In the February 11, 2013 issue of The Nation, the editors publish a list of ways that Obama can act to achieve progressive goals in his second term.
This is an extensive article. The section Economy states:
Create a National Development Bank
The president often invokes the need to invest in “nation building at home.” As he told a crowd in Virginia on the campaign trail last summer: “Let’s rebuild our roads and our bridges…. Let’s build broadband lines and high-speed rail. Let’s expand our ports and improve our airports. That’s what’s going to keep us at the cutting edge of a twenty-first-century economy. And we’ve got tens of thousands of construction workers ready to be put back to work.” To this end, a National Development Bank could provide the funding for such ambitious projects—and serve as a source of funding for reconstruction projects following Sandy-scale natural disasters.
This section advocates a push for taxpayer supported government spending (sourced from tax extraction and debt) to fund infrastructure projects. The Nation‘s editors fail to propose a policy beyond that of creating JOBS for thousands of unemployed construction workers. They are boxed in with conventional JOB CREATION thinking and completely ignore addressing the issue of WHO OWNS THE COMPANIES awarded the government contracts, and furthermore how do we structure government contracts with existing and future companies that will do the construction work such that their construction worker employees are empowered as owners in those companies? The Nation‘s editors, as are the national media, ignorant about the OWNERSHIP CREATION and the necessity to create an OWNERSHIP CULTURE in an age where tectonic shifts in the technologies of production are exponentially destroying and devaluing jobs as the means of production tilts intensively to human-intelligent machines, superautomation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.
The section Labor states:
Implement ‘High Road’ Contracting
In fiscal year 2009, according to the GAO, the government awarded more than $6 billion in contracts to companies that had violated federal labor laws. Obama should instruct the Labor Department to implement a policy of rewarding and punishing potential contractors based on their labor, environmental and other records. In the absence of a congressional minimum-wage increase, Obama could mandate living-wage standards for federal contractors as well.
Pursuant to their one-factor labor ONLY thinking, The Nation‘s editors continue with proposals to mandate living-wage standards for federal contractors, without recommending the stipulation that the contracted companies demonstrate broadened private, individual ownership among their employee construction workers and other support employees.
These two proposed measures demonstrate the backward thinking of The Nation‘s editors who have been conditioned to think in narrow JOB CREATION terms. They as well as most people think that jobs are going to result in economic growth. That’s backwards. Economic growth based on investments that expand the productive capital means of producing the products and services needed and wanted by society results in jobs as well as better education, healthcare, etc., all the things that the Keynesians economist and policy makers assure us will bring prosperity, when they are the things that prosperity brings.
The Nation‘s editors and the progressive movement would well serve America by getting behind the idea of Capital Homesteading (http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm). They should support a National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream and addresses the reality of Americans facing job opportunity deterioration and devaluation due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production.
There is a solution, which will result in double-digit economic growth and simultaneously broaden private, individual ownership so that EVERY American’s income significantly grows, providing the means to support themselves and their families with an affluent lifestyle. The Just Third Way Master Plan for America’s future is published at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
The Nation should also help to gather signatures in support of the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687
http://www.thenation.com/article/172403/will-obama-constitutional-lawyer-please-stand
