Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the most corrupt of all?

          Americans pride themselves on being different from other nations and of course they are. But so are other nations different from each other and from us. Each has a language, a culture, a history. Each has an official story about itself that is most likely pretty mendacious, and a more honest story that is not often heard. Our being different from others does not make us different from them.

          But, of course, we also think that we are better, although in many ways that is not true. Other countries provide better healthcare for less money than we do. Other countries do a better job educating their children. Other countries have made greater strides in the treatment of indigenous peoples or in reducing greenhouse gases. We are not as good and certainly not as superior to others than we keep telling ourselves.

          These observations come to mind in connection with a great deal of publicity of corruption in Ukraine. A colorful collection of Americans of the impressive moral caliber of Rudy Giuliani go back and forth to Ukraine ostensibly to help them overcome the threat of corruption. That's worth a chuckle or two, not only because Rudy Giuliani is not a model of the upstanding citizen with remarkable integrity, but more importantly because corruption pervades transactions in our country just as it does in the Ukraine.

          Corruption may be different here. It has certainly changed. 50 years ago when a Chicago policeman stopped you for a traffic violation you would hand him your driver's license wrapped in a $20 bill and that would take care of it. Petty bribery – and not so petty bribery – were daily events. Corruption today is somewhat more sophisticated and not quite as blatantly public. But corruption is a problem here as it is in most, if not all, countries of the world.

          Our court system employs judges, and magistrates who deal with lesser problems. Both of them are appointed by the governor of each state assisted by a Governor's Council and appointments do not only depend on the merit of the candidate. Being the friend of the governor or of the Lieutenant Governor definitely helps. In some cases it is said to be more important to be well-connected than to be a competent lawyer.

          Local government, state government, and the federal government all spend large amounts of money purchasing supplies from pencils and erasers for the schools to battleships and sophisticated military planes that cost multiple billions of dollars. Often these purchases are made without proper bids from competent suppliers. A friend of the city, the county, the state, or the Feds gets the contract. There is good money to be made by connecting suppliers to buyers. Multiple suppliers will rig their bids so that everybody will get a part of a lucrative contract.

          In the United States approximately 160 million people are in the workforce. Full-time or part-time, they go to their jobs and get paid by the hour or by the job. Merit alone does not determine who gets hired or fired from a job. Recently a story circulated of a person who had worked in a funeral home for 20 or more years before she came out as a transgender woman. She was promptly fired in spite of having done an outstanding job for many years. The customers, according to the employer, would not have patronized a funeral home where they negotiated caskets and wakes with a transgender woman. The employment history of African-Americans is a more striking example of how little merit matters in getting a good job. The same of course is true of all women who are still being excluded from many excellent jobs.

          In many countries it is well known that corruption is a serious hindrance to economic development but the government does not take action, presumably because it is complicit in the corruption. The United States is no different. Goldman Sachs and other banking firms are widely considered responsible for the 2007 – 2008 economic crash that did enormous damage to many working families who not only lost their jobs but also their houses and what little wealth they had managed to accumulate over many years of hard work. Goldman Sachs and the complicit enterprises have been investigated by the government. But nothing ever happened. They have been investigated since then for domestic and international suspicious dealings but nothing ever happened. If your financial transactions are complex and large enough and if members of your firm circulate in and out of government, you can operate pretty much with impunity. The many families who lost their homes were not responsible for the crisis. The financiers who were received bonuses from the banks where they worked.

We could go on and on pointing to corrupt practices. Healthcare of poor people, of people of color is not as good as healthcare of people with money. The education offered to poor black or Hispanic children is not all of the same sophistication and excellence as the education of white above middle-class children. Opportunities are not distributed equally. The oft repeated claim that our society is a meritocracy is a blatant lie and everyone knows it.

          Patriots, or better pseudo-patriots, will insist that corruption in the United States is not as profound as in, say, India. That may well be true but is surely totally irrelevant. Are we really going to continue tolerating and encouraging corruption on all sides in the US until the people in India clean up their act? Are we going to keep bragging about our meritocracy, which does not actually exist, until all transactions in the Ukraine are beyond reproach? That is obviously a silly question.

          Whether we are more or less guilty of corruption is not interesting. What is worthy of being said loud and clear is that integrity in politics, in business, in many other areas of our society is sadly lacking. The problem is in some ways more serious than it is in Ukraine or India where the existence of corruption is generally accepted. Our political leaders, our candidates for public office, rarely if ever target corruption. It has not become a public issue yet except in the polemics between opposing political parties.

There is no hope for ever cleaning up our economy or society so that everyone will truly have an equal chance as long as we are not willing to acknowledge how corrupt our current practices are.

He, She, They

Many especially younger persons insist that we not refer to them as he or she but as "they.” Never mind the grammatical oddity of using a plural pronoun to refer to a single person, calling a person "they" is an important way of opposing the dominant idea that there are two genders only and that every human being belongs to one or the other.

          This seems to be a very odd and eccentric conflict but it is not. At issue is the dogma that many, especially evangelical Christian Americans cling to that every human being is either a man or a woman. One significance of that insistence comes to the fore when we face the inevitable follow – up question: what kind of man are you and what sort of woman are you? It is not enough that I am classified as an unambiguous man but that classification places me under pressure to be a particular kind of man because all the alternative versions of manhood are considered unmanly or “not a real man.” Am I the one who makes decisions in my family, does my word stand and is not to be questioned? Am I the one who deals with mechanical things and mows the lawn where as the females in the family not only have to do the housework but also are in charge of emotions. They have to bring a casserole to the neighbor when their parent dies or their child is injured. They have to maintain social relationships. I don't do either of those things; it is not manly to do them. (Obviously, this is an extreme version of the patriarchal family.)

           To put this bluntly: the insistence that every human being belongs to one of two genders is an unvarnished defense of male supremacy, of the role of man as more powerful, as in charge, as the person who wears the pants in the family.

There have always been gay people. In classical antiquity they were openly acknowledged and, at least, men loving men was ordinary and accepted. Then for a long time homosexuality had to go underground persecuted by Christian churches whose Christianity happily persecuted different groups, homosexuals among them.

In recent years homosexuality has come into the open once again and with it the conflict about its legitimacy has reignited. It is not difficult to see how homosexuality is a threat to the patriarchy.

           If my wife, who plays second fiddle to me in the family and whose sexual needs and desires are not as important in our marriage as are mine, can find sexual satisfaction in a relationship to another woman, it turns out that I am unnecessary and my claims to dominance are empty, even slightly ridiculous. If women can have marriages and can raise happy and promising children, I am not needed at all. Patriarchy crumbles.

          If my son can live lovingly and become a generous father in relationship to another man, all the lessons I tried to teach him about being a real man turn out to be irrelevant. The ideology which I followed and wanted him to follow of true manhood and male domination suddenly has become pointless. No wonder that ‘real men’ are extremely hostile to homosexuality in whatever form it may manifest itself.

          Being man or woman takes many different forms and young persons as they grow up must find the kind of man or woman they are suited to be or they may be the kind of person whose gender is variable and expresses itself in different forms in different situations, and different company, at different stages of their life.

           Every person should be as fully as able to be the person that it suits them to be. Every person should be accepting of the choices about their gender identity and their sexuality made by other persons and the reasons they might give us for those choices.

          The author of Genesis who decreed that the first two members of the human race where one man and one woman got it quite wrong.

           (That author also got the gender of God quite wrong. Gender identity is always a limitation. If God were a male would he not be limited in his sexual expression?)

It is high time that we stop to tyrannize ourselves and others by demanding prescribed forms of sexual expression. What matters is that we avoid harming others and defending patriarchy by, for instance, voting in laws that define marriage as a union of one man and one woman. Without any doubt that does serious harm. End sexual oppression by trying to legislate gender and sexual identity!

Neighbor Love and Punishment

In Christianity, Judaism and Islam the faithful are enjoined to live in peace with their neighbor, to treat them kindly or even to love them. This command has its secular equivalent when a peaceful world, a world free of war and cruelty is set as a goal of political action.

This injunction to universal kindness is pulled up short in the face of cruelty when neighbors oppress neighbors. We are reminded that this is the hundreth anniversary of what is known to historians as the "Red Summer" when white mobs burned black churches, often with their congregations still inside and then went on rampages of lynchings in which hundreds of African-Americans died. One of those burned churches was rebuilt. It was burned down the gain in 2014. In 2016 several black churches fell victim to arson attacks in Louisiana. The cruelty of 100 years ago continues to this day. The advocates of peace and reconciliation are facing serious challenges today.

Dedicated to a world of peace, whether for religious reasons or following secular political principles, how shall we treat the arsonists, the lynch mobs, the murderers?           At this moment, in Togo, a small African country that only very recently emerged from a brutal dictatorship, maintained by murdering often innocent citizens, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission encourages citizens to confess whatever terrific part they played in the past and for the victims to try to reconcile with the guilty parties. The assassins will not be tried in a court of law, they do not face long periods of incarceration or even death. The goal of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to reunify a population divided for many years between the henchmen of the dictatorship and the victimized population at large. Here is one way in which the religious and secular political injunction to practice kindness to all is actually being applied.           Not everyone is satisfied with this interpretation of neighborly love. Surely, they say an important part of loving your neighbor is to respect them. One form of paying respect to human beings is to hold them responsible for their actions. You disrespect them if you do not pay attention to their actions, may those be acts of heroism or self-sacrifice or maybe they be deceitful acts or acts of violence. Refusing to acknowledge what a person has done, how he lived his life, whether she contributed to the well-being of our community or acted to destroy it is to deny respect to the perpetrators of civil oppression and war, the recognition that is an important element of respect. If you forget how a person has lived his life, how he injured neighbors he did not even know, you refuse the person the respect and thus the kindness or love you are professing.. The forgiveness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission denies genuine respect to the persons offered forgiveness.          Can one forgive and respect a person guilty of exceptional cruelty? It is a question that is not easy to answer. The truth is that forgiveness may be respectful, fully horrified by the action of the person before us, or it may be as it were absent-minded, unthinking and more or less mechanical. In that case it clearly denies the person forgiven the respect they are entitled to. Respectful forgiveness makes difficult demands on the person trying to forgive.          But punishment as it is demanded by the enemies of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions continues the cycle of brutality. It inflicts pain on those who inflicted pains on others. Now they are aggrieved and the cycle of victimization is being continued.          However heartfelt our desire for peace and an end to inflicting pain on those who have inflicted pain on others, that end remains unattainable unless we practice what we preach and forgive. Punishment as the response to breaking the peace will never allow us to restore a more durable peace than we have accomplished so far.          Fully aware of the misdeeds of those who supported and practiced violence against their fellow citizens, we need nevertheless to allow them back into our community in order to try to heal it and allow it once again to come together and to create as much harmony as it can. That is the true meaning of the injunction to love our neighbor, to befriend our neighbors and to be genuine promoters of peace.

About Elections

We recently hosted an event in support of one of the candidates for the local School Committee. This young person was born in Africa and came to the US as a child and went through the entire public school system in my town. She knew at first-hand what it was like to be a public school student in our town as a person of color. Since there had been a good deal of controversy recently about the treatment of African-American and Latinx students in our school system, run by white persons almost exclusively, supporting her campaign seemed important. Add to that, we came to like and respect her as we got to know her better.

Most of the members of our school committee have had their position for a long time. Their names are familiar but I have never met any of them and have a very hazy idea of any of them. I am not clear what they stand for when it comes to educational policy and I do not know them personally. I do not know to what extent to trust their campaign statements and whether one could rely on them to act on the principles they profess.

Well, you say, that's the way it is in a large country like ours. But that is of course totally beside the point. I have the same problem of not knowing what candidates I vote for in the town I live which is not a big town by any means. More importantly, we say that in our democracy the people have the ultimate power over the government and that they exercise that power by selecting representatives of their choice. But a population voting for representatives they often do not know and who are, in fact, different from the voters think they are does not strike me as a population that is in control of its government or society. The choices we make, most of the time, are rather sightless. Rather than making thoughtful, well-informed choices, we yank the lever of an electoral slot machine. Our choices tend to be pretty random.

Is there a way of remedying that problem? Suppose in each neighborhood where people know each other or live close enough together to meet and talk, the citizens meet to select someone who is familiar with the school committee and knows the persons who are running to join that committee. Perhaps that person was a member of the committee some time ago and thus knows the personalities of the current membership and the functioning of the body. Suppose further that each neighborhood selects one such person well able to make an informed choice with respect to members of the School Committee. The representatives of each neighborhood will meet and choose the requisite number of persons to serve on this committee. The committee membership is picked by persons who know each candidate and have some judgment as to who may be the best person to help the schools. In this way the problem of citizens voting for more or less unknown candidates has been circumvented.

You may object that this indirect vote for school committee members puts a great distance between the individual citizens and the organs of city government. But that distance exists already. There is a large gap between me and institutions whose members are elected but are on the whole unknown to the people who vote for them and therefore cannot really be said represent those people. If voters under our present system of direct elections of members of the School Board or the City Council wanted to be familiar with the persons they vote for, they would need to spend a great deal more time to meet the candidates at different forums or when they volunteered to work for a candidate or another. Most citizens do not have the time available.

Counting up the number of votes that different candidates get from voters that do not know them strikes me as an irrational way of electing a government. The jobs we elect people for are important. It makes a great deal of difference for us how well those jobs are done. We need the best candidates available. We don't get those as long as we respond to campaign literature written by professional campaign strategists that often are only faintly related to the ideas and practices of the candidate.

We need to elect persons as electors we know, whom we can trust that they will do what they promise us. That means we should choose persons in our neighborhood who are familiar with the office we are voting for and familiar with the candidates. They can choose the one who will do the best job for us.

This is, I believe, a good project. But Is it realistic? In many places in the United States citizens do not live in stable neighborhoods where neighbors know each other and are thus able to choose the right electors for local as well as national elections. Many neighborhoods are unstable in that people move in and out constantly. Think of neighborhoods with large student populations or neighborhoods of poor people who are regularly getting evicted because they are unable to pay the rent. In areas surrounding military installations, families move regularly when their members in the military are transferred. There are parts of many towns populated by young people on their way up who will leave when they get promoted and their pay goes up. Others leave because they lose their job in times of economic instability. In short, the picture of areas with stable populations does not seem to apply to significant parts of the country.

But many folks in these highly mobile populations may not participate in elections, especially not in local elections because their ties to the locality may be very weak. They may also remain aloof from elections because they do not feel at all included in the political system. Candidates do not seek them out or mentioned there needs and problems in their campaign speeches. Feeling overlooked by politicians they may well stay aside when elections come around.

Choosing the electors we do know instead of candidates we don't, is a realistic project that deserves serious consideration.

Our History

Recently the President traveled to Virginia to commemorate the Jamestown settlement and the first legislative meeting held there in 1619. He was celebrating 400 years of democracy on this continent, that 400 years earlier the first legislative meeting was held in the Jamestown colony.

The first English settlers had reached Jamestown about 10 years earlier. Most of them had been gentlemen unused to working the land or doing much of anything else for themselves. They were accustomed to having others – laborers and servants – do the work of maintaining them. One part of the workforce in the new colony consisted of what were known as "indentured servants." These were impoverished English people, some of them petty criminals, who were offered a choice between going to prison or shipping out to the colonies in the New World. Indentured servants served without getting paid from 7 to 10 or more years to pay for their passage and their food and clothing. After serving that time they would be free and be given a piece of land to farm for themselves.

The other part of the workforce consisted of black Africans who were bound for Bermuda on a slave ship that pirates captured and unloaded in Jamestown.

For the first 50 years the White indentured English and Black Africans lived and worked side-by-side (and sometimes married) pretty much under the same conditions as indentured servants. By 1660 legislation passed by the new legislative assembly-- so recently celebrated by our current president-- imposed on the Africans the status of slaves, a lifetime condition. Once a slave always a slave. The children of slaves were similarly enslaved for their lifetime. This legislation created a body of workers who labored year in year out without getting any reward for their work. Their work served to enrich the gentlemen in the Jamestown colony as well as the wealthy investors back in England who had financed the ships and equipment to found the colony in the expectation of rich rewards.

Barely hanging on for the first 10 or 15 years, the colony began to thrive when tobacco was first planted in Virginia. The soil and climate turned out to be favorable and the indentured servants, black and white, could be made to do the hard work in the tobacco fields.

The land needed to raise all this tobacco was taken – stolen – from the Native Americans who lived in the area. Many different tribes, organized into a powerful coalition, lived where the English colonists chose to settle. Initially welcomed by the native inhabitants, relations between the English and the local inhabitants soon soured and more than once erupted into bloody warfare. The colonists received instructions from England to convert the native peoples to Anglicanism and to civilize them in the ways of the English. The authors of these instructions did not see the irony of stealing people's land and then ordering the thieves to civilize the victims who had been robbed by teaching them the ways of the thieves.

This irony has been with us ever since. White Americans have ravaged the lives of the descendants of Black Africans and the descendants of the Native Americans and taken their own inhumanity as a sign of White superiority. Appropriating the land of the one and the ability to work of the other, White Americans have become very rich at the expense of people who are not White. They have shamelessly interpreted their success in exploiting other human beings as a sign of moral and even spiritual superiority.

The Jamestown assembly, the precursor of the US Congress and of the varied institutions of the United States government, in passing the first Black Codes defining slavery as a lifetime condition of utter deprivation set the precedent for later American legislatures that to this day, for instance by demanding picture IDs for voting, deny the humanity and the citizenship rights of Black and Native Americans. Successor legislatures to the Jamestown assembly have only managed to expand the range of peoples insulted and exploited and treated as less than human than White Americans.

That Donald Trump, arch racist, should celebrate that institution is not surprising. We, on the contrary should mourn it. In Jamestown, North America got off to a really bad start. We have never recovered from that. The efforts of many people to overcome this terrible heritage have only had very limited success so far.

Shame! Shame!

On the Fourth of July we celebrated the United States of America and glorified our democracy.

Two days later the New York Times reported on a group of lawyers visiting the Clint, TX detention facility where our government, just raucously celebrated, detains about 300 children ranging in age from 5 months to 17 years. Yes, you read that right-- FIVE months old. Surely an infant did not come to the US border without a parent or some other adult who brought that child. But now this infant is on its own. The older children, themselves seriously distressed, are tasked with taking care of the little ones.

I hold my seven month old grandson and think about this story. I know how utterly dependent infants are. I can imagine those children wailing in their misery and I weep.

Among these children are a number of teen mothers who gave birth very recently. All the children are filthy. Since crossing the border they have not been able to wash. They do not have water to wash, let alone soap or showers. They do not have toothbrushes or a change of clean clothes. The babies and infants do not have diapers. The government—OUR government—has argued in court that it has no obligations to allow the children to wash themselves or the clothes they have been wearing since coming into the country, often weeks ago. The government does not believe that it has obligations to acknowledge the immigrants’ most elementary dignity.

In El Paso, TX. “Border Patrol agents told us some of the detainees had been held in standing-room-only conditions for days or weeks,” the inspector general’s office said in its report, which noted that some detainees were observed standing on toilets in the cells “to make room and gain breathing space, thus limiting access to the toilets.” It is difficult not to think of Jews packed into box cars, standing room only, on the transport to extermination camps in the East.

One of the lawyers visiting the Clint, TX. Reported “ “So many children are sick, they have the flu, and they’re not being properly treated.” The same reports from different detention sites, are available on the websites of the American Civil Liberties Union, the American friends Service Committee, the Mennonite Central Committee and other non-profit organizations.

Having been a child refugee myself, these reports distressed me deeply. I began to think that perhaps there would be a way of fostering or adopting one of these unfortunate children in order to save at least one child. But all I found out was that the government cruelty extended also to fostering and adoption. It turns out that the government did send some of the children they had taken from families at the border to the largest adoption agency run by very right-wing evangelical organizations. The Border Patrol meanwhile was making no efforts to find the families whose children they had taken away. But videos of children being taken from their parents to be given out to adoption were being shown to refugees to make them “behave.” One woman was persuaded to retract her application for asylum by threatening to give her children out to adoption. Adoption has become a tool for suppressing refugees.

All of this happens in the context of steeply restricted availability of children ready to be adopted. A few years ago, American parents looking for children to adopt had children available from many foreign country such as Russia or China. Both of these countries have since prohibited foreign adoptions. So have many other countries. Fewer children are available for adoption in the US today. Fox News provocateur Laura Ingraham, herself an adoptive mother, was calling to “make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids.”

What can we do? The key lesson is that we are completely powerless although we are living in a democracy. Websites promising to tell us how we can ameliorate the suffering of children and adults at the border have two recommendations: send money to non-profits and write letters to your representatives in Congress. But the non-profits in spite of feverish activities in the Courts and elsewhere have been spectacularly ineffective. Congress after a long time has managed to pass a bill providing more resources for the Border patrol. But the bill provides no monitoring mechanisms. ICE and Border Patrol can do whatever they want, as before. Congress has not intervened on behalf of the refugee children being abused at the border. Neither non-profits nor Congress have been able to respond to the moral outrage of the majority of citizens. Citizens have been unable to act on their sense of justice being violated grossly at the border.

In the land of the free, citizens find themselves thwarted at every turn when they try to be faithful to their sense of justice. They can not put their understanding of what is right and wrong and of what they owe to their fellow humans at the border in practice.

Freedom does not amount to much when one is prevented from being a good person because all the power is in the hands of the morally damaged and the cruel.

What is Socialism?

 The headline in the Seattle newspaper was something like “Socialism Contested in Seattle City Council elections.” In national contests over the soul of the Democratic party, socialism is an important issue. A word that was taboo ten years ago, or less, is now important in the current political vocabulary. But what does it mean? Do you know what President Trump means by socialism, or Bernie Sanders? Most likely they attach different meanings to that word and when one condemns socialism and the other advocates it they are likely talking about very different things.

I want to talk about several quite different kinds of socialisms. The first identifies it with the system prevalent in the Soviet Union—USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics where the word “soviet” is Russian for “council.” Russian socialism, especially as represented by media in the West was an unrelentingly brutal dictatorship which killed millions or exiled them to harsh lives in Siberian prison camps. The essence of that kind of socialism is a violent and coercive government that did neither recognize nor respect any human rights. President Trump thinks that Bernie Sanders wants that kind of violent dictatorship for our country.

In actual fact, Sanders’ socialism is without doubt democratic; it will have no truck with authoritarianism, even the relatively moderate authoritarianism of Donald Trump or of other recent Presidents who went to war without Congressional approval and gradually extended the power of executive orders instead of asking Congress for legislation. The target of Sanders’ sort of socialism is inequality. Contrary to the practice of the current president, or of the Republican and Democratic presidents before him, the socialism of Bernie Sanders, often called “social democracy” will ask the rich to pay for assuring the poor a half-way decent life. 

Social democracy does not attempt to equalize the incomes of different citizens; it is content to accept the existence of persons who earn very little and persons who earn an enormous amount of money. But social democracy wants to make sure that everyone has enough to eat and does not have to worry about food. Everyone is entitled to decent housing, to the best available medical care and to an affordable—affordable for everyone—education. Social democracy relieves parents by providing adequate daycare for all children and assures all children a first rate education that begins in preschool. All of this calls for a great deal of money. The millionaires and billionaires will pay for that.

A different kind of socialism has capitalism as its target. In a capitalist economy, like ours, a small number of persons owns the factories, banks, modes of transportation—trucks, railroads and airlines—and modes of communication—radio and tv networks, internet providers, phone companies. Others own sources of energy, hospitals and medical clinics and privatized prisons. These owners hire the rest of us. Unless we belong to a strong union and can therefore bargain with them effectively, they pretty well pay us what they want. They hire and fire and thus determine whether we have work or not. They have far reaching power over the lives of the rest of us and our families.

The owners get rich from their ownership. They can use that money to buy many houses, in the US and abroad. They can use the money to invest in new businesses and get even richer. They can use the money to buy their children admission to the fanciest universities . They also use their wealth to influence the political processes , through lobbying, through graft, and through buying and controlling the media. A real democracy, by contrast, gives equal political power to everybody. In our democracy, the rich have effectively many more votes than ordinary people. They pretty well run the country.

The socialism that targets capitalism is also democratic but in a more radical way. Abolishing capitalism also abolishes the existence of a class of people who have a lot more political power than the rest of us. Abolishing capitalism restores political equality and thereby restores our democracy to some extent.

There are different versions of the socialism that will replace capitalism. Often socialism is described in predominantly economic terms as a system where the productive apparatus is not run by private owners—that would be capitalism—but by the workers in the enterprise. Often socialists add requirements for a socialist politics: the government is elected by all equally and its task is to serve all equally. No more governments for the rich and by the rich and of elected officials for sale to the rich.

To those two requirements for socialism—workers control of the economy and political equality for all – some people want to add a third requirement, that a socialist society will have different values. In a capitalist society profits are a more powerful incentive than human well-being. Companies will regularly pay starvation wages for the sake of their profits. In a capitalist society that is morally acceptable. People who get filthy rich by pay starvation wages are held up as models to our children. They have fancy buildings names after them. But from a socialist perspective exploiting your workers is pure wickedness. Human flourishing is a more important goal in a socialist society than profits.

In the upcoming elections socialism will be an issue—not the authoritarian dictatorship President Trump condemns rightly, but the socialisms that propose different means for restoring a society in which human lives are more important than money, and for restoring the political equality without which democracy remains a sham.

The choice is yours. What will it be: people before profits or profits above everything, even human lives?