The more federal administrations surrender our ownership of the country to private interests, the more un-egalitarian our society becomes and the less control we the people have over resources and hence the more power we give up. We become dependent on, or at the mercy of, private corporations.

If we want affordability, if we want an economy that works for all, we need public ownership, not privatization.

While the film 9 to 5 may have had a utopian dimension, there was nothing impractical or fantastic about it. The vision of a workplace free from sexism and exploitation that recognizes people’s humanity and dignity and allows them to share in the fruits of their labor should not be considered a pipe dream.

It sounds like a baseline benchmark for any society that wants to call itself civilized.

The players of the WNBA seemed to agree, and for them the vision portrayed in 9 to 5 was hardly a utopian fantasy. Led by star players Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, the players formed Unrivaled, an alternative three-on-three league whose season ran between the end and beginning on the WNBA season.  The economics and organization of the league provided a corrective to everything players complained about with the WNBA and realized a world much like 9 to 5 imagines. League facilities included childcare, chefs and nutritionists for the players, trainers, and more. The minimum salary of over $200,000 was nearly triple that of the WNBA, and the players enjoyed revenue-sharing on top of that.

So the question we should be asking isn’t really whether or not a college education is worth it; rather, we need to ask:

Can we really afford to have Americans not pursue a college education to develop the skills, knowledge, and imaginations—and do the research—necessary for a successful society and economy that meets our needs and supports our lives, materially, spiritually, and otherwise?

So, the question is, if we cannot afford NOT to have a college-educated population, how do we make college affordable?

This bill, which Trump signed into law on July 4, suggesting it bore some relation to the nation’s historical quest for a sovereignty characterized by freedom, rooted in the principle that all people are created equal, and insistent on a non-tyrannical political order, actually positions itself in direct opposition, complete contradiction, to the values informing the founding of the nation.

In the Declaration of Independence, our founders were insistent that we all enjoyed certain inalienable rights that included “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This bill is aggressively hostile to American life.

The Constitution states that “we the people” were establishing that very Constitution to “form a more perfect union” and “promote the general welfare,” among other objectives. 

As Bruce Bartlett explained the concept in a 2007 article, “The idea is that if revenues are unilaterally reduced, this reduction will lead to a higher budget deficit, which will force legislators to enact spending cuts. Thus, using tax cuts to bring about spending cuts has been called ‘starving the beast.’”

House Republicans are no longer even trying to sell the lie that tax cuts pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth and bringing in more revenue to the federal government or that the wealth will trickle down. Instead, they are being very clear that to pay for these tax cuts they will need to make substantial cuts to important programs that have supported Americans’ health and well-being–to the tune of $2 trillion.

The fact is, if you think about it, Americans just elected the worst boss ever:  the boss everybody hates, whose style of leadership is more interested in making your life miserable and thrilling in his power to do so, than in creating a happy and productive workplace that honors people’s talents and contributions.

The transformation of hearts and minds will require a profound cultural transformation, and promoting important stories that can define and inform a national self-consciousness and identity and narrate a new direction is one key element of this project of cultural transformation.

Our nation collectively, but especially white America, needs to confront and work through psychotherapeutically the deep cultural and collective mental illness of white male supremacy to understand why it’s damaging to the interests and well-being of white Americans and all Americans. We need stories that help us work this poison out of our cultural bloodstream.

One story that comes to mind is the 1998 movie American History X, directed by Tony Kaye and written by David McKenna. 

I am not suggesting we not act with conscience per se, but I am suggesting that the call on conscience tends to root us in an individualist stance that removes us from our relationship with the many others in our world and prevents us from seriously imagining the impact of our voting behavior on their lives.  We might just need a different term, maybe something like “social justice” or the “public good” which takes us out of our individual sense of rightness to think in broader terms.  Indeed, the very problem with neo-liberalism is its evacuation of the concept of a public good, its denial of its very validity, as it insists we are motivated only by private interests.

Puerto Ricans discovered in Trump and Vance the Hangman coming for them, but we all need to see that the hate informing the Trump-Vance campaign is not reserved for any one group. You don’t even have to look that closely to see through this illusion that only certain groups–certain “others” and not “us”-- are the targets of their hate.

We need a comprehensive national education policy as well as federal legislation to guarantee and enforce this human right by, in part, mandating adequate budgeting and insisting education funding be a priority.
Thus far, all signs point to the fact that a Democratic leadership in Washington, D.C. will be necessary to achieve these goals. Republicans have long called for eliminating the Department of Education.

Indeed, most of us have little say in how our work is organized, what gets produced in our factories, how resources are used and distributed. In short, we are not involved in making most of the key decisions about how our world is run. We tend as a culture and people not to think about democracy in the arena of the workplace and of production more generally.