We need a massive economic change that in addition to removing power and unearned wealth, identifies and compensates based on one’s innate worth ensuring a robust safety net. COVID-19 is bad but here is the opportunity it presents.
I generally work out between maybe midnight and two in the mornings. As I do the treadmill and my routines, I have been watching Netflix documentaries, learning a lot, getting affirmation for many of my beliefs and much more. It continues to give me a resolve to try to do more. It takes many of us to do it.
Those of us who have the good fortune to vegetate at home unlike the heroes at the hospitals, grocery stores, our garbage collectors, and other hands that truly make our economy work should consider two very good series. “Dirty Money” and “Rotten.”
I bring this up because I realize how hard change is from our calculated indoctrination that we have been deceived into accepting as our own. I was having heartburn and my wife brought me bottled water. I immediately felt, like, ‘Damn, even my household is a part of the problem.’ I wish she had watched “Troubled Water” in the Rotten series.
This is how indoctrination works when we are complicit either by apathy or gullibility to corporate control of our government and our being.
We allow corporations to take freely available water, own rights to water, bottle it and resell it to us at prices well in excess of production and even marketing. Worse, we pay for that water often twice as it is processed tap water we buy.
But it is even more sinister. These corporations promote the neglect of public water infrastructure by creating alliances to depress the tax base (tax cuts, etc.). Sometimes this causes water quality issues. They then market the bottled water to fix that problem. The thing is that the cost of bottled water way exceeds by orders of magnitude the tax base for having good water treatment systems available to all. The difference? Corporate executives and shareholders take your money that you could otherwise use to increase your own personal economy, your own wealth. This is the mechanism our economic system uses to unfairly take your wealth with your consent.
But it gets even worse. All those plastic bottles are now likely living in you and your children as the ubiquity of their presence are found throughout our ecosystem. Are these multibillion-dollar corporations with their overpaid executives going to pay anything to clean up the mess their “innovation” has created? Hell no. They are already now making profits on the remediation of the mess they created,
We are likely going into a depression. The thing is that it won’t be widely televised. You see in order to maintain our system we must not show its many gross failures. That is why my daughter was in shock when she rode through Appalachia on one of her medical projects. She had never seen poverty like that and that it was of a hue seldom acknowledge widely in the mainstream media, made it more shocking to her. You see, it is essential for one group to believe they are mostly immune to the inherent nature of the extractive economic system we live under.
We are all complicit at some level. So, for those who want to do the right thing to make real change, what can they do? Many small businesses, specifically restaurants, hotels, and other places where people go, are gone forever. It is not COVID-19 that is ultimately responsible for their demise. It is a flawed economic system that has no valves to protect society against temporary stasis caused by unforeseen events no fault of the person proper.
The solution involves redefining corporations by first stripping personhood and thus making persons only, persons. This is more complex than most need to understand but must be done. As such we remove all rights that real human beings have from some invented entity with unlimited resources. Corporations must have “ZERO” political power. Shareholder value must be the true value of a corporation’s assets, period. In other words, the fraud of speculation is eliminated. Do remember that the fact that there is no mathematical formula for the market means it is a gambling casino. All other concepts are present to allow financial instruments to screw most. And we are ultimately always left holding the bag as the dunces-playing-intellectuals of the economic system ultimately fail because it is built on nothing.
The economy is you. They want it to be a controlled-you to take it all from most. And if one looks at the charts, there is no question we are heading to complete indentured servitude to the 1% and managed by the following 9%.
So again, what can we do. The first thing we must do is forget most of what we have learned about our economic system. Secondly, we must be willing with pushback to learn from the many sources objecting to this corrosive indoctrinating system.
A depression is always a fork in the road. The Great Depression made social programs to make a better society doable because so many were hurting. It was eroded over the years again through our indoctrinating Think Tanks.
People are and will be hurting again, COVID-19 survivors will start getting their inflated bills. All of our health insurance premiums will go sky high because of much higher payouts. Of course, corporate executives and their ilk along with their media broadcaster’s increase will not suffer the same pain because the guardians of the gates must be protected to enhance the system’s survivability. Hospitals will inflate prices given that they lost much of their elective business.
The economic change we must demand
Irrespective of who is elected we must demand the following to get the economic change we want
- Demand Medicare for All,
- Demand student loan forgiveness. These would have been unnecessary or much lower if corporations and the wealthy paid their damn taxes to educate the people who ultimately made them rich.
- Demand family-leave.
- Demand massive environmental cleanup to protect our kids.
- Demand subsidized childcare to allow all the opportunity to work either for a corporation or themselves.
- Demand rebuilding our infrastructure.
- Demand pay-it-forward tuition-free college.
We can afford all these demands as the economic system is human made and can be redefined to fulfill those necessary human goals. It is not aspiration. Think about it this way. If money is a limiting factor then we must redefine to fulfill appropriate requirements in a new economy.
Once again, and how do we do this? It is time to organize a national strike after a consortium of groups writes the legislation that must be adopted unchanged by those who work for us in Congress. In general, we need an active 3.5% of a population to affect the change most want. We must do that and start now.
So, do you see how even bottled water can be, a catalyst for change? What is your catalyst? I am sure there are so many we can use to fuse into a change that improves the lives of us all.