A Blueprint for Survival

About the Book

The main thrust of A Blueprint for Survival is to offer proposals for the solution of the most serious problems, both economic and political, that burden the nation. It recognizes the fact that comprehensive economic justice and peace can only be achieved by the restructuring of the economic and political systems themselves.

The first part of the book is devoted to presenting the inherent flaws in the nation's private capitalist system. Without understanding how the economic and political systems are wrongly structured resulting in the nation's most egregious problems, millions suffering unmet needs, there cannot be a full understanding of the proposals for a National Cooperative Commonwealth that is proposed in the second part of the book.

The four major flaws in our economic-political systems are dealt with:

• Absence of any restraints on the growth of "unnatural entities," called corporations.Since the inception of our nation, they have progressively taken over the nation's productive capability until today through accelerated mergers they are oppressively dominant in every area of the nation's products, services and all levels government.
• Unconstitutional control of the nation's money and credit by private financial entities. Such control has led to the astronomical debt of trillions of dollars with the private citizens and their government in perpetual bondage to non-producers. Most seriously, they have had the power to place liens against the workers' future earnings as the only means by which they could purchase what they, in the accumulate, had already produced.
• Those who control the economic an financial systems control the political processes by which government operates. First, they have gotten control of the nation's issuance of money and credit, then corralled all of its industrial assets and technology, and finally through these interlocking monopolies underwritten all major candidates who will be beholden to act according to the wishes and dictates of their underwriters.
• Inability of the social-economic-financial system to constructively accommodate the advancements in science and technology. It has been a two-edged sword with strides made in many fields of human endeavor but at the same time it has created threats to life itself. The most potent indictment against the private capitalist system is that there have existed serious unmet needs while at the same time there has been unused technological capability to fulfill those needs!

The primary purpose of the book is to enlighten the people as to the inevitable breakdown of adversary systems like private capitalism and the need to embrace cooperative (teamwork) systems. The secondary purpose and most defining in terms of hope and the future, is to present the legal steps that can be taken within the framework of the Constitution leading to the adoption of a National Cooperative Commonwealth.

Employing the principle of incorporation, a National Cooperative Commonwealth is simply incorporating the entire productive capability of the nation (its natural resources, its productive machinery, its human skill and its technology) into a Grand Corporation in which every citizen is a common shareholder and a preferred shareholder, giving each citizen a decision-making voice and also giving each a purchasing claim against the total goods and services produced.

It is a Commonealth in which the people democratically coordinate the full productive capability of the nation so that it can be unleashed for an abundant, equitable and creative life for all.

It is a Commonealth in which the nation's work capability would be automatically unleashed in direct ratio to the determined needs and services of the total citizenry devoid of all the stultifying burdens of indebtedness and confiscatory taxation.

It is a Commonealth in which there would be full implementation of basic human rights by way of universal health care, universal education, universal employment and a decision-making voice in the enactment of all major legislation and national policy.

Much stress in the book is underscoring the constant sovereign power of the people to make all changes for their betterment. Abraham Lincoln is cited respecting this inherent power when in his first inaugural address, March 4, 1861 he stated:

This country with its institutions belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amendment, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.

Blueprint for Survival is unique in that it offers something to be for instead of just something to be against. People want change but they don't know what to do or what must be done.

The single purpose of this book is to instill renewed hope in the hearts of a downcast and very troubled people, and to assure them that there is an attainable and realistic solution to the serious problems that beset the nation.

About the Author

The author was born of Scandinavian parents on August 1, 1916 on the Canadian border of Minnesota. His father was a follower of Eugene Debs and was an ardent supporter of congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, father of the "Lone Eagle", in his battle against the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 which gave the private banks absolute and arbitrary control of the nation's money and credit.

He graduated out of Baudette High School in Minnesota in 1934 during the Great Depression when one third of the population was ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed. He forwent further formal education to help his widowed mother in maintaining a family for himself, a sister and two brothers. It was his first insight into poverty foreclosures and pervasive suffering in a land where there existed the potential to provide for all human needs. His searching questions at an early age were to be ones he was to ask during a whole lifetime.

The author was principally a product of the "School of Hardknox," working in logging camps, on farms, on construction and a three-year span on a survey crew for the State of Minnesota. However, his real blessing was an insatiable drive to selectively read and do research.

During the 1960's he, along with his wife and brother, incorporated Aquila Press for the express purpose of documenting the concentration of abnormal corporate power and how that power was exercised in the economic and political life of the society. As editor of the monthly magazine "The Eagle's Eye" he assertively proposed the idea of a "National Cooperative Commonwealth."

Out of a ten-year span of research the author wrote his book, Challenge to Crisis. It portrayed the three Americas that had to be considered. There was the America we thought we lived in. There was the America we did live in. There was the America we could live in.

Along with wife, Adelaide, he tried to be active in the community. He was president of the Noblesville Commission on Human Rights under three mayors and was head of the County Chapter of the Indiana Mental Health Association for three years. In both cases he acted on the State level.

He was part of a fact-finding group that traveled to El Salvador during the 1980's to record pictorially and on tape the voices of the ordinary people who were struggling to free themselves of the tyranny of a military rule in collaboration with an oligarchy of 12 families that brutally controlled the country. Sadly, the United States supported that regime with four billion dollars and trained its death squads a the "School of the Americas." When Robert White, ambassador to El Salvador, stated publicly that we should more rightfully be on the side of the revolutionary FMLN, he was summarily asked to resign.

In 1995, the author wrote his second book There is a Way! with emphasis on the legal steps that could be taken by the sovereign people to bring about a National Cooperative Commonwealth and a surcease to the nation's quandaries.

The current book A Blueprint for Survival was prompted by a further breakdown in the economy and an increased concern that unless the nation puts its own house in order and develops an international policy that recognizes the human rights of the less fortunate throughout the world, violence and terrorism cannot be permanently subdued and uprooted.

The author and his wife saw their three children go on to get undergraduate degrees and two achieve graduate degrees. As parents they were pleased to see them go into diverse careers, one choosing politics, another theology and the third the legal profession.

At the present time the author continues as the president of Aqulia Press, Inc., a small family printing and publishing corporation, and is a participant in a number of activist organizations seeking peace with economic justice in both our own nation and the world.

He and his wife of 58 years live in Noblesville, Indiana.