Chapter 14: Your Rights End At Your Workplace Door… And Where You Live
In the United States of America, our Constitution guarantees each of us the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of speech, assembly, religion and more. It is intended to be the template upon which the society functions. Members of the military, police and government all take an oath to protect and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Yet the socio-economic power structure directly contradict this foundation, erodes and functionally nullifies it in everyday life. Since ownership confirms authority and given no practical checks and balances on ownership, we have a tiny minority of ultra-wealthy individuals and the corporations that they control owning and controlling the vast majority of everything, it leaves the rest of us owning little or nothing. When we’re on our landlord’s property and working on our employer’s property, we have no rights, just like the serfs and peasants of a thousand or more years ago. Thus the economic power structure directly undermines the democratic principles of the Constitution. Thus, our duty is to defend the Constitution against the metastasis of the modern feudal power structure. We all know who holds the stronger position in confrontations between employee and employer or tenant and landlord in the majority of cases.
The asymmetry of transactions consistently favors the same parties at every level. Contrary to popular misconception, one can’t truly say that the party bringing currency to the table has the stronger bargaining position. This is true when employee or applicant meets employer, except if the applicant is for the position of CEO or similar position. Yet when tenant, homebuyer, or applicant meets bank or landlord, the one bringing currency to the table is in the weaker bargaining position. This demonstrates that in all interactions under the dominant socio-economic paradigm, the same party always dictates the terms: the party who is a member or agent of the modern feudal elite. While the Constitution mandates government of, by and for the people, the socio-economic paradigm creates a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation, in which the same party consistently wins.
The workplace is the “private property” of the landlord or mortgage lender, giving them legal dictatorial authority over employees while on the job. Beyond very few hard-won legal protections, which are constantly being eroded, our Constitutional rights yield to the “rights” of employers to control their “property.” Unless we own our residence outright, the same is true there. One can be fired for offending the religious or political beliefs of one’s boss. It happens every day. There’s the illusion of freedom of choice; yet having been fired hobbles one’s job search. Without a source of income, one can’t pay for permission to occupy space. This pretty much deletes all of one’s rights. If our rights aren’t respected and enforced in practice, then their existence in theory is but a cruel mockery.
Hard-won gains of the labor movement have been ground away under “at-will employment” and “right to work” laws which allow both employer and employee to terminate at any moment, with or without cause, another cruel mockery. Employees are easily replaced, jobs not so much. If one person is firmly footed holding a rope from which another person is hanging over a cliff, it’s pretty clear that saying that either party is free to let go at any time is even more heartless than Marie Antoinette saying “Let them eat cake” when told that the people were hungry.
For that matter, even if you own your own home or place of business outright and fall on hard times such that you can’t pay your property taxes or other major debts, then you could find your home taken away from you and sold to pay the debt. This could happen to you or me, but it would never happen to modern feudal lord, a billionaire. It is economically and sociologically impossible. If one is fired, the employer has preferential treatment even beyond that moment. A simple statement from your former boss of “No, we would not hire this person again” is enough to torpedo future job applications. If you try to tell your side of the story in a way critical of your former employer, a prospective employer will reject you as a disgruntled troublemaker. The circumstances of one’s firing are never examined. Innocent until proven guilty does not apply. You are presumed guilty with no chance to prove otherwise. An employer’s word is taken at face value. Your word is rejected at face value. Period. With no income, you have no way to ransom your existence and pay for permission to occupy space. In effect, by controlling access to the money that you need to buy access to all of life’s necessities, in a very real way your employer had power of life or denial of life over you.
The property of a homeless person is generally not respected. Many cities allow their police to confiscate sleeping bags, coats and other property of homeless people and drive them out of any public or private property where they may be, even if they are occupying unused locations. In fact, if you don’t own the land you’re standing on, then whoever does own it gets to say whether or not you can even be there. In many places it’s also illegal to live in one’s vehicle or camp on public property. If you own no land, have no money to pay for permission to occupy someone’s private land, and aren’t allowed to exist on public land, you are truly deprived of all rights, Constitutional or otherwise. You have the right to do anything you want, but only as a disembodied spirit.
Where rent control exists, landlords and tenants are pitted against one another and abuses exist on both sides. Where there’s no rent control, landlords mostly abuse renters with impunity. They can tell you how many people can live there, whether or not you can have pets or plant a garden, and more.
Even for true homeowners, a plethora of laws, codes and regulations limit harmless activities and enforce arbitrary requirements. Homeowners can be fined for letting their lawns go brown, as well as for watering their lawns during draught. In many places it’s illegal to grow food on one’s property, to collect and store rainwater, work on one’s car, park an RV on one’s property, and a lot more. The reason for this is that in the dominant socio-economic paradigm, currency is sacrosanct and anything that could reduce the value of commodities is forbidden or discouraged. In such a culture, the above activities can cause property values in the neighborhood to go down. Thus they are forbidden. This is yet another way in which the modern feudal paradigm undermines a free and democratic society. In some times and places, the very presence of people of color or mixed-race families has been seen as a threat to property values, causing “redlining” and all manner of exclusionary discrimination in the real estate market.
Such societies value or devalue a person based largely on their financial situation. Those struggling or not making it are seen as “losers” and fundamentally inferior to those who are doing well. Struggling people are often generally shunned, given less or no benefit of the doubt, rejected out of hand for jobs and places to live, and generally kept almost forcibly in their situation. There’s an almost superstitious attitude that it’s “bad luck” to be around such a person. It is easy and fast to fall into a hole, and nearly impossible to climb out again.
Another front of attack on democracy is called privatization, which is passing control of a public resource like schools, libraries or even the Postal Service to “private” entities AKA for-profit corporations, big developers and the wealthy feudal lords at their helm. In the U.S., there has been a relentless encroachment of privatization since the 1980’s. People are often wiling to accept it because psychologically they associate the term “privatize” with “private” which has an emotional connotation of implying the individual’s personal sovereignty. It doesn’t. Quite the opposite. It is the redirecting of public resources out of the control of the people and into the control of the ruling feudal elite. The socio-economic paradigm also directly nullifies freedom of speech and imposes censorship as severe as any under obvious dictatorships. Any content that offends network executives will most certainly never be aired.
Employees are also robbed of the products of their ingenuity, in exactly the same way as medieval peasants were robbed of their produce. Almost all employment agreements include legally-binding language in which the employee grants the employer all rights to any inventions or innovations that the employee devises, sometimes regardless of whether it’s in, or unrelated to, the workplace. Thus you could come up with an innovation that brings in millions to the company but never see a penny of it yourself. You must sign away your rights to get the job.
“Free enterprise” is another myth in these societies, as is self-reliance. In most such societies, street vendors and performers are either illegal or severely limited by laws and statutes. It’s no coincidence that this happens to the economically weakest members of the community. Gargantuan businesses will not tolerate competition from smaller competitors. There is no “free enterprise,” other than the myth.
Even within the confines of entertainment business corporations, it is the writer, composer and performer who reap the microscopically smallest portion of what they bring in. Similar to the situation of an innovator in a technical business, the corporation robs the actual producers of the wares that generate corporate wealth of the fruits of their productivity, the lion’s share of which goes to the parasitical business functionaries.
All of this goes to illustrate that the dominant socio-economic paradigm is inherently and fundamentally inimical to, and incompatible with, a free and democratic society governed of, by and for the people. Such a governmental paradigm absolutely requires a very different socio-economic paradigm.