FUNDAMENTALS

SIMPLE MATHEMATICS and THE EARTH

The health, livability and usability of the planet is the most determining factor of all for ourselves and society.

Whether Capitalist, Socialist or Communist, virtually all economies are based on the production and consumption of resources and discharging the waste products into the environment. Our economies are based on creating poisons.

1 The earth only has so much resources.

2 Extracting, transporting and shaping those resources into products creates poisons.

3 The earth has a limited capacity to absorb those poisons without undergoing drastic effects

4 Our human bodies have a limited capacity to absorb those poisons without undergoing drastic effects

5 Consider the phrase “undeveloped land”. Nature is only valued to the extent that it can be changed into man made structures and uses, killing nature and replacing it with something else; yet without nature we die as a species (no food), and the web of life is far more complex and interconnected than we understand.

Any economic plan not based in physical reality is a fantasy bringing about its’ own destruction. At present most of the world is living in fantasy. Rates of many illnesses are rising, ice caps melting, sea levels rising, oceans fished out, nutritional value of soil way down, etc.

All our political differences and personal dreams are moot if we are dying of environmentally caused cancers or are environmental refugees or dead from disasters brought on ourselves by fouling our nest.

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THE MATH OF JOBS IN AMERICA

1 Jobs and prices are related. How much work one needs to pay living expenses is highly variable.

2 At current wages and prices, especially housing, most people need to work 40-60 hrs/week to survive.

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3 There simply are not enough jobs for the population at 40-60 hrs/wk, especially decent jobs paying enough to live decently.

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4 Many of the jobs that do exist pay so lowly that many work hard and barely survive with no margin for error, such as illness

5 Illegal immigrants take up a certain amount of low low wage jobs, and/but if every immigrant went home there still would not be enough living wage jobs.

6 Many large companies are understaffed due to high executive compensation being chosen over hiring additional staff. This can be noticed on checkout lines, looking for someone to ask a question on sales floors, etc.

7 Many jobs have already been sent overseas to low wage countries, many more are in the process. Owners and execs seek profits for the business. The old vision of business as service and family is long gone.

8 Automation continues to kill jobs. Now even fast food order taking is starting to be automated

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9 Businesses are there to make money, not be socially responsible. If firing everyone in America, automating some jobs and sending the rest to some country where people work for 25 cents an hour increases profits they do that if it makes the owners more money and execs higher bonuses.

This goes to basic understandings and definitions of how a society is supposed to function: for the good of some or for the good of all, what used to be called the Social Contract.

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So, a game of musical chairs with jobs. What happens to those who lose, many of whom do not have the technical and computer skills

and education to get a job in today’s workplace.

If one researches the difference between “participation rate” and “unemployment rate”, one finds that real unemployment in US today is around %25-30. Official unemployment rate only counts those actively looking for work and can’t find a job, not those who for whatever reasons are not looking.

If it were possible to survive on 30 hours of work per week, or even 25, there could again be full employment, but rents would have to go way down.

And what if the limits to planetary poisoning are acknowledged and the whole basis of the economies of the world is disrupted. Where then do people work, and what do they work at?

Not so simple, certainly not as simple as red or blue winning an election.

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ELECTIONS; WANT REAL CHANGE?

Don’t like government policies? Until the type of decision makers in power is changed expect more of the same. Regardless of the particular names and faces, the electoral system guarantees that only certain types of people can win an election, with occasional rare exceptions. What type? Corporate Capitalist business-as-usual type, red or blue variety.

Lemon trees grow lemons.

1 verifiable voting, incl. exit polls. Honest vote counts.

Here in the USA we have Faith Based Voting: they announce the results, we have to take it on faith.

Electronic Elections are hackable elections, push one button.

In the old days they had to at least stuff ballot boxes and they could recount real physical ballots.

When you go shopping you get a receipt. If you have any doubts you look at the receipt. A paper trail. Not so in elections, not even the same level of verifiability as shopping.

No verifiability, no trust. Why should we trust a result that can’t be proven?

2 Want real choice?

multiple choice voting so that people feel free to vote 3rd party, without which 2 parties continue their monopoly of power. One thing Democrat and Republican leadership agree on totally is not letting anyone else in on the action.

3 Really we don’t have elections in America, we have AUCTIONS, legalized bribery of politicians with “campaign finance contributions”.

Money out of politics.

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Secondarily

1 unGerrymander. Many people’s votes hardly count, districts are so heavily biased

2 unStrip voters from rolls. Tens of millions have been cheated of their chance to vote in various devious, ugly ways. Every election in every state for every issue has been affected for years. Many results would have been quite different.

See the work of Greg Palast

3 election day a national holiday. Elections on a workday inherently discriminates against working people

4 abundant polling places, no more lines. Many are almost denied their right to vote by making it incredibly difficult, often deliberately

5 amendment: affirmative right to vote. It is a democracy, right?

6 abolish electoral college

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Dishonorable mention-all the millions of (mostly black) people who have been deliberately robbed of their right to vote because of War on Drugs convictions.

We have been in a long term cultural civil war which started in the 60s with the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests.

The War on Drugs was a brilliant, deliberate, devious move by the Republican party to seize power by incarcerating blacks and leftists to deprive them of their votes, to make them afraid or ineligible to run for office or partipate in politics too openly. They couldn’t criminalize being against the war or a Democrat, but they could and did criminalize a lifestyle choice common to anti war protestors, leftists and black people

Ronald Reagan, Bush 1, Bush 2, DT, along with countless Senators, Congesspeople and ballot measures, none would have won if all the people who had their votes stolen by the War on Drugs could have voted.

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Step 1: get more people aware of the top 3. The shocking thing is how many are in denial of vote hacking and how few realize how important multiple choice voting is.

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and,

IF CORPORATIONS ARE PEOPLE, MICKEY MOUSE IS A PERSON TOO!

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POISON THE RIVERS

there’s a LAW that says a corporation’s #1 responsibility is to make profits for it’s shareholders. That means that if it’s cheaper to poison drinking water and pay the fines than to not poison the river, they poison the river. Execs face pressure from shareholders to maximize profits no matter who gets hurt.

can anyone tell me

*Where that law came from?

*why it should still be there?

*why no one talks about it?

That law needs to be taken off the books.

Maybe replaced with another law saying that business has a responsibility to the society to not do harm for profit, but at least take the present law off the books.

meanwhile

NO ONE IS PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE

Execs in Corps are immune from prosecution for the consequences of their actions.

This makes sense for honest mistakes, but what about when they knowingly poison a river, or order a coverup of a safety flaw in a product?

And willful and criminal negligence?

Why is there no PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?

If there was, they wouldn’t do those wrongs.

Those laws arguably make more difference than the President

We need a law change:

Execs personally liable to prosecution for harm resulting from criminal activities, willful and gross negligligence, including public right to file civil suits.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY NOW!

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A VERY SMALL TECHNICAL CHANGE WHICH MIGHT MAKE A VERY BIG DIFFERENCE:

LAST MINUTE CHANGES TO BILLS IN CONGRESS

Very often, at the very last minute, legislators slip in nasty little additions or changes to bills, usually for the purpose of giving some big business a tax break. One or two sentences in a 600 page bill, slipped in at midnight. Usually a giveaway to some business that has bribed them with “campaign finance contributions”.

SUGGESTION: a 3 day vetting period for all bills before they are voted on, no changes allowed, meaning the public has 3 days to read the final bill, to catch any attempted hanky panky.

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VISION OF SOCIETY AND DESERVING

One of the biggest differences in the the liberal and conservative views of America is deserving.

The Left believes that all people deserve a decent basic existence, period.

The Right believes that:

*people have to deserve what they get,

*deserving being defined as getting a job, working hard, being excellent at budgeting and controlling spending…

*with a very few exceptions for disability, etc,

and believes that

*if you don’t do that, work hard, budget your money carefully, etc,

you deserve whatever suffering you incur,

and believes that