On Jul 12, 2006, at 12:53 AM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
Hi, Jonathat. Welcome to the list!
[please scroll down . . . ]
Mostly, we just need the economy to function properly again.
Define "function[ing] properly" . . .
-- Ronn! :)
OK,
Yes, let's re-organize society before breakfast.
My goals are modest: forestall the industrial feudalist model.
Here's a few talking points:
- Strive to see wages & pay enough that a one parent can support a
whole family with a single job.
- Executive pay shouldn't increase by factors of ten over their lowest
paid members of their team, who rarely see any increase in good times
or bad.
- Leading to productivity gains never reaching working folk, but
siphoned off to "performance" benefits to executives, and sometimes
shareholders. How many years since there was even a modest minimum
wage increase whereas congress builds-in $3K/yr average during this
entire time?
- I want more money in people's pocket to buy the goods I would like to
create and sell.
- I'd like to revoke recent congressional changes to copyright law on
behalf of Disney, etc, that makes it impossible for creative works
adopted by society from entering the public commons... as our Founders
expected.
- Stop military boondoggle projects {white-collar welfare spread around
congressional districts} and fully fund a space program that embraces &
enables entrepreneurship and experimentation.
- Direct the moribund high-tech sector into a rejuvenated energy
decentralization and cleaner generation system{s} and sell these goods
to a world desperate for an upgrade: this would make the dot-com boom
look like a fire-cracker.
Since I'm playing Chief Bottlewasher this AM I'd also break the
thug/lawman dynamic around drug wars which costs society huge amounts
of prison & court funds while health issues take a back seat. America
used to spell this P-r-o-h-i-b-i-t-i-o-n. I've lived in Amsterdam and
seen first-hand what happens when you remove the mafia/gangs incentives
{gangs have no profits and lawmen no vested interest in asset
forfeiture & aggrandizing personal power} to push the sane, rational
and entirely civilized health-services approach. Our DA's and Sheriffs
are now as addicted to the drug economy as many gangs and those white
collar figures who too-often fund illicit imports. Better to regulate
it like states already do with alcohol and assist the illness that do
develop, but stop criminalizing morality.
As Bill Murray said in Meatballs {roughly}, "It doesn't matter how
well we play - and even if we win - because the guys across the lake
will still get the all girls because they have the money!" Any fool
can have money, and often does, but that doesn't mean they are doing
anything but leaching off others. Paris Hilton is an excellent
poster-girl for this foppishness: when hunger, poverty, homelessness
are all on the rise Congress wants to enshrine the No Heir Left Behind
tax-gratis act. She's a relatively harmless figure compared to, say,
Ken Lay and the harm he did - although the rolling blackouts were
really lovely that time of year.
I treasure initiative and creative development all too often stifled by
cartels and rigged monetary systems. This has left me quite sour on
the notion of Capitalism and I question the notion of profit itself. I
understand a service and product, but how can the goal be profit?
Treasury functions are the mechanism to fund the creation of worthy
goods/services that receive feedback from the marketplace {you and I}
which justifies, enables, and {hopefully} modifies the continuation of
such organizations to meet further needs and wants. We've put too much
stock in this notion of profit as the end-all. No wonder the
hind-brained rail against government services that see non profit - yet
must be done to keep civ going enough for commerce to thrive: it's
beyond there ken.
I don't have a replacement worked out, but this last decade {even the
dot-com boom tail-end} has left me searching for something with heart.
I think the Corporate model is pathological and I agree with our
Founders that such enterprises must be very short-lived {human lifetime
scales} and be stripped of "personhood". They behave as sociopaths far
too readily as constructed and there simply must be a social-feedback
mechanism because right now they are an immortal form of life with
thousands of stomachs, myopic vision and questionable brains -
certainly no empathic system. Our current model has recently been
called a tapeworm economy, or Ponse-type scheme, modeled along the
lines of Enron... and I don't see _that_ collapse having changed much.
We need to embed self-sufficiency deeply in our psyche and actions: if
you can't do with what you have regionally, then the model must take
from somewhere else and is therefor unsustainable. With the numbers of
people on this planet and brittle institutions we've built to sustain
us {health care literally has bricks flying off the building, poverty
rising every year, etc} a collapse of our current model would leave
billions in ruin and death.
For lunch, I'd stop our false-flag members of the Chamber of Commerce
who have championed off-shoring jobs for several decades now, while
importing illegal workers en masse for jobs that must be done locally.
Tariffs funded the growth of this nation for hundreds of years and I
don't see why we shouldn't revisit this. Why should goods and services
flit back and forth over bordes, but people cannot? Open it all up, or
control trade in commerce, but to filter as we do inevitably forces
wages down here in America. I was for NAFTA, but it has been a total
train-wreck leaving Mexicans still making the same wage they did back
when it started while hollowing out American industry in some Auction
Grande.
One used to be able to afford a house, car, ... a family all on one
carpenters' wages - now this backbone of America competes with pickup
trucks full of Home Depot parking lots full of illegals. I don't have
a bitch with these poor sops looking for a chance here in America
because they are at the wrong end of a long bullwhip. I assert they
haven't come here to steal our jobs, because our flag-pin wearing
mercantile class has been given them away: I say three-strikes and
CEO's land in mandatory jail time for each offense. The mantra of
these businessmen {let's face it, vastly republican in orientation}
actions for a long-long time has been to drive wages down and by
accepting illegal workers aren't they really more akin to slavers?
Throw in property confiscation and asset forfeiture like we so happily
dispense upon drug-runners and we'll see wages increase here in
America, finally.
Yikes, I see your clever little question has eaten into valuable novel
writing time.
Curses!
BTW - How would you measure a successful economy?
Yawn, time for some coffee so I can get really excited.
-JG-
Jonathan Gibson
www.formandfunction.com/word
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