Maximum profits over human needs

Back in May I wrote a couple of posts about robots and computers soon taking over most jobs. The first discussed that we may all be out of a job soon. Will this no need for work be a workers paradise? In the second post my friend and debate partner replied saying it won’t be a paradise because those at the top are heavily invested in ranking and keeping the rest of us poor and miserable so that their position is secure.

Jim Hightower writes the Hightower Lowdown, and describes it as “Dispatches from the Populist Rebellion.” He also looks at the robot situation in both the September and October issues. I’ll only refer to the latter one. I’ll start with his summary:

THE ISSUE BEFORE US is not robots or no robots. They are here and spreading, like it or not, with everyone from Silicon Valley engineers to savvy Ghanaian teenagers designing ever-smarter versions.
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Further, many people around the globe are shackled to exploitative jobs so impoverishing, dreary, awful, or deadly that humans should not be doing them. Let the robots have them.

Our goal, then, is not to kill all robots, but to reject the socially poisonous corporate ethic that prizes maximization of profits over human needs and egalitarian values. Machines are not stealing jobs from us (as intelligent as they are, they have no capacity to conceive such a move). Rather, what’s happening is that capital is displacing labor–or, more precisely, capitalists are displacing human labor with robots and then pocketing the paychecks of the employees they discard. The progressive movement should keep making this distinction–and keep the public’s focus on our real adversary.

To get to life after work Hightower proposes a few paths.

* A permanent Work Progress Administration. Bring this New Deal program into the 21st Century. Pay people to create art and to rebuild and maintain public infrastructure.

* More time off. Spread the available work around and give each a living wage for a shorter work week. People have more time for family, education, civic participation, and community work.

* Redefine work. Pay for socially valuable but currently unpaid jobs, such as parenting, care for elderly, teaching assistants, mentors, and such.

* Universal Basic Income. Tax the unearned windfall of corporations when the zero out their payrolls. Use the money to give *every* citizen enough money to live on. No need for bureaucracy to figure out who needs it. UBI experiments are underway in Finland, Uganda, Canada, the Netherlands, even Oakland, CA. Alaska’s oil wealth has been giving its residents a UBI since 1982 (though maybe not enough to live on), giving the state the lowest rate of poverty and the highest rate of well-being. Madhya Pradesh, a state in central India, experimented with UBI. Sanitation, housing, nutrition, overall health, and employment went up. The employment rate went down for only one group – children. More of them were in school.

I’ve said frequently (such as above) a big reason for what the corporate bosses are doing isn’t about the money (though they definitely enjoy that). It is about oppressing us so we can’t challenge them for their spot at the top of society. They aren’t going to accept these ideas without a big fight. So we need to start talking about it (which is what I’m doing with this post). Even so,

With concepts like UBI, rather than simply worrying about “getting a job,” people can focus on getting a life. It’s a chance for workers everywhere to get out from under the boss hierarchy and decades of a relentless 9-to-5 schedule, freeing them to build their lives and communities around the myriad of things they really want to do.

These watershed moments rarely come around, and we should grab this one to launch local, national, and international discussions about a new, egalitarian social order based not on our one-dimensional role of “worker,” but on the whole human.

In an article I spotted on the Lowdown website Hightower asks the GOP, “Why are you even considering giving more tax breaks to corporate giants?” He gives four reasons why those breaks are a bad idea.

* The rich are already wallowing in wealth, “refusing to invest it to benefit the vast majority of people they’ve been knocking down and holding down.”

* You shouldn’t give away public money when there is a budget deficit and there are huge needs in public investment.

* The people's sense of equality and social unity has been fracture by huge wealth inequality, so intentionally widening that gap is “criminally stupid…and dangerous.”

* “Why would you think over-paid, over-pampered CEOs deserve more pampering? They’ve become imperious potentates who feel entitled to gouge, cheat, defraud, lie, and otherwise run over us commoners.”

The GOP is doing this (as I said above) because it isn’t about the money. It’s about ranking and keeping the lower ranks of society oppressed.