I was reading the Progress Report yesterday and had an idea. Just incase you didn’t read it, this is the part that sparked it:
the fact that as a society generally we’re freaking out more about stuff we used to take with more aplomb (seriously, look up the number of plane hijackings, domestic bombings, and homicides in the ‘70s…and we still managed to create both disco and punk rock).
Having anxiety for a reason is normal. So why are we more anxious now? Would a graph of our aplomb decline be the inverse (pretend I used the right big word here if I didn’t) of the graphs of wealth inequality or real wages or the difference between CEO pay and worker pay? These all cause insecurity in our home base and when we don’t have a place to feel secure, we can get anxious. Some people respond by protesting Wall Street, some by going down a Q hole and everything in-between. Of course I want everyone who needs mental health care to get it, but is that the real problem?
Thanks for listening.
Another thought from today’s ProgRep. If you’re not reading it you should. Newsletters
"If enacted, the TRUST Act would require members of Congress and their immediate families to keep some of their investment assets in a blind trust and would do absolutely nothing to improve public trust in Congress. Why?
Because no one would care about congressional stock holdings if their votes served the people. As long as their votes don’t serve the people, the people are going to assume members of Congress are violating the public trust, if not through trading stocks based on knowledge they glean in their oversight roles than some other way."
I’m more optimistic (strange feeling for me) about this. It is only removing one of the incentives they have to vote for profits over people but it is a start.
My CRAZY idea is that the left and the right should work together against the establishment on chipping away at the other incentives. The right might think that it’s only Zuckerberg and Soros buying elections but if they want to stop the buying of elections we could get campaign spending limits and maybe dark money reform. They also claim that our elected officials are corrupted by big-moneyed lobbyists. So the left should be able to get them onboard with stopping the lobbyists from financially incentivizing our representatives to vote their way.
What are your thoughts?