About Self-Evident LLC

Increasingly since the election of Ronald Reagan in1980 and more transparently since the Citizens United decision of 2010, special interest groups, large corporations and wealthy individuals have been exchanging private campaign contributions for supply-side, or ‘trickle-down’ economic policy — through which an enormous amount of wealth has instead trickled up.

Between 1980 and 2015 the share of the total income among Americans realized by the poorest 50% fell by nearly half, while the share realized by the wealthiest 1% more than doubled.

CEO pay offers a stark example: in 1960 the average pay of Fortune 500 CEOs was about 20 times greater than that of their average employee. In 1980 it was about 30 times greater. Today it’s about 300 times greater. And for the largest low-wage employers in the U.S. average CEO pay is about 600 times greater than that of their employees.

Despite our vast resources, wealth and power and our representative form of government, the quality of the lives of most Americans has been in decline for more than a generation. The reason is that our election campaign finance system has devolved into legalized bribery. Our political system has become corrupt.

The now decades-long outsourcing of manufacturing overseas, as well as advances in technology that supercharge productivity but wreak havoc on our workforce — along with increasingly regressive tax laws and a near-absence of anti-trust enforcement — have been major catalysts in the vast and growing gap between our haves and have-nots. Yet poor and formerly middle-class Americans are being left further and further behind principally because our government hasn’t responded effectively to changing conditions. Representative democracy has been usurped by enormous amounts of money being paid to government officials by private interests.

Both a contributing cause and a purposeful distraction from these sea changes in American life has been an assault on the consensus reality that’s at the core of United States law, social structure and our overall way of life — general agreement about true and false and right and wrong.

This assault is being led by elected and appointed Republican officials, who are being aided and abetted by an industry of so-called Conservative media outlets (what’s ‘Conservative’ about bearing false witness?) and conspiracy promoters, as well as the Russian government of Vladimir Putin, as confirmed by the Republican-led 2020 US Select Senate Committee’s Intelligence Report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

Most American voters don’t support 21st century Republican policies, and since their losses in the 2012 national elections in particular, Republicans seeking and holding national office have adapted by what has become bald-faced lying; near-unanimously about the results of the 2020 presidential election, and more generally about their own policies as well as those of their political competition. In recent years this behavior has devolved to lying about consensus reality itself.

A diabolical twist built on the foundation of years of incremental deceit has the current administration of the United States government routinely accusing their political competition of what they themselves are doing.

Having been priced-and-otherwise excluded from the American Dream and misled by torrents of false information, many Americans have become discouraged, resentful and vulnerable to the siren song of fascism: The blaming of various ‘others’ for that which we the people and our representatives are ultimately responsible and loud, persistent claims of simple solutions for complex challenges.

Meanwhile global air and water temperatures are increasing, the polar ice caps and the world’s glaciers melting, and ocean levels rising — all at an accelerating pace. The marine life that supports much of the earth’s population is increasingly scarce and their habitat is increasingly polluted. The Great Barrier Reef is on the ropes. The Amazon Rain Forest — the earth’s lungs —is being stripped of its vegetation at an unsustainable rate.

Human behavior has caused these conditions and human behavior can rectify them, by developing and adapting to systems for clean and renewable energy, disposing of our waste in a sustainable manner, and by bringing our election financing, taxation, healthcare, education, and social policies into accord with current reality, with the innovation that’s characteristic of our culture and a prominent feature of our history.

But that won’t happen through deceit, denial and distraction. False information leads to bad decisions.

The challenges we face won’t be overcome, nor will our greatest opportunities be realized, through denial that they exist or surrender to fear that they can’t be managed. Honest dialogue will be needed if our Ship of State is to be set back on its intended course of expanding freedom, equal rights and equal justice under law for all Americans, regardless of sex, race, religion, national origin or political inclination.

Self-Evident LLC’s distress flag designs were created to focus attention on our nation’s foundational principles, juxtaposed with behavior — anyone’s behavior — that undermines efforts to form a more perfect Union.