On April 4, 2012, Nick Keppler writes on CT.com:
“For the cover of its November 24, 2008, issue, Time photoshopped the famed summer hat, oval-shaped eyeglasses and upwardly pivoted cigarette holder that defined the mug of President Franklin D. Roosevelt onto the face of then-President-elect Barack Obama. “The New New Deal,” the headline read.
“Back then, the parallels between Obama and Roosevelt were obvious. Obama was also a reform-touting Democrat who was elected after a Republican-led era in which deregulation and wild speculation resulted in a historic wealth gap and then an economic collapse, and like Roosevelt, he sold himself on optimism in an age of misery. “If [Obama] can do what FDR did — make American capitalism stabler and less savage — he will establish a Democratic majority that dominates U.S. politics for a generation,” wrote Peter Beinart in that issue of Time.
“Three and a half years later, Obama’s success, as it can be felt by most Americans, is falling far short of Roosevelt’s. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty recently gathered IRS data from the two eras. From 1933 to 1934, the average income of a citizen in the lower 90 percent of earners jumped by 8.8 percent while those in the top 10 saw a 3.4-percent reduction in their earnings. But from 2009 to 2010, incomes for 90-percenters barely changed while the highest-earning tenth saw an astonishing 21.5 percent spike. To put it succinctly, all the gains for the Obama recovery are going to the rich.”
The system is dysfunctional and requires reform to end the endless concentration of wealth defined as the productive capital assets of our “business corporations.” Until we acknowledge and address the impact on our society of the tectonic shifts in the technologies of production created by technological innovation and invention, the concentration of ownership of the non-human means of production––productive capital––will continue to deprive ordinary Americans of an economic secure and prosperous future.
President Obama and other leadres need to acknowledge technology’s impact and embrace it, but with the clear vision and goal of broadening its future ownership so that ALL Americans own productive capital assets that will produce a second income. Doing so will make Americans better customers for the things that American industry produces. But the problem is how to get the working man [and woman] that second income.
In such a society, productive capital income would be distributed more broadly and the demand for products and services would be distributed more broadly from the earnings of capital and result in the sustentation of consumer demand, which will promote economic growth.
If we do not succeed with the necessary financial structural reforms to bring this change about we will be left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another, and become further dependent on government employment and government subsidization of private employment solely to increase consumer income, while at the same time a tiny minority further concentrates future productive capital ownership. This is unjust and dysfunctional and does not reinforce and strengthen our value systems of social order, strong families, and personal responsibility.
http://www.ct.com/news/advocates/commentary/nm-ht15commentkeppler-20120405,0,707278.story
