As always, a long one.
I watched Rachel's show last night and was disgusted by how far our country has sunk. We have wealth inequality that would make most 3rd world nations blush, and it's socially unsustainable. I've had three conversations about revolution in this country with three complete strangers. You should not feel comfortable talking about revolution with a complete stranger. There is a mood that something is going to break if we continue to let most of the wealth flow to a small, elite few. Corporate profits and the wages that workers receive are no longer even linked together. The military's budget will grow unabated for years to come as we move into Africa and the social safety net, however meager and poorly designed it is, will be on the chopping block so long as Republicans have the house under their control.
It's time to be serious.
Activists have tried. Brilliant writers have tried. There are massive movements across the nation to democratize the workplace and punch down as much money as they can to the people who wake up in the morning and work to make these corporations enjoy the vast profits they are now swimming in. They still only make so much of a dent. The American middle is like a glacier. People aren't moving fast enough. Their elected officials are disconnected and think Reagan's America is still around. This level of inequality is socially unsustainable if you want the country to look like a functional democracy. One need only look to places like Brazil, where the rich have to take helicopters to and from work so as not to be kidnapped by roving bands of thugs to see in real terms what happens.
Once we get to this point we'll have few options. Right wingers will want to meet force with force. As far as they are concerned, the criminals that arise from a poor environment are immoral because they commit crime, and in order for the rest of us to live in our prosperity bubbles, we'll have to go out and kill them from time to time to maintain order. They don't care about their plight, because to a right winger, the reasons why you got yourself into a fight are irrelevant, it's destroying your enemy thoroughly and scaring him off that counts. This is the logic of the current war on terror. If right wingers used it there, they'll use it on their own soil if things get bad. Right wingers are not interested in preventing the situation from happening in the first place.
Centrists won't help us. They'll be too busy mirroring Republicans or satisfying their need for false equivalencies to stroke the intellectual ego. They will give softer, gentler reasons as to why income inequality is perfectly okay and that our GDP growth is a sign of it. Social Security is the greatest part of the deficit, they'll say. They'll say that people drink too much Starbucks and should cut back on the Ipods as a means of combating long term unemployment and an economy that is becoming top down corporate. They'll be so busy making sure everyone's crossing their t's and dotting their i's that they will miss obvious solutions to the problem. They may not even really identify the problem.
Where does this leave us?
We have to be disciplined about attacking income inequality. Washington is gridlocked. Politicians are, for the most part, self interested or work in a world where not being self interested translates into having no power. There are only so many San Francisco's and Vermonts to produce Bernie Sander and Nancy Pelosi type Dems. The political solution is one dimension, but we need to be more basic.
We need an effective buy local campaign. We must stop shopping at big box stores. It has to completely stop. None of your money can flow to a business that adds to corruption if you can help it. I do not go to Red Lobster nor buy from Papa Johns. Yes, they have employees and they have since recanted, in a way, their anti-Obama screeds, but they've made their intentions know and will not receive a cent from me. We need to incentive-ize more places like Costco or aggressively develop co-ops or employee based businesses to punch the money down. The middle and lower class need alternatives to spend on, rather than McDonald's and Walmart. Stimulus doesn't work when the money goes back to big corporate. It does not help our cause when Walmart is the biggest recipient of food stamps. It's a wealth transfer from taxpayers to big corporate, which in turns suppresses worker wages and fuels more money for anti-labor legislation through campaign donations to willing politicians. Even when we want to try and help the lower classes, we cannot do it in such a way as to further press them down. We need to diversify America's portfolio, so that when money is punched into the system, it circulates faster and passes more hands, and doesn't pool for too long without being useful.
I understand why people shop at these places, but it's time to be disciplined. I understand gas and oil companies have a strange hold on our modern world. People are going to drive cars. They need to. We have to wait until green energy is ready for the market place. I totally understand that, but in the mean time, we have to diversify this economy. Is there no way to start a company that has high fuel efficiency cars and takes people to work, or at least, back and forth like a bus to places? It wouldn't be convenient as a normal car, but even in a place like Michigan, if it was affordable, you could grant people greater mobility which will mean that they can start negotiating with their feet when picking a job.
We cannot be like Sweden. Our welfare state is too threadbare, mismanaged, and invaded by corporate. We'd just have a class of skilled people with minimum wage workers to serve them. We cannot force wages down and expect prices to go down with them, modeling the entire country on Indonesia or Hong Kong, making people expect less from life. Economic diversification on the local level has to happen. The American people have to be shareholders in their own destiny.
We are the left. We are filled with creativity. There must be some way we can provide the same goods and services that the Walmarts and McDonalds provide, at a cheap cost, and not come off as hippies so even centrists and right wingers will shop there. It doesn't have to be a new advancement in tech, it could be alternative energy apartment buildings with low rent, or a fast food chain that serves healthier food at a cheap price. We could even set up local small business training for people looking to start their own business but need capital and training. I'm sure Kossacks would volunteer.
I am Left Libertarian. I am not a liberal, nor am I really a Democrat like many people on this site. I never had a political home for the most part. I share much of the same creed as American libertarians, but their adversarial individualism, laissez faire freedom, and lack of morality disgusts me. I think government should be local (not necessarily small), not because of freedumb, but because it helps people engage in with their community on a level they can handle and understand. Democratic Socialist states do entice me, but I question their translation to other countries. I believe in privacy rights and am always skeptical of entrenched power of any sort. I stay with the people on the left because my anti-authoritarian streak is not met with cries of "traitor!" or "terrorist sympathizer!" I think this country does not deserve to have its wealth stolen in the night and then left beaten and bloody on the floor. There has to be something we can do.