Book excerpt: This Book Eight of the Earth Manifesto contains incisive essays, including "A Clarion Call for Common Sense Action" and "Climate Change Considerations", along with provocative Pope Francis-inspired "Views on High from an Angular Unconformist", and "Sad Implications of the Two Dueling Santa Claus Strategies in Political Economics". It also contains renewed assessments of optimum economic and social planning for the United States and nations around the world. Among other contents, it includes the essay "Thirteen Main Methods Used to Increasingly Concentrate Wealth and Power", which assesses the pathological causes of extreme inequality that are having such deleterious impacts on the world during terribly hard times for tens of millions of Americans during the on-going coronavirus pandemic.