NewSystemUSA

2005-01-23T09:29:00.000-08:00

We reprint the following important article by Pierre Tristmn because ....:

We live under a system which has failed to service a peaceful and prosperous society.

We are the overwhelming majority millions of Americans who labor in our factories, health and service industries, in our public and private schools.

We have the people power to liberate themselves from the system's corporate mythmakers and organize into one large, nationwide union ...organize our industries into democratic constructs, form industry co -ops nationwide, integrate our workplaces to coordinate production to satisfy our individual and societal needs and wants ...

What we lack today is democracy in both industry and government.

We truly need a second American Revolution, legal and peaceful, which can become a reality only after we educate ourselves about how capitalism really works to undermine our freedoms while in the process of robbing us of our total social product.

Abraham Lincoln told us to remember that the working class, that's us, is the most important, the most vital element in our industrial and service operations ... without us, which nothing would happen..., no production anywhere could take place..., no schools would operate..., no hospitals would exist ..., when he declared:

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital cannot exist without Labor, but Labor can exist without Capital."

And yet, we still don't get it! We, as working class people, do not see ourselves and our class, as the most necessary factor in our nation!

Remember, only under this system of capitalism does Labor need capital to produce, whereas, in a system of industrial democracy ...where there is no need for "capital," we can produce for our needs rather than for the private profits of a relative few.

And most important and necessary, if we are to live in a truly free and democratic society, an industrial democracy would enable every citizen to have a real voice in all matters which affect their lives!

The following is one more good reason to peacefully and legally abolish this system and replace it with an economic democracy...

New System Editors

The following was published on Tuesday, September 2, 2003 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal

Labor Subdued as its Liberties Erode Within Corporate Culture

by Pierre Tristam

To call America a free country today requires reading the civil liberties landscape through an anthology of retro qualifiers:

The USA Patriot Act is homage to George Orwell.

The Department of Homeland Security is Franz Kafka's newest castle.

The Department of Justice is run by a dangerously sober Elmer Gantry.

Guantanamo Bay is a tropical one-stop of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Siberian gulag.

And whatever goes on in the White House is a cross between Dr. Strangelove and "Groundhog Day."

The government's security crackdown in the wake of the terrorist attacks two years ago was understandable. Liberties are meaningless if they're not protected.

Less understandable is the way the crackdown has grown roots, grown walls and been tendered by a cowed population like inmates decorating their prison walls. This, even after it became evident that fixing a cracked intelligence system was most likely to ward off the next mass murder.

Passing dark-shaded laws and copying East German bureaucracies only parodies the freedoms we stand for. Still, let's not exaggerate. For most of us 290 million Americans, the crackdown hasn't made a noticeable difference.

The government has the makings of a police state. The infrastructure is there, the cameras, the wiretaps, the Internet trawlers are in place, the uniformed brigades are certainly eager to validate their buffed up eminence.

But life continues pretty much as we've known it. The Labor Day weekend's lounging was a reminder.

It was also an astutely deceiving reminder, because if we worry disproportionately about what the government might do to the liberties of a few thousand people, we worry not at all about what everyday workplaces are doing to the liberties of 110 million working Americans.

If it's privacy we cherish, or free expression, or personal rights, or even the right to have erred in the past, paid for it and moved on, the USA Patriot Act has nothing on how the corporate culture has eroded those rights in the workplace.

There are a few headline examples (drug maker Eli Lilly started running background checks on workers and sent one packing for having bought marijuana eight years before, fired another for bouncing a $60 check).

But it's the routine incursions in everyday workplaces that reflect the pernicious surveillance mentality on employers' part -- and, more dangerously, acceptance on employees' part.

In enterprises large or small employers snoop into their employees' credit histories, their driving records, their criminal records. They scour sexual-offender convictions and bankruptcy filings. They check into whether employees have been party to civil lawsuits. They read employees' e-mail and eavesdrop on their phone conversations (you don't really believe that bunk about supervisors listening for "quality assurance," do you?).

The pretext on employers' end is always something like security, liability, the dubious notion that employees are "agents" of a company whose words and deeds even away from work reflect on the company. It's a curious extension of the 40-hour business week into a 24/7 claim on an individual's identity.

You're always free to go if you object.

But work is a necessity for most, not a luxury, and the sameness of the corporate environment is such that changing jobs is only a change of locks. It's a no-exit sort of freedom.

None of this is new. Henry Ford used to say that he was "more a manufacturer of men than of automobiles." He had a Sociological Department staffed with inspectors who visited workers' homes and kept tabs on people's family lives, their mortgage payments, their debts, what money immigrants sent back to the home country. Immigrants who didn't enroll in Americanization classes were fired.

Those who led lives Ford considered loose outside of work were encouraged to change or were fired. Ford didn't want kinks in his assembly lines, whether mechanical or human.

In the 1950s corporate presumptions were so overt that they were easily satirized by the likes of Sloan Wilson and William Whyte in "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and "The Organization Man" (those workplace versions of Orwell, Kafka and the rest).

The methods have changed, thanks to casual Fridays and other harmless perks of the made-over workplace. But the principles persist.

"Human resources" is every company's Total Information Awareness department. For-your-own-good scientific management still ionizes the air you breathe. You won't get fired for refusing to attend Americanization classes. But you will get fired for not attending sensitivity training (a $10 billion industry kept flush by its diversity-mongering consultants) or submitting to whatever coercive fad happens to be ornamenting management's control panel.

"What is an intellectual playground for an entire class of consultants and gurus is, for the majority of Americans,“ Thomas Frank wrote in "One Market Under God" three years ago, "a living hell of surveillance and degradation in which every emotion is faked and every response anticipated."

In an atmosphere like that, the USA Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security are more like natural extensions of what we're used to.

At the moment, anyway, they're not the problem. They're not even the greatest threat to liberties. They're among many symptoms of a surveillance society that long pre-dates Sept. 11, and that thrives on submissive, unquestioning compliance.

The workplace is its most loyal collaborator.

c 2003 News-Journal Corporation

******************

Please really take to mind Tristam's revelations and warnings. We spend a good part of our lives in our work places. These should have the highest forms of democratic interaction to ensure that our "DEMOCRATIC" ideals are practiced in our workplaces and not simply found in our school texts and on the lips of our politicians..

WE must face the fact that it is our class, people who work every day for a wage or a salary or a commission, which includes our work place supervisors and other management workers, who are responsible for the condition of today’s society.

WE have allowed the so-called leaders to do our thinking for us. WE are the majority who have placed people in our halls of government, those same people who, in the interests of their corporate sponsors, have led our nation into wars…Iraq being the latest…Iran, from all the inside Washington talk, perhaps the next.

WE have shirked our responsibilities to ourselves, our children and future generations by allowing this current system to determine our work place rules as well as our absence in the decisions making process in what is touted to be a democratic society.

IN short, WE, as the majority citizenry, have failed to build a society of peace and prosperity.

WE have allowed a system, not of our making, a system that has long ago failed to maintain our societal needs, to dictate the way we live.

There is no need for us to have wars and economic global conflicts with other societies.

There is no need for anyone to involuntarily be jobless, or have kids going hungry, or anyone to live in slum communities.

There is no need to have a government in which WE give away our right to make decisions in our own working class self interests.

Our unquestioning compliance with the present work place rules and our acceptance of restrictions placed upon us in making decisions in all areas which affect our lives ….both in government, and in our places of work, has led us to our present social conditions in which WE find ourselves competing for the limited jobs being offered by the private and corporations …

And WE have been thrust into wars not of our own CLASS doing, rather, because OUR “elected” rulers, and OUR corporate rulers have decided their economic interests were best suited to engage in military actions in various parts of the world where Corporate interests would best be served.

We are in economic conflict at home and abroad ..none of which is the making of OUR class.

There are better ways. We needn’t be submissive and compliant.

We have the overwhelming majority numbers to legally and peacefully determine, by way of the ballot, a better way to democratic self rule in both government and industry.

YOU can begin this process. How? The best, simplest way is to discuss
conditions with your work colleagues …, your union work mates…, your office associates…, and your friends and neighbors …And, if you belong to a political organization …regardless of name …, open up the possibilities of a new and better system…, and point to this site…New System, USA, for a rationale which brings democracy, legally and peacefully, into our communities and work places…

Change starts with ourselves…Certainly those who own our corporations, and run our government…, will not do it.

New System USA is at: http://peoplefor.blogspot.com/

2005-01-23T09:23:00.000-08:00

We live under a system which has failed to service a peaceful and prosperous society.

We, the millions of Americans who labor in our factories, health and service industries, in our public and private schools, can liberate ourselves from the system's corporate mythmakers, and organize into one large, nationwide union ......, organize our industries into democratic constructs, form industry co -ops nationwide, integrate all industries to coordinate production to satisfy our individual and societal needs and wants ...

What we lack today is m DEMOCRACY in both industry and government. We truly need a second American Revolution, legal and peaceful, which can become a reality only after we educate ourselves about how capitalism really works to undermine our freedoms while in the process of robbing us of our total social product.

Abraham Lincoln said: ”Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital cannot exist without Labor, but Labor can exist without Capital."

Only under this system of capitalism does Labor need capital to produce. In a system of industrial democracy ...where there is no need for "capital," we can produce for our needs rather than for the private profits of a relative few.

The following is one more good reason to peacefully and legally abolish this system and replace it with an economic democracy...

New System Editors
*******************

Published on Tuesday, September 2, 2003 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal

Labor Subdued as its Liberties Erode Within Corporate Culture

by Pierre Tristam

To call America a free country today requires reading the civil liberties landscape through an anthology of retro qualifiers:

The USA Patriot Act is homage to George Orwell. The Department of Homeland Security is Franz Kafka's newest castle. The Department of Justice is run by a dangerously sober Elmer Gantry. Guantanamo Bay is a tropical one-stop of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Siberian gulag.

And whatever goes on in the White House is a cross between Dr. Strangelove and "Groundhog Day."

The government's security crackdown in the wake of the terrorist attacks two years ago was understandable. Liberties are meaningless if they're not protected.

Less understandable is the way the crackdown has grown roots, grown walls and been tendered by a cowed population like inmates decorating their prison walls. This, even after it became evident that fixing a cracked intelligence system was most likely to ward off the next mass murder. Passing dark-shaded laws and copying East German bureaucracies only parodies the freedoms we stand for. Still, let's not exaggerate. For most of us 290 million Americans, the crackdown hasn't made a noticeable difference.

The government has the makings of a police state. The infrastructure is there, the cameras, the wiretaps, the Internet trawlers are in place, the uniformed brigades are certainly eager to validate their buffed up eminence. But life continues pretty much as we've known it. The Labor Day weekend's lounging was a reminder.
It was also an astutely deceiving reminder, because if we worry disproportionately about what the government might do to the liberties of a few thousand people, we worry not at all about what everyday workplaces are doing to the liberties of 110 million working Americans.
If it's privacy we cherish, or free expression, or personal rights, or even the right to have erred in the past, paid for it and moved on, the USA Patriot Act has nothing on how the corporate culture has eroded those rights in the workplace.
There are a few headline examples (drug maker Eli Lilly started running background checks on workers and sent one packing for having bought marijuana eight years before, fired another for bouncing a $60 check). But it's the routine incursions in everyday workplaces that reflect the pernicious surveillance mentality on employers' part -- and, more dangerously, acceptance on employees' part.
In enterprises large or small employers snoop into their employees' credit histories, their driving records, their criminal records. They scour sexual-offender convictions and bankruptcy filings. They check into whether employees have been party to civil lawsuits. They read employees' e-mail and eavesdrop on their phone conversations (you don't really believe that bunk about supervisors listening for "quality assurance," do you?).
The pretext on employers' end is always something like security, liability, the dubious notion that employees are "agents" of a company whose words and deeds even away from work reflect on the company. It's a curious extension of the 40-hour business week into a 24/7 claim on an individual'

2005-01-10T03:25:00.000-08:00

The Need for Social Ownership

A studied reflection on what is at the core of the social turmoil we call poverty, crime, racism, the environmental question, and the vicious Congressional divisions in government, can be narrowed to one, and only one cause; the structure and use of our economy.

It should be clear to everyone by now that the present system has failed to service us to sustain a consistently prosperous, peaceful and harmonious society. In fact, the opposite is true.

Think about it. Many of us have been pauperized. We fight among ourselves and with other countries. We have little or no real decision-making role in a government which has become an open political battlefield for the economic system’s most powerful corporations and their chief beneficiaries to the exclusion of our everyday living needs.

Right now we are in the midst of a societal and global holocaust. As a people we have been led into wars abroad, and now the wars have been visited upon us by people most of us have never met, and have never personally harmed or injured in any way. To passively witness our own destruction, and to deny the real reasons why it is happening, is to condemn ourselves and future generations to a drab, worry-laden, welfare ridden future of physical and mental impoverishment.

We can do something about it.

The Rationale for Social Ownership

To begin to call for the building of a sensible, new system in which we have real input and actual control of our lives, we start here the necessary beginnings of a vital, broad-based national discussion for a reconstruction of our society on a sound, rational base starting at the ground floor of our economic organization.

A new social plan is needed to replace this present one which has been breaking down periodically and dramatically ever since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. We need a NEW SYSTEM which We, the People, the citizen majority, can democratically use to serve our societal and individual needs and wants. Social ownership of our needed industries and services is the most logical answer.

Our emphasis is on a NEW SYSTEM …We are not talking about so-called “Communism,” or the popular understandings of “socialism.”

We are not advocating any form of STATE ownership of our national industrial assets in which the administration and operation of our work places is governed from the top down.

In the realm of ethical morality, social ownership of our industrial complex, social ownership is natural and just.

Social ownership is natural because We, the People, operate our socially-operated industrial tools, the foremost instruments we, as a cooperative society, now have for societal survival in the modern industrial world. By virtue of their critical need by the whole society, it becomes imperative that these are not misused for narrow, short term private gain by any minority, as is now the reality.

Social ownership is just because it is compatible with the fair, universally-accepted axiom: that is, the product belongs to those who make it. Since the majority of society’s citizenry is of our working class, and since it is our class which has created, and operates the industrial wheels of necessary social production to provide the goods and services required for us to function as we do, it becomes a simple matter of elementary justice that our industrial tools be owned, controlled, administered and democratically operated by those who work them.

The Legal Question

Our Constitution, the law of our land, makes it possible to have a New System.
Article V, the Amendment Clause, enables us to change the system through legislation, the legal and peaceful ballot way. The legal and moral basis for using a new system, for a fundamental change, is found in our early American traditions.

Thomas Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence, told us that his writings were for the people of that time, and that conditions would change as to the ways future generations would order and govern themselves. He declared that WE mustn’t look upon what his generation did as being written in stone, never to be changed, which is why the Amendment Clause, Article V, was included in the Constitution.

On the folly of keeping the Constitution exactly as was originally written, Jefferson wrote:

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him as a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their …ancestors.”

George Washington added:

The basis of our political system is the right of the people to alter the constitutions of government.”

Abraham Lincoln agreed:

Any people living anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most sacred right -- a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.”

Lincoln went a step further:

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their CONSTITUTIONAL right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”

Perhaps James Madison, The Father of the Constitution, came closest to understanding how our present form of government, as well as the economy, established over 200 years ago, would not be desirable for future generations when he declared that the time would come when:

"Wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the few,” and that it would be necessary to “…readjust the laws of the nation to changed conditions.”

That time we believe is now. We need new laws…a new system.We propose a New System, an Economic Democracy.