The War of the Hierarchies: Maslow vs Central Inc.
Has the hierarchy that evolves from personal safety and security to personal fulfillment and actualization become incompatible with the hierarchical corporate order?
I came across Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in a story by Scott C Dunn, A basic guaranteed income in the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
The bottom two tiers used to be recognized by the controlling elite as necessary in maintaining civil contentment, while the top two tiers were oppressed in the masses by the policies designed by the top, particularly in centrally managed states, premised on societal hierarchical order.
Today the bottom two tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of (individual) needs are under threat bringing the entire social hierarchical system to a tipping point.
Jan D Weir unravels the merging of financial markets and single-family homes in informed detail in his series on the housing crisis. (recommended reading) and Francesca Mari tells of a renters landlord nightmare in A $60 Billion Housing Grab by Wall Street in the New York Times. Alana Semuels writing for Atlantic tells a similar story in When Wall Street is Your Landlord. It couldn’t be worse if Charles Dickens were writing it.
Worry at the top inspires a call by the elite to tax themselves
On January 17, 2022, a group of elites calling themselves the Patriotic Millionaires were alarmed by writing on the walls of history and signed a letter to world leaders meeting at the virtual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, calling for world leaders to tax the rich.
This injustice baked into the foundation of the international tax system has created a colossal lack of trust between the people of the world and the elites who are the architects of this system. Bridging that divide is going to take more than billionaire vanity projects or piecemeal philanthropic gestures - it’s going to take a complete overhaul of a system that up until now has been deliberately designed to make the rich richer.
To put it simply, restoring trust requires taxing the rich. The world - every country in it - must demand the rich pay their fair share. Tax us, the rich, and tax us now. - Letter signed by millionaires and billionaires on In Tax We Trust and aimed at the virtual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Taxing the rich is a partial solution, not a comprehensive plan!
The solution: ABSOLUTELY AND COMPLETELY PROHIBIT FUTURE CORPORATE OR GROUP OWNERSHIP in any form: REIT, equity, hedge fund or whatever, from buying single-family homes. Jan D Weir
The above is not the solution to everything but it is a fundamental structural reordering needed to reverse the wealth divide running amuck and threatening the foundations of democracy.
Monetary values and financial considerations are part of an interacting context. Money is a means to an end but in contemporary times it often feels that financial goals have become the end itself in a game when the goal post is forever moving and enough is never attainable, even for those who have more than most can fancy. It’s not enough to have too much, or even to have the most because someone else is always not far behind vying for the title.
At the base level monetary goals are about subsistence and survival. Understandably, people feel under pressure to make enough to provide for their basic needs but contemporary societal forces encourage individuals to believe they need forevermore, to be the largest, the richest, the top of the totem pole. This is the transcendent psychology when the economy is an ever-expanding wealth divide. There is no middle ground, just top, and bottom until the golden egg bursts as the social reasoning that kept it altogether tumbles into a scary, exciting, transformative time.
The middle tier is missing! The middle tier is missing!
Taxing the rich is a partial solution arriving too late. The Patriotic Millionaires could have acted before the rift became too deep, now it seems like an attempt by the wealthy to save themselves from the rising tide of public discontent. Inequities run deep in veins penetrating to the most basic level of security and investment power of commoners, shattering the dream of individual homeownership as it is replaced by the merging of financial conglomerates and real estate single-family home markets.
As the resignation from the corporate order continues, the mainstream media explains it away as a retiring older generation while social media reflects growing disbelief among all age groups in the current corporate social structure. It is long overdue for the centrally managed hegemony to fracture and disperse into smaller interacting formations.
Trust - in politics, in society, in one another - is not built in tiny side rooms only accessible by the very richest and most powerful. It’s not built by billionaire space travelers who make a fortune out of a pandemic but pay almost nothing in taxes and provide poor wages for their workers. Trust is built through accountability, through well-oiled, fair, and open democracies that provide good services and support all their citizens. Patriotic Millionaires
As discussed in my last post, A UBI is a viable restructuring tool when the wealth divide has stretched so thin that there is nowhere else to go. Support systems are needed during reconstruction.
Criticism of the UBI usually leads by calling it “free money” and declaring that people won’t bother to work if they have a basic income to cover physiological and safety needs.
The first argument discounts the cost paid by the general public to finance corporate welfare and the fact that fiat currency (free money) has been distributed into the top of the economy since the seventies, arguably explaining the rapid growth of the wealth divide.
The second argument discounts the top tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, the same top tiers that a centralized economic system systematically oppresses in the people. The second argument assumes that those on the bottom have no need for a sense of accomplishment, self-esteem, self-actualization or to make a better world. Those traits are considered exclusive to the corporate hierarchy, be it public or private, for-profit or non-profit, the powerful institutions are the exclusive purveyors of a better world, as seen in the results.
Scott C Dunn’s article A basic guaranteed income in the context of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs references a study published in 2013 based in Uganda
The group that received the grant worked on average an extra 17 hours in comparison to the control group. And they showed a 41% increase in earnings four years after receiving the grant. They invested in skills and businesses. Individuals were 65% more likely to practice a skilled trade two years after receiving the grants.
There are many studies available. Most show that people invest in a better life whether it be an income-producing activity or a non-income producing activity like caretaking. Maslow’s hierarchy holds up well. People want to self-actualize and to contribute to their world.
There is also the consideration that humanity is moving from the Industrial Revolution to the Automated Revolution leading to reconsideration about who owns and controls the means of production and distribution of resources. Everything is changing so rapidly that in many instances the old paradigms no longer work. New paths need to be carved out from the conflation, chaos, and confusion of rapidly changing times.
Slow Down, Calm Down and Listen Within.
Who takes the ball and runs with it? Can we have a viable small business economy or will the entire world become a hierarchial corporate world order, controlled by the few?
More UBI Research:
And researchers have seen similar results from other experiments with unconditional income. In Kenya incomes increased by 33% and assets increased by 58% just one year after people received an unconditional $513 grant. What’s Good About Guaranteed Basic Income Jul. 6, 2015 11:19 am By SueN
Dissolving into Diversity Can Become a Refreshing Reformation
It’s been decades since I lived in New York City but NYC remains a vivid example of a diversified culture only possible in decentralized organic social organization. The attraction to outsiders, as I was, was that everybody could belong in New York in a positively dynamic way. NYC is home to many exclusionary cultures but at the same time, as a people-watching town of idle intensity, the culture intermingled from all directions. Aristocrats hung out in pool bars. Street artists became artworld celebrities. It was the genuine American melting pot that happens at the opposite extreme of the hierarchically ordered society, and in being so culturally fluid, it attracts the young.
I favored downtown where the art world roamed. Andy Warhol had done a very interesting thing in the sixties when he created “the factory”. He gave the workers exotic names and made them into stars, while he made silkscreen portraits of celebrities and turned them into commodities. An Andy Warhol print was the brand and the celebrities were the flavors, sometimes printed in a repetitive grid, like soup cans stacked on grocery store shelves.
I do not speak from first-hand experience. The closest I ever was to Warhol was in a crowded room where he stood out like a dark empty void, motionless and empty. Beyond the hip pop-art surface of his art, was class rage. I became most aware of it when I came across something Warhol had written about poor little rich girl, Edie Sedgewick after her death describing her life and personal habits in a most depressing way and never a good word to say. It was cruel as if Warhol had never felt anything but disdain for Sedgewick, even as he made Sedgewick into his star and social prop and so I wondered if she was targeted because she came from a rich family where she was raised in a very isolated environment.
I have never read a review of Warhol’s work that made much about the branding of his art studio as “the factory” or the meaning of the factory to the Industrial Revolution, but Warhol was raised in the factory town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and his father was a coal miner. Wikipedia glibly describes the Factory as “His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. He promoted a collection of personalities known as Warhol superstars, and is credited with inspiring the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame", a description that reflects the shiny surface, as Wikipedia is about “the facts” and so it is not the role of Wikipedia to ponder on why Andy Warhol called his studio “the factory” or even to make much about Warhols early years when he was raised in a factory town. Like my Dad, Warhol’s response to the factories of the Industrial Revolution was to reinvent the factory as an art form, but beyond that, there was a world of difference between Dad and Andy, starting with their early backgrounds, my Dad being raised on a farm in Primghar Iowa, owned by his Dad and came of age at a time when corporate farming was taking over.
How the Centrally Managed Order is Implemented Locally
In the present times, I live in the centrally managed state of Maine, on the Boothbay Peninsula.
The local media is serving up a steady stream of articles of seemingly predetermined plans for a new high school although there has been no public vote to proceed and no discussion of how it will be financed as if the town has been bought by a developer and his small circle of friends who financed a fundraiser to pay architects two and a half million to design the fifty to sixty million dollar school.
A school sounds like an easy sale to the public if not for the price tag which has not been part of the discussion, inviting speculation that it will be funded using federal, state, county, and industry grants, which is not without significance. The Industrial Partnerships Act of 2013 combines industry, education, and financing into one package. To bring up one aspect- such as financing- is to bring up the other parts of the package, coordinated by “the collaborative”, which is state-controlled, not locally controlled as much as the articles in the newspaper are written as if the local community is involved in the decision-making process (thirty people composed of educators and parents)
One might ask if the local community is in control, why is the local community not discussing the financing of a fifty to sixty million dollar project?
Likewise, there is never a mention in the local media that secondary education has been repurposed and included in the State’s “industrial clustering”. Perhaps those pushing the training center on the Peninsula are waiting until they get their foot in the door before mentioning the involvement of “the collaborative”.
2. Responsibilities of the collaborative. The collaborative shall:
A. Provide support and staffing assistance to the industry partnerships established under this chapter; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]
B. Create an industry partnership to advise the collaborative, the State Workforce Board established in section 2006 and the boards of the local workforce investment areas designated pursuant to the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Public Law 113-128 on aligning state policies and leveraging resources across systems, including workforce development, education and economic development; [PL 2017, c. 110, §32 (AMD).]
C. Include requirements that support industry partnerships in all relevant programs, grants and new initiatives; and [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]
D. Use industry partnerships as a connective framework across systems and programs when applying for federal and private funds. [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).] (emphasis by author)
No one seems to think financing is a discussion that needs to be had at this time and so the articles keep on coming about planning a dream school, as if it were just the conventional high school of the past and not the industrial training center that is written into state law as an economic development agenda controlled by the State, in turn, controlled by the federal gov since it was instituted in the 1970s, controlling through wealth redistribution networks that are continually merging with each other, in a similar manner that the financial markets have merged with single-home real estate, making the wealth concentration industry so top-heavy that it threatens to sink its own ship.
State central management has been partnering with large corporations for forty years or more. Now a significant segment of the workforce is resigning from corporate employment because the dream they have been sold is no longer believed. Remote working is changing the terms of agreement for individual workers who are traded in public-private deals as X number of jobs at higher than average wages for the area in exchange for taxpayer subsidization of corporate capitalization costs, “that which up until now has been deliberately designed to make the rich richer”, and that is just historical record of fact since the wealth divide in Maine and across the country has been expanding ever since the 1970s when central management of the economy by public-private relationships, was instituted
Then there is the issue of environmental sustainability:
Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake currently meet state water quality standards, but both are listed on Chapter 502 of the Maine Stormwater Law as “Most at Risk from New Development” and on Maine’s NPS Priority Watersheds List. Adams Pond and Knickerbocker Lake Water Shed Protection Plan published 2015
The State issued warnings about Knickerbocker Lake and Adams Pond. From the State’s point of view locating an industrial training center on a peninsula with a challenged water supply does not offer room for the growth of “industrial clusters”, which is clearly written into the plan. There is reason to question whether it is environmentally sustainable to build the industrial training center, let alone clusters of industries around it, which would transform the culture on the peninsula, absolutely.
Join the Upcoming Boothbay Green Party Caucus!
Tentatively scheduled for 4 PM on Wednesday, Feb 23 at the Town Hall. Desiree Scorcia, our Town Selectperson will be the Convener. Meet Green Party National Congressional Candidate hopeful, Alan McDonald who is gathering signatures to be on the ballot! Must be registered Green Party or unenrolled to sign!
On the other hand, the Peninsula could preserve and take advantage of our unique geography and natural surroundings to appeal to the alternate culture that is leaving the corporate grid. A grassroots free enterprise sector of smaller-sized businesses is less likely to pose a threat to our water supply than a fifty-sixty million dollar industrial training cluster. Think different. Be unique. Create original alternatives!
There should be equal time given to other ideas about education but the coverage for the fifty million dollar school moves ahead like a steam roller, written about as if it were already decided upon, but that is not the case. It is just the lighting. By the time the people finally get to vote on it, sometime in 2023, financing has to be discussed, as well as the water supply, which needs sustainability established with certainty before building large development projects. You don’t decide what to do about water sustainability after building a massive and expensive development that threatens the entire system.
There is a long history in Maine of politicians convincing the people to change their cultural ways using promises never intended to be kept. As a means of overcoming public resistance to publicly funded higher education, those advocating for the establishment of the University of Maine, a federal land grant college, promised to train farmers’ son’s in scientific methods. Back in the day, that never happened. See more in How The Morrill Act Gave Birth to Public Ownership of Private Intellectual Property in the USA.
Likewise, Paul Coulombe, the leader of the pack that funded the architects to design the school, has a history of using underhanded means to get his way, as this incident at Oliver’s Restaurant on Southport Island, is but one example.
Meanwhile, The Museum project still needs a leadership board. It could be an asset for financing an alternative, grassroots, creative, free enterprise economy.
This Story is also published on Medium’s Age of Awareness