By Robert Simmons
You are at home, sitting on the couch, when you notice that your beer can is empty. There is more beer in the fridge, but no one is around to get it for you. You weigh your options, form a plan, and moments later, you are back on the couch with another beer, plus some artificially-flavored Doritos you scored along the way. You had a goal, you made a plan in order to achieve that goal, and executed that plan to perfection. There is a career waiting for you in Logistics Management.
So solve this. What’s our plan? I mean humans. Do We even have a collective goal? Perhaps We are still not mentally capable of working on such a problem. We have a forebrain, it’s true, but in our current arrangement, We don’t have much use for it. After working enough to afford beer and Doritos, we then must work to counteract the effects of working, one such effect being our growing addiction to beer and Doritos; after that, who really has time left over to think, if thinking were even a thing.
Statistics do show, however, that people arrive much sooner at a destination if they actually know where they are going. Wouldn’t it be nice if people all got together, just one time, and did something truly meaningful to better this otherwise self-centered existence? Raising the National GDP doesn’t do crap for me, personally. I don’t feel a sense of pride when mass shootings are down, or the stock market is up; and War is so twentieth century. Can We all please do one collectively selfless act (that doesn’t involve violence) before We croak?
We could keep it simple. For instance, We all like to eat, and sleep in some safe comfortable place, with clean running water; and because We must work in order to survive, We definitely all need a job, as well as some way to get to and from that job. We also would need an education, in order to qualify for a job, and the job should be able to financially cover all the aforementioned basic needs; and even if We got old or sick or injured, and became useless in the measure of the current System We Have Created, we should still be guaranteed our right to life and liberty and happiness for the duration of our existence. Finally, because survival in the current System relies heavily on access to communication technology, We should also guarantee this utility is affordable for every citizen.
Current Cost Of Living
These are quite reasonable goals, and no, not every one, even in the United States, can claim to have secured these most fundamental needs. Once we set our minds toward providing these needs to every American, it is then We can finally confirm what all of Us already know: that our current system of Government and Economics is incapable of delivering on any of it. Today, a person would need to make over $45,000 a year just to pay for all of the above, without a dime left over for beer or Doritos. Only 45% of Americans even make $45k in a year, and a 45% success rate is an “F”, but only because there is no such grade as a “G”.
Now to be fair, the goal of this System We Have Created is not to take care of people, it is to make a Profit. The basic idea is that when some of us make a Profit, it somehow takes care of the rest of us, which would normally be considered delusional except that no one who says this actually believes it, they only say it in the hope that you believe it.
Something about Profit has that old familiar sting; it’s as if Oppression somehow disguised itself as Profit and secretly arrived, undetected, here in our current time period; meanwhile, every one vigilantly searches high and low, pointing here and there, mostly at each other, trying to pin down the whereabouts of Oppression, and Oppression is right there, in the Profit, hiding in plain sight, having quite a chuckle I imagine.
I am personally not a big fan of Oppression, but to be honest, Capitalism is the best System of Oppression people have so far invented. Capitalists gave Oppression a whole new look, cleaned up its image, and by breaking Oppression into a million little monetary pieces, gave the appearance that anyone could now own a small piece of It.
Doritos, Crystal Meth, Profit, it all works the same: once you start “using” money, you’re hooked, and a smart “employer” will give you just enough of the stuff to keep you strung out, forcing you into a life of prostitution. Some of Us will stoop lower than others to maintain that high, but really, all our hands are dirty. When a Capitalist tells you it’s ok to use because “everybody’s doing it”, he is at least half right, though mothers everywhere also correctly point out that just because everybody’s doing it, “doesn’t mean it’s right.”
At the surface, Most of us go through our day and do no obvious harm to anyone, yet somehow, just below the surface, people are being harmed in small and big ways every day. Not only do we individually have no real control over that, neither does our System of Government or Economics; not the way they are currently designed. All the problems oppressing Us today are problems We brought with us from the past, and they will never go away until We actively do something about it.
Logistically, We have taken over the surface of a planet stocked with many elemental ingredients, enabling us to cook up anything our imaginations can conjure, some good for us, others not so much. We need people to extract these ingredients, others to turn them into products, a third group to distribute the products to a fourth group, whose job is to sell them to a fifth group who chooses to consume them. Currently, someone sits at the top, trying to extract profit from this process, and for his alleged risk, he is heavily rewarded; meanwhile, the other 90% of Us (who do not have the financial means to take on this alleged risk) must work on the supply chain gang; extracting, manufacturing, distributing, marketing, selling, consuming.
In the proposed Oppression-free version, We the People (that’s us) would now claim ownership of our monetary system; US currency is backed by the Federal Government, which is supposedly owned and operated by We the People, though the Banking System (as well as the Military, Research and Development, Congress, the Executive Branch, etc.) fell to private interests quite early in America’s history. We would first regain control of the Banking System, so whatever interest is garnered through the loaning of money would be the property of the people, and divided equally among all citizens.
Next, We the People would also claim that essential needs fall under our “inalienable right to life”, and therefore claim eminent domain over them. Finally, We would hire the Federal Government to manage our essential needs, making We the People the “shareholders” capable of limiting the salaries of “management”, and also eliminating Profit from off the top of things like Healthcare or Electricity, Transportation or Housing, to bring essential needs into a more affordable price range. A “living wage” would actually be created, not by raising salaries higher and higher, but simply by lowering the cost of anything considered an “essential need”.
By loaning money out to Communities to build essential needs Infrastructure, We could now make sure our energy is green, our transportation and water are safe and clean, our agriculture is either regenerative or Vertical, our “pre-existing condition” are covered, our Housing is affordable…and when we pay for our affordable food and water and electricity and housing and healthcare, etc., it goes back into our Bank, helping those “shareholder dividends” grow into something meaningful in our retirement years.
So. Solve Climate Change: check. Rebuild crumbling Infrastructure: check. Provide Universal Healthcare: check. Create a “living wage”: check. Secure every American’s Retirement: check. Create jobs within every Community: check. Make Government work for the people: check. Lower every ones’ Income Taxes: check. Lower the cost of Federal Government: check. Create a safer Transportation Grid: check. Lower the cost of Housing rent: check. Pay down the National Debt and make a profit doing it: check. Put more money in every one’s pocket to spend on things they “want”: check, plus many other benefits.
To see more, visit 3rdOptionParty.org, and browse around. It’s one of those parties where every one is invited, and you do not have to check your political (or any other) beliefs at the door. You only have to admit that A) you are human and B) so are the rest of us.
Want to Change the World? Change Public Education First (While We Still Can)