This is an open letter to the governors and state legislatures of California, Washington, New York, Minnesota, and anywhere that still has responsible human beings at the helm. This blog itself is a wasteland of poorly considered guff, obscenity, and self-indulgent daydreams, so I’d rather this letter not be shared with links to the source. Just copy-paste it at your politicians, if you agree with my thinking, and by all means, if you have better ideas, improve and rewrite it. For my part, I’m sending it to Washington State’s Governor Bob Ferguson.
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The federal government of the United States is being destroyed. We will fight to preserve what we need, to get a fair return on what we pay into it through taxes, but the thugs have a death grip on every lever of power, and we must respond to their destructive radicalism with constructive radicalism. We have to build something to replace everything they destroy. And the best time to do that is right the hell now, because the destruction will happen very quickly. Like global warming, it is already too late to truly get ahead of it.
This is not going to be easy at all. I understand that it seems like I’m asking for the impossible. Right now so much is under threat in so many ways, and we are all operating at a loss from responding to massive natural disasters, year after year after year. But we cannot expect the status quo to suffice, even in blue states. Perhaps especially in blue states.
I’m not talking about replacing capitalism, as much as I’d love to be. I know there is not a body in power with any interest in seeing that happen, and that’s fine. Properly regulated capitalism is still recklessly cruel and ultimately burning the world to ash, but it’s a system under which we can enjoy some liberty, can lead reasonable lives. You ran for office in this country knowing what this country is, and I’m not asking you to fundamentally change that.
This the United States of America. At our christening, we took this name to show that we are a collection of individual nations – willing to be united, but never willing to give up our self-determination. My proposal is to assert control of that self-determination – to make it our own – so that when the feds say “public schools don’t exist, we’ll only fund hitler youth programs,” we can say “no thanks, we’ve got our own way.”
These aren’t meant to be done in sequence, hence bullets without numbers. They have to happen all at once, as much as possible, because the “storm” they promised is coming down now.
• Come Together
The blue states need to be forming political alliances, making deals with each other for mutual aid and protection. As I recall, during the pandemic response, the governors did meet. Now it’s even more important to do this.
• Shore up Taxes
None of this will be possible without tax revenue. All of our states have powerful lobbyists constantly campaigning to keep the wealthy from having to pay a fair share of the cost of having a civilization. You may have to make some risky moves, you may have to examine every inch of every way money changes in the state to look for new angles, you may have to fuck up the avenues by which the wealthy put their gold bricks on the scale against you. But you cannot afford to lose a cent.
This could be a significant part of why Democrats have lost so much nationally. They profit handsomely from business as usual, from legalized bribery in the form of lobbyist money, from gerrymandering that makes their jobs safe at the expense of fair representation for all. Obama and Biden could have seen the writing on the wall and used their executive power to limit the power of the executive, but they couldn’t bring themselves to lose a drop of their privilege. You may have to reach within yourself to find principles that have been very hard for the best of us to find, when national power is on the line. Please do. Lives are depending on it.
We’re taught in middle school that budget decisions have to be approved by Congress, but the current president has shown that these norms are so much paper. Expect every drop of federal funding to be leverage for intimidation and coercion, to abuse you and your constituency. Get ready to lose it all.
• Replace Federal Funding
This could border on impossible, or it could be way easier than I’m imagining. After all, most of the revenue of this country comes from our states. But replacing federal funding of state programs will absolutely be necessary, for our continued safety and prosperity. It is very unjust that our tax money continues to flow to a federal government that cares so little about us, that only trickles back as it sees fit – especially when that is jeopardized by the whims of a tyrant. However, short of civil war, what can we do about it?
Work around the problem. Come up with investment schemes, carefully negotiate with the wolves of business. Maybe some functions of the state can be handled by the private sector. That has been generally bad for utilities and extremely bad for telecommunications, but if you have no other recourse, privatization could prop up tax shortfalls. Only use this one with the strictest of regulation, OK?
Right now US Treasury bonds are underpinning the global economy. The tyrant could end that tomorrow because he didn’t get a nap and felt cranky. What if California State bonds were so hot that international investors could just ditch the fed and buy into Cali? How does your value stack up against the BRIC nations? What about the combined value of the blue states?
• Plan Radical Restructure
Plan this, but with the knowledge it is aspirational – unlikely to be passed into law in one grand sweep. This is what the radical right wing administration is attempting at the federal level, and attempting it with a grand sweep. They want to destroy every institution on which the country has come to depend, and replace them with exploitative mock versions that funnel money into the pockets of wealthy administration cronies. That’s a radical restructure. We don’t have that kind of power, but maybe we could benefit from some careful measure of that kind of radicalism.
Our states’ institutions evolved over time from the growth of our respective economies, and from the progress of history. This process is not elegant, not efficient, and there may be costly redundancies in our laws, policies, and bureaucracies. The right wing solution being attempted at a national level is to wipe away the complexity of established systems and replace them with something new, simple, and rigged to feed the rich.
To help with the goals of shoring up taxes and replacing federal funding, targeting these inefficiencies may be a useful goal. We don’t have to leave people in a lurch like they have. The right way to do this is to study how our civil structures operate – what they do, how, and why – and see if we can engineer more elegant ways to achieve the same ends. Then implement those fundamental changes in a way that exercises care to prevent lapses in essential services.
If the current president cared one jot about his own constituency, actually believed that his right wing agenda was a principled and good thing, he would have taken that thoughtful and slow approach to making these changes. It didn’t have to be implemented like a blitzkrieg. That’s just a way of showing off that they don’t have to care what anybody thinks of them anymore. It’s a way of showing off that at a national level, democracy is over.
• Plan for State Border Problems
While red states demolish their social services, health care, infrastructure, human rights, and worker protections, our states will become the release valve for anyone trying to escape the badlands. This is already true in many ways, but can get so much worse. At least for the moment, interstate travel is free access, but as the reddest states try to lock their women in Gilead, border checkpoints may become a thing. And if that doesn’t happen? Then that’s a lot of red state refugees you may need to accommodate.
This can be a good thing, if it’s done right – like international immigration. Try not to be as exploitive as our country has been in that regard. Instead of “what can these desperate people do for us?” ask “what can we do for each other?” Indeed, to the extent the fascists allow any international immigration to happen, the same kind of solutions can be applied to both issues.
Job programs and genuinely affordable housing are my preferred solution. And if there aren’t enough jobs? Figure out how to make more jobs. It’s been done before, during the New Deal. And if that’s too radical for you, this may be a good place to make deals with private businesses, to have them fulfill some of these roles, for profit. Any unskilled position in healthcare, construction, agriculture, customer service – these are places where the most desperate people can be employed. The kind of jobs we have a bottomless need to fill.
It’s important that any immigrants that are allowed to stay in our states should be allowed to do so in a legally sanctioned way. Our country has allowed illegal immigration to prop up entire sectors of the economy, because that labor force was cheap enough to encourage us to turn a blind eye. But that’s just human trafficking – moving unprotected bodies and subjecting them to abuses we’d never allow to happen to those we fully regard as human. We have to be able to figure out a better way to do this. I know the red state solution is going to be prison labor. But that’s just slavery. Let’s do better, for everyone.
And if it can’t be like that – if there’s a need to privilege residents of a state over immigrants from another – then there should be a refugee program to allow a more expedient path to residency, for those under the most threat where they come from.
• Rethink Healthcare
Our nation’s health care structure is a rolling disaster, created explicitly to make the rich richer, off the desperation and sorrow of the poor. To an extent you cannot escape this. Medicare is federal, and Medicaid is federally funded.
I think it’s instructive to look at the history of Medicare’s “parts.” Part A was free for people insured through taxed wages and covered hospitalization. Part B became necessary as healthcare expanded to lean more on specialists and outpatient care, and there was not enough money (was there?) to make the expansion happen without charging for it. That’s $185 a month out of old folks’ Social Security checks, and not well-liked.
A and B didn’t cover everything, so gap coverage came along to pick up the rest, plus another letter for prescription drugs. These are parts C and D, and these were a massive gimme to the rich. The fed subsidizes these programs, forking over barrels of taxpayer dollars to private businesses. In return, those businesses provide spotty service, while terrorizing and badgering the vulnerable with deceptive advertising and outright lies, denying care, and getting people killed.
This situation happened in stages. Some causes were unavoidable – healthcare was bound to become more sophisticated and expensive over time – and some were a result of avoidable government corruption. At this point in history, we have enough perspective to come up with new ideas that aren’t hobbled by piecemeal development.
This is another Radical Restructure. Your state could probably afford to lose its entire Medicaid program easily, if it had a well-designed and efficient replacement that covers many more people. Maybe that could be handled as an expansion of the bureaucracy of Medicaid, but an expansion that relies on state funding over federal. Because most importantly, as the federal government abdicates all responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, we are obliged – by the human decency they lack – to make sure everyone is adequately cared for.
• State Social Security
The federal program of Social Security will likely limp on in some debased form, barely helping anybody with anything, while its coffers are pillaged to pay for nuking Samoa, or some other absurd nonsensical atrocity. I think it’s time to help seniors (and other vulnerable populations) within our states in big ways. This can either be done with a new retirement program – a “State Social Security” – or by massively reducing the expenses members of these populations face, with expansions of Section 8, EBT, utility programs, etc.
Advantages of State Social Security: This can be tied to investment schemes that generate revenue, and because people are already paying for and receiving Social Security from the federal government, this doesn’t need huge payouts – just enough to make up the shortfall, to keep old folks from having to eat dog food and ration medication. Disadvantage: Corporations will exploit any public benefit to raise their prices, busting you back to square one, with nothing but useless bureaucracy to show for it.
Advantages of Reducing Cost of Living: Takes away that last disadvantage. Need-based programs cost money. More people using them means more people needed to administer them. And as a strictly humanitarian thing, they cannot generate profit. These programs are always targeted by aggressive lobbying – by rich vultures that will never be satisfied until the poor are beaten and bleeding in chains, calling it austerity.
The best way is probably some combination of the two, but one thing that is needed regardless of the approach is…
• Genuinely Affordable Housing
OK, you can’t very well have half your state on Section 8, and you can’t limit the asinine price of real estate without damaging the financial sector, right? But there is absolutely a middle path here. Poor people – the renting class – generate so god-damn much money. The rich have come to feel entitled to have an ever-escalating amount of that money, with no thought to how much blood is in these stones.
If you could just get a corporation to be willing to accept a smaller profit margin, in exchange for providing massively more units for rent at reasonable rates, you could house many more people. People who could afford to participate in your economy as consumers, as workers. All you need is the political will to make these deals with a strong hand – without capitulating to lobbyists who tell you that “one or two sliding scale micro-studios in a block of two thousand $8000 units should be enough to house all your baristas.” Those lobbyists are liars that do not deserve your tax breaks. Don’t sell your people out; don’t let yourself look like a cheap bum.
• Disaster Preparedness
Climate change has caught us completely flatfooted. What happens when we are still recovering from the last disaster every time that a new one strikes? We are gradually worn down to nothing. What happens with no help from FEMA? Don’t let that be you. I don’t know how much your state spends on research into new ways to deal with natural disasters – new solutions – but it needs to be a lot.
I know, we are so many grains of sand before the mighty gale. But we caused this with innovation. Surely there are ways we can deal with it that haven’t been fully considered or even developed yet. And again, there’s a venal motivation for you as well. What if California figured out how to manage wildfires, to prevent them from ever damaging property? To prevent them from turning the sky into blood and hellfire multiple times a year?
What do you suppose that might do for the value of real estate there? To the decision-making of businesses considering your state for a new campus? If the new methods involve a process of labor or technology that can be employed and exported, how would you like to corner that market, in a world that is increasingly on fire?
This isn’t just about fire. New solutions for flooding, earthquakes, winds, freezing, for temps that melt plastic and soften aluminum. We’re in for a world of excitement.
• Global Warming is Not Going to Stop
I reiterate. Look at what all of the world’s reputable scientists have said. Look at what our federal government and businesses are doing in response to the crisis. You know those maps of what the world will look like with no polar ice caps? Familiarize yourself with them. Count on that becoming a reality before this streak of fascism has even run its course.
None of you are in as bad of shape as Florida, but we are all going to take big hits – in addition to the disasters mentioned above. NYC is going to have to move ashore, eventually. Paint all your rooftops white. Start wearing silver foil when you walk your dog. SPF ain’t gonna hack it. Air conditioning must be regarded as a human right, same for water. Incorporate this kind of awareness into every law and policy you draft, for the next ten thousand years that it may take for the world to recover.
• Beware the Wolves
Unregulated capitalism devours itself. It destroys competition, consolidates power, devolves into dictatorship and tyranny. I’ve mentioned that, for lack of revenue, you may involve corporations in the essential functions of your state. But this must be regulated powerfully, unfailingly. That’s even without the consideration of a federal government that might consider dropping tactical warheads on San Francisco. Watch your backs.
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That’s all I got for the moment. The nuke thing was hyperbole, I hope. Don’t look at me like that.
This took way too much brain to compose. Hopefully I don’t get spammed for donations by the DNC for the rest of my natural life.
Look forward to my usual foolery later today.
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