@bondibox
Term limits just encourage political carpetbaggers who collect as many kick-backs and bribes as possible before they are forced out of office. The term limit movement is predicated on "We don't want professional politicians", a romanticized notion about the the Founding Fathers wanting farmers and shopkeepers to run the country.
Do you want a four year limit on a lawyer's career? A doctor's? An engineer's? A scientist's? Do you see how absurd that is?

Yes. We DO want professional experienced politicians, because government is not a side job that just anybody can dabble in and do well.

To break the deadlocked stalemate we need congressional term limits, and there's zero chance that the current congress will pass legislation which dooms them. The first thing we must do is elevate a viable third party. But we all know it can't happen in the current climate where they are lucky to receive 3% of the vote.

The good news is that each state has the authority to run its own elections. Ranked choice voting has been adopted for federal elections in Maine, and for local elections in a handful of other locations. We need to pressure our local and state representatives, and our Governors, to adopt ranked choice as a first step.

The next step is to make it easier to vote, either by mail or online. Here in Kentucky extenuating circumstances allowed us to vote by mail in the last election, and in-person voting was available for the week prior to Election Day. We had record participation.

The third step is to insure the integrity of voting, with a system of verified voting. Distributed ledger technology (blockchain) is ideal for this purpose.

@fire with fire that enterprise should become localized. Doing things at the local level might be the best chance we have to meet people's needs. We have been shown that our federal government will not help us. It's been forever since I read E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful but perhaps some of those ideas may be useful. I'm all for cobbling the best ideas from the best sources to make a new structure.

On a side note, I don't think we have to worry about producing excess stupid shit, we will be fortunate if we can produce what we need.

From the Google response to that phrase:

Capitalism is defined as private ownership and control over the means of production, where the surplus product becomes a source of unearned income for its owners. By contrast, socialism is defined as social ownership of the means of production so that the surplus product accrues to society at large.

I had an internet debate on a message board maybe ten years ago with a university professor in Australia about the relevance of socialism in the 21st Century. I purposefully inflated my own skepticism about socialism in hopes of provoking a thoughtful response about revolutionary praxis. I was surprised to find that my rather simple observations about the silence of global socialism on how to reverse climate change, end wars and eliminate systematic racism and systematic poverty turned out to be stumpers for my interlocutor from Down Under.

My Aussie friend was incensed that I would argue against socialism and, after quoting the ancient tag line about having The People take over ownership of the means of production, he refused to continue the discussion -- claiming that I was being disingenuous.

That was not true. I was sincere in wanting to hear a committed socialist tell me what a socialist political triumph would look like. I want to get behind something, anything, that might reverse the insanity of our current world disorder.

I argued, first, that the word, "ownership" is archaic and meaningless in a world of corporations that are run by "managers" but "owned" by stockholders and investors. More than half a century ago, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that the class of managers have a separate and discrete interest from the stockholders and there is occasional litigation between them and their putative bosses, the stockholders.

Asserting that The People should reap the benefits of surplus production is a laudable goal, but what does that really mean? Do the managers run their businesses with the goal of maximum short term "profit" so that The People will get the most stuff possible? Put differently, do the managers shift their problematical allegiance from Stockholders to The People?

How do The People collectively impose climate change policies on individual corporations? That begs the question of what the socialized goals for the corporations should be? Less production? An absolute necessity for the future of life on earth.

This brings into sharp focus the other loaded term in the traditional conception of socialism, "surplus production."

In order to make meaningful changes in how we live, a Socialist Society has to overthrow the idea of surplus production and replace it with something new and different, some as yet unimagined means of producing less but delivering more useful stuff for The People.

But what kind of stuff? More lawn mowers and barbecues? More fine wine and exquisite perfume? I would suppose that most socialists would agree that consumer goods production will have to be re-aligned. Re-aligned how?

Asserting State power over the means of production, by itself, begs the most important questions. What do we produce? How does it get distributed? Those are now chaotic "market" decisions and I am with the socialists 100% in condemning the current regime.

But "ownership" of the "means of production" does not provide any answer at all the key questions other than making them political.

So why does the political control over the means of production have to involve "ownership" of the means of production? Taxation and iron fisted regulation of corporations, their managers and their owners are indistinguishable from Full Monty Socialism in terms of actual effect, and the argument about "ownership" is irrelevant.

One other possibility exists. Destroy the corporation as a business association. Enterprise becomes totally localized and meets human needs directly. Something like that will have to happen if our species is to survive. You can call that socialism, but it is not ownership of the means of production.

Our far bigger problem than who "owns" the means of production -- it is too much production of stupid shit that nobody really needs. Our current version of capitalism (neo-liberal) rules the question of what people really need out of bounds -- deeming it elitist oppression of the individual. Capitalists are always ready to show how their hearts bleed for the individual.

We have to break the paradigm in which capitalists claim to be the true populists, giving the people what they want rather than what liberals think they need. That is the political challenge before us.

You don't hear much from socialists this century because they are stuck with an ideology that is more than 150 years old when scarcity was still the major problem for humanity. Now we have too much shit, distributed perversely. Saying that Uncle Sam now owns all the shit in the country does nothing to disentangle the web of dysfunctionality and corruption that we face today.

How to live peacefully while taking from the rich and giving something new and different to everybody else is the problem. Socialism from Marx until now offers no vision of how to do that or what it would look like.

Thanks for an interesting essay.

@Not Henry Kissinger @Not Henry Kissinger
is that out politicians will gut and divert it and tax it like they have done with Social Security,
I can envision the worst of all worlds, a government single payer healthcare system with management farmed out to for-profit insurance companies.

EDIT: "Medicare for All" with everyone being on some insurance company's part C plan. You do know that there is a movement to eliminate Part B to "save money and eliminate government drones" so that everyone can "save money" by having their claims processed by insco drones with orders to cut costs.

It's not that political imagination is lacking. It's that the vocabulary we use in promoting solutions is hamstrung by its own historical baggage.

All these nineteenth and twentieth century labels ending with -ism (fascism, communism, socialism, etc.) get casually thrown around with very little understanding of what they originally meant, let alone what they mean when someone attempts to apply them to the socio-economics of today.

Invoking these labels in pursuit of policy goals inevitably leads to fruitless historical debates that only serve to distract from any real discussion of important issues and place a distorted, politicized filter that obscures and negates any attempt to find innovative solutions to current problems.

Case in point: Universal Health Care is not inherently socialist or communist or fascist. It's simply Universal Health Care, and should be promoted own its own merits rather than as part of some larger ideological agenda that allows critics to instantly conjure up pictures of labor camps, purges and pogroms.

In order to create the circumstances for a more freeing, creative future, we first need to release ourselves from the straight jacket of these tired, out-dated groupthink ideologies, and move to a new, more inclusive language that respects individuals for their own unique perspectives instead of treating them merely as faceless soldiers in some permanent ideological war.