Forum Post: Happy birthday America - the place where freedom was born!
Posted 10 years ago on July 4, 2013, 11:04 a.m. EST by DemandTheGoodLifeDotCom
(3360)
from New York, NY
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
It's been a while since I posted here. But what better day to get radical than the 4th, so I figured I would re-post my happy birthday post!
To all my fellow Americans, today we joyously celebrate our country's founding. We are celebrating the day when a few, white, rich men got so sick of paying taxes that they declared war on their country. But the war, of course, was not about rich, white men. It was about freedom, equality and democracy for everyone. It says it right there in our Declaration of Independence. It was so noble an act, thinking about it should give any good patriot a Chris Matthews tingle up their leg.
When the war was over, we founded the greatest country in the world. It was a country where liberty reigned for everyone. Well, except blacks who we enslaved. And except Native Americans who we mostly slaughtered (you know, with their barbaric ideas of sharing and all). And except women who we prevented from voting. And except men who were not rich or white enough to own land who we also prevented from voting.
But for everyone else, you were free at last, free at last, free at last.
Well, only rich, white males are left. And they were already free. But now they finally escaped the tyranny of having to pay a tax. And now they had their very own kingdom to rule, I'm sorry I mean country to democratically participate in.
Thus began a 236 year tradition of politicians giving the American public a heavy dose of all the right American feel-good buzzwords like freedom, democracy and equality, while engineering a society that mostly favors white, rich men and goes to wars to further their interests.
So in the immortal words of Frederick Douglass, a real revolutionary for freedom, democracy and equality, “The Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”
P.S. Here's how to solve nearly all the world's problems: Replace capitalism with democracy. Doing that would make everyone wealthy (and making everyone wealthy would solve nearly all the world's problems), and doing that is actually politically feasible today as explained in this occupy post which you can view by clicking here
We are many, they are few. How do we implement the plan?
The way you change society is by organizing politically. But political action is only effective if you have many supporters around a common cause. The occupy movement does not have that. They are fractured because everyone supports different causes.
You heard of the tactic divide and conquer? That is why occupy has not changed anything. They are being conquered because they are divided over what to do. If occupy was united over a single cause, they would have political power.
Look at the tea party. They have a simple, singular mission that the ENTIRE tea party movement is working towards: reduce the size of government.
The tea party has millions of members. And since they are all for just one cause, that one cause of reducing government has millions of supporters. That is why they single-handedly changed congress and passed many tea party laws.
What has occupy accomplished? Nothing. They may have millions of supporters too. But if they are divided among thousands of different causes, each cause only has a small amount of support. So each cause dies from too little support.
Even worse, some actively encourage more division by advocating decentralization and diversity!
Occupy needs to change from a protest movement to a solutions movement. It needs to adopt a singular goal and focus everyone's efforts to achieving that goal. Complaining about the world's problems and not offering a solution won't change anything.
I believe OWS's singular goal should be to create a fully democratic society: A society with a democratic government AND A DEMOCRATIC ECONOMY.
And to make society fully democratic, it should specifically demand that the govt provide enough funding to launch enough democratic companies to fully employ everyone who wants to work in a democratic company. And a democratic company is defined as a company where all the workers are equal owners, have equal say and get paid according to a plan that limits the differences in income between workers by law to only what's necessary to get workers to do hard jobs and to give their maximum effort.
You would give everyone a choice between working for a capitalist company where they struggle or a democratic company where they don't.
You would in effect guarantee everyone a job in a company that pays you at least $115k per year. That would put an end to all our economic problems.
I talk more about that solution in the link in the end of the above post and also in this post. I think this solution captures the spirit of what occupy is about.
The idea is great and democracy is my preferred method. A minimum $115k per year is fantastic.
Defining hard jobs might be difficult. Maybe that can be overcome with technology but hand picking vegetables has to be one of the toughest jobs. Physical jobs exist that can currently only be done by young males. What is the plan for who does what?
You can read how a democratic economic system works by clicking here and reading the post.
And you can read how the incomes were calculated and how hard jobs would be determined by clicking here and reading the comment.
A hard job is a job that is physically or mentally difficult. In calculating incomes I made the assumption that the 12.3 million workers who work in the physically and mentally difficult fields of science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, and farming qualified as hard jobs and that we needed to pay workers twice as much to get them to do those jobs. (But read the comment I link to in order to understand how that was arrived at.)
So $115k would be the minimum income for jobs that are not difficult and $230k would be the minimum income for jobs that are difficult.
Workers will choose which career they want to pursue just like they do now and will choose among the available jobs.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/none-are-more-hopelessly-enslaved-than-those-who-f/
http://occupywallst.org/forum/the-cooperative-union/
The flaw in your premise is that there were many, many, many Indentured WHITE servants from Europe who also were treated like slaves.
Of course, the difference was that eventually they could become "free". However, it wouldn't surprise me if the calendar kept getting pushed back in exchange for emergency cash to pay a doctor for some illness brought on by working too many hours or without enough water.
To be clear, my premise was not that no whites were slaves. My premise was that the only people who were free were white, male property owners. But I understand your point. Slavery was so rampant even some white men found themselves as indentured servants.
I think it was a lot whites early on that were indentured servants. Boatloads of indentured servants from England and the surrounding area made a win win all the way around. It cut costs for England, got rid of people who probably would go back to crime because of lack of employment opportunities, and gave those in prison an eventual way out.
As for why the same model was not used for africans brought over as slaves, I think once they were adults with little education, nobody wanted to deal with that.whereas indentured servants possibly had some education or at the very least spoke a similar language.
Not justifying it. I think it was bull crap that everybody could not work their way out of slavery and that is why I don't consider the constitution to be such an incredible writ of passage.
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Runnymede was where freedom was born.
America may very well be the place it dies.
I couldn't find anyone to discuss the constitution with. They were busy partying.