So, Scott Santens recently did an article about the movement against basic income and the groups funding bills to ban it on the state level. As you might expect, it's a bunch of right wingers. The group is funded by a bunch of billionaires who basically are fighting their own culture war on the topic. To quote the article:
Bragdon has described FGA's goal as wanting to "return America to a country where entrepreneurship thrives, personal responsibility is rewarded, and paychecks replace welfare checks," and that their approach is "to really tackle one big issue: how to give more Americans the life-changing power of work, at both the state and federal level.”
Ya know, blah blah blah, work is so great, work is life changing! WORK!
I mean, just...think about it. Who does this kind of rhetoric benefit. These people want a society in which everyone has to work, everyone has to be dependent on them, basically they want to force work on you. They want to ideologically brainwash people into clamoring for work, and oppose any effort that might make people less dependent on work. As I've said before, if society HAD to be this way to function, that's one thing, but it seems clear the more I look at it, that this is about control, and about cultivating a slave mindset in the population where they're obsessed with work and define their value as a person on work. It's like the statement of old "Arbeit Macht Frei". Yes yes yes, it's associated with the nazis, but it actually predates them and is one of those weirdo jobs programs mantras that jobists loved to throw around. Kinda like how in America we say stuff about how "work is about dignity." No it's not. The concept of getting dignity from work is entirely cultural and something the elites cultivated in the masses to make us all wage slaves.
Really, the fact that most people spend most of their time working and being busy nonstop should actually be the #1 issue of our time, but because the propaganda is so effective, as George Carlin would say, "nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care."
As Santens points out in the article, the concerns the elites have aren't even valid. UBI actually increases employment in some ways and actually makes people more productive, but because it is about control, they'll fight it regardless, it's an ideological war for them. Just as it is for me, but from the other side.
For them, the cruelty is the point, and it's been the point for the past 200 years. Why do you think I'm so worked up about the work houses? I've seen the extent of cruelty that we will impose people to under this system. it really IS about enslavement. It's not about functionalism, it's not about work being necessary, it's about controlling human beings and their behavior. They really don't want a class of people smart enough to sit around thinking about how badly they're being screwed, they want tired, worn out people who would rather blame immigrants like discussed in my last article, or get obsessed with culture war bullcrap, than to focus on the real issues. politics is about distracting people from the real issues, and they keep tower of babeling us again and again.
Scott said it best at the end of the article:
That's the world the FGA and its donors fear. They fear a loss of power, and so they fear the successful results of basic income pilots. They don't want everyone to know how well basic income works. They don't want people to want UBI. A world full of people empowered by unconditional basic income scares them.
Yep. At this point, it is about control, it is about imposing a system and an ideology on people to brainwash them and make them slaves. It's full on EVIL. And this should be ISSUE #1. Like, seriously, this is why I get so irritated by all of this Palestine bullcrap, or identity politics for example. This is what REALLY AFFECTS US. It affects us more than any other issue, and it does so universally. 60% of Americans work. Others want to work but cant find jobs. 10-15% of people are in poverty at any one time. 50% live paycheck to paycheck. We spent 40+ hours grinding away only to barely keep our heads above water. And what are people obsessed with? Identity nonsense and a conflict half way across the world that doesn't affect most of us, WAKE UP, PEOPLE! THIS IS YOUR ISSUE, RIGHT HERE!
But again, that's how effective the propaganda has been. Even worse, the so called "left" doesnt even properly approach the issue. They understand yes the evil capitalists are exploiting us, blah blah blah, but they simply think changing who owns the means of production is the solution. Or having labor unions. Or having slightly better regulations. Everyone wants to talk about the issues SURROUNDING work, but not work itself. And even then most people dont think about work at all in terms of politics. Like economic issues are those issues that everyone has an opinion about, but no one actually wants to follow through on. Like....craplibs will sit around being buddy buddy with conservatives who wanna gut the safety net, but dont you DARE have a different opinion than them on identity politics. If you arent 100% pure on that, youve crossed the line. And even the "leftists" are making Palestine more of a red line than this stuff, and again, it doesnt even affect the overwhelming majority of them. People are so distracted by all of this bullcrap going on in the world, and here I am, trying to keep my eyes on the prize.
This is why I'm such a purity testy ###hole by the way. I understand that there are powerful forces out there seeking to distract us from focusing on this stuff. They want us to argue about anything BUT this. They want people to participate in culture wars over race and gender and alternate sexualities. They want people to seethe over foreign policy conflicts and ignore that every day, they gotta get up early, go to work, spend 40+ hours there, and almost never have time to themselves. Again, our society is engineered to make us think and talk about literally ANYTHING ELSE, and the reason Im so glib and cavalier on other issues is, in part, because I wanna keep the conversation laser focused on this. THIS IS ISSUE #1. UBI is issue #1. Work is issue #1. Healthcare is issue #2, closely related to #1. That's how I see it. The liberation of humanity from being forced to be wage slaves should always be #1. Everything else in politics that we focus on should be in service to this goal. This is why I somewhat respect Yang;'s forward movement, despite abandoning UBI, because at least they're focused on other issues intended to get us to dealing with that. Btw, these same billionaires also seem interested in sabotaging ranked choice voting efforts too. So yeah, stuff like UBI, healthcare, and secondary issues like political reform should be the MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES in our democracy. And that's just how I see it.
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