Playing Monopoly with America.
The desire — by some — to privatize everything.
I sucked at Monopoly.
And that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me well or has read a single thing I have written.
Sucking at Monopoly is not a good recipe for being a successful small businessman. Or a large businessman. Or any range in between, including a titan of industry.
You needed to be ruthless and merciless to succeed in that board game. I was always just happy if I got to select the little Scottie dog as my player token. Then I’d proceed to hop around the playing board and hem and haw at whether I should purchase something or not. I never had a plan.
At least, never a plan that worked.
Communism was the boogeyman of my youth. Communism continues to be used as the lowest, most frightful pejorative conservative’s can imagine despite the fact that it hasn’t existed in a pure form for half a century. I’ve said it before, and I will repeat it a million times over, no one born on American soil or, anyone who becomes a naturalized citizen, favors the idea of communism.
Even if it did seem like a worthy economic system, in America, the masses are too thoroughly indoctrinated into the brother and sisterhood of capitalism from the moment we emerge from the womb. I imagine this is happening the world over. Consumerism rules! We’re just particularly adept at it in our little corner of the world.
Even so, you’d have to be blind or intentionally oblivious to not recognize — at some point in your life — that unfettered capitalism has its drawbacks.
I have a few anecdotal examples.
Sometime in the 90s or early aughts, the state of Washington decided to divest itself of some of its public properties. Small state parks sprinkled about the region the state government had decided it could no longer afford to keep.
Normal citizens who rarely utilize the state parks probably never noticed the handover between a state-owned facility and one that “looked” like the same park but was now owned and operated by some private entity.
Maybe the entity was part of a hedge fund.
Maybe a private equity group.
Who knows? That’s way above my pay grade.
But I noticed.
Because I utilized some of these parks every single season over decades with youth groups I would take rafting. I watched in real time as these parks became neglected and then, began to crumble. The asphalt got rugged. The cement cracked. Skunks invaded the campgrounds. The watering of the greenery was spotty. The whole place just became run down.
As a small business owner, I get it.
Sometimes you have to pinch pennies. Sometimes you put off the big upgrades. Sometimes you mask the problem and hope for the best.
That can be the beauty of things that are public, assuming the public can agree that these things are worthy of our attention, support and treasure.
~~~
Medicare is probably here to stay, but, under our very noses, corporate shysters and their flacks in Congress are undermining it every chance they get. Now, I’m in over my head here in regards to explaining what it is they are doing exactly, but for those of you who are too young to care yet about Medicare, or convinced Medicare will not exist by the time you elect to take it (since you’ve been paying for it throughout your life with every legitimate paycheck - as George W. Bush use to exclaim, “It’s your money!”), there are two options when you reach Medicare age — DIY Medicare where you figure out which plans and supplemental plans you need to enroll in AND MedicareAdvantage where you leave the heavy lifting to the PRIVATE insurance companies which — I assure you — have your best interests in mind.
The shysters and flacks want you to choose the path of least resistance — MedicareAdvantage no muss! no fuss! — so they control more of the levers of your health care.
Being a recent participant in the byzantine workings of DIY Medicare, I’m here to tell you the opacity of the whole system is staggering. Even so, I staggered through it with the assistance of one of my older siblings who had already staggered through his own research on what plans to implement.
None of this is going to keep me from chanting “Medicare 4 All!” but, if we ever achieve a more progressive government, the privatization of Medicare needs to be addressed. With each passing Congressional session, I suspect the universal health care aspect of Medicare slips a notch.
For what it’s worth, I’m impressed with my old-school, DIY Medicare coverage.
So far.
~~~
Right now, progressives are losing the battle for the soul of the nation. Billionaires are in the ascendancy. The Supreme Court has been taking apart all of the safeguards used to temper the influence of the ruling class. A deadlocked government ignores passing meaningful legislation that could help the hoi polloi, or the classes below the ruling elite.
It’s the second coming of the Roaring Twenties, but just as it was in the first rendition, an enormous swath of the country has not been invited to the party.
The social pact of government needs to play a more significant role. The drive to privatize everything needs to be pushed back by a countervailing force. Billionaires cannot be allowed to dominate the airspace, or space. That’s an incredibly shortsighted idea.
I think Americans are coming around to this idea.
I think it’s why Harris/Walz are resonating.
Americans want to trust their government, trust their neighbors, trust society as a whole.
I think they’re turned off by the division which is the only concoction the snake oil salesmen over under the GOP tent are selling.
I came across this word the other day when I was looking over my wife’s shoulder at one of her social media feeds:
Ubuntu.
It means, “I am, because we are.”
(It is also an operating system apparently. Because, of course, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would want to co-opt such a noble expression and use that to make a fortune. Capitalism!!)
Wikipedia entry for Ubuntu:
Ubuntu (Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼù])[1] (meaning humanity in Bantu) describes a set of closely related African-origin value systems that emphasize the interconnectedness of individuals with their surrounding societal and physical worlds. "Ubuntu" is sometimes translated as "I am because we are" (also "I am because you are"),[2] or "humanity towards others" (Zulu umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu). In Xhosa, the latter term is used, but is often meant in a more philosophical sense to mean "the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity".[3]
We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.
None of us just fell from the coconut tree. Kamala’s mom had it right and — hopefully — taught her well.
These are the days we need to be united. We need to understand and cherish connections. We shouldn’t need an alien invasion to bring us together. We have all of the existential threats necessary for us to find common cause.
I’m counting on the Democratic National Convention (which is starting in the next couple of hours) to blow some life into that tiny glowing ember of democracy.
Speaking of Monopoly…it was originally patented and titled The Landlord’s Game. (I might have been better at this version!) It’s lively inventor was not the gentleman who laid claim to it in 1933. It was a young woman who — apparently — filed many patents in the early 1900s, and invented other games. Her name was Elizabeth — usually referred to as Lizzie — Magie and she filed her patent for the board game in 1903.
The route to how it ended up in the hands of the game manufacturer, The Parker Brothers, is truly circuitous.
From publicdomainreview.org — to wit:
Included in every new Monopoly box for decades was a story about how Darrow invented the game while tinkering around in his basement — a self-made man who saved himself from poverty through ingenuity and hard work. Darrow and Parker Brothers stuck to this story, even to the point of suppressing contradictory evidence. Parker Brothers bought up early homemade versions of Monopoly, presumably to have them destroyed, and somehow maneuvered their patent despite existing patents. Everyone in Darrow’s social circle knew the truth and some tried to say so. They were ignored.
Perhaps Darrow quelled his conscience by imagining the game had no inventor. In fact, with a bit of effort, he could have tracked her down. She was still alive, and still making games. As was later detailed, Darrow learned the game at the Todds’ house, and the Todds learned it from a friend, Eugene Raiford. Eugene learned it from his brother, Jesse. Jesse learned it from Ruth Hoskins, who taught at a Quaker School in Atlantic City. Ruth learned it in Indianapolis, from someone named Dan Laymen, who had played it in his frat house in college. The frat brothers who taught everyone else to play were Louis and Ferdinand Thun. They learned it from their sister, Wilma, who learned it from her husband Charles Muhlenberg. Charles learned the game from Thomas Wilson, who learned it in his college economics class, with the radical Wharton/UPenn economics professor Scott Nearing. (Nearing played the game with his students until he was fired, in 1915, for criticizing industrial capitalism.) The trail ends here, for Nearing learned the game directly from its remarkable inventor, Elizabeth Magie, or Lizzie, who filed a patent for it in 1903.
Interestingly, Scott Nearing was interviewed in Warren Beatty’s movie, Reds, during one of the several interludes in the overly long film as one of America’s real world avid socialists. The term Reds, of course, refers to America’s “pinko commies” (there’s that boogeyman again). Scott Nearing embraced anti-capitalism and he and his wife, Helen, wrote a book called Living the Good Life which should come as no surprise as being one of my formative introductions to making my way through the world in a non-traditional way.
Also —
This congressman is from TEXAS! Holy Shit! Well worth the watch if only for the Beer/Christian comparison at the very beginning.
“God is a verb.” Right on.
A fine education today -- both the writing and the truth-telling video.
For what it's worth department: My income was so minimal for the last 35 years that count for my Social Security income, my monthly check is as minimal as it gets. You don't make a bunch of dollars as a river guide or as a faller in the woods. Also, major depression and constant back pain played a huge role and still do today.
As far as Medicare goes, I think that those in the Wenatchee Valley have outstanding medical care with Confluence Health. With the standard Medicare, I went with a Medicare Advantage plan, Health Alliance. Oh my, what a struggle to wade through all those decisions that you think will be best for your future healthcare. With as many surgeries I have had since about 2005, I was 58 at the time, so this was a good choice for me. Before my Social Security/Medicare age requirement, I was fortunate to be on a Washington State low—or no-income program called Basic Health. FYI, for all those youngsters now trying to wade through the "big eddy" of this significant decision.
It's an interesting video; I waded through its entirety. It's sort of like, "I'm not that type of Christian."