Indentureland: Workplace of Tomorrow

Ranked-choice voting tells us not just who everyone’s first choice is, but who everyone could agree on.

https://www.concordmonitor.com/We-need-ranked-choice-voting-32890873

• Civil Rights Act –
• Voting Rights Act –
• Women’s Right to Vote –
• Equal Pay Act –
• Clean Air Act –
• Minimum wage –
• 40-hour work week –
• Overtime –
• Unemployment Insurance –
• Putting people on the Moon –
• Inventing the Internet
• First black president
• First female major-party candidate
• Saving the country from a GOP-caused depression (twice)
• Social Security
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• Healthcare Reform
• Food Safety
• New Deal
• Great Society
• Peace Corps,
• Vista,
• Job Corps
• Motor Voter
• Consumer Protection
• FDIC
• Banking and Wall Street Regulations
• SEC
• Federal Reserve System
• Anti-trust Legislation
• Head Start
• School Lunch and Breakfast Programs
• Endangered Species Act
• Veterans’ Benefits
• GI Bill
• UN
• NATO
• Marshall Plan
• Vehicles Safety Requirements, Reduced Emissions, and Fuel Economy Standards (CAFE)
• TVA
• PBS, NPR

• Term limits are a corporate scam to give corporations even more political power than they already have.
• Term limits just guarantee that elected officials will be perpetual amateurs, while corporations can hire career professional lobbyists who will run circles around them.
• Term limits to NOT guarantee you get better people in government, but they DO ensure the people you want to keep have to leave.
• They also discourage dedicated public-minded individuals from entering public service, since they can have no career stability.
• They also guarantee a speedup of the revolving door, where newly elected legislators will pass legislation that favors corporations, and then get rewarded by those corporations with cushy jobs when their term limit expires.
• Or alternatively, they encourage politicians to jump up the ladder to ever-higher office instead of sticking around to serve their constituents. The only way to move up fast is to get money from corporations and special interest groups, who then own the offices they paid for.
• Also term limits will encourage exactly the kind of behavior they are intended to prevent, since legislators who have no chance of being re-elected will have no incentive to pass laws that benefit their constituents.

• Building the Panama Canal –
• Winning WW II –
• Building the Interstate Highway System –
• Inventing the Internet –
• Putting people on the Moon –
• Public transportation
• Fire departments
• Police departments
• Public libraries
• Every branch of the US military
• Roads & highways
• Social Security
• Medicare/medicaid
• Public, not private prisons & jails
• Public hospitals
• The Veterans Affairs Administration
• Public universities
• Public parks
• Public toilets
• Public drinking fountains

• No standing in line –
• No taking time off work –
• No transportation problems –
• We have a 500 hour window to vote instead of a 12 hour window –
• Reduces or eliminates weather problems –
• Ballots are transported not by volunteers or temps, but by federal employees trained in security — postal workers
• Ballot transportation security is protected by federal law
• There are never any large numbers of ballots in one place (e.g. ballot boxes) except in the secure counting facility, so ballots can’t “go missing.”
• No armed racist “poll watchers” at polling places
• No worries about police looking for people with outstanding warrants
• No worries about false messaging about polling places or election days
• Bomb threats can’t shut down voting
• Epidemics such as coronavirus can’t be used as a pretext to shut down elections
• Recountable, by hand if necessary
• No election-day credential challenges
• Visit the website to see if your ballot was counted, if it wasn’t, you can re-vote – or sign up for email notifications
• If you didn’t get a ballot, same story, 3 weeks to correct the problem
• No crappy voting machines in poor or POC precincts
• No misaligned paper in machines – no machines!
• If you vote early, the campaigns stop calling you and sending you junk mail
• People talk about the civic nostalgia of gathering at a physical polling place, but that’s pretty much a white privilege thing (cf. intimidation and taking time off work)
• No “illegal immigrants” voting — this isn’t a problem anyway, but it calls the bluff of people who say it is.
• Machines that print out a paper ballot can be hacked to print something different than what they actually record. That’s not the same as a paper ballot.
• It stymies polling and forces the media to wait until the election is over to get the results. Which is what elections are for.