buried my son—the severest trial of my life—I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg, and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ.”[xiii]

In his post at lincolnstudies.com, Samuel Wheeler noted that the statement by Lincon came from an article in the Freeport Weekly Journal of Freeport, Illinois. “Here’s the shocker,” he suggested: “the article appeared on December 7, 1864. In other words, during Lincoln’s lifetime. In my view,” reported Wheeler, “this lends substantial credibility to the purported quote. But what does it mean?” In quoting from Wayne C. Temple’s book, From Skeptic to Prophet, Wheeler repeated Temple’s remarks as a commentary upon the question that remains. “And the honest President did not rush to join a church after speaking at Gettysburg," the author reported. "For a number of years he had been a God-fearing mortal, and he often referred to the United States as a Christian nation, yet Lincoln still did not publicly acknowledge himself to be a Christian. Lincoln’s attitude toward Christ is most difficult to evaluate.” One can hardly ignore the involuntary thought about how President Lincoln's political acumen compares with the outrageous political audactiry of Donald Trump. But this then leads one to reconsider the fact that though the senator from Vermont is Jewish, he is, to his credit, honest and forthright in a professed commitment to his faith. And though it appears he has never confused the matter of his faith with his role as a politician, he freely admits that his faith, nonetheless, informs his character. He professes to be an admirer of Pope Francis, which is a perfectly reasonable tenet for any leader to profess; indeed, this tolerant view is refreshing, given the intolerant views expressed by some others. The senator, in fact, openly defends the rights of Muslin-American citizens devoted to the Islamic faith. Quite frankly, the Judeo-Christian vlaues of our forebears are actually brough to modern maturity by Senator Sander's patriotic outlook and tolerant views. Perhaps these matters of faith that are front and center in the campaigns of 2016 offer the electorate hope and optimism for the important questions about the pluralistic society the United States has brought to the world; that such an evolved national character will actually contribute in an open way to making the country great again. Indeed, if  Senator Sanders is successful in his bid for the presidency, such an outcome will present a hopeful and mature political model for the World.

In concluding these observations about "America's Rigged Economy," there is sound reason to consider that the effects the Civil War of a hundred and fifty years ago are still with us as they remain present by way of President Lincoln’s central idea of "majority rule" as enforced by the two-party system that grew solidified in the years just before the Civil War. Yet, little is said about the effects as they impact us still, or about the hundreds of thousands of Americans lives senselessly lost during the War Between the States; or about how this wound upon the people continues to divide the electorate; or that such wounds are unlikely to be healed so soon—or not until the excuses made for the conflagration our grandparents were forced to endure are articulated to become a common fact of history for all Americans: that both sides in War Between the States were at fault—one terribly wrong and the other horribly wrong. The terror of a war that wrought destruction upon the people a century and a half ago still resides within our present psyche. But surprisingly, the physicians of long ago failed to assign the cause of “neurasthenia” to the battle scars of a conflict between the North and the South that resulted in either death or disability for more than a “thousand-thousand” Americans. Lincoln, it appears, was too partisan to prevent the conflict, too politically loyal to party to properly assign blame for the conflict to the “rigged economy” of the Robber Barons who took control of the nation’s financial houses and began a rule over Wall Street that continues to this day.

It is clear to this writer that we need a New Economic Model, not one based on “more” of whatever it is that those who mistakenly judge what makes one successful might be, but one that is transformed and grounded in a realistic vision of better lives for workers in every corner of American life–indeed, for all people: a new system modeled on the American sense of fairness and justice and a respect for humanity and the natural world—not a system of greed and power that has driven our nation into the same disfunctional ditch that once resulted in the slaughter of nearly a million American citizens during a Civil War that ended with unintended consequences and economic enslavement of both Blacks and Whites who were set upon to work for the machine that goes on destroying nature and the consciousness of the American soul–a rigged economy and system that pays healthy dividends to shareholders of the corporations that run the show. A slower pace of economic life and good sense might be just what the doctor should order: a rational pace out of which the country elects a real leader who can inspire the nation to work together in building a future that brings about improved infrastructure planned upon what’s possible from producing more with less: a society that is happy with an economy no longer rigged against itself. In this author’s view, the senator from Vermont promises some hope that together we can move our nation forward to a fairer political system no longer rigged against the electorate of today or the generations that will follow.