On March 21, 2014, Thom Hartmann writes on his program’s blog:
Wall Street banksters raked in almost $27 billion dollars in bonuses last year, yet Congress can’t even get it together to raise the minimum wage. According to the New York State Comptroller’s office, the gamblers on Wall Street raked in $26.7 billion dollars in bonuses in 2013 – 15 percent more than they did the previous year. That’s enough money to double the paycheck of every single minimum wage worker in our country.
Our economic system is so completely broken that banksters got another pile of cash after wrecking our economy while millions of real working people put in long, hard hours for paychecks that leave them in poverty. And, this keeps happening even though it does not make a lick of economic sense. Every extra dollar paid to a low-wage worker generates about $1.20 for our economy. When that dollar goes to line the pockets of the super-rich instead, it adds less than 40 cents to our GDP. The banksters and the corporate elite can afford to stash their money away in foreign countries and high-return risky investments, while real working Americans have to spend every single dollar just to get by.
If that $26.7 billion in bonuses went to the working poor, instead of the gamblers on Wall Street, our economy would grow by more than $32 billion. That makes a whole lot more sense than gifting billions to the very people who crashed our economy. It’s time to fix this broken system, to stop rewarding the people who gamble with our economy, and time to put this money back into the hands of the real working people in America.
Yes, our economic system is broken and in need of serious reform.
The capitalism practiced today is what, for a long time, I have termed “Hoggism,” propelled by greed and the sheer love of power over others. “Hoggism” institutionalizes greed (creating concentrated capital ownership, monopolies, and special privileges). “Hoggism” is about the ability of greedy rich people to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital “worker” owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success––always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 percent ranks. Yet the 1 percent are not the people who do the overwhelming consuming. The result is the consumer populous is not able to get the money to buy the products and services produced as a result of substituting machines for people. And yet you can’t have mass production without mass human consumption. 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.
Binary economist Louis Kelso postulated: “When consumer earning power is systematically acquired in the course of the normal operations of the economy by people who need and want more consumer goods and services, the production of goods and services should rise to unprecedented levels; the quality and craftsmanship of goods and services, freed of the cornercutting imposed by the chronic shortage of consumer purchasing power, should return to their former high levels; competition should be brisk; and the purchasing power of money should remain stable year after year.”
Without this necessary balance hopeless poverty, social alienation, and economic breakdown will persist, even though the American economy is ripe with the physical, technical, managerial, and engineering prerequisites for improving the lives of the 99 percent majority. Why? Because there is a crippling organizational malfunction that prevents making full use of the technological prowess that we have developed. The system does not fully facilitate connecting the majority of citizens, who have unsatisfied needs and wants, to the productive capital assets enabling productive efficiency and economic growth.
Kelso said, “We are a nation of industrial sharecroppers who work for somebody else and have no other source of income. If a man owns something that will produce a second income, he’ll be a better customer for the things that American industry produces. But the problem is how to get the working man [and woman] that second income.”
The “how” is answered in the Agenda of The JUST Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/, http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jtw-graphicoverview-2013.pdf and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/; Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice; and the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-a-plan-for-getting-ownership-income-and-power-to-every-citizen/ and http://www.cesj.org/learn/capital-homesteading/capital-homestead-act-summary/.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/03/our-economic-system-broken
