Punishing The Poor Has Been Very Productive For Us, So Pat Yourself On The Back America!
When you are down and out, wealthy Americans are there to kick, and knock you about.
In mid 1974, seven months after my father lost his job, we were all a few weeks away from living in the street, Dick and Dot, myself and my four sisters. Thankfully, dad did get six months of severance pay, at 60% of his salary. Yes, that was better than nothing, but getting your pay cut 40% overnight will dramatically change your current, and near future perspective. Few Americans are able to continually save enough of their take home pay to cover such a deficit for very long. Luckily, dad was able to get a loan from his aunt. Shortly afterward he also found a job, or just into the eighth month of joblessness. Sadly, he was never able to regain the same financial footing; he died in debt 33 years later.
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My birth family’s full story was not a terrible one. It came very close to an all too frequent tragedy, and never was the clean, ever-rising American dream afterwards, but compared to where millions of other Americans end up, my parents led decent lives, and so did their kids, me included. The trip up that put my parent’s dream on a downward path was my dad’s own damn fault. He had many very incompatible business ideas and beliefs. In corporate America, he tried to be consistently straightforward, and helpfully honest. That has a tendency to backfire when you confront the big bosses about their malfeasance. Seems like there can be resentment when you raise difficult questions, and demand truthful answers from ginormous wankers. If dad would have just kept his mouth shut, and become a slimy greed grifter, we could have exulted in all the mammon imaginable. And I could have overdosed on cocaine at Studio 54 before my eighteenth birthday.
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That said, I am glad to be here, and then again not so much. I guess I am in a state of true ambivalence. Still being alive to write is great, but the topic of poverty is not dear to my heart. Something that shouldn’t occur in a land of plenty. Sadly, it does happen in a land of plutocrats. They are the human sleeves who deserve a proverbial wooden-pencil-parsed heart, although as a recalcitrant Van Helsing pacifist, I could almost never consider performing such an act of plagiaristic bloodlust. These human sleeves are the punishers of the economic precarious, and the poor. They are also the numerous and nameless pus bags who must be taught a common good lesson, and brought down a number of overcompensated notches. Disclaimer: also some pus bags may accidentally not remain nameless. Outing, skewering, and heart-parsing pus bags has been my cause-célèbre for centuries.
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Our Economic Theory Delirium.
Capitalism is a great thing, until it is not. As anyone who has ever stood up for “free” market capitalism will say, it is not perfect, but it is the best economic system we have. I like that truism axiom because it admits, upfront, there are failures, and fault lines inherent in the idea. The not perfect parts are where capitalism fails us. Of course, nothing is perfect. Yet that does not absolve the person, backing their imperfect concept, from doing nothing about the blowback effects of that economic theory. Another major problem is with the supporters of capitalism, and the insistence that We The Peoplepower, and influence, be almost nil, nada, nothing in the business environment. Such an idea is no better than the socialist seeing some kind of utopian apex where socialism does everything we need and want. Neither utopian versions will likely condone We The People intervention since neither drastic version will be supported by all of us.
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Everything and every system will always have imperfections. Conversely, those imperfections are the problem, and will continue to be the problem. While this may seem like an intractable paradox, there is a better way to approach the imperfections of a system. As with our Constitution’s preamble, in order to form a more perfect union, there is always work to be done, to protect it, and improve it when necessary. How we develop our economic structure is also an ongoing process. While no system as large as an economic one should be changed willy-nilly, that is without significant deliberation, and preparation to adjust for unintended consequences, the fact that nothing is perfect should not preclude improvements. So both are simultaneously correct; perfection is not the goal, and imperfections are failures. This gap is where our problems begin and end.
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The first thing we must do is to rename our economic system. A cogent brand provides more clarity that older and broader terms cannot. Rather than continuing with concepts such as capitalism, or socialism, I will call our system Americonomism. The reason this new branding is important has to do with how our 245 years of reality have formed our economic system.
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The Peoples’ Economy.
Being a democracy, the people will always have at least some power over the structuring of any system. Removing the people from the economic part of the equation is very unlikely. Our government is by the people, which means government will always be involved. Therefore, some level of regulatory intervention will continue. The people will demand some level of protection from business interests. At the very least the corrupt company store, industrial-sized sweatshops, unscrupulous sharecropper landlords, and corporations with near complete autonomy from legal and societalpressure are not coming back. Basically, the most severe laissez faire capitalists are never getting everything they want. That is a fantasy in a We The People democracy, because the people do not want an economic system that usurps their civic power.
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The same is true for the purist of socialists; anything close to a government from the foundation up, bureaucrat-managed economy will not happen. The moderate American socialist is unlikely to see their complete dreams fulfilled. This is not to say there cannot be any movements towards more social programs and legal enhancements for labor unions and such. Capitalists have made society-controlling inroads in the last five decades, and the pendulum could swing further left in response. However, there is one structural element that is going to keep the economy where it is, or moved some distance farther right. That is the concentrated power dynamic of big money in politics and massive billionaire monopolies, duopolies, or tri-opolies which continue to infringe upon We The People, democratic governance.
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For us to make headway in refining our economic system another level, a super majority of Americans must come to an agreement that the Americonomy is a democratic economy. It has always been that, and is that, in many ways, but has become lopsided again in the last four decades by the mega wealthy and large corporate business interests. If we continue debating whether capitalism or socialism is the best way to go, little will be decided, let alone done to improve things for struggling, and economically precarious Americans, which I consider those not in the top 50% to 20%. As I noted above, that income or wealth designation can change at any time, especially when the fixing potential is still voluminous.
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Bully Billionaires, and Nameless Pus Bags.
We must call out every greed grubbing offender who is cheating We The People out of our future. They may be your kindly neighbors, or the creepy dude in the gated-community down the street. Many good people are trapped in economic structures that are indifferent to the needs of society, and will tangentially contribute to the problem, wittingly or somewhat unwittingly. Fewer in number are the bad people who construct those edifices to indifference, and are directlyculpable. Yet many bad people are caught in the inertia set in motion many decades ago by the more capitalism–less democracy Reaganomics’ putsch. And everyone else in between and around also have some level of culpability. You and I cannot easily remove ourselves from any of the bad actors because of where we invest and spend our money, and who many of us work for.
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What I demonstrated above was how depressingly tangled we are in the system we currently have. How do we defeat the grinding-into-dust future we all are contributing to, and are so tied tightly up in? A small percentage do benefit from it in various ways, but our current economic system also punishes our planet, and pushes down and away too many people.Capitalism, how it is currently played, whether more socialist than capitalists want it, or still uncomfortably close to the worst kind of capitalism we have ever experienced, has major problems. Those problems do not occur in a vacuum. Our political system, as it functions today, guarantees almost nothing comprehensively effective and lasting will be accomplished for the common good.
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For example, Biden’s spending bills of 500 billion dollars on energy will be about 15 to 18 trillion dollars per year lowerthan what we need to spend each year over the next 25+ years to reach the 2050 goal of net-zero emissions. In today’s dollars, Americans, including the government, spend about 9.5 trillion dollars per year on energy. Some of the extra 15 to 18 trillion would come directly from our pockets as consumers — likely paying some portion of an energy efficient, and renewables home update, and transition to electric vehicles — and the remainder from higher gasoline, and income taxes, and government debt purchases. While many Americans may be upset about paying that much more for energy in the next few decades, the capitalist pus bags caused nearly all of the political delay and the ecological damage that lodged us in such a backlogged deficit.
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When anything the government wants to do for the common good is delayed, obstructed, watered-down, or denied, the pus bags are the culprits. The pus bags see their own greedy aggrandizement as a valid contribution to the common good, and whatever scraps are left over can be spread around like alms to the poor. We The People in general are powerless to fight back on a regular basis. The People generate much of their power from the government. While the wealthy do not require the government for power, they can and will access a weakened government via their money and power. Then as they weave their money, and power into, and around the political machine, the wealthy gain even more power from the government.
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Notice the escalation in the bully-billionaire power dynamic above, buying up greater influence from professional lobbyists, and full time influencers, and punishers. Fighting city hall is much easier if it is not run by a political machine. The state and federal governments are more difficult to fight due to their respective size. Today, political machines are developed in more elastic ways, and change somewhat more often in their constituencies, and compilation of goals. Their power differentials are based on various silos of focus and action rather than near complete control of everything, as they were inclined to be many decades ago. That said, the state and federal government have increased and nearly solidified their connection to wealthy individuals and groups associated with them. This colluding relationship has led to the problems that have so stymied our ability to make needed changes for the common good.
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The Rule-Violating, Ruling Class, Reigns Extreme.
Rules that are politically pliable are very common-good unreliable. That is how America has regularly gotten a bad rap. We move away from our ideals when we allow politics to extremely stretch, or supremely mess with, the rules of play. However, our ideals are ill-formed, corrupted by our history and half-assed corrective actions, as I explain in the following two sections. In this section, I will explain how ill-formed ideals distort and harm our democracy.
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Party “R” is bloated by billionaires, over-muscled, proactive lacking, robustly reactive, and regressively future-oriented, a.k.a. the slow-mo status quo. Party “D” charges into the middle of the pack, supporting many causes, wildly swinging its arms, advocating for tens of millions without a voice, or a bank account, and seems like it is doing a lot, but cannot do much because it has decided to play by most of the old political rules. Both sides being ensconced in the capitalist ventureto one level or another has increased their inability to help the common good. For example, some Democrats still get pumped by public-private partnerships, which too often deviate from common good work.
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The political rules Party “D” plays by are the rules Party “R” now quickly eschews and undermines when the rules do not provide the outcomes Party “R” requires. Party “D” is stuck in a set of rules no one else is following. Being sanctimonious about Party “R” not following the rules makes little sense when Party “R” is consistently subverting the common good like stacking 6 conservative justices on the Supreme Court, placing unqualified judges on other federal courts, fighting universal health insurance, pursuing unwinnable, forever wars at home and abroad, promoting rampant gun violence, and destroying the environment.
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Without the agreement to follow the same rules, and actually following them, the political system breaks down. When rules can be bent as far as possible, without ever being broken to the point where real costs are borne, there are no rules. Expanding-to-infinity political campaign spending by the wealthy, and untethering the identity strings to the sources of that spending, tightens, and perverts, the grip money has on politicians. When a multiplicity of constituents are getting outspent by a few, electoral representation gets fatally skewed.
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Since we have not actually settled on our basic ideals, it is difficult to see how we can effectively navigate our future. Our disagreements are deep in our marrow, not merely something we can sand off in a few legislative terms. For example, are we a diversity welcoming, inclusive United States, or a White supremacist, separatist nation? Are we a Judeo-Christian, televangelist nation, or a secular government with freedom of religion? Do women have control over their bodies, or do certain religious traditions, and their scary zealots, have the first and last weapon, and word? Does science and factual evidence determine how we solve our present and future, or do those solutions come from some combination of political-Machiavellian extremism, and a few supposedly foundational faith traditions? Should the rule of law rule the nation, or should retribution, and the threat and use of guns rue society?
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Our democracy is under much strain today because we have not collectively equalized our ideals since the founding of the nation. Even then it was done by only about 20 percent of the adult members of society. Packing those two problematic pieces together is a big reason why there is so much consternation and contention in our nation. If you have put off coming together and making the big decisions for so. long, and you are still working from a corrupted White male, wealthy landowner originalist script, it is a no-brainer why there is so much stress on the system nearly 250 years later. Our ideals have changed, while not drastically overall, they have in many specific instances changed drastically. Rather than cleaning the slate and starting over, we have partially erased elements, and have written overtop those glitches in very ineffective ways as in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, as it shows in our need for a Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Housing Rights Acts, and other.
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The result of the above: Democracy is only worthwhile when the rich get their unfair share, and it allows the originalists to incrementally suffocate a living constitution, and mendaciously delay the changes our planet, and our future as an inclusive nation, requires.
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The Origin Story of Our Original Sin Entanglement.
The goal of this section is to show our myths and misunderstandings about our own history have clouded our pursuit of societal truth and economic justice. I have included some history below to correct the record, so the premise of my essay can be understood.
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Slavery, states’ rights, the Continental Army, and the divergent education of a nation are all entangled in the messes we have created. Those who cannot see, or do not want to know about, our past failures, want America to always languish in those failures, and stumble over them. No successful businessperson would ever not remember, or refuse to learn from, her or his failures. How could America ever be exceptional if we did not?
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George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and John Laurens had their epiphany, or further justification, for establishing a national government, and a standing army, during their horrible experience at Valley Forge. Hamilton and Marshall were always about complete freedom for slaves, as Washington and Laurens increased their belief in emancipation over time. Everyone but Washington had a university education. However, Washington eagerly sought out highly educated men so as to fight the war successfully.
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The self-taught collaborating with the educated elite of the day made sense, as it does now. There is nothing inherently better about persons who have made either choice, or were lucky enough to have a choice to be self-taught, or get a college degree, or more. The objective was to have enough minds with different experiences, knowledge, perspectives, as well as big enough straight-talking egos to guarantee Washington was getting the best and straightforward advice, not just sycophants and yes men who appease and flatter him.
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Washington recognized that he needed one of two types of men, those who had been trained in critical thinking and had been challenged by people from other backgrounds, and-or well trained military professionals. Unfortunately for Washington, there was a great desert-dearth of officers and experienced military men. Though there were a number of small squads of elite militia troops like the Connecticut Rangers and the Marblehead Mariners.
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The reason for lack of professional training was the subservient status of subjects residing in a British colony. Colonial subjects were not drafted into the British Army in any consistent manner, most men were not trained in standard army form except during times of war, as Washington was during the French and Indian War. Few then were well-trained since the King and Parliament did not want to develop a potential professional army to reside as citizens in these far away colonies. Even an entire state’s militia would be fearful of taking on the British Empire’s professional soldiers, and there was no uniting of colonies in any form or a strong feeling for it, until about 1775. So no state would have come to the defense of another state against the Redcoats before that time.
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Washington only trained his troops during battle because he was tasked with near immediate threats by the British, and had little time or money to spend on training. Actually it was Baron von Steuben who whipped green militia men into a professional fighting force after Valley Forge beginning in 1778. America’s general needed men who already knew how to fight as a team, without restrictive, or time sensitive attachments to their home base, and clan. Only small skirmishes pursued by Minutemen alone would have meant a many decade insurgency. These state militia fighting men, would leave after 12 months, or just 6 months. They had many military discipline shortcomings including an inability to march in formation to fleeing just as they needed to fire, or charge forward. We needed a standing army of at least 30 thousand to successfully fight the British, and win in most cases, without help from others.
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There were multiple instances where the Redcoats could have overwhelmed the Continental Army, even killed or captured Washington, especially early on, and completely demoralized our cause, or ended at least our initial attempt at freedom from King George. For example, if the Howe brothers had not been leading the British army — both saying “they didn’t want to destroy the Continental Army” — and instead two other Redcoat commanders had been in control those first few years, and were determined to destroy us immediately, it is very likely we would have remained colonies for a few additional decades at minimum. The British brothers’ reluctance to end the war in one major, bloody slaughter had to do with their fond connection to America, and William Howe’s in-country romantic relationship. Rather than being able to negotiate a surrender after winning their first critical battle on Long Island, as was their preference, the Howes allowed General Washington to escape from New York.
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Much American luck, enormous French loans the U.S. government never paid off, Redcoat reluctance to end the war in a decisively crushing battle early on, thousands of soldiers’ lives wasted at Valley Forge, and more on Ghost Ship prisons, and personal fortunes lost, and general haphazardness occurred, so we barely won our Revolutionary War. Finally, we relied on the French to win our last big battle in Yorktown. All of these incidents occurred to some large degree because America did not consider itself a nation.
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The states feared a standing army, and therefore disliked the Continental Army. Yet it was key to have a large, well-trained force that could follow the British wherever they went throughout the 13 states, with a desire to stick to it, year after year, and having the financial support to pursue the war thoroughly. We built up an oppressively huge debt to France because our cowardly, monied class cared little about the common good. Over ten thousand American soldiers died, and many civilians were raped, and killed due to the wealthy’s cheap and sordid negligence.
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Many Americans likely still believe The Revolutionary War was mostly a matter of the Minutemen militia winning the day. However, unfed, unpaid, unsheltered, unclothed, and undisciplined troops are not very likely to get the job done. Lamentably, it took our 1812 war to expose the vulnerabilities of lacking a decently financed standing army and navy. Of course, the wealthy had disdain for our government, allowing the Whitehouse to be burned down. And it was not until later in the 1800s that we put much real money into either. Our luck with having two separating oceans, and distant enemies our main threats, barely kept us viable.
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The Slavish, Dysfunctional Sovereign States Theory.
The culmination of all our history results in the current dynamic of a violent Jekyll and Hyde belief in the federal government. This is the split between Hamilton’s and Washington’s more centralized government position, and Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s mostly states’ rights sovereignty position. This is ironic since both Jefferson and Madison should have known about the need for unification into a national government structure because of how we nearly lost everything during the war. Additionally, there were near mutinies during the war, and many disturbances due to the debtor status of many veteran militia, and army members after the war, including Shays’ Rebellion that initiated our 1787 Constitutional Convention.
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Yet, Jefferson was fixated on violence being the answer, or the threat of it, with his comment to Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” This was from the guy who was our peacemaker diplomat in France, and fled on horseback from the British many times, never violently engaging the enemy himself. The contradictions are too ripe to need more explanation.
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The other engine of our discontents was the fact that slavery anchored the position they took on states’ rights. Madison and Jefferson likely would have said their reasoning for states’ rights ran deeper than their own need for slavery, or slavery’s importance. However, by beginning their notion of nation or confederation with both states’ rights and slavery, they guaranteed the forever impossibility of separating the two. That major flaw in reasoning put us on the path to intermittent violent disruption, i.e. race riots, and labor strikes, and sometimes teetering on dissolution, i.e. Civil War, or fake election fraud insurrections. Our economic and social path is fraught with major fault lines because of our reliance on such an out-of-date political and governmental structure. States’ rights are not without merit, but they are blown out-of-all proportion in their reasoning and application.
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Some Northerners, and other Southerners like the two above hoped slavery would peter out after a couple decades. Again, because of the states’ rights doctrine, this was a perjured pipe dream, or a convenient and profitable decision. Whichever it was, states’ rights anchored in slavery contributes to our current problems with capitalism. Socialism is the rallying cry for those who see the problems associated with, and created by, the entangled two. Likely few socialist manifestos would have been written if states’ rights was not combined with slavery. Individual rights would have been higher on the inalienable rights’ hierarchy. Instead, the guarantee of individual rights for all were delayed much longer, and even strangled at times by the entangled two.
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Conclusion.
The tangled web we have weaved holds us back, and always has. While wiping the slate clean, and starting over, without all the dead weight of our past, would be best if a perfect new world was guaranteed, the likelihood of only bringing forward the good parts is low. The devil-in-the-details-you-know is a difficult partner to divorce from because the unknown new elements could fling everything out of control without much warning. Furthermore, the decision would not be left up to those who wanted to initiate the positive changes. And as we know, merely employing the word democracy does not make for a perfect world. The structure must be there to produce the result desired. Our founding fathers obviously did not have the complete bullet [and bullshit] proof structure. At best it was a wish, and a hope in us, their progeny.
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The widest berth for a better future, although not without problems, comes from our two preambles in the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
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“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
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What these documents did not, and could not do, was predict the future, and how we would challenge some of their specific views, laws, and ideas. Regrettably, these challenging elements were not given the same wide berth to be decided from the other content in their [and our] document. Both preambles are, and were, made nearly impotent by the powers-that-be, and that have been over the last two plus centuries. Designating men in the Declaration’ preamble, and malewithin the Constitution —a total of four places in both documents — greatly contributed to a delay of almost 150 years for women to get the vote. So insidious are two words, noted only four times in total. These discreet penned contrivances denied many other rights, as well, to half the nation. It would have taken as much effort and time to employ the word all instead of men, and less time and effort than male. Such a simple word switch would have put us in a much better situation today.
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Additionally, free persons was the only allusion to slaves, and as to representation apportionment, three fifths was the only allusion to slavery in the Constitution, i.e. previous to the 13th Amendment that outlawed the practice of chattel slavery. For almost 100 years, those four words kept Black Americans in bondage, then de facto placed them under Jim Crow another 100 years, and to this day, its disgusting originalist constitutional residue perpetrates racist ideas, actions, policies, laws, and law enforcement.
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The manner in which we have gone about narrowing the meaning of words and phrases — including our general welfare, establishing justice, securing the blessings of liberty, insuring our domestic tranquility, and inalienable rights as in life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness — causes many societal problems to persist. For some reason the narrowing has meant that law and order, and private property, i.e. business interests, are our main concerns, and the people are secondary. Why does so much value supposedly emanate from the police, and plutocracy state? Why have We The Peoplebeen overlooked for so long, and in so many ways? We must open up the valves of these foundational words and ideals to meet the challenges of today, and tomorrow.
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It is interesting how the police state is again controlled by the plutocracy state after a short break during the FDR administration to the mid 1970s, which took a great depression and world war to engender. We The People will always end up taking a back seat in our political system because money and government can much easier, get much cozier.
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Therefore, we need a government for We The People. That means working around the current political system with a more direct and powerful path to influence the government, and truly make it our government. Politics as it is practiced today is confused, corrupt, and obsolete. However, it still is the big player on the block. Since that is the case, we cannot abandon politics entirely. Working within the current system must continue. That said, developing a potent workaroundis required, if we are to make any major changes within this decade, or maybe at any time this century, without further social disruption and violence, by some of the people, or the plutocrats. More about the workaround.
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