Today is Wall Day

There is only one way to celebrate Wall Day: get a sledge hammer.

As of today, February 6, 2017, the Berlin Wall has been down exactly as long as it was up. In honor of Wall Day, I call on the people of the world to look over another wall and see another better world.

The people tore down one wall. Another needs to fall.

The fall of the communist system was likely due to the fact that there was another system operating at the same time just across the wall. While the rhetoric of the communist world presented a line about a “worker’s paradise” everyone from the top to the bottom could see that the system was not as good as the other system in most ways for most people.

Today we have a system of global managed capitalism with elected representative governments. There is no other active system to which we can compare what we have up and running around us. That does not mean that our system is great.

If you criticize this system, call it neoLiberal or something, then they throw arguments back at you: What, you want to live in Venezuela? You like Stalin? Anarchism doesn’t work, obviously. You want divine right of kings back? Don’t you know that billions of people have been pulled out of poverty! Progress is real. Democracy, or this form of capitalism, is the worst system, except for all the others, and they’ve all been tried and failed. There are laws and rules of this system, like nature. You can no more change this system of state monopoly capitalism with some pretense of democracy through politics than you can change the weather.

Taking apart these status quo arguments is pointless. Rather, let’s just look over the wall and imagine how easy it would be to make the world much better. It’s so fricken easy and obvious that in a few paragraphs, I can easily outline a fool-proof plan to fix the entire world without hurting anyone at all.

I don’t have to propose a comprehensive “ism” or ideology. Just look over the wall. Imagine these steps:

Pay the People

As we all know, inequality is extreme. Let’s stay in the domestic US sphere for a moment. The richest 400 individuals own more than the bottom 70% of the population. If those 400 people were capped at maximum wealth of a billion dollars each — again, they get to be rich as hell — there would be enough money left over to give every man, woman and child in the US more than $60,000 each.

I say, do it. If a political party were to take control of the government, then hand out checks for $60,000 to everyone, I suspect that party would be mighty popular. If any billionaire howl or pay others to howl for them, too bad.

The Social Security Administration and the IRS together do a very good at redistributing wealth. The young send billions of dollars to the old every week with very little overhead or corruption. The IRS manages to collect money very effectively. Jeff Bezos is a sitting duck: his money is in Amazon stock. You can take it from him, then send the shares out to people in the general public in a short amount of time. Months at most.

It would be a fair and honorable thing to do. Bezos should be rich. Enterprise and investment must and do include a fair amount of luck, along with vision and hard work, etc., and luck is fine. Being rich is fine. But the snowball effect of technology, where an idea or institution gets going, then grows rapidly, has nothing to do with nature or morality. Technology allows one entity to expand rapidly, cashing in on momentum in a way that increases in speed over time. So, the SSA and the IRS should simply step in and correct this inherit problem with technology drive market snowballs. Getting rich is fine. Snowballing out of control to squash the entire planet is not fine.

You would think giving everyone a nest egg — money for emergencies, for retirement, etc. — would be popular. Sure, there would be unfairness and dislocations associated with the vastly new world this simple procedure would create but the government and media were never too concerned about the dislocations and unfairness inherit in, say, foreclosures, war, speculation, trade agreements… what is more reckless than war?

If our economy would grind to halt if the people aren’t desperate and poor, then the economy will need to correct itself. We don’t tolerate child labor as we once did. We worked around it. I’m sure this great market economy can find a way to keep on chugging even once the workers are not worried about how they will make it through the month.

Reparations

A separate issue to the 1% versus 99% is the inequality between Black and White Americans. Again, this issue is within the US (unlike the next two) but the principles may apply to other societies in other ways.

White households have at least 10 times as much wealth as Black households in the United States. A big discrepancy holds even when you factor out the very rich, who are almost all White. Of all the differences between White and Black people in the US, this seems like one of the most important inequalities, and one of the easiest to fix if you wanted to fix it.

Imagining America as a place of two peoples, one Black and one White, doesn’t really work. A large number of people don’t fit in, including many Hispanics, Asians, etc. Also, when I say “Black” and “White,” how would immigration fit in?

There are so many problems with reparations — transferring wealth to Black households — that it is impossible to imagine a way to do it without the process being unfair to many people. What about Jamaican immigrants? What about Mexican Americans? What about the Navajo? Who’s Black? What about historically marginalized White communities?

That is why I would propose mixing this issue, reparations for Black America, into a pot with the redistribution proposal above. If everyone, White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and other, is getting a savings account with the stocks and bonds stripped from the top .01%, it might take the sting off the fact that some people might get a slightly bigger balance. You could mix in some other variables, like zip code, to try to increase the fairness of the redistribution, recognizing that there is no way to do this that will be absolutely fair but that the project of reparations with redistribution will be more fair than the current situation.

I mention zip code because some people should get more based on concentrations of poverty, like Appalachia, some Indian reservations, some disadvantaged areas. If you live in Beverly Hills, your share might not be $60,000 per person, but maybe $50,000, while if you live in the poorest part of Webster County, West Virginia, you’d get $75,000 and if you are Black and live in Flint, you might get $90,000.

Also, that would a figure in stocks and bonds as off the moment the government stripped that asset from the oligarch. In the months between the stripping of the asset and the apportioning of the assets to accounts for everyone with a social security number, the value of the asset would change. So one person would get something worth $40,000 and his neighbor $65,000 based on pure luck of the performance of the randomly assigned assets in the months between the start of the process.

So, I would mix reparations into a mix of redistribution to make the process more palatable. The goal is not perfect fairness but a reshuffling of the deck — which will include luck, as some will get more than others based on factors such as zip code, race, and pure luck.

Dealing the Third World in

Now that we’ve reshuffled the deck in America, it’s time to deal in everyone else on the planet. America is not going to institute this redistribution policy in a vacuum and the American people will need the support of people around the world to make this oligarch correction policy work.

The Germanic tribes that brought down the western part of the Roman empire didn’t destroy Rome because they hated the Romans. They wanted to BE Romans and destroyed the empire on accident.

Right now, the difference between, say, the sahel in Africa and Europe, not that far to the north, is massive. Technically, in terms of purchasing power, a billionaire oligarch further away from the average American than the average American is from the poorest of the poor in the Third World. However, if you don’t have clear water, no medical care, no food, this distinction in purchasing power might be lost on you.

I just don’t think in the long run you can have rich countries and poor countries without something giving somewhere. It’ll give and break. You can’t build a wall big enough, if the difference gets too stark.

It’s safer and more moral to cut everyone in and make life better for everyone, give everyone a stake. So, my next proposal would be to radically change the World Trade Organization to put the environment and workers rights at the top of the agenda for all nations who want to participate in the international system. If you want to be in, you have to give your citizens a social security account, workman’s comp, basic safety and health standards and something like a free press.

I don’t know, as I’ve never been there, but I suspect, and I may be going out on a limb with this one, but I bet workers in Bangladesh, as poor as they are, don’t want to go to work in a factory that is going to collapse on top of them and kill them. Wild guess here, but I bet they don’t really want to die in an industrial accident. Now, I can’t prove this, but I would be willing to bet that Chinese people want to retire when they’re old. Not sure, just speculating. Maybe people in Mali have 8 children because they have no safety net and maybe if they were sure they wouldn’t starve, just a guess again, they might have fewer children that one of them might, somehow, manage to save them when they’re old…

We have the technology and the money here on earth to guarantee that every single person on the planet can retire with a pension. If a country does not put in a pension system, then that country should not be allowed to trade with the international community.

And some of the money taken from the oligarchs, as I outlined at the beginning of this essay, should go into an international fund to pay for some of the pension system. While we’re redistributing from very rich to everyone else domestically, we cannot forget the people around the world. No money for foreign governments: these pensions would go to individuals.

We cannot leave the poorest people out there in the cold (or extreme heat, as the case may be). We have to bring everyone inside, even if we start with a $50 a month pension for a peasant in Nepal.

Glimpse Over the Wall

Wouldn’t it be better if people in Africa were not so desperate to get to Europe that they die in the numbers we now see? Wouldn’t it be better if American workers did not have to worry about missing a paycheck and ending up homeless? Wouldn’t it better in America addressed it’s original sin, racism, with the only thing that matters in this world, cold cash? Why not just do it?

I don’t trust the bureaucracy and the state. I’m not crazy about big business and high finance. International institutions are suspect too. There are ways to govern much more democratically than we do now. If we wanted to, we could make a kind of government that is so democratic, everyone would live longer, be happier, have more public space to move around in, war would decline, and we could feel better as part of a human community. It wouldn’t be perfect, but better.

Step one is get the money from the assholes who are hoarding it. Step two should be make sure the government doesn’t squander or steal it. Next, cut everyone in and show that we all are humans, with rights. Right now, there is no such thing as human rights. Your rights depend on who you are — your passport and your bank account. That’s dangerous. Without human rights, the man can kill you and your children. If he can kill the children in Yemen or Ferguson, he can kill your children when he gets ready to.

On the other side of the wall, no, that’s impossible: you have rights. On the other side of the wall you don’t starve and die. On the other side of the wall there are no private jets warming the planet and melting the ice.

America, people of the world, tear this wall down.