The Nonconformist: economy

Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts

People are behaving badly and have been on both "sides" of the whatever for 20+ years. During the Reagan administration there at least seemed to be more unity and cohesion. Politics have become too personal for people. We can't agree that someone may not be the best for a job or a (insert whatever justifiable/provable label) proven criminal without that “side” acting personally persecuted or that their beliefs/rights/morals are being attacked. The two sides (liberals and conservatives) are talking in slogans (“love conquers hate”, “one man, one woman”) instead of having real dialogue about issues, problems, and “sides”. And yes, both sides have acted out depending on which alternate side is in power at the time. The media is filled with “haters” and “trolls” who accentuate all of this. So why are we playing on these platforms, only dividing us more?

Buying a ticket and taking a seat to a circus of clowns doesn’t mean you get input on the show. If you want real change, real progress – start by reserving comment and not reacting every time a politician takes a shit on a media platform.

Give Peace, Prosperity, and Positivity the same attention given to Politics, Power, and Protest.

Then, what stands to win?

Media

#Value

Instead of getting that paper, find real value and real substance.

Why conform to what society, the government, corporate and big business, wants or expects?

Material possessions, things, more stuff, bigger, newer, latest, luxurious, brand, labels.

Don’t allow yourself to be a slave to the system.

Always seek your spirit and live for your soul.

Stay true to yourself hold value to what no one can take away.

Working with the GLBT Population

Flock of Sheep

from the "Some People Feel Like This" exhibit by Jim Roche

Neil deGrasse Tyson Selects the Eight Books Every Intelligent Person on the Planet Should Read

Tyson's Eight Books for Intelligent People

The Bible (public library; free ebook), to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself

The System of the World (public library; free ebook) by Isaac Newton, to learn that the universe is a knowable place

On the Origin of Species (public library; free ebook) by Charles Darwin, to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth

Gulliver’s Travels (public library; free ebook) by Jonathan Swift, to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos

The Age of Reason (public library; free ebook) by Thomas Paine, to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world

The Wealth of Nations (public library; free ebook) by Adam Smith, to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself

The Art of War (public library; free ebook) by Sun Tzu, to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art

The Prince (public library; free ebook) by Machiavelli, to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.

If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.

Generation Minimal Effort

People are learning less to earn more by taking every short cut they can. Motivated by money and status, Americans no longer value in themselves actual knowledge or experience. Generation Minimal (effort) doesn’t want to read, study, or truly research. Unbeknownst to them, this is where all the great learning occurs with labyrinths of other explorations. One cannot get to experience all of that with a mere search on Google that brings one simplified possibility. And Google it they will. Colleges are willingly going blind to the tricks of students and their techogadgets that allow them to cheat in every way they can. Employers are left with no choice but to pick from a herd of whiny, short cut taking, non-thinkers. The age of robots/computers taking our jobs has arrived. The question is – when will corporate America realize the bottom line will be less costly and less aggravation to adopt early?

Where We Are, Where We Are Going (?)

In the 1930s, Langston Hughes wrote a poem, "Lenox Avenue Mural":

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore-

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over-

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The following is from the compelling book, "A People's History Of the United States" by Howard Zinn.

With the Establishment's inability either to solve severe economic problems at home or to manufacture abroad a safety valve for domestic discontent, Americans might be ready to demand not just more tinkering, more reform laws, another reshuffling of the same deck, another New Deal, but radical change. Let us be Utopian for a moment so that when we get realistic again it is not that "realism" so useful to the Establishment in its discouragement of action, that "realism" anchored to a certain kind of history empty of surprise. Let us imagine what radical change would require of us all.

The society's levers of powers would have to be taken away from those whose drives have led to the present state-the giant corporations, the military, and their politician collaborators. We would need-by a coordinated effort of local groups all over the country-to reconstruct the economy for both efficiency and justice, producing in a cooperative way what people need most. We would start on our neighborhoods, our cities, our workplaces. Work of some kind would be needed by everyone, including people now kept out of the work force-children, old people, "handicapped" people. Society could use the enormous energy now idle, the skills and talents now unused. Everyone could share the routine but necessary jobs for a few hours a day, and leave most of the time free for enjoyment, creativity, labors of love, and yet produce enough for an equal and ample distribution of goods. Certain basic things would be abundant enough to be taken out of the money system and be available-free-to everyone: food, housing, health care, education, transportation.

The great problem would be to work out a way of accomplishing this without a centralized bureaucracy, using not the incentives of prison and punishment, but those incentives of cooperation which spring from natural human desires, which in the past have been used by the state in times of war, but also by social movements that gave hints of how people might behave in different conditions. Decisions would be made by small groups of people in their workplaces, their neighborhoods-a network of cooperatives, in communication with one another, a neighborly socialism avoiding the class hierarchies of capitalism and the harsh dictatorships that have taken the name "socialist."

People in time, in friendly communities, might create a new, diversified, nonviolent culture, in which all forms of personal and group expression would be possible. Men and women, black and white, old and young, could then cherish their differences as positive attributes, not as reasons for domination. New values of cooperation and freedom might then show up in the relations of people, the upbringing of children.

To do all that, in the complex conditions of control in the United States, would require combining the energy of all previous movements in American history-of labor insurgents, black rebels, Native Americans, women, young people-along with the new energy of an angry middle class. People would need to begin to transform their immediate environments-the workplace, the family, the school, the community-by a series of struggles against absentee authority, to give control of these places to the people who live and work there.

These struggles would involve all the tactics used at various times in the past by people's movements: demonstrations, marches, civil disobedience; strikes and boycotts and general strikes; direct action to redistribute wealth, to reconstruct institutions, to revamp relationships; creating-in music, literature, drama, all the arts, and all the areas of work and play in everyday life-a new culture of sharing, of respect, a new joy in the collaboration of people to help themselves and one another.

There would be many defeats. But when such a movement took hold in hundreds of thousands of places all over the country it would be impossible to suppress, because the very guards the system depends on to crush such a movement would be among the rebels. It would be a new kind of revolution, the only kind that could happen, I believe, in a country like the United States. It would take enormous energy, sacrifice, commitment, patience. But because it would be a process over time, starting without delay, there would be the immediate satisfactions that people have always found in the affectionate ties of groups striving together for a common goal.

All this takes us far from American history, into the realm of imagination. But not totally removed from history. There are at least glimpses in the past of such a possibility. In the sixties and seventies, for the first time, the Establishment failed to produce national unity and patriotic fervor in a war. There was a flood of cultural changes such as the country had never seen-in sex, family, personal relations-exactly those situations most difficult to control from the ordinary centers of power. And never before was there such a general withdrawal of confidence from so many elements of the political and economic system. In every period of history, people have found ways to help one another-even in the midst of a culture of competition and violence-if only for brief periods, to find joy in work, struggle, companionship, nature.

The prospect is for times of turmoil, struggle, but also inspiration. There is a chance that such a movement could succeed in doing what the system itself has never done-bring about great change with little violence. This is possible because the more of the 99 percent that begin to see themselves as sharing needs, the more the guards and the prisoners see their common interest, the more the Establishment becomes isolated, ineffectual. The elite's weapons, money, control of information would be useless in the face of a determined population. The servants of the system would refuse to work to continue the old, deadly order, and would begin using their time, their space-the very things given them by the system to keep them quiet-to dismantle that system while creating a new one.

The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.

Percy Shelley was a radical poet, polemicist and political activist. Jacqueline Mulhallen traces the revolutionary thread that ran through this extraordinary writer’s life and work;

Rise like lions after slumber

In unfathomable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

That in sleep have fallen on you

Ye are many, they are few.

That verse is perhaps one of the best known pieces of poetry in any movement of the oppressed all over the world. The Chartists knew it in the 19th century and so did the striking women garment workers in 1909 New York. It was chanted on demonstrations in Tiananmen Square (1989) and Tahrir Square (2011).

Rise like lions after slumber

In unfathomable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

That in sleep have fallen on you

Ye are many, they are few.

Change

What Are We Learning? What Are We Teaching?

Hope for the Future of America

Do you have healthcare coverage? Do you have a job? Do you pay out of your own pocket for your college? Or do you not? When are you ever told no? What can you control and what can you not?

Do you save on healthcare coverage because you are on your spouse’s plan instead of your own? Can you comfortably put up pictures of your family at work and share what your family did over the weekend without hesitation? Does your income/family/background determine whether you can get a higher education? Do you feel like you are a part of America? Do you feel that you are an American and when wars are fought, lives are lost --- they are for you and your freedom? Or do you not?

Higher taxes, unemployment, and affordable healthcare --- to some, a luxury to worry about. What if you had to worry that your country will have a leader who does not approve of you or your life? You worry because you know such a mentality is extremely influential. You apply for a job, but your mannerisms make the potential boss uncomfortable. You have health insurance, but you’re not permitted in the room because you’re not considered a relative.

If you were a minority, and if your personal safety was a greater concern than HMOs and PPOs, if every election year you stressed about the possibility of your civil rights being decreased, if you were told NO --- You would understand that EQUALITY and FREEDOM are taken for granted by those who have it and you wouldn’t worry so much about MONEY.

You’re a fairly intelligent person and you know that the gay can’t be prayed away. Now imagine your 13 year old child struggles, but ultimately tells you that they are gay. Think about this. Now ask yourself, what is most important in our future?

"Sometimes our technological expertise has seemed to top our moral capacity to use this expertise for the good of humanity. We have a capacity to feed all and yet millions starve because we seem to lack the moral and political will to do what we know is right. " ~ Archbishop Desmond Tutu

American Corporations Impose Slavery in Less Developed Countries

Here you will see what sacrifices are made to make American goods so affordable. Large corporations like Wal-Mart allow horrific working conditions for the workers outside the US who make these products. They have almost eradicated labor costs all together by creating slaves who by law have no other choice but to take what is dealt. We as Americans should not allow this to go on. People in other countries are being enslaved with few rights only to enhance our way of life. Americans should use their dollars to support fair wages, fair working conditions, and freedom of work. By shopping for the best deal and buying goods made elsewhere, we are often buying slaves.