Politics is Not Enough; and Never has Been. Much More Action is Required!
And the personal responsibility scapegoat, and social responsibility escapers.
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Life is real for everyone… In both good and bad ways, but in different doses. No one gets the same exact shot at it. We have a right to be very loud, angry, and demanding about certain things, and at other times, we are obliged to shut up and listen, serve, and give back. Sometimes we overuse, or we underutilize one, or the other. Maybe we deserve where we are at, or we are unlucky compared to most, or much luckier than we realize. Personal responsibility has a place, yet when and where is it unrealistic for an individual’s responsibility to be ascribed causation priority? Accordingly, does government have any comprehensive social responsibility, or is most of the societal responsibility allotted to religious charities who can hopscotch over their sacrificial lambs, along with private sector services and private charities that make choices case by case, and provide haphazard coverage?
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All of that said, ignoring counterintuitive ideas, and taking illogical positions, as well as oversimplifying the complexities within our changing society, politicians are able to argue around in circles in a never ending, vicious cycle of not quite half solutions. More specifically, too many politicians allow inertia and incrementalism to exacerbate our future with the we don’t know what to do until we find out answers, but only after more than our share of pain as individuals, communities, as a nation, and world; think 9–11, the Iraq War, COVID pandemic, corporate-liars-caused climate change, housing discrimination, drug wars, opioid addiction, etc.
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Yet, we never fully remember what was discovered from the graphic memories and painful mistakes, and proceed with half the data, knowledge, time, and investment needed in the next round, or to actually fix what is still going on.Primarily, today’s politics is focused on the premise that there are no good answers to improve society except more economic growth for the few who make the — uneven, unrepentant, and historically rigged — cut. Translation, there is nothing new under the sun for society, but for extremely large sums for a tiny some.
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We can climb out of this hole with the proper tools and system. However, we can no longer expect politics to do more climbing out than it does digging the hole deeper. That is because the political process is skewed towards a stale, rape the world, White man against nature, ideology, a.k.a. the Greed Old Deal, supported by the most wealthy and best connected. David beats Goliath because he knows where the big dude is vulnerable. So it is best that Goliath catches David unawares. We The People are unaware because the powers-that-be benefit from confusion; merely consider the last online agreement you click-agreed-to without opening it, much less studying it. Politics does its best work only when the opposition forces’ resources are equal to the other side, or sides. Gross inequality is not just an economic problem, it is also a citizen and civic degradation.
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Personal responsibility is a cultural and evolutionary construct. More importantly, it is a narrowly used construct. Promoters of the personal responsibility is-nearly-everything hypothesis use it narrowly. We all likely have a public, and a private narrowed usage. Humans can hold two contrary constructs in their mind simultaneously, and can manage with both those contradictions their entire lifetimes. For me as a child, those constructs could be described as the sins I told the priest, and the sins I didn’t. Giving up all the sins was not immediately preferable to me, but I did want to work on most, said and unsaid. Nonetheless, there are some acts of irresponsibility we have compartmentalized out of existence, and only remember the personal responsibilities others fail on. We also can extend the responsibilities of those we look down on, or despise, beyond what we do for our own negative acts that may be different, but still cause a similar societal impact, or worse.
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What is problematic about our linking of financial success with personal responsibility is how it conveniently removes the messiness in the middle, and the struggle imposed on those below. The very successful have the time, money, and influence to buff up their image, and importance. Those who do make it out of the most difficult situations are promoted as self-help, role-model gurus for those still struggling, when luck, which comes in incalculable forms, had an unknowable impact on their successful rising. The middle person, though moderately successful, who fights the unwinnable fight, and is erased from the success rolls for that fight, straighten up the mess to some extent that was created by the belligerent elements of the greed gang. Both the successful struggler, and good fight fighter, many times a combination of those two stereotypical personas, play roles that allow We The People democracy, and the economy, to survive a bit longer.
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Besides the legitimacy, mostly compliant workers give to our economic structure as it is, and less than 60% voter turnout does for our current civic system, the successful struggler, and good fight fighter, do prop it up another level. Almost no matter how infrequent Americans rise from the most difficult environments, they are offered up as proof that the economic system works. According to this tired — and if ever true — Horatio Alger tale, means Americans in poverty are as valuable as sperm. As long as one success (a pregnancy) occurs every so often from the poorest two or three quintiles, the millions of poor Americans (sperm) that don’t make it pay a fair price (their happiness pursuit voided). That is why most jobs are now found in the low wage bed sheets, socks, and condom hints industry. As to fighting the good fight, their cleaning up of the civic and economic system is the bare minimum that can be done, and is allowed to be done by the powers-that-be. Though their efforts do help our democracy scrape out an additional few years.
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Unfortunately, the scrappy good-fight fighters are often crushed by the greed-grab success system unless they begin playing the non-personal responsibility game as the very successful do. But as the truly responsible do, another rises up to take the place of the previous good fight fighters to also get whack-a-moled by the powers-that-be. The wealthy, and effectively connected, dilute the power of the one-offs, and there is no structure to boost the good fighters’ power except the fickle and unreliable two-party system. Not because every politician is unreliable or always fickle; it is just that the party system itself is not structured to fight for, and support, We The People consistently.
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The arrogant relativism of personal responsibility makes it irrelevant as a way to degrade others for their mistakes or misfortunes. The phrase is devoid of value in the current environment. Personal responsibility is only used to degrade those in categories we wish to ignore. Nearly everyone is personally responsible in certain areas, even the sociopath. Yet we applaud the wealthy criminal sociopath, and we arraign the poor person, criminal sociopath. We protect the lazy wealthy, and destroy the lazy poor. While these are extreme examples, they concisely dredge up our prejudices as a society. Personally we may disapprove of both types, but as a society we allow the wealthier version much more leeway, since money buys considerable immunity from the law, and makes it possible to avoid the economic oppression that subjugates the poor. Lack of personal responsibility does not cause Americans by the tens of millions to be in poverty, or go without healthcare, good housing, and a quality education, nor does it cause billions of others on earth to be stuck in the same low position. However, lack of comprehensive social responsibility is the cause of many poverties in the U.S. today: health, food, income, etc.
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Since everyone is going to fail sometime, and some are going to fail regularly, we need an arbiter for all of our negative acts to decide which truly do arise from personal responsibility, and others that require a comprehensive societal solution. While we cannot end all failures and stop all crimes, our current repertoire of solutions is sorely lacking. Current social hypotheses and strategies are filled with antiquated and subverted logic based too much on the economics of big businesses, with little regard for the economics of workers and citizens. The social impact such a narrow ideology of economics, entrenched in, and corrupted by, political capture, results in serious damage to people and communities, and to national cohesion. Recalibrating our ideals algorithm would be an appropriate place to start.
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Like many Americans I have family skin in this game of personal responsibility causation, and citizen degradation.
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My father, RJC, sacrificed his automotive engineer career fighting the good fight. I guess you would call him an internal whistleblower. RJC confronted the current plant manager, and future CEO, about his duplicitous activities, witnessed by my father early in his career, and the last time they worked together in the mid 1950s. In the interim, dad had been the chief of the power-steering division, then began working in a special consulting and problem solving unit of the company until the VP running the unit retired. As the new quality control manager, RJC was not going to put his signature on any shoddy work, or let it leave the plant, or tolerate any other chicanery. Dad was conveniently laid off in the midst of the 1973 oil embargo downturn, less than two years after the plant manager became CEO of the internationally known automotive and aeronautics engineering and manufacturing company.
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Even high level employees like RJC are not immune from the coldness and eviscerating tendencies of the corporate world. Nearly eight months after dad lost his job, the seven of us were within a few weeks of living on the street when he finally got a new job in Iowa. Additionally, having two mortgages for over a year, meant his financial situation after age 49 would be forever in the tank. My parents sold our South Bend, Indiana home, the one they designed and had built 10 years before with one thousand more square feet of livable space, for the same price they bought an 80-year-old fixer upper in southern Iowa. The house came with an inch of dead flies in the upstairs’ floor, almost no closet space to accommodate me and my 4 sisters, a driveway as uneven, and rubble laden as if from a movie earthquake, which he parked one thousand dollar beaters in from then on, after driving a different new car to test for a few weeks at a time when he worked in South Bend.
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Was RJC personally responsible when fighting corporate corruption, or was he irresponsible when he lost his job, almost put his family in a homeless shelter, and burned up a much bigger financial cushion due to head-butting with management? There is a good chance that if dad had lacked the guts to challenge management, he would have moved up even higher in the corporation, more likely had another 34 years on a positive financial path, and death at 83 without over $100K in mortgage debt. Where in the personal responsibility pantheon do you think people like my father are placed on a normal basis? Did he deserve his plight? Should he have gone for the greed gusto, or done what was best ethically? Should he have done the socially responsible thing, or the personally and economically responsible? Going after the powers-that-be is fraught with this kind of livelihood clear-cutting and kneecapping. Allowing the-powers-that-be to use their arrogant position and perspective to determine our situation is just as dangerous.
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Most very large corporations are predisposed to manipulative habits, and political aggrandizement. Some lead; many others follow. Most go along to get along. The corporation’s main or all-encompassing profit seeking focus is the guarantor of its success; everything else will be, and usually is, pushed aside to achieve it. They are not set up to protect the rights of workers, never mind citizens. The mega corporation where our youngest daughter worked her first hourly position at age 16, threatened everyone attending orientation with her, about consorting with unions, or imbibing in their subversive yet informative literature. The corporation’s fear was palpable, and its bedwetting was predictable. No wonder corporate climbers consist of so many gutless goons, and goblins of greed.
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However, even nice people will justify strategies harmful to workers, and the community in our economic structure. The harmful elements have many years of whitewashed ethical degradation, barely registered incremental worker benefits’ repression, and the purchase of political approval. Corporations can do good things for the community, and it can do bad things, as well as both. Giving back 100 million dollars every year to communities is a good thing, but not covering worker health insurance, and saving a half billion dollars every year, is five times worth of bad. These compartmentalizing corporations aggressively and publicly promote the common good, and hide, obfuscate, and if need be, justify the bad via the convenient, upside down greed is good euphemism, while positioning social responsibility, directed by government, as a sucker’s game.
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Except for 5% to 10% of Americans, most of us get our brains primed into part-time politics and public policy thinking, and activities, for only about 30 years, age 40–70, or 30–60. That involvement is done in, and around, raising our kids, focusing on our new job, or business, extra jobs, attending our kids’ after school events, doing home fixer up projects, etc. Such hectic lives create a fragmented knowledge base as to what is happening in our community, let alone other communities, or around the world. Additionally, our generally short lifespan makes historical book learning a prerequisite, which is not a common pursuit, less so for many politicians, therefore we have many large history-repeating-itself knowledge gaps, and a reduced ability to avoid those previous mistakes. Since no one can know everything, we are left with making blinkered decisions that can, and too many times do, impinge on our future, our lives, and that of others.
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Unintended consequences of government actions are often hard to pin on any one decision, how it was implemented, or who ran the project. This political slipperiness is a natural response because the polarized environment disallows the flexibility to learn from mistakes. Since anything that is considered a failure, whether in a minor or major way, will be slated by the other party, usually Republicans, as a waste of taxpayer money, etc., and ended if possible, these programs, policies, regulations, and statutes are strongly defended with few revisory criticisms by Democrats, even if revisions are required to improve the project. Of course, Democrats have little choice in those situations, since exposing any doubts in their government project is met with calls for full eradication from Republican opposition. Instead of considering any failed element as a complete failure that requires termination of the entire legislative project, we must learn from the failure, and repair or overhaul it like most private businesses would. Unfortunately, repealing or gutting the project is what the opposition stridently demands, and in enough cases achieves.
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There are many problems that the two-party politics model — and the public in its current formations — cannot solve. My goal in this essay and others is, and has been, to explain why our political process is incapable of solving big problems, and present why understanding this is important to our future, and also offer a way to workaround politics to attain our objectives that is orders of magnitude advanced, constitutional, non-political partied, and doable.
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Politics proceeds in cycles, most notably in two and four year cycles. In the last 75 years, there has not been a presidency where one party had control more than 12 consecutive years. Since 1980, one part of Congress has switched party control at least every 12 years. Because of cycle length, and the frequency of party-control switching, continuity is continually broken, harming We The People influence. Therefore, the wealthy and big corporations, a.k.a. the external powers-that-be, are able to have more control, consistently, than the people. They always have the ear of the president, or the Congress. During their extensive terms — that can be many decades even a century — multi-tentacled corporations, think Bechtel, or J.P. Morgan and associated entities, have amassed mountains of lobbying muscle, even personal ties, with the political powers-that-be. Many private sector heavy weights also have senior posts in every administration, which is proximity representation the masses almost never have, a pernicious and obscene usurpation of our inalienable right to fair representation.
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Imagine the building up of a monstrous tower for defense, financial, and other corporate lobbyists to reach their highest levels of power over government, and yoke Republicans to do their bidding during their control of Congress or the presidency. The monstrosity of a tower is now tall enough that when the Republicans lose power, the tower can be positioned as a bridge to the next term, or terms, when they regain an overwhelming power base. As far as heads of government agencies and politicians are concerned, these private sector behemoths never removed themselves from the conversation and persuasion base. In the end, the drip, drip, drip (politico-masochistic) water torture of massive industry lobbying, Super PAC dark money spending, tinkle down dink tanks, and donations to politicians, work better than the intermittent firehose of protest, and short-term election victories. Republicans may be fully in this camp already, but Democrats are not immune from the aggressive encroachment of moneyed influence, and the oppressive requirement for campaign dollars.
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Politicians make laws; they are good people and not so good people, people with high ideals considering everyone, as well as people who have their own narrow, skewed ideals, and many abhor updating any universal ideals. Everything is filtered through this hodgepodge of people and their good, average, and terrible ideals, personalities, religious dogmas, emotional traumas, potential sociopathies, etc. Every law is also filtered through our 200 plus year history of good and bad ideals, decisions, leaders, pronouncements, precedents, court rulings, etc. Running any new, or old law, through this filtered gauntlet in all the random ways possible, elicits a different ideals-skewing answer every time, especially as each new round of congresspersons, legislators, or court members are seated. There is something endemically problematic here.
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The whiplash and flip flopping of these rulings and laws, along with the minority of Americans who end up influencing these decisions, has a significant deleterious effect on social confidence and civic cohesion. Though it is insidiously difficult to detect or measure when such connivances are in the process of undermining our democracy. Even if we, the great mass of Americans, could be convinced that 10% of Americans, leaders of the greed industry and political sophistry, have 90% of the correct answers, and the remaining 90% of Americans, the huddled masses yearning to seize thee arrogant, have only 10% of those answers, the problem is that the elite 10% will never fully hear, or correctly understand, our 10% of good answers. Our current national decision matrix does not allow these connections to be made consistently or effectively, due to aristocratic groupthink, pumped up on pompous steroids.
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Leaving out any part of our 10% of answers is like playing skyscraper tall Jenga, without ever expecting the blocks to topple. The political establishment does get some good done, but too many times the whole thing has nearly fallen on our heads; the 2000 election and January 6th are only two fairly recent voting-related, near total toppling incidents. Our financial messes, and military messcapades are other categories in that toppling realm. As we have grown as a nation, our Jenga towers have proliferated, and their height and girth have increased. Using the same politician-based system, will never keep up with improving our situation enough to manage all its complexities, and escape its ever-larger calamities. My belief is that we, the masses, can, should, and must provide at a very minimum 89% of the answers, solutions, and decisions about our future as a nation. A certain level of expertise is required, but limited and groupthink expertise has shown to be very prominent, composed of the ideologically, economically, and politically captured, as well as simply the dodgy category.
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Extreme polarization makes it even more likely our democracy will break before we learn what is required to survive and thrive. For example, our 20 years of Middle East wars, and the 2008 crash, revealed how we are learning less and less from our mistakes. We only effectuate the loss leader portion, and not a corresponding or a bigger gain in our values or ideals, as the 1929 crash, and Vietnam War debacle, provided in at least some ways. Clearly, there were things unlearned as well.
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Lamentably, breaking and destroying things to learn seems to be our strength. That said, we cannot continue solely exploiting this corrupted strength, and little else. The ability to learn from history and human nature has never been productively utilized by politicians. We created a constitution that was based on what worked well, and avoided what did not work well, in antiquity. While not everything was taken into account in a more truly enlightened manner, e.g. slavery was reinterpreted in a more sinister way via the ugly side of Enlightenment, i.e. colorism and a corrupted christianity, the founders made a number of important changes that have lasted over two centuries. On the other hand, today we have much more data about what has, and has not, worked well in the past, and scientific data about our evolutionary propensities, and human nature tendencies, but each decade we use fewer such facts and evaluations to guide us. Why is that?
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Some may say it is due to anti-intellectualism. There is a lot of that. However, the wider threat is party lockstep, sycophantism. Once someone signs onto a party, the voter must follow all the rules, or they are excommunicated. Purging dissenting groups may be effective for a political party, but not for democracy. Having a large dissenting third party caucus within your party is not the same as having many dissenting perspectives, and members pushing new ideas. Being in lockstep works too well as a force for change, or halting change, especially when the main issue of an internal (third party) caucus is aligned with your electoral opposition.
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To hold onto that caucus, you must water down your stance on a core issue due to their influence. Such a strong caucus within a party stretches the fabric of your differentiation value, so independents are less inclined to choose either party. For example, you may hold onto the caucus by watering down the fight for, or against, low taxes on the wealthy, making abortion illegal, a pitifully slow clean energy transition, or voter suppression, but you are then becoming the opposition on your core issues. This lockstep propensity of two, or many, parties is a catch-22 dilemma we cannot extricate ourselves from very easily; our Civil War and the 1929 depression, as well as Shays’ Rebellion, which initiated the 1787 Philadelphia constitutional convention, may be our only examples of successful extrication (in a few major areas at least). Predicting such a demise or drastic deterioration is not much different from the Jeremiah’s who predict the end of the world every few decades, yet the potential for our own democracy end time is greater than in recent decades.
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Rather than continuing to saunter up to it, there is something we can do to get us off that recycling track, and avoid a forced-error end time. That something I will explain in paragraphs before, and in, the conclusion. Before launching that idea I want to dig deeper into how the nation’s major original sin got us into this predicament.
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The state of property over people is still our state of things; perhaps still a priority supported by the state? Yes, some prioritizing is essential for every entity and person, otherwise we are forever bound up by frivolous inconveniences. Corporations and capitalists have always prioritized property, and the profits gained from the activities of property. In contrast, the labor force is a threatening competitive inconvenience for corporations. Obviously, this is not true for all corporations, but as soon as a corporation is large enough, the odds increase quickly and exponentially toward the workers as inconvenience viewpoint. Hiring fewer (full-time) workers can in general improve the bottomline, but not necessarily increase revenues, and gain additional market share. While no business can survive with too many employees, the inconvenience story is not often about survival or the inability to thrive, it is merely the scheme to improve the corporate share price.
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Paying workers a few dollars more or less an hour does not change the potential for any very large corporation. For example, an additional 5 dollars per hour would be 10,000 dollars more per year, per employee. Currently, Walmart generates about 240 thousand dollars on average per year from each employee. By paying them more, they would generate at least half the higher wage, if not all, in increased revenue, so at worst it would reduce their average revenue per employee by 5 thousand dollars to be 235 thousand dollars per year. As you can see, the problem is not about Walmart surviving or thriving, as much as it is taking from their workers all they can, and only mostly but not fully degrading each worker’s life, and future.
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Are we being pushed closer to chattel slavery (when people were sold as property) or farther from it? The gums flapping personal responsibility folks were instilled with a very skewed version of social responsibility as you can see in their ancestors’ acceptance of slavery. Today there are similar strains of thought in their overemphasized personal responsibility perspective. The fear big business has of government overreach is never considered as diabolical as the overreach it often possesses, and utilizes. Their deep entrenchment in government would be just as dangerous with a small government, and much more likely, a lot worse. Grover, and his big business and billionaire bullies, would drown the American masses in the same bathtub as he, and they, want to do to our government.
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As we have forever buried the slave overseer type, we also must rid ourselves of the rugged individualist, captain of industry, railroad baron types along with more recent “I have done it all on my own” charlatans via personal responsibility, sheer perseverance, and other outdated descriptors. The rugged individualist type enslaved people, and evicted and hunted down indigenous people. The other versions fully ignore[d], at minimum, 90% of the population from their success equation. In a nation of over 300 million and a world nearing 8 billion, it is folly to ignore, demean, or oppress such a vast multitude. There is almost no way to be a rugged individualist anymore. Even the billionaire heading off to Mars requires a few people to get them there.
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That said, we still have doubters about the validity of a social responsibility, or having concern for the common good, as if it must always involve a totalitarian state, with an ominous ism thrown in. Let us see how far such non-farsighted thinking gets us today. Imagine the rugged individualist sitting down to eat dinner in the midst of a massive earth-sized food court, with 8 billion people including the rugged one sitting thigh to thigh, while Rugged is eating the only meal because Rugged was the only one that could afford to eat. Now, is individualism and personal responsibility going to save Rugged’s ass, or would thinking in a socially responsible way be more advantageous to the rugged one? Gated communities, threatening tinted window vehicles, bought government officials, private police forces, a large cache of weapons, employing strikebreakers, and plantation overseers are ways captains of blustery and bullying are, and were, able to ignore, and subjugate the hoi polloi.
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Hiding from social responsibility, I guess is personal responsibility from the perspective of the rugged — fearing government control — individualist. Why are the rugged, thuggish, ones able to purchase governments, amass weapons, hire police, etc., and when the overlooked masses demand that a stronger government work on their side, their much more sane demand is worse and must be feared? The wealthy are justified in protecting their turf, but our turf is to be left unprotected so their “free” market can be excessively leveraged onto us in much smaller overpriced, payday-loaned tracts, along with unregulated contaminants and disastrous effects here and there? What a bargain. Then blaming government for allowing you, the economic elite, to crash the housing market, or blaming the poor for participating in your schemes. (Of course, not until after all your years of profit taking and raking in.) What a shameful, take no personal-responsibility hypocrite, and white-collar scammer you are, wolfish of Wall Street Grandmofo.
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The only thing that supposedly should increase wages is a tight labor market, but what are increased or better wages today when we have been paid subverted (minimum) wages for many decades? For example, the minimum wage should be 22 dollars an hour today if the wage rise had continued, and not peaked in 1968. An American who worked 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, using 15 dollars an hour as today’s base, would have had at least an additional 14 thousand dollars (in 2021 dollars) to spend or save every past year worked.
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Many are against government getting involved in the regulation of businesses, and the “free” market, particularly in setting wages and prices. But companies like Bechtel, Koch, Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, J.P. Morgan, etc. all rely on the government to protect them (not just via military or local police), and many like Bechtel and Boeing rely on the government to pay them. The Supreme Court in the last decade increased their protection from labor union organizing, and widened their free speech protection, a.k.a. the ability to be shielded from public scrutiny, and exponentially expand the campaign donation limits of corporations and the wealthy.
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The Bechtel corporation, which has been wholly protected by the government in its defense and energy industry colluding practices, and pilfering of American taxpayers, does not provide public reports about its government work using its “but we are a private company” dodge to lie, cheat, and steal from us. They have made billions dinking around in forever nuclear cleanup taxpayer rip offs, the Boston Big Dig boondoggle, and botched, no-bid U.S. military projects’ with huge cost overruns in Iraq, and throughout the world.
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Realize that there never was a time, and will never be a time when the government is uninvolved with business. For example, the banking system makes all business viable, and it would not survive today without government guaranteeing the money supply. Big business loves deregulation and passionately wants government out of their business until it needs to be bailed out. But does this mean government should be overly involved in business? Of course not, yet if government must sometimes bail out businesses, government does have its place monitoring, and regulating businesses, and enforcing compliance in our rules. And We The People should have a much larger say in that placing conversation and legislation.
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As to low, non-livable wages, American workers have done nothing wrong to deserve such a fate. The problem is the political power differential. If large corporations are having their way with politicians, and We The People do not, it is easy to guess which way the political pendulum will swing, and who will have the most powerful say in how our economic environment evolves. The appeals for smaller government harbor a doubled edged danger. Since government is never a non-entity, the group with the most power over the government regularly decides the fate of those with lesser power, and with no, or minimal input. A small government reduces the power of the people, and increases the power of those with the most wealth. Though the people with a very small government may have their freedom from government, they will not often have their freedom from anything else.
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A king with an army can be more of a dictator than a king with a parliament and an army.
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Elected governments are currently the only buffer the people have from despotism. The 1st and 2nd Amendments have no value without a government’s protection. By themselves, your gun and bullets, and my mouth and words, do not create an amendment valuing buffer. Yes, even an elected government can be oppressive, but like almost everything else in life, some spectrum of moderation is required to avoid falling off the wagon on one side, or the other. Unless We The People have our side fully covered, the wealthy and, corporations, will press us hard against, or off, our weakened side. Just as they squeeze out more profits by lowering our wages as low as they want, when government is made small, and weak, in the defense of workers and citizens. Fortunately, I have a new, and different way out of this power pressurized predicament that gives We The People more direct power over the government, politicians, and the big wealthy, and big business.
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But what happens when telephone operators get replaced by automatic telephone switches? (a nostalgic example) Do telephone companies need to pay operators to stare at switches all day? Enforcing much higher wages to do jobs that are so simple a child could do them, or can be done automatically, is something a government should probably never do. That said, too much automation has been subsidized by low interest rates, which was made available by the government. Also think of a job as a grocery or large retail store cashier, where interaction with the customer is helpful to customer service. Consider how downsizing knowledgeable employees can harm sales on the profit side of the balance sheet. Is the corporation really profit oriented, or lower costs incentivized, meaning more focused on fewer employees rather than better trained employees? By providing low interest rates and tax write-offs on machinery to corporations, the government is picking winners and losers, a favorite conservative anti-government talking point. But guess who the losers are? Big money wins, workers and citizens lose.
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More directly, it is possible to avoid a lot of this handwringing by setting up a system that provides workers in America with the jobs we want, where the government bureaucracy is removed, or kept, from doing any micromanaging in the employment arena. The system must make sure that when technology changes, workers are not left in the lurch, and new employers get the highest level of ability possible from each worker. Workers must have much greater flexibility, support, and choice than they currently have. Rather than only relying on multiple labor unions throughout the United States, the jobs system should be nationwide, highly advanced, and an automatic common good benefit every worker in America receives. Call it the Jobs Development Platform. The JDP has workers choosing their jobs instead of employers doing the choosing, while employers are guaranteed qualified workers. Furthermore, illegal and unethical hiring discrimination is ended with the JDP workers-choose construct.
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The Jobs Development Platform makes social and economic responsibility a given on all sides; putting personal responsibility back where it belongs, in the individual that expresses it, not on the preacher pundit’s lips. Private property is also forever demoted fathoms below We The People. The corporate-influenced government lowered interest rates to buoy private property, while allowing workers’ wages to sink underwater without a bailout, only an invisible hand-jobbed government to pull us deep into insolvency. American workers have not done anything wrong, it is a political infrastructure failure, exacerbated by an out-of-date system. We have powered up business without an advanced grid to efficiently and effectively connect workers. The JDP is that advancement.
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Conclusion.
You know something is wrong with a system that made people property, which in turn made property more importantthan people. While the determination that property is a higher priority than people, in our early years as a nation, does not make capitalism inherently bad, our cultural acceptance of property’s high value still influences our politics, and our generally executed economic ideology. Having said that, the masses of people, which includes the common worker, somewhere below the top 10%, were called the ignorant masses for our first couple centuries. The ignorant masses epithet was used in many respects because of how highly we prioritized property. It is why only (White male) property owners had the right to vote in our early years as a confederation, and then unified nation.
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But not until about 1830 were all White American men given the vote. Black men got the vote in 1870 after our Civil War, and all women in 1920 after nearly 100 years of agitation. Of course, most people of color did not get significant federal protection to vote until 1965. Since property was so profoundly and passionately protected by the government for nearly 200 years before every adult was able to vote safely, it is easy to see why property, and capitalism are still unevenly weighted, and pose an ongoing threat to the masses. Keeping us ignorant through uneven educational opportunities is another way they are holding us down, and subservient to their selfish economic plans.
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The “free” market monster and the government leviathan are not inherently bad. But what and how much we feed them, and the length of leash with give them can be a problem. Both unleashed government bureaucracies and big business billionaires can chase politicians into calamitous corners. The monster and the leviathan can be fed too much, then growing their tentacles into many pots and cookie jars of corruptibles. Nevertheless, our biggest problem here is believing one is worse than the other. The mammal monster may be furrier and cuddlier than the scaly sea creature, but they both have sharp teeth and strong arms. Besides everyone wanting their government to protect the nation from invasion, the monster wants a small, weak government to push its property priorities as far as it can, and the governed masses want a strong enough government to protect them, so they can go about their lives without being made the property of another, etc.
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Working for, or running and owning, a business is fine. Participating in the “free” market is fine. However, workers demand to be treated fairly. We will work through government if employers ignore our pleas, therefore a strong enough government is required. What does being treated fairly mean? It means what we need it to mean. There is no final say, today or tomorrow. As business and society changes, so will what we need and want from both. That is democracy as we see it, flexible and responsive, and as our future needs it.
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The sincerest form of flattery is to steal an idea from your competitor.
When Charles M. Schwab, an engineer at the Carnegie steel mill at the time, made a presentation in front of J. Pierpont Morgan, near the beginning of the 20th century, he noted how steel mill trusts currently entered the market. Once these mills gained as much market share as they could, they would raise prices two or three times to make huge gulps of short term profits, which would dwindle in later years as other competition erupted. Schwab’s ideas was to buy up other mills, and reduce the price on steel. That low price strategy made U.S. Steel, which also purchased the Carnegie mills, one of the most massive corporate monopolies of the Gilded Age, dominant here, and the largest on the planet.
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To that flattering end, let us consider how large corporations compete with We The People for the ear of presidents, legislatures, and Congress. Today, corporations and the wealthy have a near monopoly on politics. Right now we are late 19th century old steel mills paying double and triple to get the ear of our politicians, or more accurately, whatever we pay never gets us more than one half or one third of what the wealthy and the corporations receive. Also, too many politicians are the one percent, and work much harder for the one tenth of one percent. Politicians only hear us right before, and maybe right after, an election, or after a significant societally fraught event. In contrast, throughout the year they are lobbied into submission by, and must constantly ask for money from, their true financial overlords. The best way to counteract that competitive challenge is to join them, or at least develop a facsimile of their approach. Then beat them at their own games.
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Rather than going after the big prize with series after series of hurried, half court shots, We The People must outflank the current political structure with our own strategic influencing behemoth like multi-national corporations, and billionaires, are able to muster. This feat should only be attempted with a wider net than a few thousand politicians of two political parties. We must spread the wealth of our masses’ power into the most massive, democratic force possible. Lower our sights from mostly unfulfilling, big political wins while we widen our breadth to encompass real power, to make long term change. That is, from a good portion of our 300 million citizens and workers’ force, we can achieve more power to comprehensively improve all our outcomes. Such a force is much more powerful than any amount of money we could give to the polarized political process. We cannot compete in the big money arena as consistently as the deeply ensconced big money moguls. Consequently, we must take a new, truly countervailing route to break up the muddle, and scrum that is smothering our power and corrupting our future.
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To a large extent, we are all climbing a separate ladder to our potential successes, frequently starting at a very low, vulnerable point. That is because we are ignoring one of our greatest assets, the masses we represent. So I recommend that the masses develop a robust base of operations that sets everyone on a much higher plane to initially begin, or refresh, our journey. Counterintuitively this higher plane structure makes it possible to continue as an individual in some or all things possible, or develop a community to further enhance your efforts. It is We The People starting from a much higher level together. The whole effort raises our game to the point where big business does not have all the power over our lives, or too much influence over our government. No longer can bought and banal politicians continue to stall and gridlock our better future. The We The People System I am proposing can power the Jobs Development Platform, an entire enhanced and advanced civic participation structure, and much more!
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More about the We The People System.
Making the case for person-to-person, community-to-community, democracy w/ advanced guard rails (an ideals algorithm)…richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
The signs of the times forebode major change in some form: choose or lose.richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
We must abandon the terrible, gerbil wheel of deplorable ism-ing-ing-ing-ing-ing.richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
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