Changing "Default values" can change politics

[Armstead]

So many things hve been thrown into the mixmaster lately that it seems that there is an opportunity -- and necessity -- to deal with what could be called "default values."

By default values, I mean the values and positions that the average person instinctively accepts. It could also be called the "path of least resistance" because it is a value that is supported as mainsteram conventional wisdom. It transcends ideology, at least among those who are intellectually honest and have a core of decency.

Over the last 30 years, the GOP/Right Wing/Corporatist Cabal has successfully perverted those default values. But now that the self-destrutive nature of those changes are becoming more evident to more people everyday, we have the opportunity to chnge them for the better.

Here's one example. "Everyone deserves the right to earn a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." That was a default value that was much more strongly ingrained in the zeitgeist until the mid-1970's.

There was a gteneral assumption that everyone who worked a job full time deserved to make at lest enough to cover their basic living expenses.

Of course, it didn't always work that way, and there were people who fell through the cracks. But in a broad sense, the vast majority of the population took that assumption for granted and expected that as part of the basic contract between workers and employers. Most employers also recognized that as an expectation they had to fullfill, for a combination of moral, legal, economic and public-relations purposes.

However, in the 70's and 80's that basic assumption was undermined by the contrary notion that employees were expendable, and that employers should be able to pay as little as they could get away with. They used the CON job of "global competativeness" and other crapola to barrage the population with that message.

As a result, the idea of a "fair days wage for a days work" was replaced by a new value of "People only deserve the least that their employer is willing to pay, and not a penny more."

That led the relentless trashing of workers rights and the very basis of our economy.

Now that the chickens have come home to roost from a generation of deliberate worker abuse, it's time to restore the "fair days wage" as a default value.

IMO, most people are ready for that change, regardless of how they label themselves ideologically. That can open the door to both reforms and a restoration of basic liberalism as a dominant political force.

That's one example. If we tackle the challenge of restoring deent default values, the political process will have to follow.