This was aired on March 23, 2013.
Richard Wolff’s smart, blunt talk about the crisis of capitalism on his first Moyers & Company appearance was so compelling and provocative, we asked him to return. This time, the economics expert answers questions sent in by our viewers, diving further into economic inequality, the limitations of industry regulation, and the widening gap between a booming stock market and a population that increasingly lives in poverty.
“We ought to have much more democratic enterprise,” Wolff tells Bill, in response to a question from a viewer in Oklahoma. “We ought to have stores, factories and offices in which all the people who have to live with the results of what happens to that enterprise participate in deciding how it works.”
Addressing a question about capitalism and climate change, Wolff says, “Capitalism is a system geared up to doing three things on the part of business: get more profits, grow your company and get a larger market share… If along the way they have to sacrifice either the well-being of their workers or the well-being of the planet or the environmental conditions, they may feel very bad about it — and I know plenty who do — but they have no choice.”
Wolff taught economics for 35 years at the University of Massachusetts and is now visiting professor at The New School University in New York City. His books include Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism and Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It.
http://www.democracyatwork.info/articles/2013/03/full-segment-democracy-at-work-on-moyers/
Wolff tells Bill, “We ought to have stores, factories and offices in which all the people who have to live with the results of what happens to that enterprise participate in deciding how it works.”
This is what OWNERSHIP provides. But essential to broadening OWNERSHIP of corporations and companies, and thus the capital assets they manage and control, is that all the people participate as individuals and not as some sort of “cooperative” organization, which also limits OWNERSHIP to the workers of a particular enterprise.
We need to begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every child, woman and man to establish a Capital Homestead Account or “CHA” (a super-IRA or asset tax-shelter for citizens) at their local bank to acquire a growing dividend-bearing diversified stock portfolio of multiple corporations to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income.
The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets,
The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy.
Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.
The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate social monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.
Richard Wolf and Bill Moyers, who has previously interviewed the father of binary economics and the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), should credit Kelso for Wolf’s ideas on worker ownership, The aim should be transformed via growth of major corporations the ownership of these corporations by employees and other citizens and prevent, through tax policy, further ownership concentration. This would also mean that the control be vested with ALL the owners through full-voting stock, so that the enterprise operates truly democratically, and not controlled by the few who conventionally would own the bulk of the stock.
