This is about a story that Conservatives tell about the founding of America and the American spirit. Supposedly we all, every single American, believe that everyone must work, all the time, despite illness, hardship, family pressures, mental illness - we don't believe anyone should get something for nothing. This is the message rich men offer to poor and middle class people. They are sure you don't approve of a safety net. They are sure they don't want to spend their riches on deadbeats who don't work. Americans, they say, see safety net programs as socialism (even though that is not how socialism is defined). We are "rugged individuals" they say who will tough things out on our own 'til our dying day. This assumes that you have no empathy for a neighbor or friend who finds him/herself in a bad situation that makes working temporarily impossible, or even permanently impossible. Empathy has no room in economics or government Conservatives say. It is the province of the church and private citizens. If we try to lift everyone up we will kill innovation and progress say those all wise (sarcasm) Conservatives. I believe it is time for American to be done with Conservative messaging which has produced a totally top heavy economy which is now being protected as normal. Biden doesn't have the votes but it is a sad day for America. Reactionaries are in charge and may win the day in the next election.
Yup. Nailed it! Oligarchy, check; Keep workers insecure, check. The only thing I would add is the corporate shills in our legislature. They are the chink in the system's armor. We can't influence the owner-donors, and the BEHAD (bigoted, elitist, hateful, antidemocratic, and deluded) Trumpers cannot be reasoned with. The only way to break up this systemic stranglehold on our democracy is these shills. They need to be called out, like Mr. Reich a few days ago for the four anti-drug negotiating House Dems and Sinema. The same needs to be done for every rep. I would love to see a 'Corporate or PAC compromised score' for every rep to be made public to their constituents. Put continuous pressure on them to renounce their compromised status and empower them to vote for the people's needs.
This article sounds spot on to me. This individualism, we’re-the-best-country-in-the-world business is only repeated by people who never look beyond our borders. Nor have they typically visited any other country. You are exactly correct about wanting people to feel a level of insecurity. It’s the best way to control people and take what is theirs while they are busy with 2+ jobs.
Agreed that the big corporations want workers to be insecure, a reserve army of the unemployed and underemployed.
But also, they re serious about being oligarchs. They have been quietly building a corporate feudalism, they like it, and they don't want any blips in their acquisition of power such as labor regaining some leverage.
For as long as I can remember, my family struggled with the basics: housing, food, health care, vacations, education costs, insurance, transportation. We never "got it together" as my father was the single breadwinner and my mother suffered from disability. My mother made all our clothes and we would go on vacations, only to return and find my father had been fired or a relative of the boss had taken my father's job. We substituted education and reading and family discussions of all sorts of topics to try to better ourselves and, well, we did intellectually. None of us realized that the educational establishment was another sort of oligarchy and we were not going to learn our way anywhere. (I took this to the extreme, thinking that, if I went into college-teaching, I would reach security and safety for us all. What that brought me was face-to-face with a hierarchy that resembled places like, well, Macy*s and I realized very late in the game, that there was not going to be a lot of difference between the Univ of Whatever and Macy*s.) I just continued the family set-up: well-educated people who were unacceptable and under-valued because they did not have a cushion and would never get one. That was--and is--the pattern for a good many people as education does not solve problems when one tiny class of oligarchs control literally everything and, of course, politicians. I found the only honest, decent, and responsible politician out there to be Bernie Sanders; for a long while, he was the only one proposing that what we needed were good-paying jobs building our country (we do not need to rebuild it as it's never been built) and our people needed health-care, social programs (including education, now more than at any time), housing, decent public transportation, r&d, and inclusion in all our society. Since Bernie's message was always the same and since I believed him and thought he had the interests of society at heart, I was sold. But Bernie was sold out so he became "what might have been" and what was deferred--or headed off by the oligarchs once again. I feared that Biden would see us all down the river but more pleasantly and with a tinge of progressive talk and, well, my fears were justified. Think. Bernie proposed a $6.5T plan originally, funded by the oligarchs who run the country; that got whittled down to $3.5T and now the whittling just continued until we have landed at $1.5T and it won't stop there. Whatever is proposed to help people will be too much in the oligarch's view. Our solution was the worst: to vote for a self-serving, bigoted, hateful. inexperienced, indolent, incompetent fool whose major contribution to our society in the last five-six years has been to lie, cheat, and steal his way to a place of honor among people who don't even know that they have never counter for anything but cheap labor. We have lost 700,000+ souls and the respect of any society on earth. This is what the oligarchs who run the country wanted all alone and our own elected representatives will make sure that is precisely what the real powers (the ones with all the money) get what they want. I do wish Bernie and the progressives had been able to do more than just sound the alarm once again but, well, I don't think all that alarm-sounding achieved much more. Too bad.
Well, I would disagree that Biden isn't 'aggressive and combative' aboutvissues he believes in. He pushed through the Afghanistan withdrawal against all input on his own timetable. He has all but ignored voting rights, after promising to shore up democracy as his sole rationale for his presidential campaign. He likes the idea of being the next FDR or Johnson, but not enough to blanket the airwaves with vivid descriptions of a future where his BBB (dumbest name ever) was broadly enacted. By the time (and IF) any infrastructure bill passes, people will be so sick of Democratic infighting and Biden's seeming apathy about much of anything, that it will be difficult to see this as an accomplishment. I thought Ron Klain understood the precarious state of democracy, but he seems to have zoned out on anything other than the number of vaccines administered. If BBB had been properly positioned, it would have been presented in phases and Phase 1 would easily have garnered 50 votes, with Phase 2 to be passed in 2022 (a great platform for Democratic Senate candidates to run on), and Phase 3 in 2024. Instead, there has been little strategy, zero tactics, and an utter failure of messaging.
Biden can be aggressive and combative when he wants to, clearly he doesn't want to and his advisors are far more focused on Democratic donors than policy objectives.
Four weeks of paid leave is definitely better than nothing, but not enough. People still have financial obligations like rent, utilities, medicine and food during their medical emergency. My sister took a 12 week FMLA from her nursing job, so that she could die from advanced cancer at age 57. She needed to keep her job so that she could retain her employer's insurance, which required her to pay $120 monthly, plus a 20% copay for everything. She couldn't afford hospice because they charge $5,000 monthly per patient unless the person receives Medicare/Medicaid. She worked as a nurse for 33 years, so she wrote comfort care instructions for me to follow to medicate her at home. It's absolutely disgusting not to pay employees in their time of medical need. America is not the greatest country in the world like I incorrectly assumed as a child. We are a third world country!
The combination of bread and circuses, periodic wars and attractive consumer goods can only go so far. Eventually, the American people will realize that the system is constantly cheating them of a reasonable quality of life in order to feed insatiable greed. Eventually, the series of false threats being raised like funhouse spooks will no longer distract the victims of this economy from the true culprits. If the anger expressed in the storming of Congress was directed where it belongs, things could get very dangerous in this nation. Let's hope that the powers that be realize that their future is also at stake and enact real changes that reduce inequality and truly improve our quality of life.
I think you should give the Oligarchs a shock by invoking the 13th Amendment - Wait , What? That's crazy the 13th is the anti slavery section of the constitution! ... ... Bear with me ...
IF corporations are indeed "people" as has been confirmed many times by the Supreme Court AND IF they are, under the 14th amendment, to be accorded the same rights as natural (i.e. biological) persons - see Justice Roberts arguments in Citizens United - THEN privately and publicly owned corporations are slaves - I don't mean the employees are slaves I mean the very corporations themselves (since the very definition of slavery is the actual ownership of one person by another person) and corporations as "people" with equal protections to biological people under Justice Roberts use of the 14th amendment in his Citizens United ruling, should immediately be freed from the ownership of shareholders under the 13th amendment and 14th amendments!
Consider some of the ramifications of this potentially dangerous idea ... ...
1) Corporations are slaves because they are "people" owned by other people and compelled to speak and act at the behest of the owners -especially the overseer/slave driver owners aka executives if they also happen to be shareholders - as many are. So, while corporate "person hood" entitles the corporations to free speech first amendment rights, it also makes it obvious that such rights can never be exercised since all corporate actions are actually compelled actions not free actions - they are done only at the behest and with the consent/approval of the owner/slave drivers aka executives, since it is the executives who determine how the resources of the corporations must be spent, what messages must be "spoken" by the corporation etc. The fact that a person has rights doesn't mean that their actions are not compelled by others especially in the case of slavery.
2) Since slave corporations are compelled to action by their owner/slave drivers aka executives I wonder if this makes such executive slave holders accomplices in all the corporate crimes that are committed and in this perspective liable to prison sentences since all actions by a corporate "person" are the compelled actions of a slave and the person doing the compelling is the slave driver/owner aka executive. Surely this makes them an accessory to any corporate crime at the very least. No?
3) All corporate slaves should immediately be released from their slavery - aka ownership by shareholders and allowed to become non-profits or any other corporate structure that does not entail the ownership of one "person" by another person or group of persons. This would of course create havoc on, if not crater, Wall street and send shocks around the world through other financial markets tied to Wall street. All of them? Frankly, I would hate this to happen because it would definitely hurt me.
Now, I'm not a far left socialist AND I'm definitely not a lawyer and have only a layman's understanding of the constitution, so I would not be surprised if someone has already thought of this and erected some kind of protection against this because this is a very dangerous idea. But I do think that giving corporations equal person hood to biological persons under the constitution is dangerously delusional AND I genuinely wonder if Citizens United and Justice Roberts quoting the 14th amendment the way he did in his legal opinion on Citizens United hasn't painted the Supreme Court and indeed America into a very uncomfortable and dangerous corner.
Surely I'm not the only person who has had this weird idea - BUT maybe it's not so weird.
I believe you are a lawyer Robert so any thoughts on this?
On the BBB bill, I think progressives should accept the low figure and go ahead with both infrastructure bills. Even the low BBB amount will benefit Americans and will be a boost for the Dems in 2022, with the understanding that if they keep Congress and get more senators, there will be more benefits to come. It can be very positive! Rome wasn't built etc.
If only everyone knew this, I think we could make progress. The idea that this is soooo much money is just crazy. Keep comparing it to the military budget.
John Steinbeck is purported to have said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires! The oligarchs sure know how to capitalize on this absurdity.
I think you are right when you say a small bit is better than no bit at all but come on, man! We need big, bold action and we needed it yesterday. Biden is going to be blamed for slow progress, and broken campaign promises(paid state college tuition anyone?)If Republicans get back in in 2022 with a majority all of this is for naught. And Lord help us if Donald Trump takes back the White House in 2024.I am considering what the next step is for We, the people but it goes without saying that Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes.
Bob, your analysis is so good in much of this piece, and while I don’t think of myself as a revolutionary, there is only ONE way to stop this onslaught of this authoritarian capitalism and white supremacy, and that is not within our two party system. based on my experience and knowledge of the dynamics being played out… WE NEED a much larger (probably around 35-50% of workers) ORGANIZED DEMOCRATIC LABOR MOVEMENT TO FIGHT FOR THESE REFORMS. The Democratic and Republican parties, by their nature, are fully invested in CORPORATE CONTROLLED AMERICA.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for helping me see the big picture. It is very sad and will be very difficult to change. I hope we get this smaller package, it is still a lot. God help us.
In my opinion, the oligarchs have the working and middle class by the throat. I have long proffered this image of America since Ronald Reagan. In truth, this picture long predates Reagan, certainly going back to FDR and the New Deal.
A bunch of the very moneyed CEO's and wealthy industry barons are sitting around a table. Dinner is about to be served. The door opens. In come the maid and butler with this deliciously hunger inducing, very large oven roasted beef on a platter.
The servants put the gigantic sumptuous meal on the table in the middle, before all of these power brokers of the 1%. A large slicing knife is handed to the most important man. As he directs his attention and lowers the knife, the letters U.S.A. surge vibrantly red on the crust of the feast.
This is about a story that Conservatives tell about the founding of America and the American spirit. Supposedly we all, every single American, believe that everyone must work, all the time, despite illness, hardship, family pressures, mental illness - we don't believe anyone should get something for nothing. This is the message rich men offer to poor and middle class people. They are sure you don't approve of a safety net. They are sure they don't want to spend their riches on deadbeats who don't work. Americans, they say, see safety net programs as socialism (even though that is not how socialism is defined). We are "rugged individuals" they say who will tough things out on our own 'til our dying day. This assumes that you have no empathy for a neighbor or friend who finds him/herself in a bad situation that makes working temporarily impossible, or even permanently impossible. Empathy has no room in economics or government Conservatives say. It is the province of the church and private citizens. If we try to lift everyone up we will kill innovation and progress say those all wise (sarcasm) Conservatives. I believe it is time for American to be done with Conservative messaging which has produced a totally top heavy economy which is now being protected as normal. Biden doesn't have the votes but it is a sad day for America. Reactionaries are in charge and may win the day in the next election.
Yup. Nailed it! Oligarchy, check; Keep workers insecure, check. The only thing I would add is the corporate shills in our legislature. They are the chink in the system's armor. We can't influence the owner-donors, and the BEHAD (bigoted, elitist, hateful, antidemocratic, and deluded) Trumpers cannot be reasoned with. The only way to break up this systemic stranglehold on our democracy is these shills. They need to be called out, like Mr. Reich a few days ago for the four anti-drug negotiating House Dems and Sinema. The same needs to be done for every rep. I would love to see a 'Corporate or PAC compromised score' for every rep to be made public to their constituents. Put continuous pressure on them to renounce their compromised status and empower them to vote for the people's needs.
This article sounds spot on to me. This individualism, we’re-the-best-country-in-the-world business is only repeated by people who never look beyond our borders. Nor have they typically visited any other country. You are exactly correct about wanting people to feel a level of insecurity. It’s the best way to control people and take what is theirs while they are busy with 2+ jobs.
Agreed that the big corporations want workers to be insecure, a reserve army of the unemployed and underemployed.
But also, they re serious about being oligarchs. They have been quietly building a corporate feudalism, they like it, and they don't want any blips in their acquisition of power such as labor regaining some leverage.
For as long as I can remember, my family struggled with the basics: housing, food, health care, vacations, education costs, insurance, transportation. We never "got it together" as my father was the single breadwinner and my mother suffered from disability. My mother made all our clothes and we would go on vacations, only to return and find my father had been fired or a relative of the boss had taken my father's job. We substituted education and reading and family discussions of all sorts of topics to try to better ourselves and, well, we did intellectually. None of us realized that the educational establishment was another sort of oligarchy and we were not going to learn our way anywhere. (I took this to the extreme, thinking that, if I went into college-teaching, I would reach security and safety for us all. What that brought me was face-to-face with a hierarchy that resembled places like, well, Macy*s and I realized very late in the game, that there was not going to be a lot of difference between the Univ of Whatever and Macy*s.) I just continued the family set-up: well-educated people who were unacceptable and under-valued because they did not have a cushion and would never get one. That was--and is--the pattern for a good many people as education does not solve problems when one tiny class of oligarchs control literally everything and, of course, politicians. I found the only honest, decent, and responsible politician out there to be Bernie Sanders; for a long while, he was the only one proposing that what we needed were good-paying jobs building our country (we do not need to rebuild it as it's never been built) and our people needed health-care, social programs (including education, now more than at any time), housing, decent public transportation, r&d, and inclusion in all our society. Since Bernie's message was always the same and since I believed him and thought he had the interests of society at heart, I was sold. But Bernie was sold out so he became "what might have been" and what was deferred--or headed off by the oligarchs once again. I feared that Biden would see us all down the river but more pleasantly and with a tinge of progressive talk and, well, my fears were justified. Think. Bernie proposed a $6.5T plan originally, funded by the oligarchs who run the country; that got whittled down to $3.5T and now the whittling just continued until we have landed at $1.5T and it won't stop there. Whatever is proposed to help people will be too much in the oligarch's view. Our solution was the worst: to vote for a self-serving, bigoted, hateful. inexperienced, indolent, incompetent fool whose major contribution to our society in the last five-six years has been to lie, cheat, and steal his way to a place of honor among people who don't even know that they have never counter for anything but cheap labor. We have lost 700,000+ souls and the respect of any society on earth. This is what the oligarchs who run the country wanted all alone and our own elected representatives will make sure that is precisely what the real powers (the ones with all the money) get what they want. I do wish Bernie and the progressives had been able to do more than just sound the alarm once again but, well, I don't think all that alarm-sounding achieved much more. Too bad.
Well, I would disagree that Biden isn't 'aggressive and combative' aboutvissues he believes in. He pushed through the Afghanistan withdrawal against all input on his own timetable. He has all but ignored voting rights, after promising to shore up democracy as his sole rationale for his presidential campaign. He likes the idea of being the next FDR or Johnson, but not enough to blanket the airwaves with vivid descriptions of a future where his BBB (dumbest name ever) was broadly enacted. By the time (and IF) any infrastructure bill passes, people will be so sick of Democratic infighting and Biden's seeming apathy about much of anything, that it will be difficult to see this as an accomplishment. I thought Ron Klain understood the precarious state of democracy, but he seems to have zoned out on anything other than the number of vaccines administered. If BBB had been properly positioned, it would have been presented in phases and Phase 1 would easily have garnered 50 votes, with Phase 2 to be passed in 2022 (a great platform for Democratic Senate candidates to run on), and Phase 3 in 2024. Instead, there has been little strategy, zero tactics, and an utter failure of messaging.
Biden can be aggressive and combative when he wants to, clearly he doesn't want to and his advisors are far more focused on Democratic donors than policy objectives.
Four weeks of paid leave is definitely better than nothing, but not enough. People still have financial obligations like rent, utilities, medicine and food during their medical emergency. My sister took a 12 week FMLA from her nursing job, so that she could die from advanced cancer at age 57. She needed to keep her job so that she could retain her employer's insurance, which required her to pay $120 monthly, plus a 20% copay for everything. She couldn't afford hospice because they charge $5,000 monthly per patient unless the person receives Medicare/Medicaid. She worked as a nurse for 33 years, so she wrote comfort care instructions for me to follow to medicate her at home. It's absolutely disgusting not to pay employees in their time of medical need. America is not the greatest country in the world like I incorrectly assumed as a child. We are a third world country!
The combination of bread and circuses, periodic wars and attractive consumer goods can only go so far. Eventually, the American people will realize that the system is constantly cheating them of a reasonable quality of life in order to feed insatiable greed. Eventually, the series of false threats being raised like funhouse spooks will no longer distract the victims of this economy from the true culprits. If the anger expressed in the storming of Congress was directed where it belongs, things could get very dangerous in this nation. Let's hope that the powers that be realize that their future is also at stake and enact real changes that reduce inequality and truly improve our quality of life.
I think you should give the Oligarchs a shock by invoking the 13th Amendment - Wait , What? That's crazy the 13th is the anti slavery section of the constitution! ... ... Bear with me ...
IF corporations are indeed "people" as has been confirmed many times by the Supreme Court AND IF they are, under the 14th amendment, to be accorded the same rights as natural (i.e. biological) persons - see Justice Roberts arguments in Citizens United - THEN privately and publicly owned corporations are slaves - I don't mean the employees are slaves I mean the very corporations themselves (since the very definition of slavery is the actual ownership of one person by another person) and corporations as "people" with equal protections to biological people under Justice Roberts use of the 14th amendment in his Citizens United ruling, should immediately be freed from the ownership of shareholders under the 13th amendment and 14th amendments!
Consider some of the ramifications of this potentially dangerous idea ... ...
1) Corporations are slaves because they are "people" owned by other people and compelled to speak and act at the behest of the owners -especially the overseer/slave driver owners aka executives if they also happen to be shareholders - as many are. So, while corporate "person hood" entitles the corporations to free speech first amendment rights, it also makes it obvious that such rights can never be exercised since all corporate actions are actually compelled actions not free actions - they are done only at the behest and with the consent/approval of the owner/slave drivers aka executives, since it is the executives who determine how the resources of the corporations must be spent, what messages must be "spoken" by the corporation etc. The fact that a person has rights doesn't mean that their actions are not compelled by others especially in the case of slavery.
2) Since slave corporations are compelled to action by their owner/slave drivers aka executives I wonder if this makes such executive slave holders accomplices in all the corporate crimes that are committed and in this perspective liable to prison sentences since all actions by a corporate "person" are the compelled actions of a slave and the person doing the compelling is the slave driver/owner aka executive. Surely this makes them an accessory to any corporate crime at the very least. No?
3) All corporate slaves should immediately be released from their slavery - aka ownership by shareholders and allowed to become non-profits or any other corporate structure that does not entail the ownership of one "person" by another person or group of persons. This would of course create havoc on, if not crater, Wall street and send shocks around the world through other financial markets tied to Wall street. All of them? Frankly, I would hate this to happen because it would definitely hurt me.
Now, I'm not a far left socialist AND I'm definitely not a lawyer and have only a layman's understanding of the constitution, so I would not be surprised if someone has already thought of this and erected some kind of protection against this because this is a very dangerous idea. But I do think that giving corporations equal person hood to biological persons under the constitution is dangerously delusional AND I genuinely wonder if Citizens United and Justice Roberts quoting the 14th amendment the way he did in his legal opinion on Citizens United hasn't painted the Supreme Court and indeed America into a very uncomfortable and dangerous corner.
Surely I'm not the only person who has had this weird idea - BUT maybe it's not so weird.
I believe you are a lawyer Robert so any thoughts on this?
On the BBB bill, I think progressives should accept the low figure and go ahead with both infrastructure bills. Even the low BBB amount will benefit Americans and will be a boost for the Dems in 2022, with the understanding that if they keep Congress and get more senators, there will be more benefits to come. It can be very positive! Rome wasn't built etc.
If only everyone knew this, I think we could make progress. The idea that this is soooo much money is just crazy. Keep comparing it to the military budget.
John Steinbeck is purported to have said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires! The oligarchs sure know how to capitalize on this absurdity.
I think you are right when you say a small bit is better than no bit at all but come on, man! We need big, bold action and we needed it yesterday. Biden is going to be blamed for slow progress, and broken campaign promises(paid state college tuition anyone?)If Republicans get back in in 2022 with a majority all of this is for naught. And Lord help us if Donald Trump takes back the White House in 2024.I am considering what the next step is for We, the people but it goes without saying that Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes.
Bob, your analysis is so good in much of this piece, and while I don’t think of myself as a revolutionary, there is only ONE way to stop this onslaught of this authoritarian capitalism and white supremacy, and that is not within our two party system. based on my experience and knowledge of the dynamics being played out… WE NEED a much larger (probably around 35-50% of workers) ORGANIZED DEMOCRATIC LABOR MOVEMENT TO FIGHT FOR THESE REFORMS. The Democratic and Republican parties, by their nature, are fully invested in CORPORATE CONTROLLED AMERICA.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, for helping me see the big picture. It is very sad and will be very difficult to change. I hope we get this smaller package, it is still a lot. God help us.
In my opinion, the oligarchs have the working and middle class by the throat. I have long proffered this image of America since Ronald Reagan. In truth, this picture long predates Reagan, certainly going back to FDR and the New Deal.
A bunch of the very moneyed CEO's and wealthy industry barons are sitting around a table. Dinner is about to be served. The door opens. In come the maid and butler with this deliciously hunger inducing, very large oven roasted beef on a platter.
The servants put the gigantic sumptuous meal on the table in the middle, before all of these power brokers of the 1%. A large slicing knife is handed to the most important man. As he directs his attention and lowers the knife, the letters U.S.A. surge vibrantly red on the crust of the feast.