Conclusion: Democratic-Cooperative-(Supercharged)-Capitalism

"A regime of global governance is needed in which world markets are managed so as to promote the cohesion of societies and the integrity of the states. Only a framework of global regulation-of currencies, capital movements, trade and environmental conservation-can enable the creativity of the world economy to be harnessed in the service of human needs."

-John Gray, False Dawn, p. 199

The United Nations was specifically designed to be controlled by the imperial-centers-of-capital. Before it can effectively federalize the world the UN must become democratized along the lines of the World Constitution and Parliament Association's Constitution, http://www.radford.edu/~peace/ ippno/doc.html, and other groups pushing for federation of poor nations: Earth Federation, http://old.jccc.net/~mfoster/rs/constitution. html; Commission on Global Governance, http:// www.cgg.ch/; United Planetary Federation, http:// www. upf. org/index.html; World Citizen Foundation, http://www.worldcitizen. org/; and The United Nations http://www .un.org/.

There are five basic rules for elimination of poverty and creation of a peaceful world:

1. Developing nations must ally together so as to negotiate equally with the allied imperial centers.
2. Within that alliance there should be roughly equal pay for equal work.
3. Society must share the productive jobs (each person needing to work only 2-to-3 days per week),
4. Through a slight restructuring of private property laws, the subtle monopolizations of land, technology, and finance capital must be eliminated.
5. And society must address population issues and sustainable development within the capacity of the earth to provide resources for all and the environment to absorb wastes.

Equal pay for equal work provides roughly equal buying power to all who are employed. Sharing the remaining productive jobs within the imperial centers would reduce their workweek to 2-to-3 days per week and employ all able-bodied workers which, along with equal pay on the periphery, would immediately melt the invisible economic borders which currently guide the manufactured wealth, produced primarily by the low-paid, into the hands of the well-paid. Grossly underpaid workers would no longer be toiling to produce products and profits for the powerful and wealthy. Each person in society will be equally paid for equally-productive labor and/or earning honest profits.

As development of the poor regions improves and living standards increase, addressing population-related issues in order to avoid overstressing the resource and ecological capacity of the earth will be even more important. With the most Catholic country in the world, Italy, having a birth rate per family (1.29) far below replacement levels and Germany's and Japan's birth rates (1.51 and 1.53) also well below replacement rates, that is an attainable goal.

The buying power for a healthy economy comes from wages paid to productive labor. Those earnings are spent for family needs and that money is spent again and again as it is passed from hand to hand to purchase necessary food, fiber, shelter, and services (the economic multiplier). Thus care must be taken by both the developed and developing world for each region (small and medium sized nations must ally) to produce most of their own food and consumer products and provide most of their own services.

With the wealthy developed world sincerely promoting equality in world trade through relinquishing their subtle monopolies on resources, technology, and finance capital, and with that newly-produced wealth relatively equally shared in the developing region through equality in wages and with equal access to jobs, poverty will quickly be alleviated.

Powerful nations currently control the world. That control is the opposite of what is preached (peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule) by those same nations. If peace and prosperity for all is ever to become a reality, this offer by the powerful for equality of rights and elimination of poverty must be made, sincerely, to all nations of the world:

·         The wealthy world will turn their war industries towards producing industrial technology for any nation or region of the world that agrees to eliminate terrorism; that agrees to reduce their military to a level that provides internal security but leaves no offensive capabilities; and that agrees to provide full political and economic rights to all its citizens, including women and minorities. These rights to include: a constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

As this is exactly what most emerging nations were in the process of constructing and which triggered their destabilization, agreement on these conditions for developmental aid will be quickly accepted. Industries and access to markets would go only to those who agreed to these conditions. The authoritative dictatorships that the imperial-centers-of-capital have placed in power and kept in power throughout the world for two centuries will quickly melt away once that sincere offer is made.[kkk]

·          All military weapons beyond that necessary for internal security should be turned over to a democratically restructured United Nations and destroyed. In trade, the powerful nations will assign their military forces to a United Nations command, in step with the demilitarization of the world, and those forces shall guarantee the borders of all nations. All weapons of mass destruction in all nations should be destroyed.

·         A democratically reformed United Nations should be chartered with the responsibility to oversee world peace and all nations should agree to place a worldwide embargo against any nation which attacks or subverts any other nation-or against any nation which attempts to retain or build its own military capacity to wage war.

·         Any honest accounting would show the wealthy world in enormous debt to the developing world through centuries of imperialism, slavery, and structural exploitation designed to create indebtedness through plunder-by-trade. Thus all unjust Third Word debts should be cancelled.

·         Markets should be free between regions of equal development and equal pay. Trade between countries and regions unequally paid for equally-productive labor should be managed to prevent the continued plunder-by-trade as outlined in Chapter 6.

·         To take control of their destiny, regions should establish their own central bank trading currency as per Chapter 3 and addressed in depth in Economic Democracy, 3rd edition, Chapter 26.

·         The level playing field so crucial to efficient economics should be leveled upwards. Through export tariffs (equalizing surcharges, a form of landrent), minerals and other resources in the low-paid countries should be priced relative to mining or harvesting those same resources or substitute commodities in the developed world. Labor values should be calculated and equalizing surcharges collected on exports of manufactured products.

·         Funds collected from these tariffs on international trade should go towards building industries and economic infrastructure in the lower-paid nation or region and for renewable energy capitalization, developing environmentally sound products, designing and implementing ecologically sustainable lifestyles, rebuilding soils, and cleaning up and revitalizing the ecosystems of both the developing and developed world. Protections should be lowered in step with the equalizing of industrial technology, capital accumulation, labor skills, and wages paid equally-productive labor.

With the cost of minerals in the United States at 1.7% of GNP and the cost of fuel 2%, developed world economies can handle these equalization surcharges.[193] Through those same surcharges (or call them resource depletion taxes), the price of minerals and carbon fuels in the developing world should be increased to a level near that of the lower grade deposits in the developed world. The recycling of minerals would then be profitable and renewable energy would be competitive. The consumption of the world's oil and coal will be slower, pollution pressures will be lower, and, on the average, all countries will develop faster.

Those incentives and disincentives will conserve resources, reduce pollution, and protect the environment. Appearances of higher prices are deceptive. Once equalizing surcharges are established, the entire world will be able to develop to a sustainable level and poverty largely eliminated. What appears more expensive to the few in the affluent developed world is really far cheaper to the billions in the entire world.

As resource depletion and pollution can be monitored and controlled, democratic-cooperative-(supercharged)-capitalism would be far the most efficient economic philosophy. Neither the wealthy nor the poor want to deplete the world's resources or live in a world polluted to the extent it is a threat to their survival.

·         To prevent diversion of funds, money should not be distributed directly to developing nations or regions. Fulfillment of contract is the essence of a successful economy. Any industry or infrastructure built with developing world money or with equalizing surcharge funds shall be built by contract and the contractors paid from those funds. However, since they now have the tools of production, these regions will be building their own infrastructure under those contracts and eventually will build their own industries.

·         Once nations or regions are roughly equal in technology and labor roughly equally paid, surcharges should be eliminated and fair and honest free trade will flow between nations and between regions. We will have turned "win-lose" and "lose-lose" trade wars into "win-win" equalizing managed fair trade and from there into honest and equal free trade.

·         There should be a balance between industry and natural resources. A nation or region short on resources should be allotted a higher level of industrialization. ( Japan provides the ideal example.) Once all nations and regions are roughly equal in world trade, equalizing surcharges would transpose into a resource depletion tax to fund rebuilding soils and revitalizing the world's ecosystems.

·         One-year-old trees in biodegradable, aerodynamic, pointed cylinders can be planted at the rate of 800,000-trees a day per plane (search keywords "Moshe Alamaro", "reforest"). Newly planted grass grows beautifully in North Africa when fenced off from goats. Technology has been developed to grow extensive ground cover in 1-to-3 years on steep, barren, infertile road cuts. The technology is here to reforest and regenerate the earth and a resource depletion tax is the proper source of funds.[194]

·         Patent laws should be restructured, as per Chapter 2, so all can use a technology simply by paying an appropriate royalty. Destruction of industries and communities through industries moving offshore would cease-even as competition between and within regions increase. Prices would fall and living standards would rise rapidly even as the hours worked per week shrink.

·         And, to protect everyone's rights and freedom, the world's intelligence services should remain operative and alert. As opposed to being the planners of most of the world's most violent acts of terrorism, these agencies should be mandated to cooperate in preventing terrorist attacks anywhere in the world. As opposed to today's demanding job of suppressing breaks for freedom, that mandated change alone will eliminate most terrorism.

Powerful Nations will not willingly give up Their Superior Rights

Powerful nations respond only to another equal power. However, just laying out and broadly distributing the knowledge of how the wealth of the weak is appropriated by the powerful and outlining the simplicity of eliminating poverty by full and equal rights for all severely weakens these mighty powers.

It remains for all weak nations of a region to ally together to gain their freedom, just as the powerful nations have allied together although that reality is never openly acknowledged. Once allied together, the world's weak nations will have power. With that power they can negotiate to trade natural resources for technology, as per the guidelines for world development above, and they can negotiate for equality of pay for equally-productive work. To not do so is to stay in poverty and watch their natural wealth be continually transformed into someone else's manufactured and capitalized wealth.

Equal rights within the wealth-producing-process are just as important as political rights. With political rights you are politically free but may still be ill-clothed, poorly housed, and can starve. Add equal economic rights for all people to the democratic rights they now have through efficient and productive democratic-cooperative-(supercharged)-capitalism and all people can be well-fed, well-clothed, and live in a comfortable home.

Certainly those powerful nations will manufacture excuses as they always have (the leaders of these new breaks for freedom are killers, dictators, and terrorists) and send in the military to suppress these allied breaks for freedom. But, if these newly allied nations firmly hold their ground; a few hundreds of millions will no longer be able to preach peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule while simultaneously using their military to suppress those very same rights for billions of people.

Mahatma Gandhi of India showed that to the world. When the people of India stood up together, refused to fight, but also refused to accept British rule, the British had to leave. The availability of natural resources limits the production of wealth and those resources are primarily in the impoverished world. If the developing world refuses to work those mines, cut those forests, pump that oil, drive those trucks, or load those ships, the powerful nations will have no choice except to negotiate in good faith.[lll]

But before people can organize they must fully understand why they are poor while others are rich. Our research provides those simple reasons why and also maps the road out of poverty. Democratic-cooperative-(supercharged)-capitalism is that road.

In Chapter 7 we documented the expenditures of hundreds of billions of dollars by the imperial-centers-of-capital to protect their wealth and power through controlling the belief systems of the world. But that war of words is a war they cannot win if the developing world seriously engages them in that battle. The truth is too simple and too obvious.

For the masses to gain the knowledge to win this war of words, we ask that each who come across our research and gain this understanding to inform their personal contacts and have them inform all who trust their judgment. Many have, or sense, these fundamentals of poverty already; they just have not learned how to articulate them. A quick read of our research will provide the articulation tools to go head to head with those imposing the very philosophy that is creating their poverty. It is a debate the powerbrokers and their negotiators cannot win once the masses and their negotiators are armed with the simple tools of truth.

Form study groups to look deeply into every aspect of why there is poverty and how to eliminate it. Professors, organize your peers and students to study this in depth. This research is in use in university classes on World Conflict and Poverty. A democratic-cooperative-capitalism group has formed specifically so all people and your students can obtain these books at a reasonable price.

Expand these concepts through your books.[mmm] If all this were to happen, this knowledge will sweep across the world and not even the powerful nation's Mighty Wurlitzer could stop it. The truth is too simple and too sensible.

Being fully free is having full and equal economic rights. If the world's poor share this knowledge among themselves, and especially if developing world universities and governments accept the job of informing the masses, no amount of propaganda and bluster can stop the world from gaining their full rights and rising out of poverty.

Little of depth appears on the mainstream media but Argentina's, Brazil's, Uruguay's, and Ecuador's economies are in serious trouble. In Venezuela a Bolivarian Revolution is underway. The Venezuelan government once received 80% of the price of oil revenues, today it receives 20%, and the revolution is intent on a return to the previous share. The revolution in Columbia has the same underlying causes. More and more are thinking of joining together to break out of capitalism's stranglehold (search for http://www.narconews.com/, Heinz Dieterich Steffan, Venezuela).

Why do our politicians and evening news not inform us? Because those in power are primarily of the same mind and refuse to recognize that they are an empire let alone that their empire has no clothes. There is no left in the American political and media system, only a right and an extreme right and that nation is moving further right all the time. This thesis is not to the left, it is in the middle. We are not proposing government ownership of industry. We are proposing restructuring residual-feudal exclusive property rights to conditional rights which provide full and equal rights to all and maximize the efficiencies of the wealth-producing-process. The solid logic and the enormous gains possible under democratic-cooperative-(supercharged)-capitalism permits the misnamed left (really the middle) to regain their voice.

These are Historic Moments

We all know the story of the king whose clothier promised him clothes made of gold, could not create the gold thread, dressed him in invisible gold clothes, the whole kingdom marveled at his beautiful gold clothes, and it took a child to say, "The king has no clothes."

This allied empire has no clothes. For 50 years the imperial-centers-of-capital have dressed themselves in the fine clothes of peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule. Throughout those same 50 years the policies-of-state of that empire have been anything but peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule.

But the need for internal supporters and the unrest of the masses has forced powerbrokers to give more rights to the people. Simultaneously the need for allies to suppress the periphery of empire's break for freedom forced these same powerbrokers to give equal rights to nations essential to create a barrier to fast expanding socialism.

Once that struggle was won, those protections were substantially withdrawn. This has forced Japan to the edge of collapse and shrank the standard of living of the Asian Tigers. Argentina's economy has shrunk 60%, Brazil Uruguay, and a few other Latin American Countries are threatened with collapse. Russia is down 50% and Eastern Europe ranges from serious to substantial loss of living standards. Originally strengthened by the collapse of the periphery causing money to flee to the imperial center, powerbrokers are now trying to stave off a collapse of that center through gaining control of Iraq's oil, lower the price of oil to under $20 a barrel, and give a boost to the world economy.

These are historic moments. If a further collapse cannot be stopped and the empire's armies are busy hopping all over the globe to keep all countries in line, the empire will stand exposed. Many will see the light and say, "This Empire is not for peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule. This empire is for maintaining control of our resources and the wealth-producing-process."

When that can be said on the evening news-just as news anchor Walter Cronkite gave up on the Vietnam War, shaking his head at pictures of napalmed children, forcing the powerbrokers to make peace-people will in unison see that the empire has no clothes just as the kingdom spoke in unison that the king has no clothes once that small child spoke the obvious.

If we do not stand up and speak openly about the obvious, the world may not break free. Those are two options: freedom for all or the mighty military of the imperial centers controlling the world's resources, controlling the wealth-producing-process, and imposing poverty on weak nations. That is not necessary, eliminate the waste of that control process (in both internal economies and in world trade) and there is enough on this earth for everybody.

Restructuring to an efficient Internal Economy

An economic structure is a machine designed to care for a society's citizens. Just as more efficient machines reduce costs, a more efficient economic structure cheapens costs and produces better products. Addressed in depth in our primary work, Economic democracy, and summarized here, the elimination of subtle monopolies is the key to an efficient internal economy:

·         Eliminating the subtle monopolization of land through society collecting the landrent would instantly distribute land rights to every person, while eliminating all other taxes, and increasing economic efficiency equal to the invention of money.

·         Elimination of the subtle monopolization of technology, along with a job for each worker (each working only 2-to-3 days per week) and equal pay, would instantly and equitably distribute the values produced by that technology. The efficiency increase would equal the invention of the printing press.

·         Elimination of the subtle monopolization of finance capital would provide equal access to finance for all productive entrepreneurs and all productive businesses. The efficiency gains would equal the invention of electricity

·         And elimination of the not-so-subtle monopolization of information through returning a share of the communication wavelengths back to the modern commons for use by all, as outlined in Chapter 5 and more fully in this author's previous work, Economic Democracy, again creates a massive increase in economic efficiency.

·         As shown by how easily the world could be developed to a sustainable level and poverty eliminated in only 50 years those efficiency gains are equal to the invention money, the printing press and electricity

Democratic-Cooperative Capitalism-(Supercharged)-Capitalism, Restructuring all Societies to a Life of Leisure

Emerging nations can avoid being locked into the imperial centers enormously wasteful distribution system. With a modern communication system, as addressed in Chapter 5, it is possible to educate the citizens of the developing world even better than the industrialized world at from 5-to-15% the current cost. In retail distribution, also addressed in Chapter 5, utilizing the same efficient communications systems will lower distribution costs by possibly 50%.

Utilizing the efficiencies of democratic-cooperative-capitalism-(supercharged)-capitalism, these now-free nations would have the option of developing an efficient economy with large amounts of free time for everyone. Workers would have the choice of working five days a week for four months with their pay spread over the full year. They could work a full year and take two years off with pay. Or they could work two days a week the year round.

The most important aspect of abandoning residual-feudal exclusive property rights and regaining rights to a modern commons within democratic-cooperative-(supercharged)-capitalism is that private ownership, individuality, and competition is retained yet subtle monopolists disappear and the wealth created by nature (not that created by labor and capital [stored labor]) is-while working less for a higher standard of living-instantly distributed to all. Distribution of wealth would be through fully-productive labor, fully-productive capital, and the instant and costless distribution of use-value within a modern commons. Full and equal rights means none would be in poverty. GNP and the average workweek would fall by possibly half even as average living standards rise. Those reductions measure the wasted labor, wasted capital, and wasted resources under unrestricted private title to nature's wealth. The money no longer flows through those low-productivity subtle monopolies to provide a high living to those not producing.

The economic efficiency gains for society through elimination of subtle monopolization and a return to a modern commons within democratic-cooperative-(supercharged)-capitalism would equal the invention of money, the printing press, and electricity. Under democratic-cooperative-capitalism that reclaiming of the modern commons, a quality lifestyle is possible working only 2-to-3 days per week. The efficiencies of subtle-monopoly capitalism we have heard about for generations are fictions protecting the subtle monopolization of wealth and power. Economic efficiency has always been greater under conditional private ownership of what nature produces than under subtle monopolies created by residual-feudal exclusive private titles.

It is the arteries of commerce running through these unproductive subtle monopolies and the battles over monopolization of resources and the wealth-producing-process that wastes enormous amounts of labor, resources, and capital. Many are forced to the margins of the flow of commerce and some are excluded altogether. The expansion of full private property rights, individualism, and competition to all people under democratic-cooperative-(supercharged)-capitalism (a relatively small change in the legal structure of subtle-monopoly capitalism) brings all within the economic system, eliminates that waste, and creates an efficient, productive, peaceful society.