What if Life were like Musical Chairs?

[Randers]

I had this idea recently (it's better if you don't think of all the reasons this could not work) - and if every 5 years or 10 years every family in a given county had to randomly trade houses/living spaces (and incomes/assets) with someone else - approximately the same age and family size. Like it would be chosen out of a hat - so it couldn't be that the fastest would win or whatever.

(You would also have to have some random way to choose out of a hat what county people would be in so all the rich didn't congregate in one place - or leave the country entirely - but this is a fantasy anyway - and I'm basing it on the idea of a county where you have people from every way of life - cities could use multi-county areas.)

It seems the result would be that everyone would be more interested in having all of the households be more equal. It would be in everyones best interest. It would be in everyones interest for all jobs to pay a more similar amount. Also - it seems like it would be a good idea to have a pool of money that whoever was having a difficult time - health problems or whatever - could access.

Then just think if this were worldwide. Income and resources would be shared if people had the slightest idea that people would have to trade places with someone else anywhere else. All the excess that is horded by people with way more than they need would be used to even the score. A lot more attention would have to be paid to who really needs what the most.

----

Recently I saw a show about East Germany/West Germany and to some extent that has happened - an evening out of resources. On the show there was someone who would have preferred that her West German town had been able to keep it's money for it's own projects and another person (in government) who was happier knowing that the people's living standards were more even.

[Randers]

1. Wouldn't it be great for Cheney to have to trade places

with one of the people from the Philippines that Halliburton has working in Iraq for $1.56/day?

As seen posted:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x161803

------

http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675

Blood, Sweat & Tears:
Asia’s Poor Build U.S. Bases in Iraq

by David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch
October 3rd, 2005


Jing Soliman left his family in the Philippines for what sounded like a sure thing--a job as a warehouse worker at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. His new employer, Prime Projects International (PPI) of Dubai, is a major, but low-profile, subcontractor to Halliburton's multi-billion-dollar deal with the Pentagon to provide support services to U.S. forces.

But Soliman wouldn’t be making anything near the salaries-- starting $80,000 a year and often topping $100,000-- that Halliburton's engineering and construction unit, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) pays to the truck drivers, construction workers, office workers, and other laborers it recruits from the United States. Instead, the 35-year-old father of two anticipated $615 a month – including overtime. For a 40-hour work week, that would be just over $3 an hour. But for the 12-hour day, seven-day week that Soliman says was standard for him and many contractor employees in Iraq, he actually earned $1.56 an hour.

Soliman planned to send most of his $7,380 annual pay home to his family in the Philippines, where the combined unemployment and underemployment rate tops 28 percent. The average annual income in Manila is $4,384, and the World Bank estimates that nearly half of the nation's 84 million people live on less than $2 a day.

“I am an ordinary man,” said Soliman during a recent telephone interview from his home in Quezon City near Manila. “It was good money.”

His ambitions, like many U.S. civilians working in Iraq, were modest: “I wanted to save up, buy a house and provide for my family,” he says.

That simple dream drives tens of thousands of low-wage workers like Soliman to travel to Iraq from more than three dozen countries. They are lured by jobs with companies working on projects led by Halliburton and other major U.S.-funded contractors hired to provide support services to the military and reconstruction efforts.

Called “third country nationals” (TCN) in contractor’s parlance, these laborers hail largely from impoverished Asian countries such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan, as well as from Turkey and countries in the Middle East. Once in Iraq, TCNs earn monthly salaries between $200 to $1,000 as truck drivers, construction workers, carpenters, warehousemen, laundry workers, cooks, accountants, beauticians, and similar blue-collar jobs....