On Saturday, December 3rd, 2022, the 1worker1vote movement team formally deactivated our Twitter account for platform crimes under new ownership against “Humanity@Work&Life”. “Only 12% of Americans who make under $30k a year” reach for Twitter as a natural extension of their unnatural gig & paycheck-dependent lives. Twitter never synched historically with sizable, diverse majorities of our movement worker demographics and that was before it quit our moral reservation.
Today it’s Twitter re-platforming “surge in hate speech and disinformation” bombast bile leading to the next January 6th, 2021, domestic terrorism insurrection somewhere, anywhere, everywhere in the “meta-snark & smash-verse”. Yesterday, it was the “Musk Twitter Files” bombshell clickbait producing “no smoking gun showing that the tech giant had bent to the will of Democrats” but instead “Elon Musk making up the First Amendment as he goes along”, turning Twitter into “another insular space that drones on, endlessly, about itself”. In its newly liberated state, tweet-promos by “Amazon, Snap, Uber and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service” comingle with white nationalists.
A circular firing squad tweet from the one-term, twice impeached, 45th President of the United States putting another seditious “con-father” hit on the U.S. Constitution quickly overshadowed these revelations. Why not imperiously MAGA-terminate the Constitution’s existence as “the world’s longest surviving written charter of government…written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and in operation since 1789”, defended in blood soaked into the most hallowed, “last full measure of devotion” cemetery ground under spacious skies, alongside purple mountain majesties, above fruited plains? Two days later a New York jury found two of his namesake companies guilty of criminal tax fraud.
Tomorrow it will be Neville Chamberlain’s Elonian-Ukrainian “peace with honor”, “peace for our time”, “how horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”. The timeless art of knowing nothing fast tracks appeasement assembly lines where all supply chains congeal into totalitarian global gravy trains. “Go home and get a nice quiet sleep” is just as appalling and viciously wrong in today’s 2022-2023 freezing Ukrainian winter of our incoming Putinista red fascism discontent as was the “Munich Agreement on 30 September 1938, ceding the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler”.
Libertarian Apartheid Afrikaner Babies (“laabs”) ought to know. “The Great Depression and World War II brought increasing economic woes to South Africa, and convinced the government to strengthen its policies of racial segregation. In 1948, the Afrikaner National Party won the general election under the slogan “apartheid” (literally “apartness”)”. Reading the signs, Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Republican Party convention presidential candidate acceptance speech, “…extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”, served as prologue for Milton Friedman to concoct “Shareholder Primacy Capitalism” in 1970 as both national anthem and pledge of allegiance.
An unbearable lightness of being point of no return pivots into a George Floyd twenty-first century under jackboot duress. This cowering inferno, Dante’s’ latest streaming release, despoils workers as prey caught up in corporate hunger games custom-coded by unconstrained “Robber Karens”. Back home on the indifferent range, the meek pay to play to inherit Levante-like winds bearing more ecological dystopia. Embedded socioeconomic misery turns renters into squatters, the homeless tired and poor into wretched refuse thrown upon shores teaming with unreconstructed climate deniers.
1worker1vote purposely disembarks from global indentured servitude by tweet-edict in the name of hundreds of Tesla workers who suffered unnecessarily from COVID contagion in their Fremont, California, assembly plant between May and December 2020 pre-vaccine availability, so that the owner could make his multi-billion dollar bonus on the backs of their infected bodies, literally. The first publicly available U.S. vaccines were injected starting in mid-December 2020 (two-dose Pfizer) already confronting over two million global deaths linked to COVID by January, 2021, in stark rebuttal to Tesla’s, SpaceX’s and now Twitter’s CEO pandemic predictions.
Someone who hawks his own techno-science but discards inconvenient data when it conflicts with amassing gargantuan personal wealth represents a clear and present moral hazard. Someone who, like Bezos owning the Washington Post or Thiel bankrupting Gawker, commands an authoritarian capitalist right to bully or de-platform online media bully pulpits at will, represents a clear and present, Peter Isherwellian danger to public wellbeing by alienating and marginalizing the right of “we, the people” to pursue and defend mutualist greater common good.
Ownership in democracies is an earned privilege to serve and seek good on behalf of all stakeholders as shareholders. Managed efficiently, fairly and profitably, it can result in doing well as a virtuous cycle consequence, but only without any “droit de seigneur”, divine right to control and perpetuate recidivist plantation economies. A more just, productive, innovative, and aspirational neo-renaissance world reinvests solidarity-grounded cultural dividends from committed and valued social and human capital assets increasingly graded by how closely owners treat workers as themselves. This starts with broadening, lengthening, deepening and uplifting worker owners sharing equalizing risks and earned equity rewards, unfolding and operating in transparent, respectful and inclusive, democratic workplaces.
-Michael A. Peck-
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