The Call for a Constitutional Convention
The Middle Ground
Americans, in general, undervalue the power and promise of self-government. We don’t trust the government with our money, but we expect them to use it to solve all our problems. The only other group with money is corporate America, but we don’t want them to control our government. The Contract for Mutual Responsibility finds a middle ground where private property continues, but the government controls the corporations in new areas. It ensures that all workers have their basic physical and spiritual needs met first in the quest for corporate profit.
Free enterprise elevates the rights of corporations over the worker, the government, and society at large. Under Mutual Responsibility, the Labor Corporation and the Industry Corporation both lose some power. The rights of the individual are elevated instead. In the same way free speech is protected, protection is also given to the fruit of ones labor. In an agrarian society this protection was not necessary, except for the slaves.
A simplified tax code with mandated profit sharing and benefits makes everyone equal. It isn’t negotiated by the union or based on the generosity or profitability of the corporation. Under the current system, one company has an advantage over another because of its unionized or non-unionized work force. Under Mutual Responsibility, corporations compete as equals.
Small businesses can compete equally with large businesses because the benefits pool will cost the same, ensuring growth and innovation of new ideas and technologies. The best way to make more money will still be to start your own business. Entrepreneurial freedom is intact. When every worker has full benefits and rewarding pay, the government burden is less. Government can spend less time social engineering the failures of private enterprise.
Our History, Wealth and Power
We are a great and powerful nation because our forefathers gave power to the people. We need to trust this wisdom, and empower the people yet again with a quasi-ownership mechanism in our developing industrial national society. This new formula will solve many of the problems we have been wrestling with for the last 100 years, and leave far fewer citizens behind. It doesn’t make the government bigger, it’s not a federal program. The entrepreneurs will still have the opportunity to earn more, the American spirit will be preserved, but we will go forward as one nation united in wealth and strength, not divided by opportunity and power. This formula changes the rules for all of us, but it does not expect more from any of us. It is self-interest, channeled better. It checks is the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots, and it will re-establish the disappearing middle-class.
Corporate America, which can be better described as the top 5%-10% of Americans, would give up a lot. But they would get a lot in return. Wealth accumulation, by definition, is only half of the priority, it is also playing and winning. That still goes on, the rewards are just less hyper-inflated, and the gains are more secure, since a downturn in the market does not wash out fortunes overnight. Also, it makes the society they live in more secure. There is less crime, less blight, less poverty.
Recent Political Events
Close elections seem to reveal a nation split. It is not a split, but rather a sense that both parties are failing to address what is wrong. The choice is between two equally bad corporations. The message to be read is that we need a new formula, not a third party. People are unhappy. There are power concentrations, political partisanship, and money flowing everywhere. Each side blames the other for everything that is wrong, but as power and positions have flip-flopped, only the workers effort has been consistent. Recessions and deficits and corporate downsizing were followed by taxes, surpluses and hyper-growth. Neither extreme lasted, neither extreme seemed right, and the cycle is returning again.
Proposition 2 1/2, the last attempt at a formula-driven solution, has created its own set of problems. Towns now look to state and federal solutions for local problems. It was too narrowly defined, and treated only a symptom, not the cause.
Our leaders are failing, and the peopleÕs interest on the pocketbook issues perpetuates the problem. The paradigm of the marketplace is now used to explain away all injustices. Individuals seek to be as greedy as the examples set by the corporations. If we do not hang together, we will hang ourselves separately. Our social utopian community will be lost due to our own blindness.
Rather than campaign finance reform, which simply shifts how corporate and labor money flows into campaigns, we shift the flow of political power and money to the workers. Private property continues, and the government has the benefit of having public goals privatized in the new responsibilities of the corporations. This is a partnering of public and private powers, which by weakening each strengthens both. The result is a society that meets its philosophical goals by creating a new social framework.
The Invisible Hand of Free Enterprise
Cash and interest payments controls free enterprise. Free Enterprise is a misnomer, it is actually a system of rigorous controls to divert property and create wealth for the slave-masters. The entire system revolves around interest payments, and the profits and wealth that can be derived from them. Loans and investments have no limit on the amount of interest obligation that can be returned.
All of America is attached to this interest profit system, and because we are all free to participate in it, it is regarded as free. In reality, it enslaves all of us to a system that creates a fictitious wealth. When the stock market crashes, or a stock or corporation loses its value, a lifetime of earnings and work can vanish in an instant. Our wealth was never real, it is based on made up figures written on a piece of paper. It is interest that is being hoarded and driving our price values, but it is not real wealth, either physically, intellectually or spiritually. Even without the criminal activities of the gatekeepers at Wall Street, interest creates a system that is immoral and anti-utopian. Only the Muslims can imagine a world without interest.
Without the attraction of different interest rates, every transaction under free enterprise changes. Adam Smith recognized private wealth as a tool for building a better society, but it was based on the citizen being productive. Interest is an insidious form of taxation. A tax is a levy on a transaction, interest is a mechanism for draining the capital from one person to another. Venture capital and the stock market, the primary engines of the modern corporate infrastructure, all rely on interest payments as stock returns as the liberating force to generate personal wealth.
Investors seek the greatest return, and the money constantly flows from one entity to another in hopes of maximizing the return. The abundance of products in the marketplace is credited to free enterprise, when just the opposite is true. Only those products that give a great return are funded. We now create new medicines to make money, not to cure illness. We should be giving credit to the inventor scientist, not to a system that restricts opportunity. After thousands of years, the best medicine is now that which promises the greatest return. Interest is a leech on free enterprise, and is how everyone is robbed of the fruits of their labor.
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