On August 10, 2013, Occupy.com writes on NationOfChange.org:
The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin have served as bitter reminders of not only how far we still are from realizing the vision for jobs and freedom that brought over 250,000 to Washington, DC, in 1963. They have also underlined how ephemeral the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement currently are.
In this context, no 50th anniversary event can remain a celebration of days gone by. It will inevitably be seen as a test of commitment towards regenerating a movement that can steer this country in a direction towards economic justice and equality.
The path to fundamental social change is not straight and clearly paved. Generations are consumed by building social movements powerful enough to topple an unjust status quo, only to fall back, sometimes for decades, if they haven’t been able to pull out the economic and political grievances by their roots.
Nevertheless, even when no substantial progress is being made or gains are rolled back, the lessons of previous struggles are still absorbed and adjusted according to modern conditions by new layers of activists. The path to making another world possible may submerge for long periods only to again become visible and inviting on a broader and potentially more advanced level.
In an Economic Policy Institute statement entitled “The Unfinished March: an Overview” by Algernon Austin, a detailed analysis is laid out that demonstrates how far we are from realizing the vision behind 1963’s March on Washington.
Even with the greatest employment crisis since the 1930s and an unemployment rate for Blacks that remains double that of whites, there is no talk of legislation for a federal jobs program to be paid for by taxing the rich. Today’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is unbelievably far from 1963’s demand for a living wage, which would be over $13 in today’s dollars. Opportunities for education and housing remain in fact, though not law, segregated and unequal.
This is not to mention the effects for Blacks of living under a legal system that is quick to approve and encourage state repression against them. Blacks now constitute almost 1 million of the 2.3 million people that are incarcerated. Blacks are arrested at nearly six times the rate of whites. And, according to a report by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, in 2012, 313 blacks were killed by police and some vigilantes and security guards without trial — most were unarmed, like Trayvon Martin.
President Obama, though in some ways a beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement, has pursued policies in complete opposition to its goals. While Wall Street was bailed out and the Federal Reserve spends over $80 billion a month to fatten the banks (Quantitative Easing), cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are promoted and the scourge of unemployment, growing poverty and institutional racism remain unaddressed. And the administration’s support of drone attacks, most often against innocent people, have made the U.S., in the words of Cornel West, the George Zimmerman of the world.
The Anniversary’s Prospect
In spite of this, according to the Guardian’s Paul Lewis, “Obama is understood to have been invited to play a central role in the King commemorations….” Those who are extending this invitation no doubt justify it by saying it is necessary to pressure Obama to play a more progressive role. However, they are sacrificing the essential political independence to do this.
There will be pressure not to embarrass the President, though the effects of his policies and inaction are what need to be unambiguously opposed. The 1963 March on Washington was about speaking truth to power. Its 50th Anniversary must continue this tradition rather than choke it which would bolster the calculations of President Obama and his big business party. If 2013’s March on Washington is to contribute to a social movement that can challenge corporate rule, it must mobilize around people’s needs that they are ready to fight for regardless of how much they conflict with the big business agenda of the Democrats and Republicans.
Today, almost all organized labor has endorsed the August 24 demonstration <<http://www.laborfightback.org/>>. Accordingly, this event represents an important opportunity where labor and the civil rights movement can unite around a common agenda that would unite all working people and include the following demands that have already been endorsed by organized labor:
- A federal program guaranteeing good-paying jobs for all.
- No cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — improve and expand the safety net.
- Justice for Trayvon Martin — stop racist murders.
- Restore and expand the Voting Rights Act – stop voter suppression.
- Stop military interventions — money for human needs, not war.
All working people are currently under attack, whether they are being forced to accept wage cuts, health care cuts, attacks on their pensions, or high rates of unemployment. These afflictions target Black and Latino workers the most, but all working people are threatened by a lowered standard of living, while more and more of society’s wealth is seized by the rich.
The August 24 demonstration could serve as the first step in uniting all working people to fight for a better world, a world where everyone has a job with a living wage, where health care is a human right, where public schools and social services are well funded, and where the rich are not showered with bailouts and ever more generous tax breaks.
As this op-ed by Occupy.com amply demonstrates, their thinking is restricted to one-factor––human labor––as the ONLY means of production entitled to the masses, the poor and underclass, other than taxpayer-support State welfare and charity.
Until we, as a nation, understand that it is the lack of ownership of the means of production that is the basic economic problem for most Americans, we will constantly see an eroding of wages, the destruction of jobs, and increasing demand on the part of the people that the State do more and more for them. For the vast majority of Americans, their only source of income is wages, government welfare support or charity.
As tectonic shifts in the technologies of production exponentially advance on a global scale, the result will be an increase of lower-paying job opportunities, job destruction, and the decreasing worth of labor as a means of production. In other words, the non-human factor of production — productive capital of all forms — will increasingly be employed with less and less human labor necessary to produce the products and services needed and wanted by society.
What is needed is a policy program that facilitates stimulating economic growth simultaneously with creating new owners of the productive capital assets created. Conventionally, most people do not have the right to acquire productive capital with the self-financing earnings of capital; they are left to acquire assets, as best as they can, with their earnings as labor workers. This is fundamentally hard to do and limiting — for individuals, families and the economy. Thus, the most important economic right Americans need and should demand is the effective right to acquire capital with the earnings of capital.
What historically empowered America’s original capitalists was conventional savings-based finance and the pledging or mortgaging of assets, with access to future ownership of new productive capital available only to those who were already well-capitalized. As has been the case, credit to purchase capital is made available by financial institutions ONLY to people who meet the universal requirement for collateral — those who already own capital and other assets that can be pledged as loan security. Lenders will only extend credit to people who already have assets. Thus, the rich are made ever richer, while the poor (people without a viable capital estate) remain poor and dependent on their labor to produce income. Thus, the system is restrictive and capital ownership is clinically denied to those who need it.
Past savings — the present value of past cuts in consumption — are not, however, the only or even the best source of financing for new capital formation. There is also “future savings,” that is, the present value of future increases in production. Just as derivatives (“money”) called mortgages can be created using the present value of existing marketable goods and services as the “underlying” asset backing the derivative, derivatives called bills of exchange can be created using the present value of future marketable products and services as the underlying.
Believing — erroneously — that past savings are the only source for financing of new productive capital formation has one of two results. If we believe that the market will take care of things without the State doing more than policing abuses, enforcing contracts, and in general providing a level playing field, we end up with capitalism. Ownership of productive capital must be concentrated in the hands of a private sector elite, for only people whose productive capital assets produce far more than they can consume can afford to finance the formation of new productive capital, thereby providing jobs for the rest of us, to the extent that they are not necessary due to ever-increasing shifts in the technologies of production.
If, however, we believe that the market and private initiative cannot be trusted to take care of things, and that government action is required to both regulate and control the private sector so that everyone will be taken care of adequately and there will be sufficient investment to create enough jobs (whether or not we believe State control will continue to be necessary, or it will wither away), the State must take an ever-increasing role in the economy. That is socialism.
The way to avoid the fallacies of both capitalism and socialism is to realize that new productive capital formation can be financed better using the present value of future increases in production –– future savings –– than by using the present value of past cuts in consumption –– past savings. Reliance on past savings, however (despite its obvious falsity) is accepted as an absolute dogma by all mainstream schools of economics, and virtually all of their offshoots. That is the challenge –– to re-educate.
Of course to succeed practically in creating broadened private, individual ownership of FUTURE productive capital formation, there must be a provision to secure investment. This is where collateral insurance comes in (i.e. the provision of sufficient security to support a loan for productive capital acquisition). Because beneficiaries would be enabled to undertake financing on the strength of non-recourse pure capital credit loans from banks and other lenders, the question of collateral or other satisfactory security security to support the loans is critical. Banks cannot extend pure capital credit without security to cover the risk of the borrower’s inability to repay the loan. Nor can existing owners be saddled with the risk of business failure. Thus the risk of productive capital investment failure (a risk that is now borne primarily by existing owners, but with considerable governmental back-up mediation through economic intervention by way of taxing, borrowing, monetary, regulatory and other powers) can instead be commercially insured with government reinsurers in reserve if necessary. This would be included as an element in the cost of borrowing in the case of each pure capital credit loan to provide financial compensation to the lenders. Similar insurance mechanisms can be employed as used by the U.S. Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to overcome the formidable financial barrier that prevents most people form effective productive capital acquisition. Once we set put on this path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice it is an open question whether government involvement (and how much and in what form) is necessary to promote the market provision of pure capital credit insurance. In the writings of binary economist Louis Kelso, he consistently proposed the creation of an agency to operate on the broad principles as practiced by the FHA in providing loan insurance to home buyers. The FHA has experienced decades of profitable success in facilitating the financing of broader home ownership throughout the United States. Instead of financing with insured loans a consumer purchase (a home to live in) we would be financing productive capital asset formation that generates its own earnings out of which to pay back the loan. Capital credit insurance is not a government guarantee. To the contrary, capital credit insurance would be provided only if the premium is competitively attractive in view of the risk insured. Any investment risk that is not insurable on market principles should not be undertaken. The government’s reinsurance corporation would be expected to meet the profitable performance standards of programs like the FHA’s home loan insurance program.
The solutions — which include specific financial mechanisms to enable economic growth to be financed with “future savings” (earnings) — can be found in the platform of the Just Third Way and the proposed Capital Homestead Act (a technology/industrial development blueprint which takes its lead from the Homestead Act of 1862). This new paradigm will economically empower all individuals and families through direct and effective ownership of the means of production as a significant source of income, and put our nation on a path to universal prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
