Post 643 - August 21, 2024

There are plastic particles in the deepest recesses of our oceans. In the Pacific, there is a floating collection of garbage swirling around that is the size of Texas. Countless places around the globe are in danger of running out of water. Our air, in some cities, has days when it is unbreathable. Our food is full of sugar and additives that are making us sick. We have even managed to litter the space surrounding our planet with junk.

I just spent a week in London working on West End Woofs! For the first time, I found that about three-fourths of the places I went to eat or buy something would not accept cash. They forced me to use a credit card.

Here’s the thing about cash. You get a twenty-dollar bill, and it is worth twenty dollars. You use it to buy a sandwich and a diet Coke at a deli and it goes into the cash register. Somebody else comes in and pays for their food with a fifty-dollar bill and they get that same twenty in change. It is still worth twenty dollars. The financial transaction stays solely between the deli and the customer. The customer takes that twenty and uses it to buy a T-shirt. The clothing store then passes the bill on to another customer.

For the life of that twenty-dollar bill, it is never worth more or less than twenty dollars.

If I use my credit card to buy my sandwich and diet Coke, the issuing bank collects a usage fee of between one and two percent. Each subsequent cashless transaction adds a little more money to the bank’s coffers. Using a credit card is automatic. A computer figures everything out about how much was charged, who charged it, and how they should be billed. It doesn’t cost the bank anything to process a credit card charge any more than it costs them when somebody uses cash.

When you buy a ticket to a Broadway show online you end up paying an absurd ticket handling fee to whomever it is who owns the ticketing site. The bank gets a fee for that transaction as well.

A few months ago, I went to visit Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. There was an admission charge to enter of ten pounds. I got to the ticket desk, and I was told that I needed to buy a ticket online. Mind you, I was the only person there. I got on my phone and found the website for the castle. To buy a ticket, I needed to download an app. So, I clicked on the app store, found the app, and after waiting a few minutes, it slowly went into my phone.

While I was doing this, the guy at the ticket desk just stood there and watched. Nobody else came to the counter during this entire transaction.

Finally, the app appeared, and I opened it. To use it, I had to fill out a registration form, submit it, and then wait for a confirmation code to be texted to me. The code arrived and I entered it. I then had to go back to the beginning, reserve a ticket, and finally pay for it.

I entered the credit card information and was told that I needed to enter another confirmation code which would be texted to my phone to validate my purchase. I did that. The ticket agent was still there witnessing all this.

I then opened my email account and had to wait for a minute or two before the confirmation email arrived. I showed it to the clerk. He told me I had to enter the code into the ticket machine to get my ticket.

In the email was a nine-character string that I dutifully typed into the ticket console. Nothing happened. I typed it in again. Still nothing. I looked at the ticketing guy. “This isn’t working.” By this time, I would say that about fifteen minutes had elapsed.

He rolled his eyes and took my phone. He entered the numbers. It didn’t work for him either. He tried again. It still didn’t work. Finally, he handed me back my phone and told me to just go in. After all that.

“That was easier than me just handing you ten quid? I asked. He didn’t say anything but just waved me in.

There was a period during the Industrial Revolution and even before that when new inventions appeared that made our lives easier. Printing presses, threshing machines, the electric light, typewriters, household appliances, and countless other labor-saving devices made the manual drudgery of our existence just that much easier to bear.

Trains, planes, and automobiles allowed us, for the first time in human history, to go wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted, in very little time.  An overseas trip that might have taken many dangerous months in earlier days, could now be done in less than a single day.

Advances in medicine allowed us to live longer, healthier lives so that we could have more time to enjoy our easier lives.

People made money from each of these inventions. Many grew rich. It wasn’t unusual for the person who figured out how to make even one small component of these new machines better to become a millionaire. For coming up with a cement additive that made it stronger and more durable, its inventor deserved the windfall. They’d made our lives better.

At some point, however, technological advances stopped being about improving the human condition and, instead, became about maximizing corporate profit.

The first Western corporations were formed in 1600 and 1602. The British and the Dutch East India Companies were created to mitigate an individual investor’s risk and encourage them to put money into the dangerous ocean trade.

Soon corporations were being formed to cover all manner of businesses. The business itself slowly started becoming more important than the individuals who made it up. The people who worked for these companies were paid a salary, but rarely did they share in the profits. Those were all for the investors.

Driving a tractor still involved a human being who before they got one had been driving a brace of oxen. The driverless cars that are on the streets of San Francisco have now cut out the human component completely. No longer does a flesh and blood person need to be paid to drive a taxi. The taxi can do it on its own. This, of course, doesn’t help the person trying to put food on their family’s table, it only helps the global conglomerate. By extension, it helps the conglomerate’s investors who own the company that supplies the automated cars.

When you book a driverless car, that company obviously makes money. The app probably gets a small fee and the credit card company you use gets their usual transaction fee as well. All of it goes to the corporation and none of it goes to a person.

Across America, Dollar Stores and Dollar Generals have taken the place of small-town general stores. They open a branch and offer a wider selection and lower prices than anyone local can afford to do. Eventually, the franchise forces the community store to close.

A locally owned business reinvests the money it earns back into the community. The owner of the store lives next to its customers. Chain stores like the Dollar brand, on the other hand, siphon money away from the community and send it back to corporate headquarters.

More than anything else, this is what is causing the great social divide in the population of the United States. The money and resources from America’s heartlands are being sucked dry by Big Business. Small farmers can’t compete with multinationals like Monsanto. They have become powerless. And hungry.

Monsanto’s corporate headquarters are in St. Louis. Most corporate headquarters are in urban areas. Urban areas tend to vote liberal and rural areas tend to vote conservative. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the groundswell of support for the current GOP candidate is from rural areas. The people living outside the cities who are just trying to get by are being kept from doing that by the liberal elite. It is no wonder that ordinary people are rallying behind a nihilistic fascist who just wants to blow up the entire system. The system is not, on any level, working for them.

The irony of their support of the former President is that he has no intention of making their lives better. He couldn’t care less about them. He wants to detonate a nuclear bomb under our constitution so that he, himself, can get richer. None of his supporters’ lives will ever improve under that man. I don’t think, though, that many of them are thinking about anything that far down the road. They’ve been lied to and stolen from for so long, that they just want to blow everything up.

A future is coming when we will all order everything we need from Amazon and whatever we buy will be delivered to us in driverless cars or unmanned drones. We won’t have the option of going to our neighborhood stores because they will all be gone. We will order our takeaway food from local restaurants, and it will be delivered to us by robots. It will probably end up being cooked by robots, too. Robotic delivery is already happening. It hasn’t started in New York yet, but it will.

Along with the takeover of our lives by corporations has come a resurgence of the nineteenth century’s ideas of free-market capitalism. The idea is to take away all the regulations that are fettering capitalism so that the market will regulate itself. What’s good for the rich will be good for the poor because money will always trickle down.

No, it won’t. It never has.

Forget the 44^th President, it was under the 40^th that we really started down the current slippery slope we find ourselves sliding down. Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of neoliberalism that has left us in the situation we are in now. We live in a world totally dictated by the markets. Every aspect of our lives is controlled by the economy. Every ounce of energy we have is dedicated to ensuring that the markets continue to expand and grow.

None of that helps people. It only helps corporations. The only morality is money-based. As long as it is cheaper to dump our trash in the oceans, we will keep doing that. As long as it is cheaper to replace human labor with a robotic workforce, we will keep doing that. A totally healthy population is not going to do much for the medical industries’ profits, so as long as big Pharma is in control, we aren’t going to get any healthier.

We haven’t heard much about it, possibly because our news outlets are all owned by big corporations themselves, but the Biden administration has been trying to pass some anti-monopoly laws against some of the biggest corporate giants. They initiated a lawsuit against Apple earlier this year alleging that it was monopolizing its iPhone technology. It may be years before it’s resolved. It might be too little, too late, but it’s something.

That we all feel a level of helplessness is completely understandable. Fixing all this is going to require an enormous, concentrated effort. We need to get out of this dead-end neoliberalism way of thinking and get back to a regulated economy where the rights of the workers are upheld and the market is kept firmly in check.

Pre-Revolutionary Russia is a great example of where we could be heading if we don’t fix things. A few very rich people enjoyed a luxurious life at the top and an entire nation of Serfs fought over a few moldy potatoes at the bottom. There was nobody in between. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well for many of those at the top. People can only take so much. We are seeing that already with the rise of the MAGA right. They don’t want things to keep going as they are.

Day two of the Democratic National Convention was just as inspiring as the first day. Both Obamas were extraordinary. I couldn’t help but tear up listening to them speak. Doug Emhoff, the Vice President’s husband presented a portrait of his wife that should end any of the ridiculous lingering discussions about her “likability.”

While I know that these conventions, on both sides, are just hype and cheerleading, I find that listening to these speakers and hearing the response to what they are saying, I am so much more hopeful that everything I just outlined can be addressed than I have been in a very long while. That, I will admit, is a very long-winded sentence but for me, it is a single thought.

Yes, I know that we have yet to hear anything of substance from the Dems policy-wise. Nonetheless, I more than agree with Mrs. Obama when she said, “Something wonderfully magical is in the air.” I can’t help it. It feels like we have a shot at cleaning up all this mess.

“Don’t sit around complaining, do something.” That’s the advice Vice President Harris’s mother gave her.

While there is a limit to what each of us may be able to do on our own, together we can do anything. A month ago, we seemed to be hopelessly divided. Now, it feels like we are coming together. Look at the positive energy we have created.

It’s high time for us to harness all that good energy and do something.