Photo by Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa on Unsplash
Part VII of the “United States 2024 Election” Series
Blue-collar workers (BCWs) often work in non-office settings like construction sites, production lines, transportation, etc. They use principally their hands and physical abilities to perform their duties. Examples of blue-collar employees include construction workers, machine operators, millwrights, assemblers, and truck drivers. This columnist argues that farm employees (permanent and seasonal) and contract workers are included, too, in the BCW category. It will also be fit and proper to consider writers and journalists as BCWs, as their hands do the job of using pens or typing on keyboards.
A suggested better term for BCW is “Working-Class Voters” (WCV). Why? More often than not, BCWs are members of labor unions or workers’ associations. Hence, they vote (pun intended) in union elections, authorizing labor strikes, or approving new labor contracts. Then, many BCWs are registered voters in political contests and cast their ballots in primary and general elections.
The 2024 presidential, congressional, and state-local elections can, and should, be the perfect opportunity for WCVs (aka BCWs) to demand the implementation of “Cooperative (Co-op) Economics.” This means forcing even conglomerates, rural banks, dominant insurance or healthcare firms, film studios or foundations, etc., into cooperatives to go co-op. This means workers and consumers (read also as “patients”) will be offered opportunities to purchase voting shares of stocks in the co-ops. This will translate into membership fees of major retailers like Costco being converted into co-op shares of stocks (and not adding to their net profits).
This will result in minority co-op owners having a significant say in electing Board of Directors (BoD) members of a majority of Corporate America’s giant and even medium-to-small firms. Ergo, a BoD — often dominated by multi-millionaire corporate-elite members — can no longer approve multi-million pay increases for its executive officers and department heads. The filthy-rich co-op directors can only act with the approval of minority shareholders, no matter how significant their investments are in the co-op. Because all co-op members have a vote each, no matter how massive or small their holdings are. It also means that profit-sharing practices will result in higher dividends for co-op members.
President Biden is in a rare position to make his reelection bid the litmus test for BCWs (read, WCVs) to use the 2024 election as a defining moment in American history to transform “crony capitalism” into a “co-op economic system.” And begin the actual making of the American government and economy for the people, by the people, and of the people and their federations of community-based cooperatives.
“President Biden is in a rare position to make his reelection bid the litmus test for BCWs (read, WCVs) to use the 2024 election as a defining moment in American history to transform “crony capitalism” into a “co-op economic system.”
If readers have forgotten it in their high-school Science 101 subject, the litmus test is for acidity or alkalinity using litmus. But as a figure of speech, it means “a decisive and indicative test.” In primary elections, it can mean the nomination becomes a “litmus test” for political support of candidates in the general election.
This columnist will ask his publisher, Jobo Elizes, about the feasibility of submitting to Amazon Books for printing and selling at least four book manuscripts in the next three to four months of the New Year. The books are about harnessing the collective energies of WCVs (aka BCWs) in support of THE “decisive and indicative litmus test” of the POTUS being reelected in 2024 to push “Cooperative Economics.”
The four books will contain the column articles published in the Philippine Daily Mirror (PDM). The books will be tentatively entitled: 1.) Biden Back-to-Basics (B2B) Doctrine; 2.) Old Man River and TNsea Ideas for POTUS Biden; and 3.) An Affordable Back-to-Basics Artificial Intelligence (ABBAI) Proposal; and 4.) Helping Mexico Become an Economic Power, with this sub-title: Solving All Problems at Mexico’s Borders. Almost all of the book manuscripts have been or will be, published in due time in the PDM and on Facebook.
Hopefully, the efforts of this columnist — as assisted by some of his fellow Filipino and Filipino-American journalists and Facebook writer-friends — will go a long way in seeing a reelected President Biden make history of turning not only the NAFTA countries but also many allied nations as successful models of Cooperative Economics. “Knock on wood,” as the saying goes.
