Pogo’s prophetic and pathetic observation holds: “we have met the enemy and he is us.” Today’s polarized and polarizing United States, under siege from itself, is proving too internally cowed, under-imagined and social media pigeonholed to buck predictable spheres of influence. More than just another rare bipartisan opportunity, getting worker ownership equations right could heal the breach between mutually-assured destructing left and…
Author Archive for Michael Peck
Independence from Ourselves
In what will become one of the most “back to the future” political realignments in America’s history, the current Democratic Party is on course to embrace the tenets of Jeffersonian Democracy while the Republican Party in power increasingly opts for Hamiltonian and Madison redux centralized authority. Exacerbated by the hardening of blue versus red, socio-political culture, geographic and economic class…
What’s More Unequal: Sharing or Scam Economies?
The 18th century British literary critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, talked about the “reconciliation of opposites,” a phenomenon which Professor Chaumont at the Political Science Institute (“Science Po”) in Paris more than 200 years later tried to teach me meant the Gallic version of “placing contradictions between parentheses.” Today’s unequalizing economies, whether Brexit, French or closer to home, appear to specialize…
No Longer Separate & Unequal Healthcare
1worker1vote.org Healthcare for All Leadership by example is a prized military trait with the idea being that leading from behind will not inspire front line sacrifices required to win. “Do as I say but not as I do” usually becomes a non-sequitur in a functioning democracy or successful battlefield. A plutocracy offers one level of healthcare to the benefit of…
Commoditized Passengers
In support of a global boycott of United Airlines and in solidarity with the passenger who was disrespected, mauled and manhandled by United Airlines – “United Airlines is facing a public-relations nightmare, after a man on an overbooked flight was dragged off the plane.” Way too many times, commercial airline passengers come to the conclusion they are nothing but disposable chattel,…
Healing America’s Regressive Gene
Mortality is universal and bipartisan: black lives do matter and lower economic class, middle-aged white lives with a high school diploma or less are driving actuarial chart curves downward by dying off more quickly than they should. Causes are also bipartisan: disintegrating family cohesion, worsening job prospects in a rapidly decaying, inequality-driven culture that commoditizes the people who work, and inferior…
Renewing the Cooperative-Union Bond
A new culture of work renewing the original cooperative-union bond = workplace democracy, equity, solidarity & greater resiliency Since the 1970s, America has counterbalanced high per capita GDP with rising unequal income distribution. “Winners-take-all” results produce stagnant wages, declining mobility, increased economic class divisions and racial tensions at levels not experienced since the Great Depression. This dynamic drastically altered the…
Viscerally Un-American
Friday, January 27th, 2017 – This Administration’s decision to ban all immigrants including refugees fleeing persecution from seven Muslim countries fails on four counts as not being just, accurate, useful or in keeping with America’s founding immigrant values and history. According to Georgia Public Broadcasting (National Public Radio) and New York Times reports, (How Does Trump’s Immigration Freeze Square With…
Beyond Snapchat Greatness
In a mobile, multimedia Snapchat image-messaging world, all human glory is explicitly fleeting and self-deleting. Midwest Rural America, so crucial to Electoral College victory last November, now risks its own Snapchat moment. Pessimists predict that newfound interest in salvaging America’s industrial heartland may evaporate as attention spans shift, compelling alternative priorities and “gotcha” scandalmongering suck up surplus policy oxygen, and “winner…
The Bipartisan Future of Work
Despite widely diverging Liberal, Conservative and Libertarian beliefs, 2016 change-voters united in recoiling against the incessant chipping away of shared founding principles, institutions and values. Both post- and pre-vote polls taken during the 2015-2016 campaign timeframe show that Trump and Sanders voters felt similarly alienated from America’s governing elites and their corporatist, rent-seeking policies widening unequal outcomes and opportunities. Notwithstanding,…
