With 2.5m users on this sub, can't we do something to fix the US? Below is a rant I stared and have added to periodically. This is a long read.

We The Peeps

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Let’s renegotiate:

1. Get the money out of politics – outlaw lobbying, make campaigns publicly financed – see how many of the rats flee the fire.

2. Get rid of political parties altogether – all candidates must be independents and run on their own merits.

3. Nationalize or remove profit motive in the following industries:

a. Energy

b. All aspects of health care –

c. News media

d. Communications – internet, cell phones network; we, the workers, the guys who get W2’s and taxes taken automatically out of our paychecks, have paid for these networks 10X over.

Nov 14, 2020

1

I submit that our current societal structure is just a slightly better version of lords and vassal state. Today at least the “lords” – our bosses, landlords, governors, etc. – can’t just randomly beat us with sticks – I mean, they do, but they’re not supposed to.

2

Here is a table. It has only two legs. It simply does not work. It is inherently unstable. Leg number one is the Democratic Party. Leg number two is the Republican Party. If we want to fix the table, to make it work, to make it stable, it really needs a third leg at a minimum.

We need a completely new form of government. We need a completely new society. Trump has shown us that what we have does not work; what we have is inherently unstable. The checks and balances are not working. It is possible to so load the mechanisms of checks and balances – i.e. the courts, congress, the senate – with politically skewed people that there is no way to check or balance the checks and balances that were set up originally with the constitution.

Maybe if we colonize the Moon or Mars, we have a chance to set up a better society. Maybe it is just too late to fix the mess we have created socially and politically here on Earth. Maybe a very small group of humans will survive global warming and they can have a fresh start.

What do “we the people” think that fresh start should look like? Will we keep it basically the same? We will agree that some of us, the majority of us, will again enslave ourselves to corporate and government masters telling us what to do, how many hours to work, how much money we can have; will we again agree that if they give us just enough money to feel like we have a shot at the ring, just enough money to buy a nice house, a nice car, have a nice TV, maybe a second home, maybe have enough money to save for a retirement at 75% of what our top earnings were, we will trade them 40 to 50 to 60 hours of our lives each week, trade 5 days of working each week for two days of rest and relaxation, trade 50 to 60 years of our lives for the chance to not work the last 10 or 20 years? Those last 10 or 20 years where our bodies and minds are so diminished, about the only thing we want to do is sit inside and watch that nice TV. Does it have to be that way? Is there not a more equitable equation?

Let’s start with a three day work week of 6 or 7 hours per day. Say Monday thru Wednesday, from 9am to 2pm with the same pay. (1/14/23 – 40 hours is the current work week; we need to make it a 50/50 game so a 20 hour work week. At least let’s start there and see what we end up with.)

Let’s start with working 10 months with 2 months off with the same pay.

Let’s start with retiring at 45.

(3/8/23 – note: the “they” I refer to below are the super rich, the political action committees, the gigantic corporations; the 'us vs. them' I have come to realize is the working people vs. these super rich – super rich is network over $30M)

Let’s start with $25 per hour minimum wage; let’s start with reducing our burden and increasing “their” burden. “They” are much better equipped financially to bear that burden than we are. “They” may have to stop stock buy backs. But I think “they” will survive.

Let’s propose this new arrangement roughly outlined above. Let’s see what “they” say, our bosses and presidents, our modern day feudal lords.

Jan 30, 2020

Let’s renegotiate.

Profit sharing – instead of the token small percentages companies shell out in the name of “profit sharing”, how about we take the net profit, divide it in half, the company keeps half as retained earnings and the rest is divided among the employees? Employees are the ones who actually earn the profit. The profit is a direct result of employee labor. Shouldn’t they get most of it?

Let’s get rid of shareholders. Shareholders are the least productive financial members of our society. They do nothing to earn the money they are apportioned by corporations. Their influence is significant for no good reason.

Capital gains – tax the shit out of them. Capital gains are the least productive income in the economy benefiting only those who can afford the stocks and bonds they are come from. My income is productive because I spend it on things – things like groceries, cell phone bills, TV subscriptions, car insurance, house insurance, health insurance, dinners, movies, going out to bars.

Post scarcity economy – let’s move there. If we are going to have robots, let’s make robots that pick up the trash, pave the roads, clean the bathrooms, grow the food, tend the cattle and livestock, deliver the burger and fries. We grant authority to the police, judges, the government. Let’s un-grant it. Let’s free ourselves from the self-imposed chains we have wrapped ourselves in by granting that authority to those governments, those police, those judges and bosses. We made those decisions. We can unmake them.

How do you get doctors to work for free? How do you get any of the jobs we all currently do done without a financial incentive? I don’t know. Yet.

If all those jobs can be done by robots and computers, what would we all do instead? Would we just devolve into drunken, coked-out wastes? More than likely the answer is yes.

Cell phones – haven’t we, all of us who pay $20, $40, $90, $300 every single month to ATT, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc.; haven’t we already paid for whatever it cost them to build the cell phone network? Haven’t we paid for it many times over? I don’t know the answer. I googled it a little bit but could not find out how much has been invested in the cell phone networks. It’s relatively easy to google some basic numbers:

405M US subscribers

$114 – average monthly US bill

$554B – annually spent by us, we cell-phone-subscribers

Haven’t we paid many times over for whatever the cost of the network is? Don’t we own it by now?

ISP’s/Cable TV – for the most part, see above; we really need to separate out the “movies” and “entertainment”, the media part of this, however. Artists, producers, actors, should be paid for their work. How do we let the record companies keep so much of the earnings of the singer, the song writer, the bass player? Why do the Harvey Weinstein’s of the world get so rich? Why do we allow this, why do we let this be the case?

I don’t know the answer. But it has to stop.