Upcoming topics for general meetings:

• June 16: Tom / The Constitution belongs in a museum, not in government
• June 30: Ian / Supreme Court
• Taylor–public option for funeral/burial services, 7/14
• Chris–lobster fishing, 7/28
• Chris–poverty is about not working, 8/11 (tentative)
• Chris–capital flight, animal rights (tentative)

 

These topics finalized:

• Constitution / Tom
• Poverty is about not working / Chris
• Lobster fishing / Chris

 

We workshopped these topics:

• Taylor/public option for burial/funeral services
  • Need: SCI owns 10% of funeral homes, but keeps it secret. SCI homes 40% more expensive
  • Everything is too expensive–people are very vulnerable, sad, easy to take advantage of
  • Capitalism takes advantage of people even in death
    • Embalming and caskets are actually not legally necessary, but people told they are.
    • Embalming: People really want to embalm to have open casket, is this the most respectful way and it seeps into ground, toxifying water.
  • Sweden–public funeral services, very common
  • People have no idea what loved ones’ wishes in death are. Agonizing to try to figure out.
  • What does grieving/death look like in socialism? What respect do we owe the dead? Organ donation. Donate body to science.
  • Why are rich afforded a better funeral than everyone else? Aren’t we all equal in death?
  • Taylor will research Swedish funeral services, look for readings.
• Tom/public control over finance
  • Obstacle: need an approachable reading on how to make finance under public control
    • Possible way to split up topic into manageable sections
      • how federal reserve is governed
      • Fed lends money to banks at lower rates than those banks lend to ordinary people. So banks literally cannot lose
      • macroeconomic policy
• New idea: capital strike / factory farming
  • Factory farms pay and treat their workers poorly, create lots of pollution, and otherwise take advantage of rural areas. Any attempt at reform is met with resistance from rural areas because factory farms are major employer and thus have grossly disproportionate power. They can pick up and leave, leaving area without employment and decimated. (capital strike)
  • freedom of speech issues
  • How did the ag system get so horrible? Capitalism. Only incentive is to create as much meat as possible, no matter the costs that society would not otherwise accept.
• New idea: poverty and the prisoner’s dillema
  • No puppet master. So why does capitalism always have such high poverty? Employers always looking for cutting costs, and race to the bottom is always the end result.
  • Capitalist sets up class prisoners’ dilemma for all applicants: you have to offer lower wage to get hired, nobody knows what everyone else is offering.