The Way Forward

Greetings good citizen,

There is one ‘issue’ I’ve seen repeated on the web pages of many financial sites (admittedly, these are sites who share my, er, negative outlook on the prospects of capitalism’s survival.)

Which brings us to the lament I’ve seen repeated on a dozen web pages; what do we replace our currently badly broken system with?

I suspect most of you would favor simply hitting the ‘reset button’ on the current system and maybe turning back the ‘legal clock’ to before Glass-Stegal was repealed. The wiser among you would turn the clock back even further, to 1972 when Richard Nixon took the nation off of the gold standard.

Which begs the question as to whether or not our remaining saddled with ‘the standard’ would have saved our economy when the rest of the world had already left it in the dust?

There’s no ‘way back’ machine so we’ll never know for sure.

Sadly, this isn’t where this idea ‘hits the wall’. What will we do to prevent, for the sake of argument, our grandchildren from repeating this fiasco? You can bet your boots the Depression era legislators thought they’d fixed the problem for ‘all time’.

Worse, knowing what would happen, our current legislators STILL repealed the protections put in place after the first global depression. How the hell do you ‘fix’ that?

Which is to point out that it is no just the financial sector that needs an overhaul, it looks like the legal sector needs to be ‘refurbished’ from top to bottom.

First thing to hit the skids…legal professionals. The law is for everybody. It is pretty damn stupid to let a few people pretend to be ‘experts’. This practice has been responsible for repeated disasters.

Understand something here, these ‘experts’ have made a damn good living not from enforcing the law but from weaseling around laws they often had a hand in crafting! This is ‘insider trading’ on steroids. This is how we got ‘swaps’ which acted like insurance but wasn’t (so they weren’t ‘regulated’) causing the global financial sector to collapse!

Yeah Bubba, any ‘overhaul’ of society starts with an overhaul of the ‘legal system’. That overhaul starts with a prohibition against making your living from ‘interpreting’ the law.

Taking that a step further, the next ‘casualty’ of the overhaul process would be ‘judges’. Want to ‘short circuit’ the legal process? All you need to do is bullshit a judge! (Which leads us to another unseemly outcome…just how ‘handy’ is it to have a ‘judge’ on your payroll?)

I’ve examined the ‘judge’ issue from many angles and I have yet to find a single instance where they are vital to the ‘justice’ process. Truth be told, the judge’s main function is to insure rulings are ‘palatable’ to powerful interests. If a jury arrives at the ‘wrong’ verdict, it is the judge’s job to mitigate the decision. (Up to an including throwing the decision out and ordering a new trial.)

Nope, putting somebody in the position of being able to, er, ‘trump’ a jury doesn’t do anyone any favors…except the judge.

Perhaps the most telling indictment is that one need not be a lawyer to be appointed to the bench. Never mind judges who are elected, how the hell does the election process insure a qualified individual is, er, ‘awarded’ a judgeship?

Better to do away with the position altogether. Just to be safe, we’d also be wise to erect a barrier to creating ‘judge like’ positions. If you’re going to run roughshod over the law, grow a pair and do it! Don’t dickfuck around trying to ‘cover your ass’!

Only scoundrels need the ‘cloak of secrecy’…as we have witnessed. If we are to enjoy a just society, we must deny this cloak to all who seek it.

Um, will these ‘alterations’ to the legal system put everything on the ‘right track’ to prosperity?

Um, no.

So what else needs to be done?

Well, it seems we have to address the problem of ‘full time legislators’ who are beyond the reach of those who elect them. Is making them ‘more accessible’ the answer? No, that wouldn’t
change things, we’d be just as frustrated by making them subject to recall or ‘suspension’. Nobody has the time or the patience to keep running down to the polls to replace their representative…and for a high enough price; they’d still sell you out! (Which points to another issue that ‘needs fixing’.)

No, the answer lays in a different arrangement altogether. We get rid of (corrupt) elected officials and vote directly on any new proposed legislation. Oh, will what about all of those ‘black budgets’ and ‘aid payments’?

They’d go where they should have gone long ago; they’d disappear. (If you have to ‘buy’ your friends they’re not worth paying for. The moment someone else ups the ante, your ‘friend’ is gone!)

Think about it good citizen, the laws should be ‘simple and few’, there isn’t a need for full time legislators nor to be voting every time you turn around.

So, have we fixed it yet? Are we ‘back in business?’

Sadly, no.

Returning our economy to prosperity is going to take some ‘rearranging’ too. One of the ‘selling points’ of Globalization was the off-shoring of ‘dirty’ industries. The reality is if you don’t participate in a particular endeavor, it is not possible to innovate in that field. (Thus you are forced to buy the technology…or do without it.)

So, yes, we will return to a large degree of ‘redundancy’ within certain basic industries but hey, it’s not like we don’t need the jobs!

Flipping that rock over, the work week/day will change also…to facilitate the sharing of what work there is.

Oh, there will be another, er, ‘change’ in the way things are done. Ownership will be abolished, meeting the needs of society is too important to entrust to private entities, besides, they have been screwing us since the beginning.

Remember a few essays back I spoke of companies earning more than six hundred thousand dollars per employee? Well, doesn’t that represent lower prices the customer never saw and raises for the employees that didn’t happen?

You want to ‘own’ a business? People in Hell want ice-water…how’s it feel to want?

Those resources already belong to you and me, there is no justification for ‘chiseling Charlie’ to gouge us for what was free to them!

Geez, all of these changes! Why not just roll things back to 1970 and run with that?

Because we aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

We can’t leave the broken system that caused the disaster in place because we will end up right where we started, quicker than you’d ever imagine!

So, that’s it? We throw the Lawyers in the lake, the judges too, then we toss the legislature in behind them and the damn bosses on top of the whole heap! (is there anybody left?)

Well, yeah…we haven’t fixed the financial sector yet…and yeah, the ‘solution’ is the same as it is for the legal sector…wipe ‘em out!

In this case, literally. One of the other features we’d introduce is the absence of cash or any cash-like substance.

There simply wouldn’t be any. All of your money would reside in your account that your employer would maintain for you…so, bye-bye bank! Um, the stock market, gone! Also gone would be the entire insurance industry, a just civilization doesn’t need it.

Sorry if this was boring…re-ordering society is pretty dry stuff…but necessary. What we had is broken beyond repair…it is a big mistake to even entertain the idea it can be fixed!

The major pieces you need to build a new social model are here. I omitted many of the ‘details’ but they can be found in the full 70 page document titled ‘A Simple Plan’.

Just feel compelled to keep trotting this bad boy out every few months so you won’t forget about it. Especially as we’ll be needing it soon.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner