Stuff happens in life sometimes that opens your eyes to what’s really going on in this evolving new world order.
My PC crashed Friday, sending me into a panic. When I finally got my wits about me and figured out how to restore it, I found I had lost numerous files I hadn’t backed up. And then I botched the reinstall so I lost my wireless connection to my laptop and made matters worse trying to fix it and lost all Internet service.
After the Super Bowl, I called Time Warner Cable for support and a wonderful woman in a faraway country spent 90 minutes on the phone with me before finally deciding a serviceman would have to come to my house to fix it.
So I poured another martini and tried to go through the steps again only to find I needed support to reprogram my cable modem. It took several tries, but the next woman I spoke to got both my PC and my laptop worked directly off the cable modem.
Being obsessed at that point, I decided to try to fix my Linksys router myself and blew out the connection, leading to a third call to yet another woman in the Phillippines, India, Pakistan, somewhere in Asia I was sure.
By dawn’s early light, I called Linksys and talked to Manoush in Pakistan who spent more than an hour going through one procedure after another until Voila!, I was wirelessly connected — except gotomypc.com still didn’t work.
That led to a fairly short call to gotomypc support where a nice young woman somewhere, maybe even in America but I doubt it, assured me it was my Norton Firewall that was the problem.
Enter Pritam Prasad, the Norton support woman I reached on the phone. She didn’t just guide me through the long laborious process, she took over control of my PC and spent an hour uninstalling, upgrading, reconfiguring and suddenly I was connected, fully restored.
Every person I spoke with was courteous, respectful, caring, smart, knowledgeable and you can bet working for a fifth, a tenth, a 20th of what any of us would expect, a better class of workers than any of us would be.
I bring this up because Tezozomoc, brilliant leader of the South Central Farmers, has been pointing out of late that this isn’t a recession we are going through but a major economic restructuring to the realities of the global economy. America has lost control of the means of production, the very heart of capitalism and the growth of wealth.
If you know your Karl Marx, you know how important it is to own the means of production and to have the skills that come with that ownership:
“The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the
same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means
of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time
over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally
speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are
subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal
expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material
relationships grasped as ideas.”
I bring this all up out of my
egotistical compulsion to share my last 72 hours of computer anguish (I
know buy a Mac) and to make what I think is a larger point about what’s
at stake here in the battle to save LA.
The City Council began
consideration, such as its members consider what they are doing, on
Tuesday of a far-reaching, long-range plan to remake city government as
if it were a generation ago when America still owned the means of
production and had the military and monetary power to enforce its will.
The
Council’s real and oft-stated goal, is to preserve as many city jobs at
the highest wages and benefits possible by slashing services to the
public and selling off the city’s assets and future revenue streams to
their best friends and supporters.
Being people who have never
really achieved anything in their lives beyond conniving their way into
elective office, they are incapable of seeing the futility of what they
are trying to do.
Time has passed them by. They, and the way they
think, are obsolete.
Look at the inefficiencies in accounting
where they miss their estimates by 300 percent and systems don’t talk to
one another. Or IT. Or customer service. We could outsource thousands of
city jobs to Asia at a fraction of the cost to people who aren’t
expecting lavish pensions or benefits, people who are willing to work
hard and be nice while doing it.
I’m not saying that’s what we
should do. I am saying city workers need to understand the reality that
many of them are replaceable just as multitudes of American workers have
been replaced.
At the least they ought to note that much of
their own wealth in their pension funds is invested in India and China
and elsewhere and that those investments are pushing other Americans out
of their jobs, the same people who are being taxed to death to keep
public employees in theirs.
There has to be a balance, a
recognition that the generation coming of age today will not have the
same deal that so many of us have come to take as a birthright.
We
have to change, change our definitions of work, success, happiness. We
have to devolve government structurally and create a true participatory
democracy where we have greater control of the world around us, a
greater voice in the decisions that affect our lives. That is what the
Battle of Los Angeles is about.
Such thinking is anathema to the
elitist mentality of City Hall. They speak the language of liberalism
but they practice a kind of feudalism where certain classes are endowed
with special rights and powers and the rest of us are nothing but peons.
I
can’t help thinking that in today’s world, it might be easier to
outsource the City Council to India where we could get smarter and more
effective people governing us. And they would do it for the living wage,
no pensions, not the highest salaries of any municipal official in
America.