Love this and thanks for your inspiration to focus locally, one of the best pieces of political advice I’ve received. So many titles on here for my reading list, now I just need more hours! Also, Davey and I also enjoyed some Xena: Warrior Princess back in the day 😏.
Thank you so much for all the research and skill you put into your essays. They are always enlightening and thought-provoking. And using the writing internship as an example of how wealth and power create structures that tend to continuously draw all wealth and power into their voracious vortexes...was perfect.
One of the sentences that really caught my eye was this: "Wealth gets its resources, including power, by extracting from everyone else in any way legally possible and many illegal."
It could be said that since wealth has a disproportionate influence upon the levers of government, thanks in no small part these days to the Citizen's United decision back in 2010, it can exploit and glut itself quite nicely within the cozy bounds of law. And if ownership is 9/10 of the law (as the saying goes), I suppose it also constitutes 9/10 of our normalized moral universe. How do we change the narrative?
Your sentence also begs the question: If wealth gets its resources and its power by extracting from and exploiting everything and everyone in its environment (and this is indisputable), then what does it rightfully owe to that same exploited environment and those same exploited people?
We need a Commons course like the civics courses of old! This is such a basic that everybody should be taught. I sure wasn't; Until now that is! Thanks!
Thank you, Nia. I have far more to say about this than I can possibly cram into a comment!
One of the projects I'm working on here is consolidating and ideally relocating our local community water systems. We're facing many of these issues, in particular intergenerational land hoarding, but we don't see them as such, because the biggest issue we're facing is the extent to the oligarchy has coopted us into the system. When we're forced to try to accumulate wealth and invest it to self-fund our retirements and pay for our health care, we imagine ourselves to be just like them and see an attack on their wealth and power as an attack on ours, from "I want to be able to pass the beach house on to the kids" to "I don't want to have to pay taxes when I win the lottery."
We have an amazing spirit of community here, but, as soon as it turns to economic matters, everyone wants to be an oligarch.
Love this and thanks for your inspiration to focus locally, one of the best pieces of political advice I’ve received. So many titles on here for my reading list, now I just need more hours! Also, Davey and I also enjoyed some Xena: Warrior Princess back in the day 😏.
This is outstanding, Nia.
Thank you so much for all the research and skill you put into your essays. They are always enlightening and thought-provoking. And using the writing internship as an example of how wealth and power create structures that tend to continuously draw all wealth and power into their voracious vortexes...was perfect.
One of the sentences that really caught my eye was this: "Wealth gets its resources, including power, by extracting from everyone else in any way legally possible and many illegal."
It could be said that since wealth has a disproportionate influence upon the levers of government, thanks in no small part these days to the Citizen's United decision back in 2010, it can exploit and glut itself quite nicely within the cozy bounds of law. And if ownership is 9/10 of the law (as the saying goes), I suppose it also constitutes 9/10 of our normalized moral universe. How do we change the narrative?
Your sentence also begs the question: If wealth gets its resources and its power by extracting from and exploiting everything and everyone in its environment (and this is indisputable), then what does it rightfully owe to that same exploited environment and those same exploited people?
This is one of the great questions of our time.
We need a Commons course like the civics courses of old! This is such a basic that everybody should be taught. I sure wasn't; Until now that is! Thanks!
Thank you again, Nia, for showing us the way. The ruling few want us to fear our neighbors.
Thank you, Nia. I have far more to say about this than I can possibly cram into a comment!
One of the projects I'm working on here is consolidating and ideally relocating our local community water systems. We're facing many of these issues, in particular intergenerational land hoarding, but we don't see them as such, because the biggest issue we're facing is the extent to the oligarchy has coopted us into the system. When we're forced to try to accumulate wealth and invest it to self-fund our retirements and pay for our health care, we imagine ourselves to be just like them and see an attack on their wealth and power as an attack on ours, from "I want to be able to pass the beach house on to the kids" to "I don't want to have to pay taxes when I win the lottery."
We have an amazing spirit of community here, but, as soon as it turns to economic matters, everyone wants to be an oligarch.
Powerfully written, and so many points of hope here, despite the long roots of oligarchy. Thank you.