"A job for every worker"

"A job for every worker" means a corporation paying every paycheck. This translates into quarter-over-quarter growth in profitability, an entire class of people and institutions who siphon money out of the economy into their own portfolios, and ultimately wage slavery.

Wage slavery because "a job for every worker" begins with the assumptions that everyone is supposed to have money to give to the holding companies that raise the rent on our apartments every year and sell us food-like substances to eat; that the way we get the money is by working "jobs" manufacturing, transporting, or selling consumer goods, the creation and disposal of which are destroying the biosphere; and that needing to have money means we have to "work" doing something that generates a profit whether that work needs, on grounds other than making money change hands, to be done or not.

Capitalism boils down to ripping off people weaker than yourself. Its motto is "Money is life." It is the opposite of community and thoroughly alienates us from the facts that we each participate in the web of life and our primary responsibility is to take care of it so that it will take care of us and future generations.

Mass global capitalist society has so thoroughly brainwashed untold millions of people into assuming that money is the highest possible value that changing this consciousness is the most difficult task we face.

The equivalent of a war mobilization to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy is obviously an absolute necessity, but using capitalism to get there will only prolong the pain of a society destroying itself for money.

The Flaw in the Green New Deal

The economic model Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is working from (as is Bernie Sanders) is FDR's New Deal: a well-paying job for every worker, tax the rich, redistribute the wealth. All good as far as it goes. The green part is building green infrastructure and retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. Also all good.

What is missing from the Green New Deal movement's analysis is what are workers going to spend their money on? More to the point: people, in the Green New Deal, are still understood to be workers and consumers, not stewards of the land. Mass society is still understood in materialistic terms: everybody's job is to get money and spend it keeping the economy growing. Everybody shares in the financial prosperity, and the environment is still understood as resources that support consumption.

Leaving aside that automation idling tens of millions of workers is grounds to rethink the work-spend basis on which consumerism is predicated, work-spend as the definitional underpinning of public life reduces the function of every human being to making money change hands.

Money is the worst reason to do anything. Chasing it demotivates doing things that should be done because they do not pay money and motivates doing things that should not be done because they do pay money. Finally, the environmental crisis does not begin and end with fossil fuels. Every so-called resource on this planet has been almost entirely destroyed, and consumerism is the root cause.

The Green New Deal is a step in the right direction, but millions of supporters need to understand that it is only a step and more importantly that money as an organizing principle upon which to construct a society is fatally flawed on social, environmental, economic, and spiritual grounds.

"What about my job?"

Check out this op-ed I submitted to the NT Times on Oct. 30, 2018:
"What about my job?"

Hat in hand.

BLM is a real grass roots organization, a group of people fearing for their lives and those of their neighbors at the hands of the police. These are not people being manipulated by clever framing of half-truths and lies by billionaires whose real agenda is no taxes for rich people, no regulation of corporations -- preservation of a societal organizational structure that farms humans to be used for certain revenue-generating activities: consuming, fighting in wars, supplying raw materials or manufacturing things for as little money as the owners of all the money can possibly pay.

The place to start talking about American society's problems is at how the money works, what government can and is supposed to do -- provide for the general welfare, for example. People have got to start seeing one another as individual human beings, stop thinking we know all about each other in terms of stupid abstractions that demonstrate we don't, and communicating with each other as human beings.

Corporations are not human beings. Human beings need to talk about corporations with each other not to them hat in hand.

Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest.

The USA spends $700 billion a year on its military, 58% of its discretionary budget, more than the rest of the world combined, and that doesn't include the trillions of off-budget emergency dollars it spends on the wars it is always engaged in, either overtly or covertly, that are always somebody else's fault. The USA also sells more weapons than any other country and of course debates endlessly in its political discourse and TV and Hollywood movies who to bomb, kill, or invade.

To run a war machine on a scale this large, you need a public who think that war and flag and country and the military are the most important things in the whole world. Someone is out to get you. Communists. They want to take your money and give it to the government and take your guns away and tell you what to do. Freedom! Mine!

I'm surprised the Star Spangled Banner isn't playing all the time everywhere. Thankfully it is only at sports events, which if you watch them on TV, you can mute.

Trump and Vietnam.

Donald Trump did not avoid killing Vietnamese people in their own country as a matter of principle. He dodged the draft to save his own skin. As Mr. Khan said at the DNC, Donald Trump sacrificed nothing: no arrests for protesting the war, no police clubs on his head trying to stop it.

Plus, like many of America's most prominent warmongers, he is only too happy to play the role of Mr. Tough Guy, a loudmouth bravely boasting about how he is going to send other people's kids to other people's countries to kill other people's kids.

An expression was going around for a number of years after the Vietnam War: everybody did what they did. It means you did what you thought was right: fighting for your country because you believed the politicians' lies or doing what you thought would help to stop the war because you didn't.

Donald Trump never has and never will do what he thinks is right. He does what is good for Donald Trump, no matter who loses money on his crooked schemes or whose kids die so he doesn't have to.

McConnel and Ryan.

Mitch McConnell is a disgrace, a cynically opportunistic politician with the moral authority of a sanctimonious gnat.

What annoys me most about McConnell's soulless posturing is that he coopts words -- obstructionist, divisive, uncompromising -- that accurately describe him and the pathological political philosophy that he and the Republican party represent and uses them to accuse people disgusted by his policies and tactics of precisely the attitudes and behaviors of which he is guilty. The man is so emotionally stupid that he seems actually to believe that this two-year-old's behavior is anything but transparent to anyone who is not entirely brain-dead.

Paul Ryan is an ignorant moron who believes he is an "intellectual" with "ideas." His "ideas" are a fact-free ideology grounded entirely in the idiotic ravings of an emotionally disturbed woman, Ayn Rand, who was pathologically devoid of empathy and warmth -- a female predecessor of the sick thief, Trump, running today for president of the USA.

McConnell has had 7 and Ryan has had 2 years to do something constructive for the millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet, and there is a reason why they haven't: people at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid are prey for the people at the top. McConnell and Ryan believe this is the natural order, and they have no problem with it. McConnell and Ryan and their ilk are precisely what is wrong with the USA: everything of yours for me and nothing for you.