Creativity, Propaganda and 9 Redistributive Charters

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Tristan Tondino

Creativity, Propaganda and a Preamble to Any Constitution in 9 Spreadsheets.

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Abstract: We are biological beings, animals, specifically Homo sapiens. What goes on in thinking and speaking is a subsystem of what we are biologically. This leads to the main topic of this paper: reference and meanings in natural language, (i.e. a subsystem of the mind/brains of Homo sapiens). I focus on the language problem at the heart of the entire cycle that Annie Leonard1 depicts i.e. Extraction, Production, Distribution, Consumption and Disposal. I offer two facts of language (one positive: ‘creativity’ the other negative ‘propaganda’) and offer three prescriptions based upon municipalism and worker democracy, i.e. aimed at resolving the problems that the negative fact raises. The language of directly democratic institutions is distinguishes them from state constitutions and corporate hierarchies. Therefore, our minimalist constitutions need to be overhauled and this is likely going to be accomplished through solidarity by unions, cooperatives, popular movements2

Number of words: 3984 not including tables, footnotes, abstract, addendum, and bibliography.

and municipalism.

Introduction: We are biological beings, animals, specifically Homo sapiens. The persistence

condition

In current Philosophy of Mind, Animalism, the view that we are animals is held by philosophers

like Eric T. Olson and Paul Snowdon. It’s strange to think that very many philosophers disagree

with the notion that essentially we are, well, animals (9/10 of philosophers according to Olson

for all Homo sapiens is that we have only one lifetime. There may be more going on in

the story of what we are, but if there is, we have no clear and distinct reason to believe that there

is.

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1 See The Story of Stuff.

).

2 E.g. Idle No More, Occupy, student protests.

3 The arguments are over truth in all possible worlds. I think what counts are the Homo sapiens in this world.

2

Most Homo sapiens can think and communicate. What goes on in thinking and speaking is a

subsystem of what we are biologically. Thus, we should, as many linguists now do following

Chomsky’s work, study language from the perspective of bio-linguistics. But, thinking of

ourselves as Homo sapiens may go a long way to connecting us to the Earth including of course,

to other species. 4

Recently, I’ve taken to illustrating philosophical problems as simple puzzles with 1’s and 0’s. So

let’s imagine that everything that exists is information.

Let’s allow that we are Homo sapiens. We can represent this by a world line see figure 1 below:

Figure 1 is extremely abstract. 5

4 The Darwinian notion of fitness is really persistence through time of any X (See Frédéric Bouchard’s article Bouchard, F. (2011) “Darwinism Without Populations: a More Inclusive Understanding of the ‘Survival of the Fittest’.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42, no. 1 (March): 106–114.). Fitness is reduced to PiTTness (my term).

An individual Homo sapiens construed as a 4 dimensional world

line expresses nothing about the animal as it relates to its environment. As a result I suggest we

consider figure 2:

5 Arguably, every way we describe the world is an abstraction. This does not imply that abstractions (idealisations like Galileo’s frictionless plane) cannot lead to understandings.

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Figure 2 suggests causality, at least to the extent that each time slice replaces an original property

with a new one. The new property can result by virtue of an interaction with the environment in

which the Homo sapiens exists. Assembling the world lines, we could generate figure 3 below in

levels of abstraction: (merging what is depicted in figures 2 and 3 would begin to suggest

interactions).

Generally speaking, the systems in figure 3 are ordered by causal dependence. This does not

imply of course that there are no causal interactions toward upper subsystems. There are.

However, there is greater dependence of each subsystem on the one above than there is vice

versa. Annie Leonard’s Introduction in The Story of Stuff inspires the ordering here as well as

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Kirkpatrick Sale’s discussion of Gaea in Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. As

Leonard puts it, “everything exists as part of a larger system [...] everything is connected”

[Leonard’s emphasis] (Leonard 2010, xvi).

While Parfitian thought experiments of the transfer of human minds to Martian twins are indeed

interesting regarding what counts to me (i.e. my consciousness) it should be obvious to all that

the causal factors regarding subsystems are far more significant to us in factual terms. The same

would hold with regard to attaching the world line of any specific Homo sapiens to anything like

a soul which implies an eternal world line.

Language and Democracy: Because natural language is a subsystem of the mind/brains of

Homo sapiens this brings me to the main topic of this paper: reference and meanings in natural

language, which is explored by Leonard in Chapter 5 of The Story of Stuff.

In the section, she considers the word ‘waste’. Note, that the disposal problem was the impetus

for Leonard’s exploration of stuff.6 In this paper, however, I focus on the language problem

Much of the work on reference and meaning in philosophy of language is of questionable value.

The most fundamental reason for making this unpopular claim is that reference and meaning are

almost never discussed as a battleground, because philosophers have tended to think in

epistemological terms. The tendency has been to treat language as though it exists primarily for

communicating truth, which is a completely lopsided view regarding what Homo sapiens do with

at

the heart of the entire cycle which Leonard depicts i.e. Extraction, Production, Distribution,

Consumption and Disposal. Language reform is a significant key to change.

6 A reflection based upon comments made by G. M. Mikkelson 02/04/2014.

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language. One would think that the study of a biological system ought to require some empirical

data regarding the system in question.7

I offer two facts of language (one positive: ‘creativity’ the other negative: ‘propaganda’) and

offer three prescriptions based upon municipalism and worker democracy, i.e. aimed at resolving

the problems that the negative fact raises.

Leonard describes the story of disposal i.e. why stuff of value becomes trash. She tells us that we

often bring home “treasures” and that our “homes are basically garbage processing centres”

(Leonard 2010, 182-3).

Leonard notes that the value of stuff seems “arbitrary”. She recounts how she teaches children in

classrooms a lesson on waste by pointing to an ordinary soda can, and asking them what it is. I’ll

call that the, What is this question? They answer that it’s a soda can. But when she throws the

can into the trash, the students refer to it as trash (Leonard 2010, 183). Interestingly, none of the

youngsters answers aluminum or 5 cents or even a toy, what we would kick around for hours

when I was young.

7 This is Chomsky’s view (see Chomsky, McGilvray 2012, Noam Chomsky: The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray) Other examples of ignored evidence (initially described by Chomsky) are the following: 1) “the argument of the poverty of the stimulus” (also often referred to as Plato’s Problem); 2) the differences between human abilities and those of other animals; 3) the capacity for first-language acquisition (the language acquisition device, LAD) versus secondary-language acquisition; 4) language lost through brain trauma and regained; 5) the generation or invention of an infinity of possible expressions from finite means (von Humboldt) resulting in the creative nature of Natural Language as well as the mathematical spandrel e.g. the natural numbers; 6) positive and negative evidence; 7) We use language mostly for thought. Linguistic externalization (communication) probably came after the capacity for thinking. Chomsky initiated many arguments regarding the philosophy of language, by actually hypothesizing about the causal mechanisms involved in language development. Whether his solutions work or not is a scientific question. Nonetheless, philosophers have tended to avoid linguistics on the assumption that “it’s basically wrong” effectively ignoring the necessity for explanation of the evidence mentioned above.

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The point of the exercise, she argues, is that whatever the soda can is, would appear to depend

upon “context”. I’d say that it also depends upon an internal conceptual framework. But, to

Leonard and I agree, waste is nothing other than “valuable resources in the wrong place” (184,

2010).8

See figure 4 below, which represents the ‘creative and arbitrary’ nature of natural language.

See note below 9

In figure 4, the prefix determines the social act of referring. The point is nothing changed

materially for the soda can (101) but something changed socially or using Leonard’s word

“contextually”.

So, I want to offer another binary analogy which represents a historical case referred to

frequently in progressive literature.

8 The reference/meaning issue is found in Marx’s work also. To Marx, meanings often depend on the economic context e.g. historical, capital, material and social. Under communism for Marx ‘social’ is a good word but under capitalism it’s not.

9 This is my interpretation of Chomsky’s internalism.

figure 4:

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We could fill in just a few of the ten to the trillionth binary strings in String C (in figure 5) with

words like ‘blood’; ‘drowning’; ‘rape’; ‘torture’; all men are created equal; ‘600,000 dead

soldiers’; ‘3/5 a person’.

Now, let’s fill in strings A and B using the terms Marx used10

A: A Negro is a Slave

:

B: A Negro is not a Slave Shockingly, it took all those informational strings (if only this were mere fiction) to change 11 to

00. That entire history was about one identity function, i.e. ‘the is of classification’, and its

location, people’s heads. What Marx called “social meanings” rather than “material

meanings”11

So, the question one may want to ask is: Was there another path from string A to B? If you’re

not a determinist you could ask: How could we do things differently?

.

Therefore:

10 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch05.htm consulted on 25/03/2014... or A Negro is a Person. 11 See G.A Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence: Chapter IV for a thorough discussion of “Material and Social Properties of Society”

String C:

Length of String C in binary

figure 5:

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Fact 1) or the Positive Side: Each of us has the right to the use and the control of our internally

grown natural “I-language”12

We do have innate capacities to understand and to recognize better alternatives. Philosophers

who disagree must provide and explanation for the facts (including the poverty of the stimulus

problem, i.e. how it is that children acquire language so quickly?).

and this is entailed by the notion of democracy. Obviously, there

will be disagreements. There are plenty of individuals who’ll attempt to derail change. People

who believe in their obvious supremacy, in their right to own the means of production; but I

make a commitment to what Marx called ‘species being’. As Chomsky puts it, Plato basically

“got it right” in the “Meno” (Chomsky 2003, 6).

People are essentially good, for example, they mostly take care of their children; it’s true, that we

do get into trouble when the best alternative is very difficult to discern or when there simply isn’t

any good alternative available.

This positive fact of our ability to comprehend gives those who are trying to establish positive,

progressive and lasting changes a distinct advantage. At some point, one has to deal with the

human capacity to compute the better alternative.

Fact 2) or the Negative Side: There are deliberate efforts being made by power to control

natural language use, and part of this control is based on propagating the belief that language

exists independently (as E-language) from all the individual minds which carry I-languages

12 Chomsky’s term for the biological system of language i.e. that it exists in mind/brains and is therefore, “individual, internal, intentional” and is thus distinguished from the folk notion of E-language.

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biologically. This leads us to a discussion concerning the PR industry; propaganda i.e. the

“manufacturing of consent”.

Schweickart discusses the subversion of democracy—he cites Arundhati Roy who stated

“Modern democracies have been around long enough for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to

subvert them, to infiltrate democracy, to “crack the code

So, what exactly is subversion of democracy, if not the deliberate positioning of strings of

information? Like the chemical industry, which countered Rachel Carson’s powerful claims by

labelling her ( thereby

” (Schweickart 2011, 184).

“crack [ing] the code”)

If we ask, the what is this? question here, the answer is a hysterical fool i.e. a crazy— woman.

a “hysterical fool” (Sale 1997, 4)?

As Richard Wolff states “That is why corporations have devoted growing portions of their

appropriated surpluses to lobbying and funding parties, candidates , and various kinds of political

action committees (2012, 148)

Prescription for countering fact 2: 1) Our goals should be to avoid violent revolution (what

Marx described as “bone against bone”) and to avoid harming ecosystems and other life-forms...

through fundamental linguistic reform, which I will call inserting code

The last sentence that Schweickart quotes in After Capitalism is from Marx: “The point [...] is to

change [...]”(2011, 26). Let’s consider some of the phrases in Schweickart’s and Sale’s readings;

“dispel the lie that there is no alternative”; “another world is possible”; “altering consciousness”;

“embedding”; “affecting habits”; “a resonating message”; “galvanizing”; and my favorite “a

permanent alteration in a short space of time” (Schweickart 2011, 165-206) (Sale 1993, 3-9, 95-

108).

.

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And what about the role that slogans and images played in the 60’s on t-shirts and posters? For

example, Che’s face. Or the statements: “I have a dream”; “Better red than dead”; “Make love

not war” or lyrics in songs, like “working for the man”; “give peace a chance” and “silence like a

cancer grows”.

The negative fact of propaganda does not imply we cannot counter it and improve. We can work

to avoid the dark future described in the latest report by the UN13

Of course, there are individuals who control exorbitant amounts of wealth. They likely have

gigantic carbon and GHG footprints. As Schweickart puts it, “everyone knows [they are] mostly

criminals who have looted the national patrimony” (2011, 171) but they might gain by learning

about Ray Anderson’s company Interface and the concept of Closed Loop Factories (Leonard

2010, 185). Or by learning about composting and healthy soil; not the stuff that is parched, dead

and filled with the mould, which is now in our mineral free chemical covered pseudo-vegetables.

Even the dumbest and most obsessed of the wealthy can still improve. The point is, we can insert

code over dinner or at a vernissage and not end up in a fist fight.

. Even in cases like in the

following, there is almost always opportunity to influence things.

Direct democracy, particularly during the student movement and Occupy, made me more aware

than ever regarding the control of reference. For example, the Occupiers in Montreal wished to

rename Victoria Square, “La place du peuple”, and the stunning tendency in the media to call

‘student representatives’, ‘student leaders’, even on the CBC14

13

, when discussing the so-called

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/06/global-warming-un_n_5099769.html consulted on 07/04/2014

14 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/protesting-student-leaders-say-liberals-caq-disregard-youth-1.1129203 consulted on 07/04/2014

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maple spring in Quebec. Or the insistence by so many on substituting the word ‘boycott’ for the

student’s preferred word: ‘strike’15.

We have a right to language use also;

Arguably, the word ‘strike’, seems to me to imply potential harm for the strikers, boycotting

some unhealthy soft drink doesn’t harm the boycotter. However, the student strikers risked their

own educations and sometimes more. But, the simplest argument is to consider the following

question: Was Britain embarrassed by Gandhi’s food boycotts or by Gandhi’s hunger strikes?

it’s not up to experts and lawyers. As Chomsky insists,

natural language simply does not have the characteristics that scientific and mathematical

languages have. That’s why Chomsky regards studies of meaning and reference (i.e. E-

language), a waste of time.

Well-inserted code in the form of slogans like “reduce, reuse and recycle” or “leave the oil in the

soil, leave the coal in the hole” (Leonard 2011, 254) and web-sites like goodguide.com,

besafenet.org, turi.org, as well as solid argumentation based upon empirical studies are much

needed (see Mikkelson 2011, 2013). Aside from cleaning house and acting as examples of

change we can seize the opportunity to help mind/brains change.

I propose we look for slogans for change and simply share them; like “Extended producer

responsibility”, “you made it you deal with it”. Or “you can’t just throw it away cause there is no

away , “if you eat, compost!”, “waste to energy is a waste of energy”, “we want zero waste not

waste management” and “ban toxic trade” (Leonard 2011 is an excellent resource).

15 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-university-students-return-to-classes-thwarted-by-protests-1.1179925 consulted on 07/04/2014

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I’m not replacing the importance of strict argumentation based upon empirical study by the

notion of memes and slogans. However, the relevant point is to avoid violence,16

Prescription 2) Both municipalism and workplace democratization can and do counter the

controlling forces above mentioned in fact 2, i.e. propaganda, because the power of those who

“manufacture consent” resides in their capacities to control the Capital initially generated by the

appropriation of the labour surplus

while being

vigilant because as I write this paper, GHGE`s are resulting in the loss of human life and causing

wide spread extinctions.

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1) Reduce the massive concentration of wealth;

. As Schweickart indicates, coops, unions, municipalities

can reclaim the labor surplus and begin to direct how resources are used. The two strategies

Schweickart suggests are (2011, 184):

2) Reduce the impact massive wealth has on democracy.

The point I am making regarding the main project for this paper, (language) is that coops, unions

and direct municipal democracy affect the what is this? question. One can go from being

disenfranchised to being enfranchised; from not counting to counting; from being a wage slave to

not being a wage slave; from being complacent about the environment to being an active

16 This is a response the issue raised in class by Frédéric Armstrong 02/04/2014 questioning whether language can suffice when creating change. Resistance is always potentially dangerous.

17 The financialization of the US economy has taken all this much further making the surplus nearly irrelevant—taking it back would amount to also making it real again. “[Chomsky blames] the ‘financialization’ of the U.S. economy for income inequality and unemployment, saying that banks that were ‘too big to fail’ skimmed enormous wealth from the market. If you take a look at the progressive changes that have taken place in the country, say, just in the last 50 years - the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, opposition to aggression, the women's movement, the environmental movement and so on - they're not led by any debate in the media [...] No, they were led by popular organizations, by activists on the ground” See http://www.sott.net/article/270980-Noam-Chomsky-We-re-no-longer-a-functioning-democracy-we-re-really-a-plutocracy consulted on 07/04/2014

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participant in its improvement; from favouring some fictional E-language over our I-languages,

to taking pride in our capacity to think and speak up for ourselves.

Schweickart offers a list of 12 reforms (2011, 180-190). Interestingly, 5 of the 10 reforms that

Marx and Engels offered are now nearly all in place in the West. We have come a long way since

the Factory Acts of the 1800’s began by legislating for no more than ten hours of work per day,

for children under 9. But, while the west actually has reformed we have definitely hampered

reforms of the same sort in the developing world.

Schweickart, Biehl, Bookchin, Ellerman, Chomsky, Leonard, Wolff and Sale propose reforms

which are heavily 1) pro-coop, 2) pro-union and 3) pro-direct democracy without there being a

consensus on what to do with the word ‘ownership’. Thus, final stage communism will be

addressed at the end of this paper. It should be noted that Marx was highly critical of Mill’s pro-

coop orientation in Principles of Political Economy (J. S. Mill 1885, 597-619) which Marx

concluded (perhaps unjustifiably) that Mill treated as an end rather than a means. Final stage

communism requires a fully changed human consciousness in which all the parts of Capital are

for use, not abuse. Of course, this does not imply that reforms are not an option, providing that

they come quickly and are significant enough.

Schweickart’s list of reforms includes: 1) support coop buyouts and 2) support new tech for

coops 3) legislate worker democracy (codetermination) and profit sharing in large corporations

4) nationalize bankrupt corporations and hand control to workers e.g. GM 5) establish banking

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coops and public banks18

Prescription 3) on comparing direct democracy with our minimalist constitutions, it should be

quite clear that the latter are deliberately illegitimate. As constitutional framer James Madison

put it constitutions must protect the opulent from the poor.

Schweickart points out that this is in fact not a picture of economic

democracy but “reformed capitalism” (2011, 180-190).

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We need to change our constitutions to make them for the people. Janet Biehl’s interview of

Murray Bookchin (1998, 168-174) as well as the Appendix of the same work (177-181) in

which “The Electoral Platform of the Burlington Greens” is reprinted provides support for the

importance of changing our constitutions. Therefore in the addendum to this paper I will propose

9 redistributive spreadsheets as a preamble to any constitution. Any truly democratic constitution

must redistribute from ability toward need and will preserve the

Language use in our state

constitutions and in corporations which have increasingly dominated democracy is

fundamentally different from what we find in the constitutions of coops, unions and

municipalities, which rely on the language of direct democracy.

right to use over to abuse

. The 9

spreadsheets can be viewed as detailing the 4 problems I) Ecology and Growth II) Moral

Economy III) Grassroots Democracy IV) Social Justice outlined in the Burlington Greens

Platform.

18 (I’d go even farther – democratize the right to lend more than what one has. Why is elasticity a special right of bankers?)

19 Original source: Chomsky.

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They are:

The Preamble to Any Charter in 9 Spreadsheets:

1) Individual (positive redistribution added to guaranteed income based upon a citizen number)

2) Cultural (positive support based on cultural statement) 3) Political (positive enfranchisement based upon a citizen number) 4) Linguistic (positive support based on population, secondary language support) 5) Peoples (rights hierarchy from federation, i.e. fullest, to corporations, i.e. weakest, with

positive support based upon mission statements for Special Interest Groups) 6) Religions (positive support based upon religious mission statement) 7) Animals (positive and negative rights; socially conscious taxation) 8) Environmental (generalized environmentally conscious taxation) 9) Special rights (based upon justifications via Universal Moral Grammar UMG)20

Unions (at least the smaller ones) are all direct democracies. Municipalism and worker self

direction creates the opportunity for constitutional reform. Mikkelson lists the “five knuckles of

the corporate invisible fist”21. They are 1) limited liability 2) constitutional personhood 3)

absent ownership 4) undemocratic central planning 5) mandatory profit maximization. It would

seem that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (CCRF) creates the monstrous being

upon which these “5 knuckles” develop. When Canada repatriated the constitution in 1980, it

became impossible to entrench a “right to own property”. So, the CCRF avoids the issue. The

NDP, refused any wording offered by the reigning Liberals over the definition of the word

‘property’ which, the NDP argued must also entrench the right to so-called new-property e.g.

benefits and social programs like universal health-care, rights to water.22

20 See Tondino (2013) “The Recognition Preamble to Any Charter in 9 Spreadsheets”

Arguably, the private

ownership of land and other property is as artefactual as any other right. This leads to a brief

21 Class communication: 03/04/2014 22 http://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/bp268-e.htm consulted on 07/04/2014.

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consideration of ownership. There can be no coherent solution over whether the right is

individual or communal.

Final Stage Communism and ownership: In figure 6, I have created an idealisation, which is

central to Marx’s work. Capital (K) is a machine (“means of production”) with two functioning

parts 1) Labour (N) and 2) Resources (R) which generates use-value (Vuse). Our bodies therefore

are Capital. In communism there is no Capital other than the machine (material M “means of

production”) which generates use value. There is no “social”, “economically contextual”, non-

material aspect to this idealisation; it avoids all forms of alienation including from other species,

from work, from our species-being (material natures) and from the ecosystem. But, what was

most significant to Marx was that no moral justification for the ownership (privatisation) of any

part of this machine could be made.

If this is fair, and I think it is, it contrasts with the notion liberalism, because we do not even own

ourselves. Note, this reinforces Ellerman’s concerns over self-sale-rental but not by virtue of

ownership rights (2006, 321-355).

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Marx ultimately compared his idealisation23

See below:

with Capitalism. The idealization under Capitalism

is Marx’s well-known Trinity Formula.

The Trinity Formula:

To Marx, The Trinity Formula helped to explain the facts of alienation, a gigantic fiction of

exchange values, enormous inequality, as well as the power of capitalism for generating massive

production surpluses as well as economic crises. But, Schweickart, Sale and Mikkelson24

23 Metaphysically possible, unlike Galileo’s frictionless plane.

(independently) show that 1) continued economic growth is not an option, 2) greater equality is

good for Homo sapiens and good for the environment.

24 See G. M. Mikkelson 2013: “I test the merits of this proposal through analysis of a few key national economic and ecological variables across time and space. The results confirm the hypothesis that equality does far less harm to ecosystems than growth does. In fact, equality seems to benefit one crucial aspect of environmental quality, namely biological diversity.”

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Conclusion: Our minimalist constitutions need to be overhauled through solidarity by unions,

cooperatives, popular movements25 and municipalism. Arguably, worker democracy and

municipalism offer a greater sense of community and a direct relationship to the stuff problem

Time is the last thing we have to waste. Please, see attached addendum for 9 spreadsheets to be

viewed as one of many interesting proposals. The goal is to ask why constitutions do not have

these features.

,

because we care about the soil around us – whether it’s healthy or toxic; we care about what we

flush down the drain when its neighbourhood grey water; we care about whether there is an

incinerator nearby or a landfill -- which boards of directors often do not. It’s not just the size of

the organisation e.g. the nation and constitution or the corporation, which is the problem. It is

that the power over these larger more abstract things must reside in human scale communities

working for the people.

Bibliography:

Biehl, J. (1998) The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian MunicipalismChomsky, N. (2003) Chomsky on Democracy and Education, ed. By C. P. Otero, RoutledgeFalmer, London.

. Black Rose. Montreal, QC.

Chomsky N., McGilvray, J. (2012) Noam Chomsky: The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Cohen, G. A. (2000) Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Ellerman, D. (2006) "Whither Self-Management? Finding New Paths to Workplace Democracy", Vol. Iss: 9,

pp.321 - 355 Olson, E. T. (2007) What are We: A Study in Personal Ontology, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Mikkelson, G. M. (2011) “Weighing species”. Environmental Ethics 33:185-196. ———, (2013) “Growth Is the Problem; Equality Is the Solution” Sustainability, 5, 432-439 Mill, J. S. (1885) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30107/30107-pdf.pdf Sale, K. (1991) Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, University of Georgia Press Athens Georgia. ———, (1997) The Green Revolution: The Environmental Movement 1962-1992 Schweickart, D. (2011) After Capitalism. Rowman and Littlefield. Lanham, MD. Wolff, R. (2012) Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Haymarket. Chicago, IL. 25 E.g. Idle No More, Occupy, student protests, environmental protests, protests for recognition, etc.

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Individual (positive and negative redistribution based upon a citizen number)

Cultural (positive support based on cultural statement)

The citizen number is a sum expressing degree of disadvantage in any given society. For example, women are attributed +1 and men -1. The citizen number is used as a multiplier for redistribution e.g. 645 X 52 weeks = $33,904 of guaranteed income.

Funding for culture should promote the heritage culture of a particular society first. There is no other way to preserve diversity. Why would anyone be interested in a homogenized world? Funding should reflect population.

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Political (variable enfranchisement based upon citizen number)

Linguistic (positive support based on population, secondary language support)

The citizen number is a sum expressing degree of disadvantage in any given society. For example, women are attributed +1 and men -1. The citizen number is used to augment enfranchisement .645 + 1 vote = 1.645.The vote is based on a single transferable voting system. This Charter would include worker self direction.

Governments ought to and already do fund language education. Here it seems natural to offer more funding to the common public language with incentives for secondary and tertiary language education. Sign laws and work use laws also make sense for maintaining diversity. The proportion of funding and linguistic representation reflects population. See Law 101 in Quebec.

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Peoples (rights hierarchy from nation, i.e. fullest, to corporations, i.e. weakest, with positive support based upon mission statements for Special Interest

Groups) Religions (positive support based upon religious mission statement)

Different Peoples have different rights depending upon the state in which they live. So for example, Canadians have powers over Aboriginal Peoples and Quebeckers that are not being addressed by multiculturalism. Corporations have powers which need to be restrained.

Religions should be encouraged to reform within the context of the modern state. Funding would go to progressive religions. Religious funding would reflect distribution in society and be based on religious texts and sermons.

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Animals (rights; negative rights; socially conscious taxation)

Environmental (generalized environmentally conscious taxation)

Socially conscious taxation already exists (i.e. zombie taxes) e.g. tobacco use is discouraged. This is an easy target because of the many glaring cover-ups that surfaced in the last 30 years. The same will occur with animal experimentation and with the dreadful treatment of livestock.

Socially conscious taxation already exists (i.e. zombie taxes) e.g. tobacco use is discouraged. This is an easy target because of the many glaring cover-ups that surfaced in the last 30 years. The same kind of practise will have to occur with environmental concerns. If we do not phase them out through government we will no longer exist.

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Special rights (based upon justifications via Universal Moral Grammar

UMG)

Socially Conscious Taxation, Environmental Conscious Taxation and generalized claims to the cooperative surplus would be used in part to guarantee a healthy direction for human kind.