This is a beginning of a basic thesis for my current thinking through the lens of an informal/unscientific and political personal research with the intent of working towards solving and understanding humanity's various problems epitomized through economic/social, environmental, and peace and security problems and opportunities and how those problems can be solved through various means such as political organization through representative democracy, education, and distribution of information and knowledge through new/old (depending on how you look at it) worldviews that emphasize cooperation over competition, sustainability over short-term profit, and social/economic equality over concentration of great wealth and power in the top tiers of society. I just wanted to throw these paragraphs out there and see if anyone had any insights or synchronous ideas that might help my research and writing. If you do, please let me know. Thank you for reading!
While it is certainly true that economic justice and inequality concerns in the United States are an extraordinarily important means of improving the total human ecological prosperity and sustainability of United States citizens as well as by extension citizens of the global economic system (by virtue of American monetary hegemony), we cannot ignore concerns of global security and peace which directly influences economic activity as well as all other aspects of human life (by virtue of universal need for safety and security). Universal human rights transcend economic concerns by themselves, yet are dependent on an adequate level of economic prosperity and equal distribution of vital limited resources such as food, clean water, air, land, etc.
U.S. foreign as well as domestic economic policy is necessarily limited by the constraints of the contemporary political and social environment in which distrust of government is amplified through (mainly conservative) reactionary media propoganda in the form of daytime talk radio 'shock jocks,' legions of conspiratorial and radical conservative libertarian bloggers, and the various 24 hour news networks that churn out stories and opinions suited to the cultural successors to CNN's Crossfire in which self-described social liberals and conservatives yell at each other in one hour segments. In this context of deep division fueled by media saturation of disruptive and distorted mythological narratives that pit traditionalists against reformers, paranoids against evolutionists, reactionaries against progressives, it is something of a miracle that the 111th Congress was able to do as much as it did (which was certainly not as much as it could have done) to increase domestic as well as international peace and security both through economic as well as foreign policy decisions.
Which is to say that there are still 1-3 or more wars going on throughout the world (depending on how you want to measure the scope of international conflicts/wars) and economic as well as ecological uncertainty is a leading cause of social instability and conflict on both the national as well as the international and global scale. Now we have a Congress that is even more dysfunctional and beholden to malefactors of great wealth and ideological commitment to the old ways of producing energy and pre-progressive era distribution of resources and prosperity (e.g. the Gilded Age). Certainly there was some progress on economic and holistic health and wellbeing of United States citizens and citizens of the world as well as security and peace initiatives in the 111th Congress, expecially when considering the Bush II era incompetence and corruption of all levels and branches of federal government. But the 112th Congress does represent several steps back (at least!) to Gilded Age politics and policies that promote the myth of rugged individualism and rampant inequality as a social good, or at least an evil to be tolerated in exchange for national and international growth of the wealthiest based on the increased poverty and wage-slavery of the poor and working classes.