Imagining government of the people, by the people and for the people.
If we had a functioning democracy we would own our energy supply. We would build publicly-owned solar & wind and provide the electricity to each other and our businesses for free. Our economy would BOOM.
We would tax & redistribute the highest incomes & profits that result from this. Healthcare, education, transportation…
Imagine a government run to do good things for its people and work alongside other countries for the betterment of all people.
I haven’t posted here at Imagine Democracy for a while because it is hard to imagine democracy with everything that is happening. I’ve been writing a LOT over at Government Cheese: Chronicling the collapse of democracy because … the collapse of democracy.
So imagine democracy. Suppose We the People manage to get control of the United States again. What’s it going to take to get America back on its feet?
The World Will Need An Ironclad Guarantee It Can’t Happen Again
We the People are going to have to make changes that provide the entire world with an ironclad assurance that this all cannot happen again. Can. Not. The level of systemic reform required before any country, business or anyone dares to trust the US again will be enormous. The damage done by tariffs, threats, withdrawal of assistance, bombs and otherwise is just huge.
Why would any country agree to any kind of arrangement with the US without some kind of ironclad guarantee? This is real. Right now the EU is talking to the UK about deals opening up more trade, and a few other things. In those talks the EU is asking for the agreement to include reparations payments if the right gets control of the UK again and undoes these agreements – again.
Even domestically. Suppose you’re thinking about joining (or rejoining) the Dept of Justice. Without such a guarantee you are not only facing the possibility of being tossed out in 4 years if the nutcases get control again, you are also facing the possibility of being indicted for trying to help the country recover! Suppose you’re a scientist thinking of coming back to help fight the climate crisis. Same deal. You could get indicted for that – or worse – if they get back in.
That’s a lot of work there to undo the ways the system is rigged against the public. How do you get government back under the control of We the People? Most important: Get money out of the election system. Ban it. Ban corporate money from being used for any purpose other than running the corporation! Getting the money out might give the public a chance to start righting the ship.
Get rid of the Electoral College – it’s a leftover from the slave-state system. Make the Senate represent their share of the population instead of two senators for a state with the population of one county in a state like California! Bring in some kind of preferential/ranked-choice voting system to stop current vote for the lesser-of-two-evils system. Get corporations under control – re-regulate them and put “stakeholders” on Boards. Completely reform and expand the corrupt Republican Supreme Court. Somehow restore an honest system for the public to get reliable news & information that stops the ability to propagandize the public. (Maybe a super and expanded version of Public Broadcasting? Govt funding for news outlets and local news outlets?) Implement ironclad ways to make sure democracy is understood, respected and protected, including a Department of Democracy.
So many things will have to be done. But seriously why should anyone trust the US “system” again without this level of real reform?
After what happened with Japan and Germany this is the level of change that had to happen. Complete transformation. It didn’t happen after the Soviet Union fell, and look where they are now!
I think it’s hard for regular people to imagine having no empathy or guilt or any use for other people whatsoever, beyond as vehicles for getting what they want. Even at my age I am still constantly astonished to know there are people who target the elderly with scams, or beat people up to get their wallet, and celebrate themselves for getting one over on them.
But isn’t that the whole point of the ideal of the America we are fighting for. Monarchies were based on that thinking, and they had the right to do anything to peasants. We overthrew that. That’s why the first three words in the Constitution are so BIG. We the People.
Wealthy landowners had slaves! We had a Civil War that overthrew that. Capitalists made people work in mines until they died from it. We formed unions that made that better – and FDR strengthened them. The South had apartheid. We had a Movement that stopped that. Tobacco companies convinced people to kill themselves slowly while handing over their money and energy companies are knowingly destroying the planet. What we are seeing is the reaction to our trying to stop them.
The UK has ended an experiment in “conservative” governance. Backed by private investors, the government withdrew support for public services, public investment, public everything. They pretended “private” investment would pick up the slack. Instead and of course the wealthy staged a “bust-out” of the country. “A fraud tactic, commonly used in the organized crime world, wherein a business’ assets and lines of credit are exploited and exhausted to the point of insolvency.”
The privatized water companies are a good example of how the country was managed under conservative governance. Public assets were turned over the private “investors.” The “investors” borrowed heavily with those assets and their income stream as collateral. They paid themselves handsomely with minimal investment in maintenance and capacity. Eventually there was insufficient water supply to support increasing housing stock and raw sewage was being dumped into the country’s rivers. Of course there was no government enforcement of rules that would have prevented this – or prevented the resulting pollution. That would be labeled “interference” in the private sector.
Private investment does not provide public returns. The only interests of private investors is private return.
The Only Way Forward For UK Governance Is Public Investment
The way forward for UK governance is public investment in infrastructure, education, healthcare, services, law enforcement, addressing inequality. Investment.
Over time public investment will result in a booming economy and a prosperous public. It always does, everywhere. Look at the countries that follow this formula. The infrastructure is maintained and modern; education and healthcare are first-class, the economies prosper. The people are more equal, happier and prosperous.
Take all the propaganda labels (socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc) out of this equation and look at it for what it is. PUBLIC investment pays off for the PUBLIC. Private investment only pays the already-wealthy private investors.
For The Many, Not The Few
Investment pays dividends down the road. Let the public collect those dividends.
There is a NYTimes Guest Essay, What Kind of Country Do You Want? Start With Taxes. Supposedly a progressive answer to Republican tax cuts for the rich & their corporations nonsense, it actually reinforces conservative arguments about government spending.
The essay amplifies conservative propaganda about the “price tag” of government tax cuts and spending. It uses conservative terminology like “revenue,” “borrowing” and “fiscal crisis.” This wording keeps people trapped in a medieval/conservative “gold standard” thought system about money that limits what governments can do to make people’s lives better.
The US dropped the gold standard some time ago. In a modern economy the government issues currency, period. The US government is not “funded” and certainly doesn’t have to round up or borrow gold before it can do things. It is not “in debt.” Think about what “bankrupt” means to a country that prints its own currency. It certainly doesn’t mean we can’t find enough gold to hand over and have to sell off the Washington Monument or the US Capitol. (Actually Congress has already sold itself but that’s another post.)
Taxes Are Not Revenue
Taxes do not “raise revenue.” Taxes balance income and wealth distribution and bring fairness. They incentivize desired behaviours. But they do not “fund” the federal government. The US government is not a family around a kitchen table scraping together a few dollars to pay for food, it manages a modern economy.
Instead of the current medieval-based system of superstitiously limiting spending “in case” doing so might “trigger” inflation, governments must do actual work to plan spending according to production capacities, available labor, available resources, etc in order to keep inflation at bay.
Free Your Minds
Understanding how modern money and budgeting works frees progressives to be able to get things done to make people’s lives better. Why can’t government guarantee a well-paying job with benefits to people who want to help solve society’s problems. For example teacher’s aides, elder or child care, insulating homes, etc? Why can’t government do what is needed to fight the climate crisis and transform to a green economy? Once you understand how money works the possibilities reveal themselves.
However
However, the public is not caught up with an understanding of modern budgeting, and these concepts could scare people and leave them vulnerable to conservative fear-mongering about “government spending” and “debt.” Wall Street and conservatives do everything they can to scare the public into thinking progressives will “bankrupt” the country. For now please just stop reinforcing old fashioned terms that limit what we can do while we wait for people to catch up with understanding how money really works. Do not use terms like “funding” and “revenue” and “borrowing” and “deficits” and “debt” in your discussions of budgets and taxes. We can say the same things without reinforcing those harmful concepts.
How far have fallen down the rabbit-hole of collapse? How many of the things we take for granted as ‘givens” in our society have gone away?
Imagine if the idea of libraries or public parks or, God forbid, Social Security or the Post Office were proposed today. Imagine if ANY of the “public goods” we take for granted were proposed today. Even police departments or courts.
Picture the national discourse around such “radical left” proposals.
It would be unimaginable today that our country would allow such radical leftist ideas to come to be. The government paying to have places where people can go borrow books … for FREE? Parks that don’t charge a fee?
We all know this is how it would be.
We don’t have to “bring back jobs from China.” Economists explain that exporting low-level jobs and automating free up resources so “we” can have more $ and free time. And places climbing the jobs ladder get jobs.
The problem is how “we” are distributing the gains. Right now a company ships jobs away or automates and a few already-wealthy people in charge of the company get all of the gains. The workers a shit out of luck. They lose homes, etc.
AND on top of that the owners of companies use those job losses to break unions, etc, forcing wages down. “Shut up and accept the pay cut or we’ll fire you.”
Imagine Democracy
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Imagine if “we” all shared the gains, and received more $ and free time. And as those other countries automate, etc., they also get more $ and free time.
What we need is democracy (aka “socialism”,) so we can GET that $ and free time.
Imagine if we had an economic system designed to be of, by and for We the People, where we require that automation and job exports mean those economic gains go to US – We the people – instead of an already-wealthy few.
A company improves efficiency by automating, etc., and the gains go into a fund. As all the companies do this, the fund provides income to working people. People get the same pay and reduced hours because the efficiencies mean there is less work to do. Or they can move up the ladder to more-skilled jobs for more pay.
In other words, imagine democracy
This post originally appeared Nov.12, 2013, at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture.
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“We the People.” How many of us have really thought through the implications of these three words? Can people today even imagine a government that is on the side of We the People, instead of being rigged to benefit the already-wealthy and crush the hopes and efforts of the rest of us?
Since the early 1970s corporate/conservative-funded interests have pounded the public 24/7/365 with unceasing propaganda promoting the idea that government can’t do anything right, business always does everything better and more “efficiently,” market solutions (one-dollar-one-vote) are better than public (one-person-one-vote) solutions, and so on.
Meanwhile democracy does not have a marketing budget, and for so long now so many people have not even heard that there can be another side, another approach to solving our problems and making our lives better. People just hear over and over that “government is bad, efforts to do things for each other are bad, but private business for profit is good.”
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