A letter to Senator John Edwards written 8 years ago when he stood with John Kerry for the US presidential election.
It calls his attention to the problem of a debt based economy and the cost of an egrigious war in Iraq:
Terry E. Hallman
c/o 1841 Arden Dr.
Lincolnton, NC 28092
USA
contact: thallman@yahoo.com
Phone: 380 979 032 459
Vice-President John Edwards
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC
USA
October 11, 2004
Dear Mr. Vice-President:
We’re all heading down home stretch now. Hopefully, my humble effort to shake and loosen things up, and talk a bit of sense into overall strategy, has filtered in. At the end of the day, I know we all love each other, and one way or another we will prevail.
For my small part, I took your campaign staff to task for incompetence, and I am now of the opinion that you, Kerry, and your staff proved me wrong. No better outcome, in my view. I am humbly and very, very gratefully chastised. So far.
The battle is not yet finished, and won’t be for three more weeks, maybe more, depending on reliability and accuracy of vote count in certain states – not least Florida.
We are not yet up in points where we should be, indicating that many in the US electorate still await to see the light of our cause. I remain steadfastly devoted to correcting that problem. Toward that end, I will continue to offer suggestions, in the fervent hope that my meager comments might find ears to deliver us from the jowls of the Beast.
One side note: references to such things as the Beast, Anti-Christ, and Prince of Darkness should be taken as literary metaphors rather than any alliance with fundamentalist or other religious views.
I had intended to give you this after you win the White House, but it now seems that you might need it to get there: how to correct the economy and relieve poverty without raising taxes, as Kerry has now been cornered into pledging will not happen. Everyone is wondering about that, and are in fairness quite skeptical as to how or whether that can be accomplished.
Under conventional schemes, I suppose it really does seem implausible. We have a burgeoning and potentially fatal public debt. Truth be known, no one on either side has been completely honest about how we’re going to deal with that. Bush Inc. has pretty much ruined the Clinton economic triumph, turning a fat surplus into a fat deficit once again, this time with no realistic end in sight. That point hasn’t been played up nearly enough, and I respectfully take exception with you, Kerry, and your campaign staff for not doing so. We cannot keep this up, and no one has yet sounded the alarm. You and Kerry have carefully avoided the T word – taxes – while allowing the Bush side to run rampant on the unspoken B word – borrowing. It’s pay now – taxation – or pay later – borrowing – and you’ve let the Bush side run unchallenged on that point. Tax and spend, or, borrow and spend. Which is better? The former means fiscal responsibility now, the latter means dumping it on children, grandchildren, and beyond. Either way, increased taxation is inevitable, unless we come up with a huge economic miracle the likes of which has never been seen before.
That may or may not be reasonable, so let’s not kid ourselves privately about that. But, it may be possible, though not under Bushites who, as I’ve asserted time and again, simply do not care about the future of America. On that point, I diverge from your and Kerry’s opinion: both of you obviously care about America’s future, and I don’t think either of you grasp that anyone in the titular position of US president might not share that same concern. You seem to assume that Bush Inc. MUST care due to their position, whereas I would argue that you’re both engaging in logical fallacy. On that point, for the moment, we can at least agree to disagree, bearing in mind of course that I’m almost always right about such things. You and Kerry are in the thick of battle with heavy ordnance flying all around, while I’m safely tucked in exile although wishing I were there. My mother is heartbroken that this is the case, and for that I’m not entirely sure I can ever forgive American circumstances that made it happen. But, at least, I’m still alive, and she hasn’t had to bury her child as have many, many mothers due to the egregious, ill-begotten war in Iraq – American and Iraqi mothers, mind you.
Your final ticket and the ticket to economic transformation in America is, oddly enough, American people.
I worked through this theme eight years ago, in a paper for Clinton’s reelection steering committee. After 35 pages of methodical analysis, and six weeks of debate with any and all challengers in Chapel Hill area prior to the paper being finalized and released, it reduced to a concept called people-centered economic development. No one along the way prevailed in any debate on the matter, and no one since then has disagreed in any way with the conclusions. In fact, since 1998, Yale, Stanford, Duke, Harvard, and Oxford business schools have embraced the arguments in the paper as a new, formal economic paradigm. The government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain has, as of 2002, included the paradigm as formal UK economic policy. Those are all under the shortened banner of ‘social enterprise.’
No gonzo mode here, my friend. It’s true, and it birthed officially in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, September 16, 1996 – which turned out to be the same day, seven years later, that you announced your candidacy for US president.
For the moment, I’m not going into people-centered economic development, nor social enterprise. These are now full-blown master’s level programs in our most respected universities, and plenty of information is available there. Precursor information is available on my web site, which you presumably know about as of a year ago, when I laid my life on the line to protect my own beloved and to raise hell about economic rights in the United States of America.
However, I will say this: a quick review of those programs, and formal cooperation with those business schools to implement social enterprise as a formal aspect of US economic policy, stands to transform the US economy from grassroots up. I saw it years ago, and many, many people see it now. I take no credit other than pointing out the idea. After that, it was obvious, and minds (and wallets) far more capable than my own took up the cause.
I’ll have more to say on this later, in much more detail, up to and including a book if necessary. Currently, I’ve been invited on exactly those grounds to lecture in the former Soviet Union. Maybe I will, maybe not. But for now, my allegiance is with you, getting you into the White House, just as I promised quite some time ago.
For now, all you need to know is about people-centered economic development, a.k.a. social enterprise. You’re in position to hook up with some of the finest minds in the world to implement it nationwide in the US, and the opposition hasn’t a clue – simply because they do not and cannot think along such lines.
Go figure.
Yours in service,
Terry E. Hallman
Kharkov, Ukraine
Economics for Humanity 