I find the whole "Primary Process" tiring. It was this way last time, and the time before. We eat our own before coalescing around a chosen Nominee.
I imagine that even with the kinder, gentler Democrats we appear to have right now, their supporters do find it difficult to remain civil. Part of me understands that the passion, the importance of the subject at hand and the very real dangers to our way of lives posed by getting it wrong makes feuding inevitable. Nonetheless, it is wearing and reflects poorly on our communities whichever side of the aisle we find ourselves.
While all this is going on, the artist known as twigg writes a bit less and suffers a bit more. Y'all are my friends, and it is hard to watch.
However, I can announce that this Diary is not about any of that. There are those much better placed than I to discuss the latest palace intrigues and I have something else in mind.
While it might be carnival time on the various Blogs, ordinary life does go on here in the Southern Plains, much as it does from Puerto Rico to Washington State, Hawaii to Maine. There are the lies of the day to deal with .... The Obama Deficit and the murderers at Planned Parenthood being just two of the more egregious examples.
One other, an idea that appears to have percolated from the pores of Capitalists, is that work will set you free, work will bring rewards and those rewards will reflect your worth to your community and your country. This is an enduring lie, and one of the biggest of them all. Before you rush to the comment section to decry the first part of the sentence before last, I assure you it was not put in there by accident.
Melissa Harris-Perry has a network ad. on MSNBC where she describes a culture where people do appreciate difference in rewards. That those who work harder will have a little more, and both she, and I, am fine with that. I do not think that any kind of egalitarian society is achievable in the short or medium term, and I also understand that even many of my friends and fellow Socialists would not consider this to be a practical objective. What I have in mind philosophically might be quite another matter, but I live in the real world and as I have said many times before "politics is the art of the possible".
So how do we decide who should earn a little more? Which of us goes that extra mile and thus deserves a better car or bigger house? Who among us goes camping at the lake and who deserves a Caribbean cruise? Who are the feckless in society who deserve no vacation at all .... and in any event, are these the measures we should be using in the first place? Mazlow, and his hierarchy of needs is often quoted as a reasonable basis for one to judge ones attainment in life, and this is not restricted solely to Democrats, Republicans are just as keen to draw pyramids ... as is my very low-paid math-teacher wife. I don't recall a 4000 square foot ranch-style house and a couple of Cadillacs anywhere in that section marked "Self-Actualization".
It always seemed to me that as we take from this world exactly that with which we are born, then reaching the top of the pyramid just as we expend our last resources at the end of our lives would be a pretty good way to go out. Add to that the idea that everyone must contribute, according to their abilities, and we start to form a model that values material things rather differently.
I would, for example, use a case of excess to demonstrate the point. We have all heard of the hedge-fund managers who earn billions of dollars per year. One can reasonably argue with the use of the word earn in this example, but billions, or hundreds of millions is what they receive. I have heard poor people say that those folk are the wealth creators, the risk takers and their rewards are only in proportion to the risks they take. On the face of it this is fanciful. Once said hedge-fund manager made his first few million, just how much is he or she actually risking. His lifestyle? His home? No, not a bit of it those are secure for the rest of his life. All he is then risking is your money, with absolutely zero personal risk at all. It's arguable that they should be fired after their first bonus check because they are now in the dangerous position of playing roulette with no risk to themselves and all the risk to people who can't afford to lose their pensions. Indeed I do not believe those folk see all that money as earnings at all, for them it is just a way of keeping score. It's reasonable to suggest, therefore, that if they were constrained from keeping that money, they wouldn't actually miss it as there would be very little chance of them ever having to worry about where the next bottle of Chablis was coming from.
So let us go to the other end of the spectrum .... me.
I am not among the lowest paid in our society. I earn about three dollars per hour over the federal minimum wage. On top of that is a reasonable healthcare plan and a non-contributory pension. Of course it is nowhere near enough to live on, but with my wife working too, we get by and are not complaining. We should be complaining, but that is for a different Diary.
What I am wondering is why my work is valued at a little over ten bucks an hour, and someone else's is fifty, one hundred, ten thousand an hour. I am wondering this not just on my own behalf, but as a model for our society. Why are the wages of the guy who shifts the trash assessed so much lower than the guy who creates it?
My employers like us all to have four-year college degrees. I do not have one of those although I do have the equivalent of a Masters degree in the care and development of children and young people. Even if I were a teacher in stead of a paraprofessional, my starting salary with my shiny new degree and fifty thousand dollars of student loans would be $32800. That's per year, by the way, not per month.
If I were a doctor, or architect, engineer or lawyer, my anticipated earnings would be considerably higher. But I don't design houses, mend roads or defend corporations. All I do is help to care for and educate some very vulnerable and damaged children. They are no one's profit center except, maybe, Pearsons and McGraw-Hill. If they have a value then that value appears to be recognized only by those folk who try to help them avoid prison, or worse .... their teachers, paras and others in caring professions who are often as poorly rewarded for their labors.
I say to all those who need an accountant to count their money for them ... You did not earn that. You did not build that. You say you took risks and I laugh in your face. Tell me, use your own words, tell me how the risks you took were greater than the risks taken by anyone entering teaching, nursing or any other profession where they knew up front that they would never earn a high salary. Those people took more risk than you could ever imagine. They bet their whole lives and the future of their families on a need to enter a profession that gives something back to society at the expense of their own comfort. You, whatever corporation your are now the head of, have zero concept of risk .... you never took a risk in your life.
This concept spreads its cancer right through our society. In what world is it reasonable that a singer can have one or two hit songs that then feed them for the rest of their lives? That's not what intellectual property rights were created for. They were never meant to create a wealthy cohort of "stars". They were designed to sponsor creativity, not turn country singers into lazy bastards, and spawn a generation of entitled kids.
We created money as a means of transaction. A way for a complex society to turn chickens into furniture. Yet in the intervening years we have allowed money to become a religion, and we all know how fundamentalists behave when they have religion.
It's time for a bit more fundamentalism ... fundamental change, and I'll support whichever candidates seem to offer the quickest path towards the changes we need.