Second Reconstruction Update

I’m trying to formulate overall goals. What kind of society do we want to live in? What have we been doing wrong? What do we need to fix or change? For now, I want to concentrate on the goal, not how or whether we get there.

The first post got a lot of good feedback.  I will incorporate that feedback into future posts; can’t do it all at once. This is a short progress report.

The comments gave me three new topics: National Identity/Corruption, Communication, and Economic Rights. I have consolidated and edited your contributions and included my topic of Taxes in Economic Rights.

• National Identity and Corruption. Develop and advocate a workable shared national identity and story. All people have the right to equal and fair treatment. Shame bad faith. More information about candidates and voters. End the erosion of public goods into private gain. More education about and politician concern for public goods and their support by taxes. Bring back experts to all branches of government and defer to their expertise. Campaign finance reform. Financial conflict of interest restrictions on elected officials. Shorten the time that campaigns are allowed to be run. Enforce laws against governmental and white collar crime. Investigate Russian support for the Republican Party.
• Communication. broadcast, internet, telephone. Much stronger digital privacy laws. Penalties for spreading misinformation. Regulate the quantity of advertisements. Regulate the use of bots in financial and other transactions. Return the USPS to a full governmental organization while outlawing junk mail. Social media should be held accountable for what appears on their platforms. Defang the right-wing propaganda machine. Make phones usable again. Department of Social media and propaganda that explains how the system works and is supposed to work.
• Economic Rights. If coporations are people then make them punishable by the same laws as people; alternatively change the laws so that they cannot be regarded as people. Improve people’s bargaining power, for example in tenant unions. Right to paid sick leave. Break media consolidation. Gig workers are not independent contractors. Restore high estate tax rates. Make companies financially responsible for data breaches. A credit scoring system, if it exists at all, should be 100% a state agency. Socialize all natural monopolies, or contract them with rigid terms. Tax billionaires fairly.

John Quiggin wrote a scenario for a future financial crash. My next steps will be to write something like that for our several categories to demonstrate how the country might look. Probably less than what John wrote – more like vignettes.