Wakeful Video Weekend 2020-08-29 (19 videos)

If you lack time to discover many top level meaningful videos covering critical events, problems, and solutions, here is a weekly share for you to check and share onward. Earlier this weekend so as not to conflict with the People’s Convention tomorrow!

Stars and channels: Democracy At Work, Graham Elwood, The Jimmy Dore Show , Jean Guerrero & Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!), The Convo Couch, DiEM25, The Hill, The Real News Network, he Rational National, The Humanist Report, Jon Norwood, Amanpour and Company, etc. and the Movement for a People’s Party

Topics:

1. Sharp Progressive Conversation about the “Democratic” Party
2. News: Mail-In Votes, Voter Roll Purges, …
3. Economic Update: China: Capitalist, Socialist, Communist or What?
4. Another Insightful Progressive Conversation
5. Could The ‘Draft Jesse Ventura’ Campaign Actually Succeed?
6. Coronavirus News: Imperfect but Possibly Sufficient Immunity
7. Perfect Points Made by Ice Cube
8. Our Elections are a Casino Stock Market on Wall Street
9. Psychological Warfare
10. Sharp Smart Critique of the DNC & Bernie
11. Yanis Varoufakis: Capitalism & Crisis (and how to socialize the capital)
12. News: Rising Unemployment, Billionaire Wealth Doubled, Guillotine for Jeff Bezos
13. News: Police & Vigilantes Slaughtering Americans
14. What Many Police Forces are About (Oppressing America)
15. News: NBA Players Strike Over Injustice, Others Too
16. Repeat of the 2016 Presidential Election (Bad Biden Doing Even Worse than $Shillary)
17. Humor and Truth: John Cleese on Extremism
18. Reconsidering America
19. Latest People’s Party National Call

Best subscribe and share with others, so the efforts I make can serve enough people. (I lack time for social media) Thanks. 🙂

Wakeful Video Weekend 2019-10-19, Part B (3 videos)

AOC’s Bernie endorsement and Bernie’s fantastic “Back” rally in New York after he is back out of the hospital:

 

I. AOC’s Bernie Endorsement

This is about a guaranteed advanced standard of living in the United States (the richest nation in hisory) with no ifs no no buts. Power to the people, and a Good Life for All:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Endorses Bernie For President
Bernie Sanders

Additional note: When we mention a people’s revolution, we should realize that this is simply a continuation of our famous 18th century American Revolution where the people shared these aims promoted again today but wealthy creeps subverted the outcome into the mess we are in today.

I hear the echo from the hopeful past: All people are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights – among these life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And the role of government by the consent of the governed is to reflect and protect these and other rights and promote the general welfare (a.k.a. a Good Life for All).  

Existential Assault

The following broadcast deeply struck a chord within me even though I have not been sexually assaulted (besides a failed attempt long ago, that is). Looking at the connection, I found that my existential assaults by soulless jerks ruining my original life’s career and later every new career and job, time and time again… led to the same feelings of grief and low self-esteem and constant fear, the being shrunk and driven into shame and made afraid to exist.

And when my appeals against profession denial based on declaring my education and job qualification invalid for totally unjustified and totally absurd and paradoxical reasons (rewriting history turning my outstanding study accomplishments into trash) were contemptuously dismissed, it gave me the same humiliation of standing up for receiving justice and getting virtually slapped into the face for it, assigning to me the guilt of others who had ruined my life. It makes me think that in today’s precarious life lived by so many of us, these kinds of results are suffered from way more people than sexual assault victims. So many of us are time and again under existential assault suffering precarious lives for no fault of our own and being denied any hope or worthwhile future.

This is the heart-wrenching report on the results of a sexual assault (often considered a dismissible minor issue) that chimes so closely with the existential assaults suffered by a huge portion of humanity:

The Stanford Sexual Assault Case Made Her “Emily Doe.” In New Memoir, Chanel Miller Tells Her Story
Democracy Now!

Indeed. Such an assault has much longer, deeper, and farther reaching consequences than commonly recognized. But, not to overlook, so do the existential assaults suffered by so many of us. 

Proper Tax vs. Iɯdɹodǝɹ ┴ɐx

As the Tax Day is about to hit us over the head or under the belt line again, it makes sense to give a thought or two about how proper or improper our tax system is.

Clearly, lots of people across the political spectrum hate taxes, or at least their own taxes, or would like others to be taxed more, or – in some cases – gladly pay their taxes as a contribution to the society that grants them a civilized life. (I once belonged to the latter group.)

But how many of us have actually thought this through? What our taxes are for and what they could be used for instead?

Since many of us are busy meeting the deadline, I want to keep this article as short as possible, only throwing out a funny historic remembrance and some food-for-thought seeds for our future.  

The Smooth Way Out of Capitalism

When the rules of a game are bad, the obvious thing to do is to change the rules. Many people today realize that capitalism is working against them but aren’t sure what to do about it while others are still wavering in doubt. Let’s take a closer look then and discover a simple solution that would leave the markets intact but remove their oligarchs and our systemic corruption, harm, and suffering; healing our economy, democracy, and lives.  

The ‘Private Property’ Demon behind Inequality

In a video I will share this weekend, I heard the following phrase: “In the criminal justice system the people are repressed by two separate but equally important important groups: the police who defend private property and the policy makers who criminalize disobedience”. When I heard “the police who defend private property and the policy makers…” my mind spun ahead completing the sentence with “the policy makers who define private property”.

Why did that pop up in my head? Well it is because of the immoral and cruelly corrupt system of human life into which I was born and in which I therefore have had to utterly waste my short time on Earth. It arranges and justifies its inequality and its abuse of people – and even the destruction of our life-supporting environment – on the concept of private property.

And what is that concept of private property? How is it defined for us?

Happy New Life!

For many of us, each Happy New Year turns into yet another Crappy Old Year. Who or what is to blame? We are trained to blame ourselves, but are you, or am I, really guilty of causing economic crashes or sudden health crises, mass lay-offs, and the like? Are we the creators of a profit-driven health insurance system that refuses to cover millions and covers many others only incompletely, so that the majority of American bankruptcies result from health crises? Are we really to be blamed for not being rich when our society is formed like a wealth pyramid with an impoverished broad base and a tall wealthy spire that rises many miles above the rest of the pyramid, all the way into outer space?

Video Weekend 11-25-2017 (12 Videos)

Twelve great videos befitting our Thanksgiving week. The first is a report on the current GOP tax scam and the near future our oligarchs are planning for us. Ack! The other 11 videos are thoughts from around the world about the UBI portion of the great future we must fight for. Various angles, differing views… I left out the bogus status-quo-worshipping and economic-evil-justifying claims from disgusting people since I don’t want to spoil anyone’s weekend… luckily I didn’t come across a lot to begin with. Phew! — So, let’s move on to a bunch of thoughtful and uplifting, yes uplifting (except for the 1st one, I suppose), weekend videos.

 

I. The Present Mess:

The future the current lords are planning for us:

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Bankers Unwittingly Admit Tax Cuts Don’t Help Workers“)

 

II. Thinking About the Future — Various Views on a UBI

In my “holy trinity” proposition[1][2][3] of a great economic system forming a shared assets economy using these three parts – a universal basic income (inherited citizen’s dividend), an earned (through work) assets dividend, and a public monetization of needed work (federal job guarantee) – the UBI is one of the currently most discussed measures:

Even the rich see sense in a UBI (mostly a safeguard against our pitchforks, for sure):

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Why the World’s Richest Say a Universal Basic Income is Good Policy!”)

A Beautiful Future (Happy Thanksgiving)

The beautiful vision of an achievable future, this Thanksgiving, is one that goes beyond merely resisting Trump or the GOP’s tax heist. It even goes far beyond merely installing Medicare for All or getting money out of politics. The beautiful vision for this Thanksgiving is one of a Star-Trek-like economy of the “live long and prosper” mantra, in which we all live lives of plenty.

Contrary to the doubts of many, it is eminently achievable in a modern economy where we overproduce and waste food and things like there was no tomorrow, there being produced enough for everybody’s needs (although many never get it), and where the rapid rise of automation will soon make most human labor unnecessary to produce everything we need and want.  

The Shared Assets Economy – Part 2

Yesterday, I introduced Yanis Varoufakis’ proposal of work compensation via shared assets as a means to end the division between an owner class and a working class. These assets would provide an earned residual income combining perfectly with an inherited Universal Basic Income (UBI) and a Federal Job Guarantee, to create a virtually Utopian society of prosperity for all, a society in which everybody would be financially secure and, if they so wished, could earn a desired raise of their income in a fair and reliable fashion.

In this combination of a quasi-holy trinity, the UBI — which is a citizen’s dividend based on our national economic resources that we all, not just a few plutocrats, deserve to inherit upon our birth — would provide a safe minimum income for everybody, gainfully employed or not, while the asset-based work compensation would provide a raise for those who want more money, and the federal job guarantee would provide paid work opportunities often missing in a purely profit-driven “free” market — as the millions of un- and under-employed wannabe-workers who are desperately looking for properly paid jobs these days clearly show.

Since the article was getting a bit long, I decided to perform further elaborations in a second article, which is the one on hand. Basically, in this article, I want to flesh things out a little more, both the current system and the one we can aim for, and also what we must do to get there.