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Amerikkka should not exist. It must be abolished. There are concessions the State & capital will adhere to when we mobilize, but revolution will never be on the ballot.
Domination is a byproduct of coercive hierarchy. To free ourselves from domination we have to be strategic in how we interact with systems of power. Non-reformist reforms can improve our material conditions in the short term, but true liberation is only achieved when we abolish all States, abolish Capitalism and abolish hierarchy.
We don’t have to bargain for our humanity. We have the capacity to collectively organize and care for ourselves and the environment.
- Democratize the workplace.
There are probably many ways you could go about this: Requiring that employees have a representative on the board of all corporations, forcing companies to give a certain amount of equity to employees, all businesses have to be worker co-ops, maybe some kind of automatic unionization? The point is to give workers more say in how businesses are run and a fairer cut of the value they produce, which would probably end up fixing some of the other things on this list as a byproduct.
- News reporting must be factual and clearly distinguishable from opinion and other non-news programming.
Something needs to be done about deliberate propaganda and misinformation. I’m not sure what the answer is here, but maybe having some rules for what can be called “news” would be a start.
- Enumerated right to bodily autonomy
This would cover abortion, prostitution, and marijuana consumption, and would also cover many forms of trans healthcare that are currently under attack. Speaking of which…
- Strengthened protections for minorities, including legal recognition of trans and intersex people. Something like the Equal Rights Amendment but for all minorities. Let’s explicitly get it into law that you can’t discriminate based on something people are born with.
I don’t agree with merging the House and Senate; uncapping the House fixes the proportionality issue and the Senate is a useful check to ensure that smaller states still have a voice.
Adding 5% to the highest tax bracket seems way too low. There should be a new top bracket with a rate so high it’s almost confiscatory; anyone earning that much is a resource hoarder and should be made to share with the rest of society. We used to have a top tax rate of 95%, so this isn’t unrealistic.
Banning tax prep is redundant if the IRS is calculating it for you, and I wouldn’t want to outright ban it for those whose financial situations may be complicated enough to actually need it.
Why are we including a ban on tipping? I feel like we’re getting lost in the details here. This should be a shorter list of high-level changes. If you don’t like tipping, wouldn’t it be better to do something about employers not giving fair wages in general?
The last one could just be “free education”
There is a case for having some cost otherwise people go to university for absolutely worthless degrees just to do something.
Could? I think it should be.
All the points are nice but the plan does not “make sense” in the sense that it will probably never happen (at least within our lifetimes).
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I don’t really see “new countries” being a thing in that way ever again. The USA was new because a “new” piece of land was literally found (well obviously it was already found by other people but you get what I mean).
There is no new land to find today. You can’t just set off and create a new country - all of the land is already taken. You’ll need to work within the confines of the current countries and try your best to improve them gradually.
At least, any other approach would probably be very bloody…
Don’t worry, World War 3 will leave vast swaths of uninhabited land.
Uninhabitable*
I mean, the US was just a colonial state that broke ties to the british monarchy, and that shit happens all the time, so I think through that method, there’s still a pretty good chance. If you’re talking more about like, the establishment of the US as a state through the genocide of the native peoples, intentional or otherwise, I’d say, sure, yeah, that’s hopefully never gonna happen again, but general independence movements happen all the time.
If you arent dying, dont overestimate capitalism’s remaining lifetime
Merg Senate in house: no: checks and balances.
Checks and balances would be the executive and judicial branches, not the senate.
You think the executive has power? Haha
No senate has powers beyond policy, inquiry committees to reviel corruption ect list goes on. Checks Nd balances
No, that is the original meaning of having three branches, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. If any of them are not doing their job the other two branches are supposed to hold them accountable (supposed to being the operative term here). I was just saying that the senate was not established as a system of checks and balances against the house of Representatives, but rather as a compromise so that smaller states wouldnt necessarily be completely beholden to one’s with much larger populations.
What positives would merging them accomplish?
None you lose thr checks and balance
This is the only one i cant figure out.
That person didn’t suggest it, it’s in OP’s list.
There’s no benefit to that. Removing the limit on house representatives, that’s huge and real, but merging Congress is dumb. There’s a few dumb things on the list (eg “abolish gerrymandering” is like saying “abolish speeding”). Choose your favorite!
Edit: Now that I’m not trying to hurry to get ready for work:
Chapter One: the HoRs.
For those that aren’t aware of how it works:
There’s are two lawmaking bodies with two different purposes. The Senate is equally split among states. There are 2 senators for each state – as a result, those seats are elected by their entire state (more people voting on each person), and the seats are more competitive (more people want to be elected to that seat). So Senators tend to be more serious politicians, more “universally appealing” (aka centrist). This also makes the Senate the one that gives smaller, or less populous states, more power, because both California and Wyoming get 2 senators, no matter what. These factors contribute to the Senate being a more deliberative body.
The House Representatives are determined by population – so California has many more senators than Wyoming. They’re elected in their district, which can be quite small, so the profile of voters in a district is often very different than in an entire state. (This is why all the crazies are in the House.)
There’s a minimum, obviously – the smallest state will always have at least 1? Or 2? I don’t remember. But you can’t have a state with no representation, that’s not ok.
The problem is, our national population is very very different from what it was. The difference between New York and Maine is much more drastic than it was 200 years ago. But we haven’t increased the number of Representatives. And there’s a minimum. As the oopulation grows, and the House doesn’t, it’s becoming more and more unbalanced, in favor of smaller states.
Imagine trying to get smaller states to vote in favor of decreasing their power.
(Also: electoral college votes are on the same system. The electoral college was intended to give smaller states more power, but because there’s a minimum, and we haven’t reduced the total, it’s become super imbalanced. It was a mediocre idea to start with, and now it’s even worse. Abolishing the EC is pretty popular, but it might be easier/better to just follow the rules and increase the total number of EC votes. But, again, small states won’t agree to it.)
The Constitution says we’re supposed to increase the total number of Representatives (and EC votes) but at some point (1929 to be specific) Congress was like nahhhh
Chapter two: why we can’t Abolish Gerrymandering.
First of all, it’s already illegal.
Secondly, it’s hard for outsiders to tell the difference between appropriate “gerrymandering” and actual gerrymandering. If you look at Chicago, where I’m from, there’s a weird vote assignment on the west side of the city, it looks manipulated and weird. But if you live here, you know, there’s a huge highway that cuts through there that’s very hard to cross, so populations on one side are very different from on the other. One side of the highway is there a bunch of Latino immigrants and settled, and on the north side are more affluent (white) people.
(The fact that a highway cuts through a neighborhood isn’t an accident, but that’s just regular systemic racism, unrelated to Congress.)
If you made the voting map a simple grid, the Latino voters might be split up in a way that reduces their voting power. So the map is weird, but it’s actually good that it’s weird.
(This is why I said it’s like speeding: one, it’s already illegal, but two, it’s something everyone is doing (and traffic would be super shitty if everyone followed the speed limit), but some people are taking it to an illegal extreme.)
If you look at a state, calculate a percentage of the minorities, and check that number (those numbers – since there are more than one minority) against the number of districts that vote the way those minorities vote, then, that’s what we’ve decided is “fine” – and, for real, what else are you going to do.
Illegal gerrymandering is when those blocks of voters (“blocs,” is you want to get into Gramsci), are intentionally divided so as to reduce their power. The voting rights act of 1965 made this illegal, and every ten years, after the census, districts are often redrawn. In 2010, we ended up with a lot of gerrymandering. Now,finally, were starting to see some corrections to badly gerrymandered maps, like Alabama, Florida, New York, Wisconsin, Georgia… Louisiana…idr the others, but it’s a lot. 2024 is going to have a very very different House of Representatives than the one we have now.
This last point is worth underscoring. The current Republican house majority is due to illegal distract maps. It is, technically, an illegal Congress. So all these ridiculous shenanigans the House Republicans are up to shouldn’t be happening. (And, in fact, one could easily make the argument that the high percentage of insane and stupid Republican Representatives is because of the maps – because the the “depressurization” caused by fair maps would have dialed Congress back to a more centrist stance.
If you want to learn more, check out Democracy Docket, which is a news source from a group of people (lawyers) who are taking bad maps to court.
I feel like the whole gerrymandering debate is missing the point. Why are our elected officials representing land rather than people? The majority of voters in my district are ideologically opposed to my existence, so they elect people who actively try to harm me. No other representatives are allowed to speak on my behalf because I’m not on their patch of land. I have no one representing my interests in the House of Representatives or my state’s equivalent. This will be true for someone no matter how you draw the lines.
It would be better to abolish the idea of districts entirely, and come up with some way to award representatives proportionally.
You have done a good job of beginning to outline why things are going to break rather than change.
Imagine trying to get smaller states to vote in favor of decreasing their power.
Are you trying to fix systemic problems of government structure or pass laws? They are different things.
Ok so…
Mandatory voting
I think this can get messy. It would require a system to prosecute those who don’t vote. That kind of registry can be very easily used for nefarious purposes by politicians or just anyone with access to that information. Also, it would really depend on what degree of mandatory this is. If you get thrown in jail then we are going to see a lot of poor people in prison for no reason. If you get just a fine then we are essentially introducing the inverse of a poll tax. Not voting is a protected form of free speech for a reason and can be interpreted as protest.
Merge house into senate
Last time something like this was posted I got flamed for asking what the point of this one is. The Senate is a representation of the states rights we have in our constitution. It serves as a safeguard against heavily populated areas dictating the laws for much less populated states. I’m all for reform but eliminating the Senate all together seems like a step backwards.
Ban tipping
I think this is another one where the spirit of the idea is right but the execution is wrong. What we need to ban is allowing restaurants to pay tipped positions far below minimum wage, and stop allowing restaurants to take a cut of the tip at all.
The act of tipping itself is a cultural thing it needs to be addressed culturally. If you can’t tip someone for something, complications in the law arise that may disallow giving money to people in general. For example how do you distinguish between tipping a server for a meal and giving the server a dollar as a gift?
+1 on the senate, it serves a purpose, if you don’t think it does you clearly don’t understand why it exists lol.
It exists because there was a time when we needed buy in from states, not just people. The Senate was how that was accomplished.
It’s a way of ensuring our democracy isn’t too democratic.You can understand the point of the Senate without thinking that we need to ensure that land is adequately represented in our government.
legislatively it makes sense. it removes a significant portion of say from large states, like texas and california, over small states like wyoming, who have comparatively little say. The trick is that it’s application specific. Unless we’re restructuring the entire government the senate does exist for a pretty explicit purpose.
I think it only makes sense if you think that it matters that Wyoming is fairly represented, and not the people in Wyoming.
I don’t particularly care about the representation of the land, only the people who live on it, where each person should have as much say as any other.The Senate is explicitly antidemocratic, and since I’m a fan of fair representation, I’m not a fan of the Senate.
Well, I suppose you could also make it so states get equal numbers of senators and representatives. That would also be fine, since there’s a slight use for the Senate having a longer election cycle.
Since this whole thread is basically playing and dreaming, I’ll easily agree that you can’t just drop the Senate without at least giving a look at how that impacts the rest of the government organization.
it depends on the legislation. If it’s something that the states are involved in, and it isn’t particularly relevant to the people of the state like most legislation probably is. And in that scenario, it would be beneficial for wyoming to not be overshadowed by.
Also i dont think you understand how senate seats work, they’re literally popular votes. We put them there. That’s at least following the basic principles of democracy. I’m not sure how one would argue against that, unless you have a massive problem with the electoral college, would which would be fair i suppose.
This isn’t a supreme court situation where they’re appointed magically.
What? No, I understand how Senate seats work. It’s not undemocratic because they’re not voted on, it’s undemocratic because they over represent some people over others. Wyoming and California should not be on equal ground because California has 80 times the population.
All issues that impact a state impact the people of the state. States don’t have interests, they’re just collections of people living on a piece of land.Giving votes to land is an artifact of getting the country started.
The problem here though is that the US doesn’t work like the EU does for instance. The EU is the US if it were less federally controlled, and more “formally agreed upon” rather than legislated and codified into law.
While it is true that most issues of the state are related to the people, it’s also true that each state government is independent from the federal government. And they do need some level of individualism, in order to function appropriately, without the ability for larger states to pull a shenanigan that can negatively affect smaller states. It’s not about representation of the land, it’s about equal representation of the individual components of the hierarchical government body.
This is like saying that because America is 75% white people, that they should have 75% control over everything, which by nature, is true to a degree, but this creates a problem where the majority, can overrule anything a minority says. And they have no course of action in response.
A lot of legislation in the government is highly isolated from the average citizen. That’s kind of the whole point of the government, if you truly wanted democracy. Wouldn’t it be prudent to delete both the house and the senate? So that way we truly have democratic rule over the county? Seems like the better option here. Not to mention the fact that the house and senate co-exist in a similar space, and can be utilized to prevent further shenanigans. If we only had the house, it would only take the house in order to push through bullshit legislation that nobody wants. They exist as two separate entities, operating in two independent manners. With a reasonable level of democratic influence over the two.
While technically not democratic, the US doesn’t advertise itself as democratic, merely a democratic republic.
The act of tipping itself is a cultural thing it needs to be addressed culturally. If you can’t tip someone for something, complications in the law arise that may disallow giving money to people in general. For example how do you distinguish between tipping a server for a meal and giving the server a dollar as a gift?
If you are a customer at a food or retail business and opt to give one worker there a cash gift while they are on the clock, how can that not be a tip? Current US laws like FLSA already have a very clear definition of tipped wages which would include anything matching that description.
Even if you want to allow that sort of cash “gift”, eliminating tips for credit card payments should be enough to shift the norms and expectations. Namely, prohibit payment terminals from prompting for a tip as part of the same credit card transaction and prohibit the tip lines on receipts. Majority of Americans don’t pay with cash. If a business says they accept credit card, customers clearly aren’t expected to give a decent tip and by extension the advertised meal prices and wage amounts should reflect what the customer is expected to pay and what the staff should expect to earn independent of customer whims.
I can see the argument for credit card tips not being necessary, especially given that it puts the onus on the restaurant to be honest and distribute that tip correctly instead of just pocketing it (thanks subway).
But if I choose to give a server a dollar, that should be my right as an individual. Micromanaging who I’m allowed to give cash to is a step in the wrong direction.
Tipping is really hard to rein in. Your suggestion of banning the “tipped wage” is good, but the regular minimum wage is so far below living wage already that paying people minimum wage still leaves them relying on tips.
As a Canadian I refuse to participate in the “tip for everything” grift that has sprung up recently. However when we’re down at the local bar and the service is great, the food is good, the waitress is friendly and cheerful, I want to leave a tip.
Also as a Canadian, the Canadian Senate is an irrelevant relic that doesn’t serve the same purpose as the US Senate, and should totally be abolished. But it’s a totally different situation.
How about age limits for government officials as well? Or at least the senate. The grandma at the tax form place in city hall is ok even if she a bit slow.
Can you please create a community for this? I’d love to be able to discuss each point separately, and suggest others.
Id also add the corporations cant own single family housing. Huge penalty for multiple houses.
Making election day a holiday probably won’t have the effect you’re hoping for.
Best case: Almost everybody goes to work as usual. A few of them get a pay differential for working the holiday.
Worst case: Holiday means holiday. We’ll give all bus drivers the day off to vote – and hope the bus riders live within walking distance of their polling location.
You could just vote on Sundays, it’s what we do in Austria.
I think in the US they all have to work on sundays too
Extremely best case: everyone votes by mail early so no one has to rush and struggle to vote on election day.
How do you ensure that the vote is secret if you vote by mail?
An online voting system would be great. Keep the in person, just allow online as well, election locations all the sudden are not busy at all and online is easy access.
Online votes would be insanely easy to adulterate. No computers should be involved. Paper ballots.
Paper ballots are insanely easy to adulterate. No paper ballots should be involved. Computer based ballots.
It’s already illegal to open other people’s mail. Intercepting mail in the US is a really quick way to get absolutely fucked by the law. There haven’t been any cases of people’s votes being recorded as far as I’ve searched. What more would you want?
Who counts the votes? That person knows.
Mail voting is great. I used it with no problems, even though I still had classes on election Tuesday.
In Australia we use local primary schools as voting places. I have always walked to vote.
Also lots of people do work on election day, we offer heaps of time to vote before the day if you can’t get off for an hour to vote.
it would be trivial to allow bus drivers and other essential workers to take half days in order to both vote and staff essential services.
and, as OP pointed out, vote by mail can also exist and be encouraged. it’s simply not as black and white as you are framing the situation.
Honestly at this point the only thing you are keeping is the English language.
eh… is there a reason why “abolish slavery” happens to NOT be on that list? i’ld put it right on top!
Not necessary, already solved with the 13th amendment. This is a list of solutions which have not yet been implemented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
which part of “except as a punishment” was actually unclear in those laws that currently still “protect” slavery since how many centuries now? did you already ask your gov how many are enslaved due to this slavery protection law today? do you know how many are today tortured because slaves still do not have any laws protecting them? tell me which laws you think would protect slaves today from torture? could they call a lawyer? by which law if they dont have rights? this “don’t have rights” was a huge part of slavery, right? so tell me, as this law clearly states the possibility of slaves, which laws would protect them? how could you tell if there are no other mentionings in any other law? i guess you just can’t, because this law protects slavery but no law protects the victims of it.
so if you did not ask your government yet about the total numbers (which could be 0 of course as you claim), on what “knowledge” are your believes based on then? pls let me know!
i remember news about children put into cages at the southern border, i remember that originally a five digit number of families was in the news, later on claims, that those kids were sexually abused instead of beeing taken care for, they tried to find them but only got a low 4 digit number of them back. what would you say happened to those at “unknown locations”? i do see a “possible” direct link to the slavery-protection by law you seem to believe would actually “prohibit” it.
Just having this exception in the laws degrades the credibility of the whole country. Why not get rid of this shit then?
And thus if you were right that slavery does not happen any more (wow cool, a real step towards civilisation) then it should also not be of any problem of any kind to remove that exception from the laws right today before sunset, right? who would even hesitate?? if there are none who currently “profit” from that law, or who are already planning to profit from it by creating false evidences of “crimes” sufficient to apply this laws to innocent ones in front of some of those “secret courts”, if none of such exists, why not just remove this exemption then and if only to really have more civilized law afterwards ???
IMHO “abolish slavery” needs to be on that list, so this list could have any meaning at all.
Slavery is still legal in prisons.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Oh fuck all that shit. I’ll add “ban private prisons and penal labor” to v4.
I like where you’re going here, and the only things I disagree with are the Senate merge and Electoral College as these still serve a purpose. The removal of the House cap will rebalance there, and if anything the Senate could be reverted from popular election back to being appointed by the State Legislatures so they rebalance back to being actual actors for the State as intended vs overpowered Representatives.
The Electoral College helps balance democracy being 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner, but maybe get some math experts to review the equation for apportionment and/or set all electors to be proportional to the vote percentages in every state.
i think your biggest problem is how you are getting any of this done with opposite financial incentives in the way without a literal revolution.
