On May 17, 2013, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labour in the Clinton administration, announced that he will be speaking at the TUC, and holding an interview with Channel 4’s Economics Editor, Faisal Islam on May 21. In advance of his appearance Professor Reich has recorded a short video clip setting out his views on the state of the UK economy.
The parallels between what’s happened in the US and the UK are significant, although austerity economics hasn’t gone nearly as far in the US or done as much damage. But it has claimed jobs, wages, and growth in both the US and the UK — and hurt the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, over the last three decades, the share of the total economy going to wages has continued to drop in both nations while the share going the profits has risen. The top 1 percent are riding high while everyone else has seen their real incomes decline. The answer in the UK — as well as in the US — is to reorganize the economy for everyone, rather than for a few at the top. I’ll be speaking to the Trade Union Congress tomorrow to offer a plan for doing just this. Here’s a short preview.
Professor Reich continues to veil the REAL problem of CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of wealth-creating productive capital assets held by the wealthiest owners of major corporations. He also fails to acknowledge that income inequality the decline of job opportunities that pay well is due to tectonic shifts in the technologies of production whereby our produces and services are produced increasingly by human-intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerization, etc, with less and less need for human labor. Thus, job opportunities are disappearing and labor value is deteriorating.
Reich fails to advocate broadened private, individual ownership of FUTURE wealth-creating productive capital economic growth, and instead calls for for taxpayer-supported “investment” in JOBS CREATION, funded by tax extraction and national debt. He fails to argue for financing FUTURE wealth-creating productive capital economic growth using insured capital credit loans to be made available to ordinary Americans, without savings or non-capitalized or under-capitalized, and paid for out of FUTURE earnings generated by the investments in the FUTURE growth of the economy.
Reich dances around the issues without a serious presentation of the solutions with respect to providing equal opportunity access to pure capital credit in order to finance FUTURE economic growth so that we simultaneously create new capitalist owners, who over time can become stronger individuals who are financially secure and not dependent on taxpayer-supported government welfare programs, open and disguised. He continues to promote more government spending, financed with tax extraction (taking from those who produce) and national debt (strapping future generations with debt), to promote “full employment” without stipulations that the private companies benefiting from the contracts demonstrate, as a condition of receiving the taxpayer monies, broaden ownership of their companies by their individual employees and other Americans, who through further capital credit loans provide the trough from which to finance growth.
Reich needs to stop preaching schemes to create “full employment,” the antithesis of the objective of businesses which always seek to lower costs of production, and advocate for OWNERSHIP CREATION whereby over time EVERY American can acquire and build a viable, income-producing productive capital estate and benefit from a new source of dividend income based on ownership of the non-human means of production.
See my article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html
Also see “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html, and the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.nationofchange.org/solution-america-s-economic-decline-1367588690
http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2013/05/professor-robert-reich-on-the-uk-economy-at-the-tuc-next-week
