Image: Justice & Inequality- Dick Overfield
On February 15, 2013, Joseph Kishore writes on OpEdNews.com:
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Obama began by declaring that economic recovery was well underway. “Together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis,” he said, “and can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is strong.”
The latest data on social inequality in the United States, released late last month, provide greater clarity as to what precisely this statement signifies. For Obama and the political establishment as a whole, the main indices of “crisis” are the stock markets, and with them the wealth of the corporate and financial elite.
According to data brought together by University of California’s Emmanuel Saez, between 2009 and 2011–the first two years of the “recovery”–average real income per family grew by 1.7 percent. However, Saez notes, “Top 1 percent incomes grew by 11.2 percent while bottom 99 percent incomes shrunk by 0.4 percent. Hence, the top 1 percent captured 121 percent of the income gains in the first two years of the recovery.”
That is to say, the top one percent actually swallowed all of the total income growth during these two years, plus an additional 20 percent. What these figures demonstrate is a massive transfer of wealth, an infusion of funds into the financial markets at the expense of the majority of the population, the working class.
The inequality figures say much about the character of American society–a society dominated by a tiny aristocracy. The program of the political establishment as a whole is above all dedicated to ensuring the wealth of this social layer. It is the conflict between this aristocracy and the working class that forms the fundamental social division, not the various forms of identity politics that have become integral components of state ideology.
To address income inequality our leaders and academia MUST address CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of dividend and capital gain productive capital asset growth––which, unfortunately no one is addressing! Yes, greed capitalism or what should rightfully be termed “Hoggism” is the culprit. Hoggism is propagated by a financial and credit system that does not enrich ordinary Americans––the 99 percent who are dependent on whatever job they can find and hold or on taxpayer supported government welfare, financed by tax extraction and national debt.
The problem is that our leaders and academia are focused on JOB CREATION rather than OWNERSHIP CREATION. Every policy that involves deficit and national debt financing is argued to create jobs. The missing conversation is that economic growth is created by connecting people to incomes generated by investment in the FUTURE productive capital assets of existing and future corporations, as long as EVERY American is empowered to acquire stock ownership and reap the full dividend income earnings produced by the new productive capacity so that they become “customers with money” and able to purchase the products and services the economy is capable of producing.
It is the exponential disassociation of production and consumption that is the problem in the United States economy, and the reason that ordinary citizens must gain access to productive capital ownership to improve their economic well-being.
The business corporation is an untapped, unimagined potential entity for solving the very economic problems that defective corporate strategy has created. Binary economic financing tools and economic proposals, and other practical ways designed to correct the imbalance between production and consumption at its source, are necessary to broaden ownership of productive capital in conformance with private property free market principles.
Unfortunately, pursuing economic democratic policies has been frustrated by the systemic concentration of economic power and exclusionary access to future capital credit to the advantage of the wealthiest Americans. The so-called 1 percent rulers of corporations have rigged the financial system to enable this already rich ownership class to systematically further enrich themselves as capital formation occurs and technological industrialization spreads throughout the world, leaving behind the 99 percent to depend on income redistribution through make work “full employment” policies, government boondoggles, excessive military build-up and dependence on arms production and sales, and social welfare programs due to the lack of an alternative to full employment and the growing economic helplessness and dependency. The unsatisfied needs and wants of society are not in that 1 percent or for that matter the 5 percent; those people are not the ones who are hurting.
Once the national economic policy bases policy decisions on two-factor binary economics, productive capital acquisition would take place through commercially insured capital credit, resulting in a quiet revolution in which economic plutocracy will transform to economic democracy.
The goal should be to teach working people, the 99 percent, to become productive capital owners, those who work through their privately owned capital, which is employed in production to supplement their being a labor worker. The goal into the future is for all Americans to be capital owners and not be labor workers dependent on labor earnings too much of their lives. We should all be productive and produce products and services in a way in which the current state of technology permits. Not only is your right to life denied if you don’t have effective access to the ownership of capital, your liberty is denied because without economic power your political power is useless. Thus, the national economic policy should be universal participation in the ownership of productive capital, alongside full employment of the labor workforce as a direct result.
If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, governments will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that products and services are actually produced.
What we really need is a national discussion on the topic of the importance of capital ownership and how we can expand the base of private capital ownership simultaneously with the creation of new capital formation, with the aim of building long-term financial security for all Americans through accumulating a viable capital estate.
We need a recognition in America that we should deliberately begin to broaden the capital ownership base in a way that is consistent with the laws of property and the Constitutional safeguards of the rights of men and women to own property and be productive.
What needs to be adjusted is the opportunity to produce, not the redistribution of income after it is produced.
The stark reality is that we are in a depression reflected in rising unemployment and underemployment and instability that we will never escape from until we change our economic policy.
This is all coming about because we have severely mismatched the power to produce with the possession of unsatisfied needs and wants. Those capital workers who have unsatisfied needs and wants have ready access through conventional finance to get as much or more capital as they want. Our tax laws are designed to further benefit the 1 percent by providing enormous write offs and credits to producers (corporations) who are owned by the few, who already produce more than they can consume. Those who have only their labor power and its precarious value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs and wants. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive capital.
But if we change direction and systematically build earning power into consumers, we have the opportunity to reverse the depression perpetrated by systematically limiting the 99 percent to labor wages alone and through technology eliminating their jobs. We need solutions to grow the economy in ways that create productive jobs and widespread equity sharing. We need to systematically make capital credit to purchase capital accessible to economically underpowered people (the 99 percenters) in which the income from the capital investment is isolated until it pays for itself, and then begins to produce a stream of dividend income to the new capitalists. This can only be accomplished by enabling every person to have access to capital ownership and purchase the capital, and pay for it out of what the capital produces. It’s time good and well-intentioned people woke up and adopted a just third way beyond the greed model of monopoly capitalism and the envy model of the traditional welfare state. This will promote peace, prosperity, and freedom through harmonious justice.
The systemic injustices of monopoly capitalism can only be addressed by comprehensive reforms to the tax, monetary and inheritance policies favoring the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to low-wage countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.
The unworkability of the traditional market economy is evidenced by the diverse and growing deficits––federal budget deficit, trade deficit, city, county and state budget deficits––which are making it increasingly impossible for governments at every level to function. The increasing deficit burden is the result of the growing numbers of people who cannot earn, from legitimate participation in production, enough income to support themselves and their families. Thus government is obliged to “redistribute” to starve off economic collapse. The key means of redistribution is taxation––taking from the legitimate producers and giving to the non- or under-producers––to make up the economy’s ever wider income and purchasing power shortfalls.
The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Those who control money control the laws that foster wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery. These laws can and should be changed by the 99 percent and those among the 1 percent who are committed to a just and economically classless market economy, true equality of opportunity, and a level playing field in the future for 100 percent of Americans. By adopting economic policies and programs that acknowledge every citizen’s right to become a capital owner as well as a labor worker, the result will be an end to perpetual labor servitude and the liberation of people from progressive increments of subsistence toil and compulsive poverty as the 99 percent benefits from the rewards of productive capital-sourced income.
A National Right To Capital Ownership Bill that restores the American dream should be advocated by the progressive movement, which 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
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Inequality-and-American-de-by-Joseph-Kishore-130215-528.html
