Alter America

This is an excerpt from Chapter 7, Breaking the Habits, in the book America's Oldest Professions: Warring and Spying

CHAPTER 7. BREAKING THE HABITS

This chapter is sort of a “How-to-manual.” It is not an AA 12-Step program. It’s an AA 7-Step program, where AA stands for Alter America. Let me give you a little backgrounder on my AA.

In the Afterword of The Devil’s Marriage I envisioned a model of a rebuilt America. I called the model “Alter America.” [1] Its characteristics would be remarkably different from the real America in four ways.

First, America would be a peace making and internationally law abiding nation, not the warring and spying scofflaw it has always been.

Second, America would be an egalitarian or partnership society, not a male dominated society that it has always been.  Remember, it was the Founding “Fathers.” America has always had male warriors-in chiefs, male dominated legislatures and judiciaries, and almost totally imperialistic male CEOs and financiers. Males on top throughout a society produces a “dominator society,” says Riane Eisler, a best-selling author, who has studied this prevailing mode of social and economic structures and cultures throughout the history of the world. The dominator society, she says, “has four core elements: rigid top-down control; intense abuse and violence” manifested (my pun intended) in “child and wife beating; chronic warfare;” “the rigid ranking” of men over women; and a culture of stories, beliefs, and the like that “justify domination and violence as inevitable, even moral.”[2] In contrast, Eisler calls the ideal model the “partnership” society. Few societies, one of them being Finland she says, come close to this model, that of a democratic, egalitarian, and non-violent family and social structure.

Third, America’s economic system would depend on the production of socially beneficial products and services and not on using other peoples’ money to make money.

Fourth, there would be no more government handouts to corporations, and as a result corporations would have to organize and be run much differently or fail. [3]

Fifth, America would be a just society that respects citizens’ rights and holds them, government, and all business and finance organizations accountable for how they discharge their responsibilities.

There you have my vision of an Alter America. Envisioning it was easy. Achieving it is a totally different matter and just may be an impossible dream, as impossible to realize as one or more of the five scenarios described in the last chapter may be possible if America doesn’t reverse course.

In the Devil’s Marriage I presented a comprehensive plan that included over 400 initiatives for achieving political, judicial, economic, and social reforms that would be necessary for ending the corpocracy and creating an Alter America. The initiatives for breaking America’s two habits were just a small piece of the overall strategy.            

I am not going to repeat here the whole plan to end the entire corpocracy. Instead, I am going to concentrate exclusively and freshly on how the two habits can be broken. Breaking them will not end the corpocracy completely but would achieve the miraculous outcome of an America at peace with the world, which is undoubtedly the most important characteristic of Alter America, undoubtedly the most important outcome for the world, and undoubtedly the most difficult reform goal. 

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