Front and Center with Steve and Michael Steve Bhaerman and Michael Maxsenti

“The best way to overgrow the ‘deep state’ is by cultivating a deeper state.” -- Swami Beyondananda
Here is the oxymoronic political contradiction of our times. We seem more polarized than ever, and yet the vast majority of us long to work together for mutual benefit. Perhaps the resolution of this seemingly impossible “shituation” can be found in the “real” American dream of our founders: individual freedom AND collective wellbeing.
The accentuated polarization of our times has put these two universal aspirations in conflict with one another. But what if they need to co-evolve together? Is there a way to transform these dueling dualities into dynamic-duo dance partners?
Our guest this week on Front and Center, Foster Gamble (https://www.freetothrive.com/), has spent his adult lifetime seeking what he calls a “universal morality” that is not imposed from the top down, but realized from the individual on up. Growing up in privilege – he’s a Gamble as in Proctor & Gamble – Foster’s journey to extend political and economic wellbeing to all has led him to the “consciousness” movement and through the “truth movement”, to exo-politics and suppressed inventions. He and his wife Kimberly Carter Gamble have produced two hugely successful Thrive movies, and created a worldwide Thrive platform that has informed millions of people. And today, his work boils down to just one idea – the Non-Aggression Principle, which states simply that no one is allowed to defraud another, or initiate force, except in true self-defense.
As the Swami has said, he is proposing a sane world – he must be crazy!
Seriously, is there a way to turn that ideal into the real deal?
This freewheeling Front and Center “conversation for possibility” leads us to some surprisingly practical ways to use the “adjacent possible” to bridge us, step-by-step from where we are now to where we want to go.
It’s been said that the truth will set us free – but more accurately, it will UPSET us free first. In producing the outside-the-official-narrative Thrive movies, Foster has confronted the challenge of presenting inconvenient truths when people would much rather believe convenient lies. He is heartened however, with how the consciousness movement and the various “truth” movements have interacted in recent years to “transcend the fake polarity of political rulership, and actually come together on truth and freedom and harmonious collaboration.”
And while his notion of a noncoercive universal morality may seem out there in some distant future, Foster’s approach is eminently practical. It involves activating truly independent forces in our political system – like the Common Sense and Forward Parties – to slow the spread of what he calls “turn-key totalitarianism”, where what used to be called the military-industrial complex has now metastasized into the military-industrial-pharmaceutical-media-tech complex with the unchecked, unbalanced power to monitor and control every aspect of our lives.
In keeping with the Swam’s prescription for sanity, “turn off your TV and tell-a-vision instead,” Foster shared his vision of the prize he has his eye on:  
"It’s a planet where every individual has the opportunity to thrive, and no one is authorized to encroach on anyone else's person, or property. It's a planet of truly voluntary exchange, where people can feel happy in their pursuit of happiness and also feel secure that that their community has their back, where they can be productive through the unleashing of the creative their natural creativity. That would happen as people know that their individual freedom is the key to liberating all of us. And as we master love of ourselves, of one another, and our environment, we can be welcomed into the cosmic community.”
Can we step off the political battlefield and cultivate a cooperative playing field together? Can we confront the true evils facing us

“There are no sides, only angles and when we see it from the right angle, we’re all on the same side.” -- Swami Beyondananda

We have three founding principles at Front and Center:
From political battlefields to cooperative playing fields.Seeking the whole truth together.Putting the government on the side of the people.
Each one is a challenge, to be sure, in these politically polarized times. Number two is particularly challenging because most political “discussions” devolve into dueling narratives.  
So, in this “conversation for possibilities” we brought together two passionate advocates for abundant, healthy, nutritionally-dense food. On one hand, we have A.G. Kawamura, a third-generation produce farmer in California who served as Secretary of Agriculture under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from 2003-2010, who advocates “big agriculture” as necessary to feed 8 billion people worldwide.
On the other hand, Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, has seen how switching her family to an organic, non-GMO diet transformed her children’s health, and she has built a formidable organization to promote regenerative agriculture that heals the soil, and doesn’t cause the kinds of health conditions she observed in her children.
In “seeking the whole truth together”, we had three goals. First, a “humanizing” format that acknowledged good intentions, personal passion, and mutual respect. Second, an opportunity for both Zen and A.G. to share their viewpoints and expertise into a “listening” instead of a debate, so that participants and listeners would emerge with a broader and deeper perspective. Third, we were looking for areas of agreement, and even opportunities for collaboration.
And …we succeeded on all counts!
You’ll have to watch the full interview to experience this for yourself, but we ended up with a vigorous, impassioned and ultimately kind conversation that might have turned “opponents” into agreeable colleagues who disagreed on certain points. A.G.’s focus was on preventing the worst food disaster of all – starvation. A century ago, the world’s population was “just” 2 billion; today, we have four times as many people, meaning we need to insure we have four times as much food.
Zen pointed out that while food scarcity is a disaster we all want to avoid, another burgeoning disaster is a society that cannot function because there are too many sick people. She points out that during the growth phase of industrial agriculture, “there’s been an explosion of sickness”. GMOs, pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers have led to not just the health problems her children experienced (severe allergies and early autism symptoms, all of which disappeared when she went organic and GMO-free), but problems like infertility. “A young man today,” she says, “has 50% less sperm than his grandfather.”
Both A.G. and Zen agreed that the food industrial complex was NOT providing nutrient-dense foods, and that increasing locally-grown food is essential for our health and wellbeing. (In fact, years ago, A.G. sparked one of the early “food gleaning” programs in California, bringing food that would normally be thrown away to feed the hungry. He is also an advocate of neighborhood and urban gardens.)
As someone whose entire life has been spent growing food, and then helping to manage the distribution of that food, A.G. prefers seeing the glass as “half full” – that we give proper credit to a system that has in his view prevented worldwide hunger. Zen, on the other hand, points out the “shadow side” of this industrial food system. She says, “Syngenta makes the largest amount of pesticides and agrochemicals in the world and their sister company is AstraZeneca, which produces 400 pharmaceutical products that treat the very same symptoms that their pesticides and chemicals cause!” 
We hope you will tune in, listen to the conversation, and hopefully c

“Why should corporations pay taxes, when they can simply pay the legislators directly and eliminate the middle man?”
-- Swami Beyondananda
In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a key missing element in government of, by, and for the people – the PEOPLE!
So … it’s up to the people on the outside to stir and move those on the inside.  
Zen Honeycutt, our guest on Front and Center this week, is one of those “inciteful outsiders”. Her organization Moms Across America, has led a highly-successful campaign to educate moms – and everyone else – about organic, GMO-free food. Her journey began when her own children developed food allergies, and early autism symptoms. She started educating herself – “a worried mom does more research than the FBI” she says – and when she switched her children’s diets to organic non-GMO foods, their health conditions cleared up.
The next thing she noticed is how many other parents were having the same issues show up in their kids. After educating herself about GMOs, and glyphosate (the major ingredient in Round-Up), she began to educate and enroll others. Launching in February 2013, Moms Across America scaled to reaching 300,000 people a week on Facebook.  “Moms buy 85% of the food and make 90% of the buying choices in America,” she said.  
“Legislators and government officials are more scared of moms than any other group of voters,” says Zen. “That’s because moms are passionate, dedicated … and unstoppable when it comes to safeguarding the wellbeing of their children.”
In fact, Zen has authored a book about her campaign called … Unstoppable.
If you’ve wondered how it is that the USA spends more on “health care” per capita than any other country in the world, yet ranks next to the bottom in “industrial nations” in healthy outcomes, maybe it’s the “unhealthy incomes” of those who provide us with industrialized food. Chalk it up to a “regulatory system” controlled by the industries they are supposedly regulating. Oh, and here is the elephant and donkey in the living room – BOTH major political parties are indebted to corporate interests who instead of paying their way, are paying to have their own way. 
Says Zen, “Any political candidate who is receiving money from big ag, Big Pharma, big tech or big oil is working for them. They are not working for you.”
She isn’t waiting for the system to change. Moms Across America launched a campaign called Toxin-Free Town campaign, and more than 100,000 people have downloaded their document offering ten alternatives to Round Up, so we can get it out of streets, parks, and playgrounds – not to mention our food. 280 million pounds of this toxic chemical are used each year in agriculture, 20 million pounds in other public places.
What makes this conversation even more interesting is that our very own Michael Maxsenti is working with the California Common Sense Party in alliance with the national Forward Party to lift us beyond the two-party divide to work together. And Michael brings up an interesting point – wouldn’t it be common sense to have a national party move past the identity issues that keep us separate and focus on the “identical” issues we all face, like clean and healthy food?
Join us for this lively conversation and find out how YOU can join the upwising – to bring us clean and healthy food, and clean and healthy government.
Watch the video on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Evcj4Ml2RrY
Find out more about Zen Honeycutt and Moms Across America here: https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/
If you appreciate the three principles behind Front and Center …
From political battlefields to cooperative playing fields …
Seeking the whole truth together ...
Putting government on the side of the people …
Support Front and Center here: https://frontandcenter.locals.com/support

“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.
YouTube: https://youtu.

Conversation with Independent National Conference Convener Christopher Life
“We have a deeply divided body politic. Half the people think our system is broken. The other half believe it is fixed.” -- Swami Beyondananda
Join Independent National Conference convener Christopher Life in a lively discussion about how we the people can stopping fighting one another and unite to restore the missing element in government by the people – the people!
Here is the paradox of our times. The body politic seems more divided and polarized than ever – and yet the great majority of us would much prefer working together to actually solve problems, rather than blame the “other side” for them.
The good news is, there’s an exciting upcoming conference in Austin, Texas April 3rd to 5th seeks to spark an “independents” movement – voters from across the political spectrum declaring their independence from the “one party” system disguised as the two-party system, where the people are mobilized to fight one another, and so are essentially unable to unite to hold the system accountable.
The purpose of this face-to-face, in person conference is to bring together independent sectors and unaffiliated voters to “let go of that left/right divide as the dominating paradigm of our politics,” and “increase transparency in government to decrease corruption.” Rather than focus on and gather around our ideological differences, Christopher says we “need an independent sector so that we can actually create a fundamentally new center of gravity.”
The Austin Conference that happening April 3rd to 5th will be headlined by independent political leaders like Tulsi Gabbard and Dennis Kucinich, along with leaders of the progressive People’s Party and the Libertarian Party, as well as political innovator Katherine Gehl (co-author of "Why Politics is Failing America”), along with many other political innovators, activists and solutionaries.
If you’re thinking, “Where can I sign up?” that’s easy. Just go here.
You can support Front & Center on our Locals channel.
Watch this podcast on our Front & Center on YouTube channel.

“It’s time to bring left and right front and center to face the music and dance together.” -- Swami Beyondananda
Our Front and Center podcast is dedicated to inspiring our community to get off the political battlefield and onto the cooperative playing field, to seeking the whole truth together, and finding a “commonly-sensed common sense consensus” that represents the virtues and values we share in common above and beyond our political differences.
Yes, yes. I know. We are proposing a sane world. We must be crazy.
Well, there is good news. There’s a “sane asylum” being built here in California, and more and more awakening voters are committing themselves to it. Even as people are pulled toward toxically divisive political narratives by the two major parties, exacerbated by both legacy and social media, there is an awakening awareness that NEITHER of the two parties have our common wellbeing at heart. While the two parties divide us through cultural issues, the commonwealth is being stolen by the uncommonly wealthy. Consider that while the two sides were “mask-debating” during the COVID crisis, the billionaire class increased their wealth by nearly two thirds.
Fortunately, there is an “upwising” afoot, as nearly 25% of registered voters here in California have chosen “no political preference.” Into this fertile field, a new political force is emerging, the Common Sense Party https://www.cacommonsense.org/. Unlike other “third party” movements, this one is non-ideological, but rather represents the one ingredient that seems to be missing from government by the people – the PEOPLE.
And while the Common Sense Party is not yet an “official” party, it is already having influence by supporting candidates who have declared their “independence” from intractable party narratives. One such candidate is Democrat Marie Alvarado-Gil, who is running against a mainstream Democrat in the largest Senate District in California, Senate District Four, that includes thirteen counties. Since the district has trended Republican, as an independent Democrat – committed to working to solve problems across the divide – she has a good shot against the front-runner, a Democrat committed to the entire party line.
When you watch this interview, you will find Marie has a background in health and education, and is a strong supporter of charter schools – because these schools REQUIRE parental involvement. She has been a loyal Democrat her entire career …until she recognized that entrenched political posturing has prevented California from addressing its problems. Water, for example. All sorts of solutions have been studied and proposed, including a desalination plant. The inability of the sides to partner around the common good has so far kept this from happening, even as California goes deeper into drought conditions.
Marie says she is representing, “People just like me, who don't subscribe to one ideology or the other, who don't completely agree with the far left or the far right. People who haven't had their voices heard in Sacramento.”
In place of what she calls “weaponized narratives”, Marie brings “a mindset of critical thinking, curiosity, and just openness to understand.” Remember that quaint term “public service” – the idea that our representatives need to do the people’s bidding, and not the bidding of the highest bidder? That – not fame, fortune and power as a “career politician” – is what motivated her to run.  
“As the state senator, in my district,” she says, “I would be working with six different assembly members. Can you imagine if we had seven minds that we're working together for the betterment of the people in our district, what we could accomplish in both houses?”
Imagine, indeed!
In the midst of dueling dualities, there IS a third way.
Watch this interview, support Marie’s candidacy any way you can, and if you’re a California vot