Interview with Marianne Williamson: Why She Is Running and Why It Matters

“The Status Quo Will Not Disrupt Itself”

“Trickle-down economics is when all the wealth is at the top, and a small portion of it trickles down to the masses. That’s why they call the people at the bottom peons.”
-- Swami Beyondananda

When I interviewed Marianne Williamson after her 2020 Presidential campaign, she told me that she was shaken and a bit shocked at the meanness of campaign politics – and that was just from her own side!

So naturally, the first question Michael Maxsenti and I asked in our Front and Center interview was, “What has motivated you to do it again?”

To get the full answer, you’ll have to watch the interview. The short form is that she is seeing more Americans awakening from the partisan trance and recognizing the entire system is corrupt and “the status quo will not disrupt itself.” That, and she has developed the “emotional antibodies” to withstand the proverbial slings and arrows.

First and foremost, she sees economic inequality as the issue that defines what America has become. In his “Study of History”, British historian Arnold Toynbee points out that a sign of an empire in decline is the growing gap between rich and poor. This is more than an economic issue, Toynbee says. It’s a moral issue, because it indicates a society’s unwillingness to care for “the least of us.” Marianne points out that since the 1970s, there has been a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. Do the math. Do the aftermath.

No other advanced democracy would tolerate such economic “un-democracy”, she says. “The American people have been played. It's as simple as that. The American people have been trained to expect too little, the American people have been told that the issues are ‘complicated’. They're actually not complicated. They're corrupt.”

Two other key issues for Marianne are health care (she calls the current system “sickness care”) and care for our children, who will either move our society forward in the future, or burden society because of poor health, poor education, and poor economic prospects. She says, “When your society's governing principle -- as ours now is – is about short-term profit maximization for huge corporate entities as opposed to the humanitarian values that should inform our policies, I think the greatest collateral damage is our children.”

She reiterates a point she made well in her 2020 campaign, if a child doesn’t learn to read by the age of eight or ten, then “the chances of high school graduation are drastically decreased and the chances of incarceration are drastically increased.” She continues, “When I was in college, we had 300,000 people incarcerated in the United States, now we have 2.3 million.”

Marianne’s bottom line – one not generally addressed by other Democratic Party leaders – is that there is a spiritual “ground of being” above and beyond all religious, spiritual, and secular ethical systems. This point of view is important, first because it reminds us of the principles and values that the 90% of us who are not sociopaths would agree on. As we’ve shifted to a secular, post-modernist view that there IS no such universal ground of being, we lose the very foundation of all of society’s systems. As she points out, Adam Smith – the “father” of free market capitalism – said that free market capitalism cannot work outside an ethical context.

This “spiritual ground of being” is also a key element in “rehumanizing one another”, she says, so that the best elements of conservatism and the best elements of progressivism can emerge.

Can Marianne Williamson shift the political conversation, address our political malaise, and unite Americans to face the daunting problems before us? Can she help shift the rules of the game to put governance in the hands of the people? Watch this interview and decide for yourself.

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