There are just not enough jobs that pay a living wage in the world, which helps perpetuate the wage inequality and the opportunity inequality. If the world is to stay with the present capitalist system it will have to change to a hybrid system of capitalism and wages will have to be supplemented by non-labor cash or the equivalent of such.
The non-labor cash is out there just not collected yet. It is could be called co-owned wealth, one could be rent from financial infrastructure, which financial firms pay nothing at this time, and another is air, which gets into carbon that causes the most harm in the atmosphere for carbon absorption. Then there is the intellectual property protection within the U.S and the worldwide, which corporations pay nothing. These are our Commons.
There is also the electromagnetic spectrum used for radio, television and mobile phones. A 20 percent value added fee on those spectrum intensive industries would generate $84 billion for dividends to pay rent to the people. Other assets that might be rented for dividends are minerals and timber on public lands. These are our Commons.
In Europe, there is a growing interest in a universal guaranteed income high enough to ensure a person could maintain an existence in dignity; such income would be in addition to not in lieu of existing social programs. Switzerland is trying for a 2,800 monthly stipend for its citizens.
All of this is driven by the sense of social solidarity and a belief in individual dignity as a human right.
In 2012 more than a quarter of all political contributions came from just 30,000 people who represented the 1 percent of the 1 percent, 90 percent who spent the most won. Today, we are an experiment in either a democracy, which started in 1787 or an oligarchy, which is winning. The nonunion people, like Trump and Musk, have most all the tools in their pockets to destroy our unions. They have money, they have the courts, they have law enforcement, they have the media, and 50 percent of workers that don’t know this don’t know the history of the working class people. This is the perfect storm to lose all the gains workers have made whether they’re union or not, even our Social Security and Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. So, now we will have to go way back to the late 1920s and ‘30s and dig up the old labor party books. One book, written in 1964, has the information, The Rebel Voices, an IWW Anthology by Joyce L. Kornbluh, educator, activist, and advocate. The history of our labor...
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