Democratizing Wealth and a Sustainable Future
(Gar Alperovitz Q&A with Dr. Norman G. Kurland)
[Time Tag @ 46:42 - 56:35]
http://youtu.be/L6XkxHFtLto?t=46m42s

Published by the New American Foundation

Published on May 23, 2013

This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook was questioned in a Congressional Hearing about his company’s complex scheme to avoid paying taxes.  According to Mr. Cook, the company’s stash of billions of dollars in overseas shell corporations was not tax dodging – it was ingenuity.  And, just in case anyone actually fell for the tech company’s creative explanation, Mark Gongloff of the Huffington Post shared an incredible chart, which illustrates exactly how unjust our nation’s tax system has really become.

The chart was produced by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and it shows how the sources of federal revenue have changed over several decades.  In 1950, corporations contributed over 30 percent to our nation’s revenue, and individual income and payroll taxes made up about 45 percent.  But today, corporations only contribute 17 percent, and individuals are paying for over 60 percent of federal revenue.

So, despite all the Republican claims about the U.S. having the world’s highest tax rate – corporations are contributing less to our nation than ever before.  Yet, corporate executives like Tim Cook have the audacity to say we should be celebrating their “ingenuity.”  These companies make the huge profits they have been raking in by using the commons that our tax dollars develop and maintain.

Without roads and bridges, communications systems and utilities, corporations couldn’t get their products into the hands of hard-working Americans.  They should be paying for the privilege to do business here.  American tax payers should not be picking up a larger share of the tab, while corporate executives hold on to an ever-increasing share of the profits.  Let’s tell companies like Apple that we’ll celebrate their ingenuity just as soon as they start paying their fair share.

http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2013/05/audacity-apples-ingenuity

“At a time when we have a $16.5 trillion national debt and an unsustainable federal deficit; at a time when roughly one-quarter of the largest corporations in America are paying no federal income taxes; and at a time when corporate profits are at an all-time high, it is past time for corporate America to contribute significantly to deficit reduction,” said Sanders, a member of the Senate Budget Committee.
“Even as profits grow to record levels, corporations’ share of tax revenues paid has dropped significantly in recent decades. Sen. Sanders and I are offering a comprehensive and commonsense solution that would eliminate tax subsidizes for big oil companies and corporations that are shipping jobs and profits overseas,” Schakowsky said.

The legislation “would increase investment, employment and wages in the United States,” said Richard L. Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. Mary Kay Henry, the Service Employees International Union president, said the proposal would “raise revenue, restore fairness to our tax code and create good jobs in the U.S.”
Under current law, U.S. corporations are allowed to defer or delay U.S. income taxes on overseas profits until the money is brought back into the United States. U.S. corporations are also provided foreign tax credits to offset the amount of taxes paid to other countries.

According to a 2008 Government Accountability Office Report, 83 of the Fortune 100 companies in the United States use offshore tax havens to lower their taxes. Today, U.S. corporations have an estimated $1.7 trillion of un-repatriated foreign profits sitting offshore.
Sanders also released a report today on how 31 corporations represented by the Business Roundtable have avoided $128 billion in federal income taxes by setting up more than 500 subsidiaries in tax haven countries. The Business Roundtable recently released a report calling for Congress to slash Social Security and Medicare benefits something that Sanders called “shameless.”

The Corporate Tax Fairness Act would require U.S. companies to pay taxes on all of their income by ending the deferral of foreign source income.

Under the legislation proposed by Sanders and Schakowsky, corporations would pay U.S. taxes on their offshore profits as they are earned. The legislation would take away the tax incentives for corporations to move jobs offshore or to shift profits offshore because the U.S. would tax their profits no matter where they are generated.

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CORPTA%20FAIRNESSFACTSHEET.pdf

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/TaxHavens-%20BIll.pdf

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Tax-Dodge-Report-3.pdf

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=f8e29aae-dda3-4af9-a8e2-c6df481d1ffa

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/media/listen/?m=139aea44-3b9b-4915-8083-b8754e7cc67c

On May 22, 2013, Americans Against The Tea Party write on www.aattp.org:

Rand Paul says the government should “just apologize” to the tax-dodgers at Apple who are reportedly holding billions in overseas tax-havens as part of a crafty legal scheme to dodge Uncle Sam.

Paul said: I’m offended by a government that convenes a hearing to bully one of America’s greatest success stories.  I’m offended by the spectacle of dragging in executives from an American company that is not doing anything illegal.  If anyone should be on trial here, it should be Congress.  I frankly think the committee should apologize to Apple.

Don’t blame Paul though.  He’s deeply concerned about the federal deficit and all of this outrageous spending (for superfluous things like social safety nets for our children and elderly citizens, roads and disaster relief!), just not concerned enough to ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share.  Also, don’t blame him for citing Apple as “an American company” even though we all know they outsource much of their production to Chinese workers who routinely attempt, and sometimes succeed, in committing suicide while on the job.  Randall is just doing what his corporate handlers tell him to–like a good little would-be presidential candidate should.

http://aattp.org/rand-paul-says-gov-owes-tax-dodging-apple-an-apology-video/

On May 22, 2013, Jerry Hirsch writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Upstart electric car maker Tesla Motors on Wednesday paid off a Department Energy loan that had become a political hot potato.

Tesla Motors benefited from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) Loan Program, a $25 billion direct loan program funded by Congress in fall 2008 to provide debt capital to the U.S. automotive industry for the purpose of funding projects that help vehicles manufactured in the U.S. meet higher mileage requirements and lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil. This program is unrelated to the United States Treasury Department‘s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) which has been providing bailout funding to two of the big three U.S. automakers.

In September 2012, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill that limits the Energy’s Department’s power to issue loan guarantees for new green-energy projects, a move stemming from Solyndra’s failure.

This Congressional action flied in the face of President Obama’s proposed Jobs Act, which would have created an Infrastructure Bank that would provide loan guarantees to stimulate economic growth.

What is needed is a massive loan guarantee economic growth plan with aims to balance production and consumption by empowering EVERY American to acquire private, individual ownership in FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital asset investments and pay for their loans out of the earnings of the investments.

Unfortunately, with Tesla Motors and others, the direct loans and loan guarantees do not stipulate the demonstration of broaden private, individual ownership among the employees of the companies receiving taxpayer financial support. Instead the direct loans and loan guarantees are pitch as JOB CREATION measures while completely hiding the fact that a privilege ownership class benefits as the owners of investment assets.

In the FUTURE ALL  direct loans and loan guarantees should stipulate that companies demonstrate broadened ownership of their companies by their employees and other Americans.

We need to lift ownership-concentrating Federal Reserve System credit barriers and other institutional barriers that have historically separated owners from non-owners and link tax and monetary reforms to the goal of expanded capital ownership. This can be done under the existing legal powers of each of the 12 Federal Reserve regional banks, and will not add to the already unsustainable debt of the Federal Government or raise taxes on ordinary taxpayers. We need to free the system of dependency on Wall Street or the accumulated savings and money power of the rich and super-rich who control Wall Street. The Federal Reserve System has stifled the growth of America’s productive capacity through its monetary policy by monetizing public-sector growth and mounting Federal deficits and “Wall Street” bailouts; by favoring speculation over investment; by shortchanging the capital credit needs of entrepreneurs, inventors, farmers, and workers; by increasing the dependency of with usurious consumer credit; and by perpetuating unjust capital credit and ownership barriers between rich Americans and those without savings. The Federal Reserve Bank should be used to provide interest-free capital credit (including only transaction and risk premiums) and monetize each capital formation transaction, determined by the same expertise that determines it today––management and banks––that each transaction is viably feasible so that there is virtually no risk in the Federal Reserve. The first layer of risk would be taken by the commercial credit insurers, backed by a new government corporation, the Capital Diffusion Reinsurance Corporation, through which the loans could be guaranteed. This entity would serve to seed the new policy direction and would fulfill the government’s responsibility for the health and prosperity of the American economy.

We are absent a national discussion of where consumers earn the money to buy products and services and the nature of capital ownership, and instead argue about policies to redistribute income or not to redistribute income. If Americans do not demand that the holders of the office of the presidency of the United States, the Senate, and the Congress address these issues, we will have wasted the opportunity to steer the American economy in a direction that will broaden affluence. We have adequate resources, adequate knowhow, and adequate manpower to produce general affluence, but we need as a society to properly and efficiently manage these resources while protecting and enhancing the environment so that our productive capital capability is sustainable and renewable. Such issues are the proper concern of government because of the human damage inflicted on our social fabric as well as to economic growth in which every citizen is fairly included in the American dream.

There are numerous solution specifics that should be implemented in addition to the reform of the Federal Reserve System.

We need to implement the Capital Homestead Act (CHA) (www.capitalhomestead.org), which takes its lead from the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act offered the landless white citizens of America part-ownership of the country by giving them 160 acres of frontier land, free, if they produced on it income for themselves and their families for a period of five years. The slogan of the Capital Homestead Act is “Own Or Be Owned.” The Capital Homestead Act’s summary can be found at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm and at http://www.cesj.org/about/programs/declarations/ monetaryjustice.htm.

We need to support new justice-committed leaders, especially those who want to end the corruption built into our exclusionary system of monopoly capitalism––the main source of corruption of any political system, democratic or otherwise.

But to develop those leaders we need a national airing and debate and a call for an “economic Marshall Plan.” We have the intelligence; we just have not been focused on OWNERSHIP CREATION, and instead have limited our discussion and policy-making to JOB CREATION––a dead-end proposition in light of the continuing march of technological innovation and invention.

We need to radically overhaul the Federal tax system and monetary policies and institute proposals to get money power to the 99 percent of American citizens who now only rely on their labor worker earnings. Under the Just Third Way more just and simple tax system, the following is proposed:

• Eliminate all tax loopholes and subsidies,

• Provide an exemption of $100,000 for a family of four to meet their ordinary living needs,

• Encourage corporations to pay out all their profits as taxable personal incomes to avoid paying corporate income taxes and to finance their growth by issuing new full dividend payout shares for broad-based citizen ownership,

• Eliminate the payroll tax on workers and their employers, but

• Pay out of general revenues for all promises for Social Security, Medicare, Medicare, government pensions, health, education, rent and subsistence vouchers for the poor until their new jobs and ownership accumulations provide new incomes to substitute for the taxpayer dollars to fill these needs.

• The tax rate would be a single rate for all incomes from all sources above the personal exemption levels so that the budget could be balanced automatically and even allow the government to pay off the growing unsustainable long-term debt, but the poor would pay the first dollar over their exemption levels as the hedge fund operator and others now earning billions of dollars from capital gains, dividends, rents and other property incomes which under some tax proposals would be exempted from any taxes.

• As a substitute for inheritance and gift taxes, a transfer tax would be imposed on the recipients whose holdings exceeded $1 million, thus encouraging the super-rich to spread out their monopoly-sized estates to all members of their family, friends, servants and workers who helped create their fortunes, teachers, health workers, police, other public servants, military veterans, artists, the poor and the disabled.

• The Federal Reserve would 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.

• The CHA would process an equal allocation of productive credit to every citizen exclusively for purchasing full-dividend payout shares in companies needing funds for growing the economy and private sector jobs for local, national and global markets,

• The shares would be purchased on credit wholly backed by projected “future savings” in the form of new productive capital assets as well as the future marketable goods and services produced by the newly added technology, renewable energy systems, plant, rentable space and infrastructure added to the economy.

• Risk of default on each stock acquisition loan would be covered by private sector capital credit risk insurance and reinsurance, but

• Would not require citizens to reduce their funds for consumption to purchase shares.

The end result is that citizens would become empowered as owners to meet their own consumption needs and government would become more dependent on economically independent citizens, thus reversing current global trends where all citizens will eventually become dependent for their economic well-being on our only legitimate monopoly –– the State –– and whatever elite controls the coercive powers of government.

We need ordinary Americans to step up and demand that the OWNERSHIP issue is addressed. This is the last option to provide prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice for America’s 99 percent majority.

Implementing such policies will enable America to realize its potential for an affluent future for EVERYONE..

To those who believe that we are doomed, consider that the haves represent a tiny fraction of humanity. The ideas that address OWNERSHIP CREATION will split them between those who see the point and understand that they would benefit everyone without taking anything away from them during their lives, and those who want to keep ownership in an exclusive club. The latter cannot publicly attack the institution of private property without threatening the legal foundation that gives them their monopoly over the money system and the ownership system.

We need leadership to awaken all American citizens to force the politicians to follow the people and lift all legal barriers to universal capital ownership access by every man, woman, and child as a fundamental right of citizenship and the basis of personal liberty and empowerment. The goal should be to enable every man, woman, and child to become an owner of ever-advancing labor-displacing technologies, new and sustainable energy systems, new rentable space, new enterprises, new infrastructure assets, and productive land and natural resources as a growing and independent source of their future incomes.

The emphasis on the systemic injustices of monopoly capitalism can only be addressed by comprehensive reforms to the tax, monetary and inheritance policies favoring the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to low-wage countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.

The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by binary economist Louis Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percenters equal opportunity to become capital owners. The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital workers) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and service,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor—physical capital—is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority—and ultimately 100 percent—of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”

Please 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

Also follow the Center for Economic and Social Justice at www.cesj.org and http://capitalhomestead.org/ Join the OWN Team to advocate OWNERSHIP CREATION at http://capitalhomestead.org/group/the-on-team

Also see The Kelso Institute at http://www.kelsoinstitute.org/

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-pays-off-doe-loan-20130522,0,1821243.story

The poverty line in the U.S., according to the federal government, is just under $24,000. But most Americans say even if you make twice that, you won’t be very comfortable in their hometown.

A recent survey by Gallup lays bare this stark financial reality, with the pollsters’ findings headlined: “Americans Say Family of Four Needs Nearly $60K to ‘Get By.’ ”

So is this a question of perception vs. reality, with poll respondents being too materialistic or confusing wants with needs? Or is this really what it means to be “poor” in America in 2013?

Sadly, the Great Recession or Depression continues and the reality is that millions and millions more are destined for poverty subsistence.

We need, going forth, to recognize that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production will increasingly replace human labor with non-human means of production, and without extending equal opportunities to own (not equal results but equal opportunity for capital credit) more millions and millions of Americans will be displaced from their jobs and not be able to find a job, especially a job with decent wage or salary earnings to support a family. Then what? The hoggist greed of narrow minded, money-focused own-at-all-cost hoarders, needs to be confronted and opportunities for FUTURE private, individual ownership of FUTURE economic growth dramatically expanded to enable EVERY American to become a capital share owner in the assets of the major corporations that produce the bulk of our products and services, all financed using insured capital credit loans that will pay for themselves.

See my article ”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

Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm

http://slant.investorplace.com/2013/05/what-is-poor-in-america-most-say-60k-or-less/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InvestorPlace+%28InvestorPlace%29&utm_content=Google+Reader#ixzz2TzBTmEOJ

The hearing illustrated a conundrum for some legislators: They’re critical of Apple’s tax avoidance practices but recognize the company is a job-creating giant that produces some of the world’s most popular gadgets.

“Apple executives want the public to focus on the U.S. taxes the company has paid, but the real issue is the billions in taxes it has not paid, thanks to offshore tax strategies whose purpose is tax avoidance, pure and simple,” subcommittee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said during the hearing.

 The hearing came one day after the subcommittee released a blistering report that detailed how Apple used an elaborate web of offshore subsidiaries to avoid paying at least $15 billion in U.S. taxes on $44 billion in foreign income from 2009 to 2012.

Of Apple’s $145 billion in cash as of April, about $102 billion is overseas. By keeping profits offshore, Apple reduced its effective tax rate to as low as 24.2% in 2011.

One of the Irish subsidiaries, Apple Operations International, which has no employees but reported $30 billion in income over the four years, has not filed an income tax return in any country for the last five years, the subcommittee investigation found.

“You shifted the economic rights to the most valuable thing you own, your intellectual property,” Levin said of Apple’s transfer of rights for its product sales in Europe, Asia and Africa to subsidiaries in Ireland.

Cook delivered remarks aimed at portraying Apple as a company bound by lofty ideals, a strong moral compass and a recognition of its impact on the world.

“We don’t depend on tax gimmicks,” Cook said. “Honestly speaking, I don’t see it as unfair. I am not an unfair person. I would not preside over that.”

“Every company that has a huge presence, that has a huge number of employees, that pays a lot of taxes, that produces really good products, obviously that has an impact on people’s thinking,” Levin said of himself and his Senate colleagues. “But it’s important that we focus not just on the profits they pay taxes on, but on the greater percentage of profits that they don’t pay taxes on. And how do they avoid it?”

On May 20, 2013, Jullian Berman writes in The Huffington Post:

America has a youth unemployment problem, and it’s not just the kids who are suffering.

The nation is poised to lose $18 billion in wages over the next decade due to high youth unemployment, according to a Bloomberg Brief from Bloomberg Senior Economist Joseph Brusuelas.

Brusuelas estimated that about 1.3 million 16- to 24-year-olds have been unemployed for six months or more. He came to the $18 billion figure using earlier research, which found six months of joblessness at age 22 results in a wage that’s 8 percent lower at age 23, 6 percent lower at 26 and 4 percent lower at 30. Still, the problem of lost wages due to unemployment could actually be much worse, Brusuelas told The Huffington Post.

“It’s a conservative estimate,” he said. “That really underestimates the true nature of the problem. My gut tells me that it’s much larger.”

Indeed, Brusuelas wrote in the note that if all of America’s 3.2 million unemployed youth stay jobless for an extended period, the U.S. will lose $44 billion over the next decade.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/america-youth-unemployment_n_3306089.html?show_comment_id=254608434#comment_254608434

On May 20, 2013, Emily Alpert writes in the Los Angeles Times while the percentage is greater in cities, the number of poor in suburbs is higher than in urban areas.

Bucking longstanding patterns in the United States, more poor people now live in the nation’s suburbs than in urban areas, according to a new analysis.

On May 20, 2013, Carl Gibson writes in Nation Of Change:

Despite its name, the Federal Reserve is a private corporation, unaccountable to our government and autonomous in its operation. Even though the president appoints the chairman and the board of governors, the Federal Reserve and its 12 regional branches in America’s major cities are dominated largely by Wall Street. Through the devious process of fractional reserve banking, have complete control over our monetary policy, as well as responsibility for price control and establishing long-term interest rates. It shouldn’t be any surprise to anyone that this private corporation allows Wall Street to withdraw billions of dollars at0.75% interest while homeowners and college students depend on those same banks for loans have to pay far higher rates. The buddy-buddy relationship the Federal Reserve has with Wall Street was fully revealed after the Fed’s first official audit in 2011, when the Fed’s records showed they had dished out $16 trillion in bailouts to not just US banks, but foreign banks as well. That’s a trillion dollars more than the United States’ entire GDP for 2011.

The Fed posted a whopping $77.4 billion in profit in 2011. While, to its credit, the Fed gave almost all of their profits back to the U.S. Treasury, those profits were made while buying up the same toxic mortgage-backed securities that Wall Street intentionally created to fail while enriching themselves. The Fed’s quantitative easing policy, known as QE3, is simultaneously shoveling $40 billion per week into the black hole of Wall Street’s coffers to keep buying up these worthless, obtuse financial instruments. The Fed claims that quantitative easing has helped create or save almost 2,000,000 jobs since 2008, and while that may be true, the people could probably find a much better way to spend $40 billion a month and create and save far more jobs.

Because the privately-operated Federal Reserve still has a monopoly on our money supply, the [Bank of North Dakota] BND still has to ultimately borrow money from the private banking cartel. However, the BND still supplies tens of millions of dollars to the state treasury every year that can be used for badly-needed investments in things like schools, healthcare and transportation infrastructure. Imagine if we could nationalize the Fed and our money supply, using the BND’s model for all 50 states to safely deposit their money and make low-interest loans available to everyday homeowners and small business owners! It would bring Wall Street to its knees.

Luckily, the Public Banking Institute is teaching everyone how we can make that happen at their 2013 conference at Dominican University from June 2-4 in San Rafael, California.

The concept of public banking is one that should be pursued in order to establish the institutional means to achieve access to the rights and power of property as a fundamental human right. Instead, universal access to property rights is ignored.

This is the reality of the FUTURE, unless you and I and every other human being with a desire to be someone and contribute to the betterment of society do something about it. It all comes down to what source of income will each of us gain access to and whether we will Own or Be Owned in the economic sense.

The statement “Own or Be Owned” suggests the two alternative worlds of the FUTURE. Today’s reality is that the average citizen does not own wealth-creating productive capital assets (as do the wealthy rich people in our society). To change one’s plight from that of capital-less or under-capitalized and solely dependent on a job or government welfare assistance in one form or another, citizens must share in the ownership of the money system. Most of you out there do not even know how money is created. Money is created when the Federal Reserve Bank (a central bank privately owned) loans it to banks that you have your checking account or meager savings account (if any) with, and the banks re-loan it multiple times because laws allow them to have a fraction of the amount on hand or in reserve in relation to the amount of loans they are allowed to make (fractional banking). This creates boom and bust cycles in the national economy, and empowers an elite few who really OWN America. With proposed Capital Homesteading, the Federal Reserve would serve as a “public bank” and would loan money directly to citizens, who must put it in a personal special super-IRA retirement account which would invest in dividend-paying stocks of corporations that use the money for productive, economy-growing purposes. This would empower all, instead of an elite few and eliminate fractional-reserve boom and bust. It would also provide for unlimited private sector growth, and eliminate the need for socialist welfare programs funded with tax extraction and national debt. This would back the currency with real products or goods and services and reduce the size and scope of government. As government becomes smaller because individual citizens are able to support themselves and their families living off dividend income and resulting REAL jobs, national debt would be retired and demand for taxes would shrink. The tax system would be changed to be far simpler, flatter, and fairer. And all of us would be on the path to prosperity, opportunity, and economic justice to pursue our personal desires and experiences as we become strongly independent and responsible.

Everyone reading this article is invited to visit and consider joining the Web site of the Coalition for Capital Homesteading, an advocacy group advancing the Just Third Way vision and comprehensive system reforms designed to achieve a people-empowered, market oriented, property-based approach to economic democracy at local, regional, and national levels.

What I and my colleagues at the Coalition For Capital Homesteading (http://capitalhomestead.org/) are recommending is that the Federal Reserve become a more accountable and effective engine of non-inflationary private sector growth. We are asking the President and Congress to call on the Federal Reserve to use its existing discount powers under Section 13, paragraph 2 to open up a new source of mass purchasing power through widespread worker and citizen ownership of productive capital.

Today the Federal Reserve uses its powers to monetize unsustainable government debt, bail out banks deemed “too big to fail,” and widen the gap between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent. The Federal Reserve could play a more positive role, removing artificial barriers to equal citizen access to acquiring and owning productive capital wealth. By creating asset-backed money for production, supported by growth-oriented tax policies, the Federal Reserve could truly help promote shared prosperity in a market system.

Chairman Benjamin Bernanke and other members of the Federal Reserve need to wake-up and implement Section 13 paragraph 2, which directs the Federal Reserve to create credit for local banks to make loans where there isn’t enough savings in the system to finance economic growth.

I urge those interested to examine the systems logic behind the Capital Homestead Act’s tax and monetary reforms, expressed in “A New Look At Prices And Money” published in the Journal of Socio-Economics (http://www.cesj.org/binaryeconomics/price-money.html)

Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/amend-the-federal-reserve.fb27?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687

Sign the Petition at http://signon.org/sign/reform-the-federal-reserve.fb23?source=c.fb&r_by=3904687

Sign the WhiteHouse.gov petition at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/amend-federal-reserve-act/GYqvqGr6

The answers are to be found in the proposed Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm, and the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797

http://www.nationofchange.org/saving-our-economy-public-banking-1369063062