Finding Hope in Democratic Control of the Economy

Today's big news, in case you haven't heard, is that Trump has used mid tech and three-drink-barroom-napkin math to own his haters by crashing the global economy overnight. I've been scared for my future, as well as the future of billions of non-super-rich people around the world (and the more-than-human world itself) for a while now. The Gripe Depression that is now upon us adds another layer to that fear.

So for my own sanity I'm trying to mitigate my doomscrolling a bit by thinking of ways in which all could not be lost here. I'm not talking about minimizing the suffering of the undeserving that's sure to result from this economic chaos. That suffering will be real and tragic and we should be doing everything we can to mitigate it.

And I'm certainly not talking about the 'market opportunities' that the rich elites have no doubt been salivating over. Yes, Trump is deranged and reckless as always. But his Republican and corporate backers will be using this chaos to buy up even more assets at fire-sale prices with the disaster capitalism mindset. I suspect that this is part of the plan. Because these elites could have stopped Trump before he started. But they didn't; they helped him along.

The fact that they're able to do so - that such a small group of unaccountable people have such a large amount of control - should show anyone who's paying attention that we don't actually have much of a democracy here. It's in thinking about alternatives to that where I'm finding some hope. So I want to share some of those thoughts. Maybe they'll give others hope, and more importantly, help steer us in the direction of making meaningful change.

(None of these are my own independent ideas, of course. This is just my consolidation of ideas that have been out there for a while.)

There are two overlapping spheres in which we (and when I say 'we' I mean everyone in America whose net worth is not in the tens of millions or above) are overdue for more democratic control. The first is in government, where we have a kind of watered-down, elite-protective version of democracy at the moment. And the second is in the economy, which has been given the bullshit descriptor of 'free-market' to hide the fact that we really have no democratic control over it at all. And I suppose we can call the overlap of these spheres 'politics.'

As far as the governmental sphere goes - it's clear we need a mechanism for the people to directly remove bad leaders. Impeachment requires so much cooperation from both houses of Congress that it's virtually impossible, as Trump's two previous go-rounds have shown us, to get it to work. If we had a system for recall elections of the executive, for example, we could be channeling the energy of mass movements like Tesla Takedown or HandsOff to this right now. Having an accessible electoral path towards removing legislative and judicial officials would be even better.

More broadly, we need true proportional representation and direct elections across the board. The small-state-concession Senate needs to be abolished, or at least re-worked so that, for example, the 30 million people in Texas or the 39 million people in California have a greater say than the 600,000 people in Wyoming or Vermont. Same with the electoral college. Direct election of the President and Vice-President (and the Cabinet too, why not?) will make a voter in Wyoming just as important as a voter in California. And a way of calling special elections like some countries do with their parliaments would give the people yet another lever of agency.

In the economic sphere, I think that socialist-inspired ideas of organizing the economy give us the most hope and the most potential democratic control. The biggest advance would be taking the essentials of dignified life - housing, food, water, utilities, transportation, healthcare (and coffee) - out of the for-profit marketplace and putting them in direct democratic control. That's right, nationalization.

We could then have direct elections for the boards of directors and top-level executives of the entities most responsible for our basic quality of life. Removing the profit mandate would help ensure they have our best interests in mind.

All non-essentials could stay in the private sector, but with requirements for employee-ownership, worker-collective, consumer/producer-co-op, or some such structure where every stakeholder of an enterprise has a say in how it runs. Profits could be progressively taxed. And opportunities to organize in not-for-profit structures can be expanded and encouraged.

Reforms like these in the government and economic spheres would help ensure that the political overlap between them also be democratically controlled. The relatively low-hanging fruit of progressive goals like overturning Citizens United could go hand-in-hand here, but might even become less essential as democracy takes more of a practical foothold.

We're a long way off from all of this. But this little writing exercise reminds me that better futures are possible. None of these ideas are impractical with a broad enough buy-in. So while we keep taking care of each other in the chaos of the short-term, let's also keep reminding each other of what a long-term positive outcome looks like.