Systemic Change IS Necessary for Maximizing Equality

Posted on September 2, 2020 by Andy Hailey

Right-wing authoritarianism has been corrupting our critical national systems for decades so as to end our long-term democratic experiment of maximizing equality. As a result, citizens have suffered needlessly for decades. Now we must stop the authoritarian’s final push to maximize inequality in their favor.

However, the obstacles to substantive change are several. There are legal protections built into our economic and policing systems that protect abusive behavior of already abusive systems. These legal protections, discussed below, plus

The abusive history of authoritarian systems,
Their recently revealed economic failures during a pandemic and
The authoritarian responses to BLM demonstrations

mandate serious system re-evaluation and significant changes to these systems.

Terminology used:

Past Practice: If an action in the workplace has a history without prior employer objection, then it can proceed as SOP (standard operating procedures) in the present and future. The lack of objection by our authoritarian employer leadership to reduce employee abuse only promotes more employee abuse.
Qualified Immunity: A legal doctrine created out of wholecloth with no basis in law. It protects abusive police from prosecution. Police become the executioner without either a trial or legal judgment leading to a penalty defined by law.
Profit/property protectors: Employees of our broken authoritarian Publicpolicing system. Their historical purpose was, and is now, to protect the profit takers/looters (employers) and their profit/property. They add short-term physical abuse to the long-suffered financial abuse of wage theft.

Whether you’re an employee abused financially (wage theft) and/or physically by your employer, or a citizen physically abused by a Public officer from a national or local agency, this worker/citizen abuse confirms systemic problems that ignore and enable such abuse to continue.

Legal Protections of Authoritarian Systems

As an employee, you may be subject to decisions by managers whom you don’t even know that reduce your income so as to increase their’s. As an employee, managers you do know may abuse you verbally or physically. Either way, if the employer never takes action to address such abuse, it will continue. This is legally known as past practice. Thus, past practice by our authoritarian employers promotes continued abuse.

As a citizen, especially a citizen of color, fear of and actual abuse by Public employees carrying guns, mace, pepper spray, tear gas, rubberized bullets, clubs, defense industry hand-me-downs, etc., are a constant worry. These justifiably fearful citizens often suffer unjustifiable injury and/or death while committing no legal wrong. This Public abuse is sanctioned by:

The Public policing system for which these Public employees work,
The authoritarian police associations that represent these Public employees,
The DJT neofascist leadership in Washington, D.C. that enourages police abuse – kidnapping, and
The legal system that sanctions these abusers by inventing qualified immunity for them.

The Supreme Court of the United States has also sanctioned Qualified immunity.

The best way to stop this abuse of Americans sanctioned by either past practice in our authoritarian employer/employee economic system or by qualified immunity in our authoritarian policing system, is through broad systemic re-evaluation and a determined infusion of democracy.

Democratizing Economic and Political Systems

Remember, our authoritarian employer/employee system has not only enriched the employer at the expense of the employee, it has used its massively excessive wealth to remake our democratic political system into an authoritarian neofascist political system that focuses on abuse of citizens for maximizing financial gain of a few. Even during pandemics their wealth grows beyond comprehension.

Reform can start by neutering our authoritarian economic system:

Enable systemic change, democracy at work, to redistribute the massively excessive wealth of the authoritarian employers,
Repeal the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that weakened the unionization powers of FDR’s 1935 National Labor Relations Act,
Add new laws that put union representation on corporate boards of directors such that they represent 50% of the vote,
Add new laws that greatly encourage a long-term transition to employee owned/managed co-ops. This eliminates employers or profit takers/looters who steal profit created by the workers, profit makers, and
Enforce existing anti-trust laws,
Reversing decades of failed privatization with innovative Public infrastructure beyond the New Deal

Using co-ops to infuse democracy into the work place means profit makers (employees) can decide to keep their jobs local. Profit makers won’t poison their own neighborhoods. Workers/Profit makers would rather cut working hours of workers than increase unemployment. Profit makers will distribute profit democratically. Corporate oligarchs will have less and less wealth to buy and subvert our democratic political system.

After enabling the democratization of the workplace, we can repair our political system by rebuilding our damaged democratic foundations.

Make election day a national holiday.
Pass a law making voting a right and prohibit any state from passing laws that restrict voting in any way.
Make voter registration automatic.
Update and enforce our anti-trust laws to minimize consumer abuse.
Amend the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act to disempower corporate lobbyist influence on Congressional committee members.
End corporate personhood.
End speech based on wealth. Instead, protect and empower one-human-one-vote.

Unique Authoritarian Policing System

The workplace of our authoritarian policing system also needs democratization. However, in this case, we must limit both authoritarian political oversight & outside corporate authoritarian influence, but also the authoritarian nature of the Public employees (police) who abuse citizen rights for the sake of protecting authoritarian corporate property rights.

Remember the early history of our policing systems: slave patrols and union busting.

In the North, police evolved out of private, corporate-paid vigilante businesses for killing unionization efforts by employees. Corporations looking to reduce the costs of their private property protection goons convinced city fathers to create replacement Public police forces and make citizens pay for their own clubbing and abuse by authoritarian policemen with a variety of weapons.

In the South, the police evolved out of the slave patrols. These patrols were paid by southern oligarchs, authoritarian plantation owners, to recover their property (slaves).

Our abusive property-protecting policing system has a unique Public authoritarian structure. At the top of this structure, we have an authoritarian local political system that is obligated to authoritarian property owners. The Public employees are the authoritarian police, or stormtroopers, who include former military-trained killers and home-grown white-supremacist militia members. These employees are NOT profit makers. They are profit protectors and are equipped with a growing arsenal of punishment tools to protect property from angry and abused citizens. This Public authoritarian structure is about protecting property and the profit it creates for 21st century oligarchs. The same as our past private union-busting vigilantes of the North and our past slave patrols of the South.

Democratizing Our Public Policing Systems

To fix this Public authoritarian policing system, as with fixing the private authoritarian system, requires more democracy in the workplace. Since this Public policing system is occupied by both authoritarian employers and authoritarian employees and because its purpose is to protect the Public, democratization must involve the Public (citizens).

Democratization should replace the current local political authoritarian employer with a community committee with oversight of the policing budget. Also, disabling violent responses based on racial fear, require limiting or eliminating Qualified Immunity. Reducing violent responses also requires work attire to fit the situation. If you don’t want a riot, don’t dress like you are expecting/projecting one. In addition, employment of ‘Peace’ officers must require their purchase of liability insurance. This insurance will pay their court costs for abuse of their qualified immunity. If they lose their insurance, they can’t serve except at desk duty. As part of the hiring process, each peace officer will take a authoritarian personality psychological test which will weigh heavily in hiring decisions.

Fixing our broken authoritarian and abusive workplaces/systems is a matter of adding and reestablishing democracy. To make that happen, we must start with massive democratic action this November.