1. Rebuilding Our Crumbling Infrastructure

We need a major investment to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges, water systems, waste water plants, airports, railroads and schools. It has been estimated that the cost of the Bush-Cheney Iraq War, a war we should never have waged, will total $3 trillion by the time the last veteran receives needed care. A $1 trillion investment in infrastructure could create 13 million decent paying jobs and make this country more efficient and productive. We need to invest in infrastructure, not more war.

 

2. Reversing Climate Change

The United States must lead the world in reversing climate change and make certain that this planet is habitable for our children and grandchildren. We must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energies. Millions of homes and buildings need to be weatherized, our transportation system needs to be energy efficient and we need to greatly accelerate the progress we are already seeing in wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and other forms of sustainable energy. Transforming our energy system will not only protect the environment, it will create good paying jobs.

3. Creating Worker Co-ops

We need to develop new economic models to increase job creation and productivity. Instead of giving huge tax breaks to corporations which ship our jobs to China and other low-wage countries, we need to provide assistance to workers who want to purchase their own businesses by establishing worker-owned cooperatives. Study after study shows that when workers have an ownership stake in the businesses they work for, productivity goes up, absenteeism goes down and employees are much more satisfied with their jobs.

4. Growing the Trade Union Movement

Union workers who are able to collectively bargain for higher wages and benefits earn substantially more than non-union workers. Today, corporate opposition to union organizing makes it extremely difficult for workers to join a union. We need legislation which makes it clear that when a majority of workers sign cards in support of a union, they can form a union.

5. Raising the Minimum Wage

The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage. We need to raise the minimum wage to a living wage. No one in this country who works 40 hours a week should live in poverty.

6. Pay Equity for Women Workers

Women workers today earn 78 percent of what their male counterparts make. We need pay equity in our country — equal pay for equal work.

7. Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers

Since 2001 we have lost more than 60,000 factories in this country, and more than 4.9 million decent-paying manufacturing jobs. We must end our disastrous trade policies (NAFTA, CAFTA, PNTR with China, etc.) which enable corporate America to shut down plants in this country and move to China and other low-wage countries. We need to end the race to the bottom and develop trade policies which demand that American corporations create jobs here, and not abroad.

8. Making College Affordable for All

In today’s highly competitive global economy, millions of Americans are unable to afford the higher education they need in order to get good-paying jobs. Further, with both parents now often at work, most working-class families can’t locate the high-quality and affordable child care they need for their kids. Quality education in America, from child care to higher education, must be affordable for all. Without a high-quality and affordable educational system, we will be unable to compete globally and our standard of living will continue to decline.

9. Taking on Wall Street

The function of banking is to facilitate the flow of capital into productive and job-creating activities. Financial institutions cannot be an island unto themselves, standing as huge profit centers outside of the real economy. Today, six huge Wall Street financial institutions have assets equivalent to 61 percent of our gross domestic product – over $9.8 trillion. These institutions underwrite more than half the mortgages in this country and more than two-thirds of the credit cards. The greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of major Wall Street firms plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. They are too powerful to be reformed. They must be broken up.

10. Health Care as a Right for All

The United States must join the rest of the industrialized world and recognize that health care is a right of all, and not a privilege. Despite the fact that more than 40 million Americans have no health insurance, we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation. We need to establish a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system.

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/

Fundamentally, Bernie Sanders effectively is saying that the system is broken, and is rigged to economically benefit the wealthy ownership class (although Sanders never refers to the word OWNERSHIP except in point 3 referring to workers owning as members of cooperatives the businesses they work at). Concentrated wealth-creating, income-producing capital ownership is at the heart of the problem of economic inequality.

While Sanders performs a great service by defining the extent of economic inequality, he does not offer the necessary solutions to the problem of economic inequality and therefore must be made aware and supportive of far, far better approaches and solutions. Nor has there really been any offered by those stuck in the one-factor world of thinking that the ONLY way to earn income is through a JOB. This is why with every proposal, whether by Republican or Democrat or other political party policies makers, the component that justifies the economic policy is JOB CREATION. Yet there is NEVER a discussion which addresses who will benefit from the ownership of the economic scheme. What we need are policies and rules that will unite America, reform the system, and empower EVERY citizen to benefit economically from owning expanding shares in the corporations that are growing the economy.

Sanders points underscore just how inadequate our corporate and tax policies are, and how our priorities are wrong. The rich are getting richer through constant capital ownership accumulation aided by government policies and rules that extend huge tax breaks for corporations with no stipulation for broadening ownership of America’s corporations. Driven by the Republican Party, whose mantra is to protect corporate ownership concentration and profitability of those who presently OWN America––the wealthly capital ownership class––further reducing the corporate tax rate WITHOUT eliminating all tax loopholes and subsidies and the stipulation that all corporate profits by fully paid out as dividend earnings to the owners of the corporations will result in more unjust corporate ownership concentration and enrichment of the wealthy ownership class at the expense of the vast majority of working Americans stuck in the rut of wage slavery.

Of course, the call for lowing corporate tax rates is ALL in the name of JOB CREATION, and Republicans blame outsourcing and the loss of jobs on what they believe is a high nominal tax rate that American corporations pay. But if the Republicans and the Democrats and other political party policy makers really want to end investment abroad and job outsourcing, then why not completely eliminate the corporate income tax in exchange for paying out fully the dividend earnings to the owners of the corporation and replacing retained earnings and corporate debt financing of economic growth (neither of which creates new capital owners) with the issuance and sale of new full-voting, full-earnings payout corporate stock that represents the to-be-formed physical capital assets that would grow the economy? This would refocus investment in American corporations who want to grow the economy in our homeland, result in the creation of new capital owners who would make up a broad corporate ownership base, effectively empower the new owners to own the “machines” that are destroying jobs and devaluing the worth of labor, and effectively stimulate REAL (not make-work) employment opportunities as we build a FUTURE economy that can support general affluence for EVERY child, woman, and man.

How can we simultaneously grow the economy and create new capital owners?

We will need to reform our broken system in which economic growth is hindered by the slavery of “past” savings. The denial of consumption or “past” savings has been the primary means necessary to financing economic growth. We need to adopt new policies to provide the necessary system reforms to abate the further concentration of wealth-creating, income-producing capital ownership and ensure that continual broadened capital ownership and corresponding wealth building occurs and benefits EVERY citizen as the economy expands.

The most significant system reform needed is to equally empower EVERY citizen, without the requirement of “past” savings or capital asset equities, to acquire personal ownership shares in FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing capital asset growth. This can be accomplished using insured (facilitated with private capital credit insurance or a government reinsurance agency––ala the Federal Housing Administration concept), interest-free capital credit loans issued by local banks repayable out of the FUTURE fully paid out dividend earnings generated by profitable investments in the corporations growing the economy. This objective can be achieved with the passage of the proposed Capital Homestead Act.

This is what I recommend Senator Bernie Sanders incorporate into his 12-point economic plan:

A more comprehensive set of solutions can be found in the platform of the Unite America Party, a platform that is offered for adoption, by any political party or candidate.

Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/…/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for…/ and http://www.cesj.org/…/capital-homestead-act-summary/.

Support the Unite America Party Platform, published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/platform-of-the-unite-ame_b_5474077.html as well as Nation Of Change at http://www.nationofchange.org/platform-unite-america-party-1402409962 and OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/Platform-of-the-Unite-Amer-by-Gary-Reber-Party-Leadership_Party-Platforms-DNC_Party-Platforms-GOP-RNC_Party-Politics-Democratic-140630-60.html.