On February 5, 2013, Don Hazen writes on AlterNet.org:
There are more than one million homeless people in America and 138 million people who live paycheck to paycheck. Many more are struggling, wondering how they’ll make rent or get enough food. Those numbers are astounding. This is America. Many proudly think our society is fair, but the evidence overwhelmingly shows that fairness in America is a myth. In the weeks and months ahead, AlterNet will shine more light on America’s economic injustice in an ongoing series, Hard Times USA. Since many have chosen to look aside, or think the traditional ways of doing politics will fix things, there is still much to learn about how this problem will be solved, or not solved.
We are launching our ongoing series with two articles today: Part 1, below, looks at how America punishes poor people living on the street, part of a larger pattern of dealing with poverty through criminalization rather than social and policy fixes that have been shown to work better. Part 2 addresses the growing apathy toward the plight of the poor, after decades of conservative demonization. As the gap between the wealthy and the poor keeps growing, there is a sense that more and more people don’t want to deal with the poor. Is that how you want our society to be? What’s your role? It’s time to rethink poverty. Part 3 in our series, running on Wednesday, looks at copper theft as a means of survival in California’s poorest city. Part 4 will look into the psychology of how people react when they encounter street homeless.
To address economic injustice what is needed is a balanced Just Third Way approach to building a FUTURE economy that supports affluence for EVERY American. This requires investment in FUTURE income-producing productive capital assets while simultaneously broadening private, individual ownership of the resulting expansion of existing corporations and future corporations. Not only is employee ownership the norm to be sought wherever there are workers but beyond employee ownership the norm should be to create an OWNERSHIP CULTURE whereby EVERY American can benefit financially by owning a SUPER IRA-TYPE Capital Homestead Account portfolio of income-producing, full-voting, full-dividend payout securities in America’s expanding corporations and those newly created to produce the future products and services needed and wanted by society.
Political and private sector leadership is required to transform the American economic system, especially our terribly flawed money and credit systems, to enable every citizen to become an empowered citizen-owner as a fundamental human right. The social technologies for turning formerly propertyless citizens into participatory and empowered capital owners on pure capital credit repayable with future savings have been successfully proven.
Policies are needed to ensure that where taxpayer monies (whether obtained from tax extraction or debt, as in national debt and deficits) are expended to “stimulate” the private sector (through government subsidies, loan guarantees, grants, and contracts with corporations building infrastructure and economic development, including the military-industrial complex), that stipulations are attached that the financial benefit results in broadened private, individual ownership of the particular companies and that the full earnings of the investments are paid out to their owners.
In order to ensure that the economy operates most efficiently, productive capital must be broadly owned. This is because as technology advances, people cannot produce enough by labor alone to permit them to purchase everything that others produce with their productive capital assets. Logically, if productive capital is doing most of the work of production (the physical aspect of producing products and services), and private property includes the right to receive the income generated by what is owned, as labor becomes less productive (essentially less necessary when replaced or devalued by human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, biobotics, digital computerized operations, etc.) relative to productive capital, people who formerly relied on labor must shift to owning productive capital to carry out the work of production.
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
Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687
We need to reform the Federal Reserve Bank to create new owners of future productive capital investment in businesses simultaneously with the growth of the economy.
The solution to broadening private, individual ownership of America’s future capital wealth requires that the Federal Reserve stop monetizing unproductive debt, including bailouts of banks “too big to fail” and Wall Street derivatives speculators, and begin creating an asset-backed currency that could enable every man, woman and child 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 stock portfolio to supplement their incomes from work and all other sources of income. Policies need to insert American citizens into the low or no-interest investment money loop to enable non- and undercapitalized Americans, including the working class and poor, to build wealth and become “customers with money.” The proposed Capital Homestead Act would produce this result.
