Stuff happens in life sometimes that opens your eyes to what’s really going on in this evolving new world order.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
“The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the
\n same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means
\nof material production at its disposal, has control at the same time
\nover the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally
\nspeaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are
\n subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal
\nexpression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material
\n relationships grasped as ideas.”<\/p>\n
I bring this all up out of my
\negotistical compulsion to share my last 72 hours of computer anguish (I
\nknow buy a Mac) and to make what I think is a larger point about what’s
\nat stake here in the battle to save LA.<\/p>\n
The City Council began
\nconsideration, such as its members consider what they are doing, on
\nTuesday of a far-reaching, long-range plan to remake city government as
\n if it were a generation ago when America still owned the means of
\nproduction and had the military and monetary power to enforce its will.<\/p>\n
The
\n Council’s real and oft-stated goal, is to preserve as many city jobs at
\n the highest wages and benefits possible by slashing services to the
\npublic and selling off the city’s assets and future revenue streams to
\ntheir best friends and supporters.<\/p>\n
Being people who have never
\nreally achieved anything in their lives beyond conniving their way into
\nelective office, they are incapable of seeing the futility of what they
\nare trying to do.<\/p>\n
Time has passed them by. They, and the way they
\n think, are obsolete.<\/p>\n
Look at the inefficiencies in accounting
\nwhere they miss their estimates by 300 percent and systems don’t talk to
\n one another. Or IT. Or customer service. We could outsource thousands of
\n city jobs to Asia at a fraction of the cost to people who aren’t
\nexpecting lavish pensions or benefits, people who are willing to work
\nhard and be nice while doing it.<\/p>\n
I’m not saying that’s what we
\nshould do. I am saying city workers need to understand the reality that
\nmany of them are replaceable just as multitudes of American workers have
\n been replaced.<\/p>\n
At the least they ought to note that much of
\ntheir own wealth in their pension funds is invested in India and China
\nand elsewhere and that those investments are pushing other Americans out
\n of their jobs, the same people who are being taxed to death to keep
\npublic employees in theirs.<\/p>\n
There has to be a balance, a
\nrecognition that the generation coming of age today will not have the
\nsame deal that so many of us have come to take as a birthright.<\/p>\n
We
\n have to change, change our definitions of work, success, happiness. We
\nhave to devolve government structurally and create a true participatory
\ndemocracy where we have greater control of the world around us, a
\ngreater voice in the decisions that affect our lives. That is what the
\nBattle of Los Angeles is about.<\/p>\n
Such thinking is anathema to the
\nelitist mentality of City Hall. They speak the language of liberalism
\nbut they practice a kind of feudalism where certain classes are endowed
\nwith special rights and powers and the rest of us are nothing but peons.<\/p>\n
I
\n can’t help thinking that in today’s world, it might be easier to
\noutsource the City Council to India where we could get smarter and more
\neffective people governing us. And they would do it for the living wage,
\n no pensions, not the highest salaries of any municipal official in
\nAmerica.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}