I started to respond that the Michigan politicians who are responsible for
switching the Flint water supply to the Flint River should be the ones who are
forced to drink the water. Then I remembered an article I've recently come
across about tainted water systems all over the country. And then I remember
Obama, visiting Flint, taking a sip of the water, and reassuring the residents
that the water was fine. And while it is true that the billionaires benefit
from an economic system that causes water systems to become tainted, it is also
true that most people who aren't affected by tainted water systems, don't give
a thought to the people who are and would not sacrifice anything to make life
better for the people whose water, air, and earth have been polluted by greed.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2017 6:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Free Lunch for Everyone
Well Miriam, if you call it your "religious nature", I won't argue.
But all of my talk about dreams of future life, was done tongue in cheek. For
sure I would not force those released inmates to build walls around the
Billionaires if they really wanted to build bridges or weed flower beds.
Now as for the Flint water...that's another situation. Here these folks are,
still unable to drink the stuff that comes out of their faucets, and the city
is planning to slap leans on them if they don't pay back water bills, even
though the product being delivered is damaged goods...I wonder if that might be
a possible way of cancelling the bills?...but while these fine citizens could
well be shortening their lives through the use of contaminated water, the
Billionaires go about drinking clear, fresh water. They bathe in pure water.
They go for a dip in clean, clear water. They even put clean, clear water on
their lawns and gardens and flush their toilets with it. No, my Jarvis Values
say that these people deserve to be forced to use the Flint water for the same
length of time that the Flint citizens use it.
The Jarvis Values would also enable Slum Lords to live for years in the same
rotten buildings they currently own and rent out to the poor.
Oppressors need to be held responsible for their deeds. I believe this
because, despite my wildest wishes, there are people who will never learn to
respect other humans. Catch them conning folks out of their possessions and
they will simply look for a better scam.
And as far as my being vindictive, remember, on email lists we can be whatever
our little hearts desire. But if I get wound up from time to time, and start
yelling, "Off with their 'eds!" the real flesh and blood Carl has never put
vindictive action to his vindictive words.
I've never hit anyone...well, I have given each of my two oldest children a
single spanking, but even falling down drunk, I have never spent much time
plotting and planning on how I'd "get even" with those who've "hurt my
feelings". So what I most likely am is the old, toothless Tiger.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/11/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You're more vengeful than I. I don't want to imprison anyone, nor do I
want to give them tainted water to drink. I just want them to live
like everyone else and no one should be imprisoned or drink tainted
water. I decided today that I am probably a religious person which is
why I don't fit anywhere. But I'm not a member of any recognized
religion. It's just that I have these values about which I feel very
strongly. You know that problem your having at the Hanford Nuclear
site? Well, back in the 70's, this investment guy came to the house
and he was talking about various tax free municipal bonds in which I
could invest. I had money that I'd been earning from my adoption work.
Fred and I sat and talked with this guy who had been recommended by
one of the rehab teachers whom Fred supervised. The guy talked about
these bonds for two nuclear projects in Washington State, which paid
very high interest, part of which was federal, but somehow, it was tax
free. Fred, who always felt that as blind people, we were left out of
the real financial opportunities because we earned so little in
relation to everyone else, wanted me to invest in those nuclear
projects. I thought about it for, perhaps, 2 seconds, and said, "no".
I didn't want to have anything to do with developing nuclear energy.
The guy never told us that it was actually nuclear weapons which I
hear now that it was. Fred was furious. Many elderly people invested
money and then the projects, or one of them, failed financially.
People lost a ton of money. Now, I hear there was some kind of nuclear
accident. The only thing that prevented me from losing money was my religious
nature.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2017 11:54 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Free Lunch for Everyone
I can certainly go with your dream, Miriam. Still, I do like the idea
of former detainees happily building walls around the palatial
estates. We can also take away their money, for sure. We would send
out Meals on Wheels with standard K Rations, and Flint, Michigan
water. But I really do like the idea of the Billionaires being forced
to live out their lives isolated in their own ill gotten homes.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/11/17, M Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'd just take away all of that money from the very wealthy,
immediately and their multiple dwellings. All of that money would go
into the pot from which everyone would have a decent income, and it
would certainly be more than $15 an hour.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl ;
Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2017 10:52 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Free Lunch for Everyone
Now here's an idea I can go for. A three hour work day and free money.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Still, there's good food for thought in this article. And whether
I've ever said it or not, I do dream dreams of a Peaceful, Clean,
Healthy, Happy Future. My dream world is one without national
borders. A Land of sharing and Caring for all Life.
What keeps my dream a dream, is the interference by the Billionaires
who profit so much from violence and destruction. A first step in
turning my dream into reality is to open the prison doors and put
these folks into decent housing, and give them good paying jobs,
cleaning up the Land and rebuilding the inner cities. One of their
tasks would be to build walls, a favorite topic of Donald Trump's.
These walls would be built around the estates of the Billionaires.
The gates would be guarded in order to ensure that the occupants
could never move about the Land that they had been destroying for so
many years. They would be cut off from any communication with one another.
They could live in their ill gotten luxury until they died, at which
time their estates would become public parks...except for a very few
that would stand as examples of how a few people exploited the
multitude. We would all wander about the lush surroundings, shaking
our heads. Then it would be off to the beaches, riding our Antigrav
Riders, that use no fossil fuel, and float in the air so we no longer
need roads.
And there's so much more to imagine in that wonderful dreamland.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/11/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
'Utopia for Realists' author Rutger Bregman argues that if you give
people a basic income with no strings attached, they will make
better decisions, work more, cost the state less in the areas of
things like health care and incarceration, and be happier. (photo:
Ulrich
Baumgarten/Getty)
Free Lunch for Everyone
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
10 May 17
Can Americans handle the new book 'Utopia for Realists'?
The first thing you notice about Utopia for Realists, the new book
that argues that money should be free and a 15-hour work week sounds
about right, is its tone. Writer Rutger Bregman is cheerful,
optimistic, imaginative, welcoming, funny and economical – the
opposite of most of our political books, which tend to be
fulminating, accusatory, combative and narrow-minded, and all of
these things across far too many pages.
Bregman is Dutch, which will be a strike against him on these
shores, and then there is the matter of his politics, which seem
designed to infuriate the entire spectrum of current American
thought. He is for open borders, which will make him an Antichrist
to the Trump right, and he speaks warmly of neoliberalism, which
will make Sanders liberals cringe.
At the same time, the entire thesis of his book seems aimed at the
tepid incrementalism of mainstream Democrats, who reflexively
dismiss all big ideas as "politically unrealistic" and the work of
"purity testers." He will have few natural allies on this side of
the Atlantic, which may be one of the reasons his international
bestseller hasn't been reviewed in very many of our major newspapers
yet.
But Bregman's book is both a fun read and a breath of fresh air to
anyone who lived through the ghastly experience of last year's
presidential election season, which turned into an angry referendum
on the relentless narrowness of American politics.
Utopia for Realists is a book that argues, with humor and sympathy,
that we've all suffered from forgetting how to dream of a better
world. "We inhabit a world of managers and technocrats," he writes.
"Political decisions are presented as a matter of exigency – as
neutral and objective events, as though there were no other choice."
American writers continually made the mistake of trying to
understand the upheavals of last year in terms of the usual
left-right explanations of the world, instead of looking at more basic
criteria.
People everywhere were depressed and bored out of their minds. They
craved something new. Polls consistently showed that people in both
parties were unhappy with their choices and wanted a new direction,
almost irrespective of what that direction was.
People wanted big ideas and big dreams, but Democrats and
Republicans both have been trained to imagine the future not as a
better place, but one filled with horror and destruction. On the
right, the fantasy future is overrun by benefit-devouring immigrants
with scabies, while for the left the next decades are a hellscape
filled with toxic greenhouse gases and overfished oceans.
What I saw on the campaign trail last year was an electorate so
desperate for big dreams that they turned to lost paradises of the past.
Donald Trump promised to build walls to reverse the onslaught of
multiculturalism and send us back to a Fifties nirvana that never
existed – he literally promised Happy Days and even had Scott Baio
as an opening-day convention speaker.
For Democrats, meanwhile, the most exciting future was presented by
a septuagenarian socialist reintroducing the New Deal to young voters.
Even a mildly radical idea like free college aroused not just
derision but anger among "responsible" thinkers in both of the major
parties and in the punditocracy, ostensibly the place where we play
with ideas in this country.
Bregman argues that we are where we are because a century of
bummerific experiences with utopian ideas – fascism, communism,
Nazism, to name a few – have left us imagining that "dreams have a
way of turning into nightmares"
and that "utopia is a dystopia." This has left us with a world where
"politics has been watered down to problem management" and "radical
ideas about a different world have become literally unthinkable."
Even liberalism, Bregman argues, has become pessimistic, an ideology
that is "all but hollowed out," with young people trained to "just
be yourself" and "do your thing." That's probably an overstatement
and a cliché. But there's probably also some truth to the idea that
a lot of the controversies about safe spaces are the end result of a
new emphasis on trying to make the individual feel maximally safe
and accepted within the larger context of a world we've
unconsciously come to accept as essentially unchangeable.
Government, too, Bregman argues, has mostly given up trying to make
a better world, and has instead focused on policing it better. "If
you're not following the blueprint of a docile, content citizen," he
writes, "the powers that be are happy to whip you into shape" – with
control, surveillance, repression.
The welfare state is where Bregman sees the ultimate perversion of
the utopian instinct. It's become "a grotesque pact between left and
right," in which conservatives have spent a generation making sure
people getting aid are punished and villainized as lazy and
work-averse, while progressives have used public assistance as a way
to lever more control over the lives of poor people who aren't
trusted to make the right life choices. Anyone who has covered the
way the remains of the welfare bureaucracy works knows this is true,
that we have made receiving any kind of aid to keep yourself or your
children alive a humiliating, intrusive experience, one that invites
an army of inspectors into your home, who examine everything from
how many toothbrushes you have in your bathroom to whether your
Facebook page shows you're spending your time wisely.
Bregman thinks we should just give people money, no questions asked,
and let them sort it out. His prescriptions are humorously simple.
He quotes economist Charles Kenny, who notes "the reason poor people
are poor is because they don't have enough money." And he tells the
fascinating true story of that time that Richard Nixon – Richard
Nixon! – tried to implement a law guaranteeing a basic family income
for all Americans.
The story is one of those classic absurdist tales of history.
Nixon's brain led him to this idea by means of some bizarre accident
– he apparently thought "Tory men and liberal policies" are what
"changed the world," and saw the plan as the ultimate marriage of
conservative and progressive politics, something that would make his
name ring out
forever: Richard Nixon, guarantor of universal dignity.
But of course aides who hated the idea (including one who was an Ayn
Rand
fan) pushed him away from the plan, and it morphed into yet another
plan to castigate the lazy poor by forcing them to work. Later in
the Seventies, the idea vanished altogether thanks to another
classic political reason – a typo, which mistakenly showed that
experiments in this area revealed a 50 percent higher divorce rate,
which naturally led men to worry that guaranteeing women a basic
income would leave them with no reason to stay home. Years later it
turned out that basic income experiments had shown no impact on the
divorce rate.
One of the reasons the welfare state is so unpopular in America is
because every aid program ends up being income-dependent. You can't
qualify for aid here until you're poor enough, but we treat the poor
as work-averse parasites with bad judgment who have to be monitored
round-the-clock. But studies abroad show that the countries with the
most universal programs are the most successful and engender the
least hostility. "Basically," Bregman writes, "people are more open
to solidarity if it benefits them personally."
Bregman's basic ideas are pretty simple. He thinks (and many
scientists agree with him) that if you give people a basic income
with no strings attached, they will make better decisions, work
more, cost the state less in the areas of things like health care
and incarceration, and be happier and feel less humiliated, scared,
and insecure. He quotes Woody Allen, who pointed out that "money is
better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."
He also argues pretty forcefully that working longer hours makes us
less productive and also more unhappy. At some point in the arc of
industrialized countries, we end up working more and more hours just
so we can acquire more and more stuff we don't need. More relaxing,
less working and consuming – that's where we should be looking. So
he proposes a 15-hour work week. I'm sure people here will hate the idea.
And who knows, maybe none of it works in practice. But what's so
interesting about modern America is our hostility to the mere idea
of trying to create an easier and happier life. We're a country that
was once rich with social experimentation, from the Shaker colonies
to Brook Farm to Oneida to New Harmony to the Fourierist experiments
to the Octagon community of vegetarians to a long list of others,
many of them amusingly crazy, who tried to use the accident of
plenty as an excuse to build a better way to live.
Now we don't really even try, and mostly just scream at each other
on the Internet. That doesn't seem like it will get us there. Maybe
free money and a three-hour work day won't, either, but it sure
seems like it would be more fun to try.
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