Detroit and America Must Choose to Banish Catch 22

Catch 22 is a phrase in the book by the same name that has come to mean a problem that has no solution, for it contains a circular argument, like those that have plagued Detroit for the past 63 years. These problems have been blamed for the misery of millions. Are they truly Catch 22?

Problem #1

To bring more business and population to Detroit, crime must be reduced. But crime cannot be reduced unless there are jobs that pay living wages. And jobs will not be created unless there are incoming businesses, which will not come because there is too much crime.

……………………………………………Catch 22….

Problem #2

Crime will not be reduced unless would be criminals can find jobs to replace benefits of crime. To do so, those jobs must pay living wages. But a majority of the unemployed are illiterate and undereducated and do not qualify for jobs that pay living wages. Therefore, they cannot obtain jobs that will pay living wages. Without a living wage, crime will not be reduced.

……………………………………………Catch 22….

Problem #3

America’s unemployed need jobs. To employ Americans, a minimum legal wage must be paid. But the world competes to make and sell widgets, and world wages to make widgets are less than America’s minimum legal wage. Therefore widgets must be made overseas and sold to Americans. Making widgets overseas keeps Americans unemployed and without jobs.

……………………………………………Catch 22….

For the past 63 years, since the peak of employment and population, the leadership of Detroit, as well as most major cities in America, has accepted the Catch 22 paradigm that their economic problems are unsolvable and therefore, not really a burden that is theirs to carry. Accepting the Catch 22 paradigm means they condemn America to high unemployment and high crime in our inner cities. Accepting the Catch 22 paradigm means that millions of lives will go unfulfilled and wasted, that millions of children go unfed each night, and that our nation suffers as we commit the least of ours to an arduous lifelong pursuit of happiness.

Catch 22 paradigms are roadblocks that keep America’s political leadership from helping America to reach optimal output and productivity. Catch 22 paradigms are impediments that keep Americans from reaching their highest opportunity for all to pursue happiness.

Catch 22 paradigms, however, are merely paradigms that are placed in the collective consciousness of America by those that wish them to exist. America is conditioned to accept them yet they need not be accepted. Owners of capital benefit from them. Political leaders benefit from them. The rest of America does not benefit from them. If America accepts these paradigms, they continue. If America simply rejects these paradigms, they vanish.

Catch 22 paradigms support the efforts of owners of capital to create maximum wealth but cost trillions of dollars and millions of jobs in the American economy. America could force American capitalists to spend their dollars in America. But our history, principles, and laws support the freedom of owners of capital to spend their dollars in whatever part of the world provides the highest returns.

To force owners of capital to spend their dollars in America would require a change of laws that would turn on our principles of freedom for all Americans. We cannot turn our back on our heritage of freedom. Therefore, we accept that the economic engine of America, the capital of our wealthy elite will be spent in other parts of the world, costing trillions of dollars of loss and millions of jobs in our economy.

…………………………………………………Catch 22

Solutions do exist to Catch 22. American owners of capital can make profits in America to employ our workforce without forcing them to spend dollars here if political compromise is made to allow equivalent profit. Jobs can be created that include a living wage, if political compromise allows for living wages. Crime can then be reduced and the pursuit of happiness can be lifted to a higher plane. And believe it or not, all of this can be accomplished without spending more tax dollars, which is the ultimate cry of those shouting Catch 22.

These real and viable solutions, however, require political compromise. America’s economic problems have arisen from deep seated differences of vision that drive conservative and liberal parties alike to pursue their own visions without compromise, producing the political vacuum that must exist for Catch 22 paradigms to live.

In Detroit, one vision is for all that have made it through the gauntlet and that have risen at least to the middle class to escape to the suburbs, and to make Downtown a playground fortress against the poverty of the inner city, while giving up the rest of Detroit’s citizens to Catch 22. The other vision is to form a grass roots effort to fight the plight caused by Catch 22 to all of Detroit’s citizens, yet without attacking Catch 22 as a mere paradigm. They therefore accept its paradigm that economic suffering must continue. Detroit’s two opposing visions have fought compromise since the riots of 1967 brought their opposing views into the political light.

Problems that such a lack of compromise creates in Detroit then cause the city to fester without solution. Polarized city political leaderships acquiesce to the meager capital investments left for their cities as they pursue their opposing political visions. Polarized state political leadership compete with other states for limited capital investments by promising owners of capital that they will not have to share the tax burdens of the state. And polarized federal political leaders pass legislation to allow for owners of capital to make maximum profits overseas at the expense of jobs at home.

Political leaders become convinced that their political interests lie closer to the owners of capital than to those of the rest of their constituency. Without having to compromise across the aisle, they pass Catch 22 legislation that make it easier for owners of capital to invest dollars overseas while escaping the uncompromising political fighting that continues at home. Political leaders’ efforts on behalf of America’s elite become an easier route to remaining in political power than having to bend in political compromise on behalf of America.

Detroit’s solution rests in ending Catch 22. America’s solution rests in ending Catch 22. The solution to ending Catch 22 rests in political compromise that puts Detroit’s future, America’s future ahead of political expediency. Viable solutions exist. Jobs can be created. Owners of capital can be rewarded in America. Much suffering can be banished. The American economy can return to prosperity.

No Catch 22….

A Social Contract Exists Between Business and the Government of the People

While classical corporatism has other meanings, the context of corporatism to which I refer is really neo-corporatism, the power shifting that occurs between owners, managers and labor for economic sharing. it’s this whole shift of power from individuals to the state to the corporations that defines our modern day and controls our every pattern of life. I continue to question the flaws of corporatism in that it does not meet the goals of man’s orignal intent.

Corporations came into existence because kings wanted them for their own aggrandizement and because other aggressive men saw this as an entrance to sharing power with kings. Corporations were not intended by their original form to be the answer for full employment. Yet through the centuries this orignal intent has been replaced by an unwritten social contract of employment for the good of the community.

As society evolved, craftsmen found that work other than that on the farm could sustain them and their apprentices and thus businesses were formed, again with no social contract other than that which could be gained by the mutual benefit of seller and buyer.

But within man is the natural state of altruism. It is in our DNA. We cannot walk by others in squalor without a tinge to help. This tendency then manifests itself in government for government is merely the mirror of our sense of self. So governments evolve a structure of social safety nets to help the less fortunate among us. With such artificial constructs, how then do we provide for the needy except through various abnormal means such as taxation and such impositions on businesses as the minimum wage?

Now through advances in innovation and productivity, businesses have provided more and more for the common good and thus the level of squalor that we can conceive of allowing within our community continues to lessen. We expect that the least among us should be provided for through higher and higher standards. Such standards as these could not possibly be provided for if man were to be turned away from society to exist on his own living on only that which he could carve out of the wilderness.

And even if he could, there is no wilderness for men to exist within, for our modern capitalism has divvied all lands to provide the capital for modern business to thrive and for government to use as a means for the common safety net of its citizens. Therefore, the modern construct of corporatism that our nations have agreed will be the means to provide for the common good no longer provides an escape or alternative for the rugged individual.

We must therefore agree that a social contract exists whereby the capture of land and capital by government and business must also provide for those less fortunate and must provide for the employment of all to exist and to contribute to the community. This social contract that has haphazardly evolved is broken and must be fixed by an equally evolving paradigm of the right of all men to full employment.

Business exists for the Sustenance of Mankind

For those that continue to harp that businesses do not exist for the purpose of creating jobs, let me set the record straight. Business has the responsibility of 100% effective and sustainable employment. In this “modern” era, mankind has fallen susceptible to the idea that business is an organism coexisting in time with men, finding arms lengths symbiosis whereby each feeds off the other but neither have a responsibility further than from what can be gained.

This odd paradigm that business does not have the purpose of creating jobs is an erroneous fiction of our time. While it may be quite true when viewed from the perspective of an individual business including the sole purpose of its owners and managers to make profit, the idea that the purpose of business does not include providing employment is one that has mutated in the evolution of the era of individualism.

Before our time, in the era of Kings, men held other misconceptions such as the purpose of land. It was widely held that land should not provide each serf his own castle but instead should connect all in servitude to the king (similarly to connecting all mankind as a series of batteries connected by wires to provide the electrical power for the nation of computers as seen in the movie “The Matrix”). Kings would grant temporary sharing of power to corporations to reward those who would risk life to advance the kingdom.

Yet in their quest for more, Kings allowed this power sharing to gain a foothold and their power spread too thin amongst the businesses. In this devolvement of power, the era of kings diminished and the era of fiat money derived from gold renting rose. With it, a new paradigm of business came to being. Businessmen gathered the trappings of power; money, ideas, inventions, innovations, labor, these were those that provided aggressive men the means to acquire kingdoms unto themselves. Yet in the beginning, these new mini-kingdoms existed within the realms of the nation-state, still subject to the whims of the king.

Ultimately, as businessmen acquired a majority of power, they demanded and received their due. A new paradigm arrived whereby these captains of industry exchanged seats with the rulers and the rulers bowed to them, becoming puppets to their whims instead. Now the new kings of business shared their power with the people to hold them in abeyance. But as the masses rose in opposition to workplace excesses, power once again shifted and all prospered in a moment of whimsical balance created only by the transfer of time and power toward its ultimate destiny.

We now have a period of imbalance that will only worsen over time. Businesses will continue to garner power from the transition toward the corporate state. And with the power shift, the middle class will suffer even more from this unnatural imbalance. Mankind is meant to be communal. Not that all should be equal or share equally but that all should contribute to the common good. Systems that provide that opportunity include businesses. Business owners are cogs in the wheel of life and have the responsibility to employ all in the community for the common good.

Yet individual businesses should not have to employ any more than that which is needed by increased innovation and productivity. Therefore, if excess unemployment exists, an artificial constraint, unnatural, ungodly, and unsustainable exists; one that is only imposed on man by those that would seek to enrich their own mini-kingdoms. And now that the era of kings is dead, those mini-kingdoms hide out in the marshes of government bureaucracy. Therefore, the bindings of government that have created it must be loosened, and a new paradigm of mutuality between government and business must be created with the outcome of full employment.

Changing the Current Corporate Paradigm Will Help America Thrive

The corporation is an artificial construct originated centuries ago to give investors and workers legal protections that balanced risk taking with entrepreneurial rewards. This construct propelled national economies to new heights, which would not otherwise have been achieved. Corporations and derivatives such as LLCs to this day provide America with the best balance for entrepreneurial growth. Yet, with the creation of the corporation, a new life form began that has now evolved to test the very nations that gave it life. Like Frankenstein, the corporation has loosened its legal bindings at the economic frontier and now has the potential to become the corporate-state master of its nation-state creator.

This imposition by corporate-states upon nation-states is appalling. Our government institutions have been rotted from the inside to their skin and their innards have been replaced with government zombies that dutifully perform functions set upon them by their corporate masters. It is a ghastly phenomenon centuries in the making, visible to the naked eye for at least a hundred years, formed from the initial character of corporations. Yet, we humans are caught in our original paradigm of corporations as servants of the nation and are unable to see a new corporate threat evolving.

We call the newest corporate form transnational or multinational. Yet these terms merely define the world’s current paradigm of the frontier edge of corporatism. They name this static moment in the development of the corporation, and not what it is becoming. “Anational” refers to the transforming paradigm of the corporation that has loosened its host nation’s bindings and that is no longer attracted to any nation except in terms of what it might gain from that nation, similarly to how the term “asexual” refers to a human that is not attracted to any gender sexually except for how that contact might produce its offspring.

We mistakenly attempt to label anationals’ evolving perverse power as having a human form, AKA Citizens United. Yet the only way we can continue to call corporations people having citizen power is to also label their behavior humanly perverse, almost psychopathic. Our problem is that we attempt to give human characteristics to all life forms. We would rather call a great white shark a man-eating monster than to swim in its skin, defining its repeatable patterns meant to enhance its sustainability on this planet. If instead of calling corporations people, we could understand how corporate-states consistently act to sustain their lives, we would not have to denigrate corporate existence with human behavioral terms but rather celebrate corporate life form, as we should any other on this planet.

Celebrating a life form does not mean approaching it cavalierly. At their evolving frontier boundary, corporations are gaining enormous capacity to bend nations to their will, in ways that do not help our citizens. In an effort to stave off the inevitable, scholars like Michael Porter write of co-opting corporations toward patriotism, citizenship, or perhaps more precisely corporate responsibility to host nations, or at least including nation states in the list of corporate stakeholders. Yet these attempts to persuade corporations to take on human characteristics are only stop gaps to the evolving threat.

Just as the U.S. can coax China to participate as partners at this stage of our empire’s shifting power sharing, the U.S. can still coerce corporations to participate as national citizens to some extent, even those as powerful as corporate-states. Yet, just as the power struggle between China and the U.S. will ultimately intensify, our ability to co-opt the growing power of corporate states is also waning.

The time will come when corporate states gain a plurality of world power and work together for the betterment of the metropolis of corporate states. By then, nation states by necessity will also have evolved to retain our maximum power. We will then no longer see corporations as people with the rights of citizens. Instead they will finally be correctly defined from the nation-state perspective as a means to an end and will be measured and rewarded for what they can add to the nation-state.

The idea that corporations are people with citizens’ rights will be replaced by the idea that corporations are self-sustaining life forms that live amongst us just as bacteria and bears do. We will acknowledge that corporations perform vital functions in the advancement of humanity but that they can kill us if we do not respect their limitations. Nations will pursue the harnessing of anationals’ positive aspects and will intensify efforts to corral their negative ones. We will understand that corporations are not wild horses that can be contained in national regulatory pens and ridden rodeo style.

Most nations today are nowhere near large enough to contain anationals’ eventual strengths with only national regulatory and legal tools. Nations will by necessity have to cooperatively combine efforts. Unfortunately, the world will also destabilize as smaller nations attempt to consume one another to find scale large enough to survive the next millennium. The very existence of corporate-states will cause tribes to devalue regional differences that have defined current national boundaries formed to combat external threats. China is not a single tribe nor is India or the United States. Others will follow.

Some might label my corporate musings as conspiratorial paranoia. Yet conspiracy is simply another human trait that would attempt to contain the evolution of anationals within our human boundaries. Conspiracy by definition suggests that anationals are somehow more aware of the global shift taking place than nation-states and thus are light years ahead in their planning and efforts. Along the bell curve, some nations such as China are able by their historical circumstances to have a much longer planning horizon than others. Similarly, some anationals are much more aware of their future posterity than others and are acutely acting on their global economic advantages. As a whole however, nation-states and corporate-states are adrift in this sea of evolution, making short-term sustenance moves, as they are able.

Great white sharks instinctively know that they must sometimes migrate throughout the entirety of the ocean, but like humans they give their greatest weight of thought to their next meal rather than where they will be during mating season. Yet, somehow the world aligns to bring them home again, and it will also align to reposition the power of anationals higher in the hierarchy of states. Thought to how nation-states must react to this realignment is warranted.

What this realignment means for humanity is unclear. The role of the nation-state to serve its people, economically and otherwise, providing a balance along the life wheel of work and play, protection and freedom, stability and exploration, sustenance and opportunity is becoming increasingly threatened. People’s allegiances to corporate-states will strengthen as realignment intensifies, threatening national allegiances and humanity’s balance further unless we learn to coexist. Shifting our current paradigm of the corporation will serve us well in that effort.

Are Corporate States Alien Life Forms Here to Destroy or to Help the Human Race

For forty years, lobbyists have multiplied, as has their power to write and financially support changing laws of our country for their benefit. Sensing lobbyists growing power, politicians have enacted laws to limit corporate impact, but at every turn, other laws are passed that pat corporations on their backs for their ardent support of political clients.

For forty years, corporations have been nurtured in the womb of America’s heartland as inhuman zygotes preparing for eventual world competition. Yet, even as these multinational corporations grew stronger suckling on our country’s teat, their MBA mantra of short-term gains began to separate these new life forms from their motherland.

Citizens United was a celebration of the birth of the anational corporate state, corporations large enough to exist on their own outside of the reach of any one nation. Yet having broken free of inconvenient national bindings, corporate states could not just remain stagnant babies in our world. They must now evolve and commune together for their species’ survival.

Just as mankind grew from hunters and gatherers to city-states and finally nation states; just as nation states developed from mercantilist competitors to a league of earth’s cohabitants; corporate states must also now evolve. It is natural for these corporate states to want their own legislative bodies to form compromises in the shaping of bills that minimize intercorporate conflicts and that allow each to flourish like weeds in the gardens of their host nation-states.

ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is one such advance in their evolution. It continues their path of lobbyist democracy that has defined America for the past 40 years, yet it takes corporations to their next stage of evolution of feasting on nation state’s legislative bodies for corporate gains. Unless citizens of nation states learn that their conduit of representation has been usurped, and unless we finally agree to co-opt our corporate citizens into recognizing human citizens as stakeholders in corporate successes, America will ultimately become fodder in the new world order.

As a pragmatic nationalist, I favor learning to live amongst this new life form, the anational corporate state, and to harness it, even to domesticate it as we would a farm animal if possible for the betterment of mankind.

Humans evolved from living in caves to the nation states we see today. Along the way, we formed governments. Then these governments formed alliances and finally several world bodies. It was an evolution interspersed with several revolutions.

Corporations are another life form, incorrectly identified by our supreme court as people. That is why our supreme court is a legal entity, not one paid to do biological work. But as any life form, corporations too will evolve and, similarly to people, will most likely be involved in revolutions as well along the way.

They first appeared hundreds of years ago, well before the founding of America. At first, nation states thought they could be domesticated, even house broken, like little pot-bellied pigs. Over the years, America nurtured our cute little corporations and we wrote rules for their existence, which they seemed to follow for the most part. Sure, during the big wars, they exhibited wild like tendencies, often seeming to harm their nation state keepers in the process but we thought we had a handle on how to keep them tame.

But in reality, they were learning how to tame us. They were aliens, living in our world, like little terrorists cells do today, learning our ways. Somehow, they grew big enough to control the nerve centers of nation states, our political structures. They grew powerful enough to send nation states to wars on their behalf and to enforce and install puppet governments in other nation states. And when they became too large to exist within one nation state under its monopoly regulations, they finally learned how to split cells and to pass from one body to the next just as parasites leave their hosts.

As these new life forms continued to evolve, they mutated, each learning to live as one being with cells in multiple nation state bodies, hearts in one nation state, brains in another, still more organs and muscles in others. And they thrived and grew into corporate states, not tied to any nation, anational if you will. Yet at this stage, their existence was similar to the human stage of evolution perhaps in the feudal period.
It was merely another stage of their evolution however to want to commune together eventually. Certainly, corporate states have fought each other as well as worked together complementary. Yet they have had to find their ways individually and to seek each other out as they grew and developed needs. Communing together in associations helped to identify one to another more easily. And ALEC was a natural step in their evolution. With ALEC, they could form a modest “Governmental Function” of working together to identify how nation-state laws could best be constructed to mutually help this burgeoning society of corporate states.

Now if corporate states coexisted symbiotically with humans, say as trees providing us oxygen and wood without too much harm, they would be no cause for concern. But they do not. They have learned to mutate and grow within our systems and to cause harm. One needs to merely draw a timeline out into the future a few decades to understand that the trajectory does not bode well for nation states. Therefore, obviously something must be done for the human race to coexist harmoniously with the corporate state.

Anationals are amorphous beings and that even as laws are passed to contain them, they simply shapeshift to skirt the flimflam. Of course, I do not support the silliness of such flimsy cover for obvious lobbying that creates loopholes as large as trucks to drive home democracy splintering corporatism. This needs to be uncovered and bureaucratically defended even as they shapeshift to a new attack on our Republic.

Yet they are a life form that will not be snuffed out and they will grow as a cancer to consume the lifeblood of America unless we can co-opt them in some symbiotic fashion. So rather than beat my head against the wall that has been built between anational corporate states and our access to our own politicians, my intellectual effort will be to understand how we might harness their emerging strengths for the good of America.

America Faces a Worldwide Economic Revolution

In the midst of America’s great economic crisis, factions from every point in the political spectrum have raised issues as causes for America’s demise. Yet most of America’s problems, when examined in the light of day, are simply symptoms of our greater issues or even just political noise, offering no real hope in deducing the core of our dilemma. America will ultimately begin a path toward our thriving future. Yet, to do so, we must first clarify the true essence of our core problems before we can agree on viable solutions.

To that end, let’s peel back the political onion to examine what some say are our core issues, and then continue to peel until we briefly reach and peer into the collective complexity of our true core. Fret not however. An onion can make one cry because of its many stinky layers, but America’s solution knives, even those identified within these bindings, can cut through all of them.

Over the past three decades, we Americans spent our way to a debt mountain and a housing bubble that will take years to correct. Factions such as the Tea Party have risen up to chastise our government and to slow its ballooning debt even as record Federal deficits are predicted to continue for at least the next decade. Theirs is a worthy cause for what seems a politically irresolvable dilemma. But even if America comes together to solve our debt issues, reducing our debt will only remove a symptom of our nation’s core problem.

If we are to reduce America’s debt without defaulting on our worldwide financial obligations, we must once again employ all able Americans in productive, well paying jobs. Yet in the midst of our bursting housing bubble, we discovered that for three decades America had also created a false employment bubble, which burst as our economy faltered. As a result of our jobs deficit, America is now in danger of lingering in a severely dampened economy for many years to come, certainly another critical symptom.

America has fallen into a monetary contraction resulting from a combination of our housing debt overhang, our poor credit and a lack of jobs. A viable turnaround solution to this monetary implosion should be immediately implemented to begin America’s journey toward our thriving path, and Congress and the President must support it. Yet, while our slowly eroding jobs base, diminished credit and housing debt overhang must be simultaneously corrected if we are to have any hope of more than a token recovery, our monetary implosion, however frightening, is still at the edge of America’s core problem.

Faced with such dismal prospects for debt reduction and job creation, America is now forced to choose between two competing constituencies. Our very concept of freedom almost demands that we support free enterprise, for it has helped America’s multinational corporations compete in the world’s rapidly transforming marketplace. Yet, the immense worldwide scale of free enterprise is now tearing apart our middle class, assaulting the American worker, and we seem powerless to even slow its destructive path. This choice between competing alternatives of either 1) supporting American businesses in their quest to rise above world competition or of 2) supporting the American worker, who is being diminished by those same corporations’ conquests, begins to converge toward the core of America’s problems. Over the past thirty years, emerging nations have conducted mercantilist attacks on America’s gross national product. Yet, our government has resisted creating the economic weapons required to defend our nation against modern hybrids of global competition.

America is already thirty years behind the curve of economic revolution. We are seemingly only observers to a world in which free enterprise is a both a bulwark of defense used by nations against those that would employ mercantilist offenses against them, and also an offensive siege weapon used by emerging corporate-states to destroy the classical defenses of nations that would attempt to resist their growing invasive economic powers.

During these thirty “standstill” years of observing the world’s economic revolution, America’s baby boomer generation rose to positions of power in business and government. In the comfort of our former world prestige, our baby boomers enjoyed the luxury of basking in decades of societal actualization. We focused our attention on America’s internal problems at the expense of creating a competitive manufacturing base. Our political struggles over competing societal goals of social justice and military superiority blinded us to our emerging jobs crisis. Yet, the hungry world fiercely competed for and took from us our very own consumers and employers.

America’s consumers naively embraced the world’s competition for our dollar. We enjoyed the low priced fruits of a desperate world’s labor, not understanding the impact that our purchases would have in the destruction of American jobs, the explosion of our debt, and the diminishment of future opportunities for America’s growth. For awhile, the savings we enjoyed from globalization offset our slowly diminishing purchasing power. Yet, over three decades, our purchases raised the world’s productivity, brought an onslaught of global competition to our shores, and ultimately replaced the American worker with an army of overseas laborers.

Eastern nations adopted hybrid economies of neo-mercantilism to rise above the fray of neo-colonialism and to position Asia for a century of prosperity. Unchecked by any natural defenses against them, neo-mercantilist nations joined forces with international banks and emerging corporate giants to concentrate the world’s economic power for China’s 21st century rise toward hegemony. In the process of this world economic shift, America’s future competitors, the corporate-states, were born.

Fierce, global competition required American businesses to employ all manners of competitive measures including intercontinental scale efficiencies. As the world would soon come to realize, the international skills multinational corporations learned to survive included those necessary to pit nations against each other and to overcome the regulatory frameworks nations imposed in vain attempts to restrict corporations’ intrusions into domestic markets.

In the process, these commercial behemoths of corporatism trampled on America’s two hundred year foundation of classical free enterprise. Within the context of our government’s regulatory framework for fair competition, America’s version of free enterprise envisioned all nations playing by our rules of engagement. In the past thirty years of economic revolution, America instead became Redcoats in the global economic war. Our structured business legal system was a bright red target easily slaughtered by guerrilla warfare of nations and corporate-states intent on pillaging America’s capital and intellectual property.

As defined by our anti-trust laws, America’s isolationist views of perfect competition required that our industries limit any one competitor’s size to well under what could be called a monopoly within our borders. Our legislated size limits were smaller than the mega-factory direct foreign investments required to compete globally. As a result, even if not the root cause of business flight, America nonetheless needlessly influenced American businesses offshore in their bid for massive customer markets such as India’s and China’s.

Some of American corporations’ resulting worldwide operations have grown into virtual states. In their unquenched quest for profit, they have created international offensive siege weapons to easily circumvent the purposes of such antiquated American concepts contained within the Sherman Antitrust Act. Many of our historically American-centric enterprises have since blurred their connections with America. Consequently, the Sherman Act has become increasingly challenged by free market advocates as an albatross of regulation. Alternately, it has been condemned by those charged with protecting the rights of consumers and domestic small businesses in America as a weak, antiquated tool of defense.

Globalization has brought competing American interests to the brink yet we dare not allow political dysfunction to keep America on the sideline of global competition any longer. We somehow must now collaborate to support America’s multinational industries’ quests while simultaneously protecting our own competitive domestic market. We must provide a pro-business environment that places America’s businesses on par with those of other countries while stopping international corporations from employing siege weapons of free enterprise against our citizens. We must provide competitive yields for capital in America to ensure America’s posterity by reversing the tide of capital outflows from our country. And we must ensure that our loose federation of American businesses can compete globally against neo-mercantilist countries. America must define the post neo-mercantilist era.

We will soon be living in a land full of global corporate giants that employ modern offensive economic weapons to consume nations. Yet unlike the neo-mercantilist countries that have attempted to create hybrid, state run industries immersed in private capitalism to compete with these futuristic monstrosities, America has not yet even begun to create its weaponry against neo-mercantilists such as China, and certainly has no viable plans against emerging corporate-states.

As America faces the prospects of diminished power in this 21st century economic revolution, we must adapt to the corporate power realities that all nations will face. Our future thriving path strategies will inevitably merge the goals of our giant, American born, corporate-states with those of our nation and its citizens. Yet our government must go beyond such surface strategies to create America’s post neo-mercantilist framework to harness the power of corporate-states for the betterment of our citizens and for all nations.

If we are to create a thriving outcome from the 21st century economic revolution for all on our finite planet, America must seek out the core of our problems and create a model for other nations to follow. Our thriving path forward begins here.

The U.S. Senate Must Empty the Stench of Its Chamber’s Pot

Increasingly, our “do-nothing” Congress is seen as the impediment to America’s recovery, but is this a fair assessment? Some say that more specifically the Senate, a chamber intended for elites to represent other elites, is out of touch with Middle America and is the “real” representative chasm. The Senate voted 235 times in 2011, hardly do nothing. Yet when compared to the previous 6 years in which the Senate voted an average 334 times, 42 percent more, something seems amiss. So I investigated.

After finding that 80% of major legislation was filibustered in the Senate, I hoped I would not find a stench in the chamber pot of the Senate’s chamber. Yet a review of 2011 Senate votes was more stinky than I imagined. Filibustering and procedure that stalled to a mere 235 votes had reached limits of credulity. For instance, cloture, a seldom used historical tool now was common place. With votes to proceed and to table, 77 votes were cast in 2011, a full third of the votes.

After 2005, when the use of the nuclear option was threatened and the Senate feared losing its filibuster toy, voting to confirm judges has become much more procedural. All 44 of the 235 votes cast for judges confirmed them. Include these to other procedural votes and a majority of 2011 votes, 52% were cast. Add 9% more votes cast for appropriations bills that many Senators did not read, and 61% of the votes were a foregone conclusion.

Some have accused the Senate of being in the pocket of big business, and not to disappoint, both parties voted for international business 43 times, an additional 18% of votes, on such interests as trade bills, IRS rules, patent reform, wage restrictions, currency exchange rate oversight and military non-appropriations bills like the sale of military equipment to Taiwan and the extension of the Patriot Act. So if we include Senate rules, votes on judges, spending appropriations and big business, these measures were 80% of Senate votes in 2011.

So what did this “do-nothing” Senate spend its remaining 47 votes accomplishing? Included in these remaining votes were 12 non-appropriations bills that passed the Senate floor. Of these, 4 were trade bills that the Senate claimed would produce jobs but by historical accounts will continue to gut America. 2 bills repealed previous impositions on business including a government withholding of vendor payments and IRS reporting rules. 2 bills extended previous bills including the Patriot Act. Of course, the ability to detain American citizens indefinitely was slipped in there somewhere.

That left 4 remaining 2011 bills that had any hope of meeting the most urgent needs of America. Did the Senate have a pulse on what could fix our slide into a jobless stagnation? Did they bring to the floor those bills that could create a better future for our children? What were the pressing needs that America’s Senate felt were the most important? Apparently the Senate thought they were patent reform, alignment of misaligned currency, modernizing air traffic control, and reducing the executive positions requiring Senate approval.

I was sure that critically important jobs bills would have made it to the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2011. Two motions to proceed on jobs bills were in fact voted on but were rejected outright. Also, one jobs amendment made it to a vote but failed to win a majority.

My analysis did not shine a favorable light on this esteemed chamber of our legislature. Perhaps all in Congress will analyze their poor 2011 performance for themselves and make a new year’s resolution to hear the call of America prior to the 2012 elections. Alas when they do not, America must resolve to listen to our own voices and to vote in a new Congress.

It is Time for The U.S. Government to Grow Up

America faces a major dilemma. We support free enterprise principles that help America’s multinational corporations compete in the world’s rapidly transitioning competitive market. Yet when faced with the immense worldwide scale of free enterprise, we are adamant about protecting the American consumer and worker from the assault of big business.

During the baby boomer generation’s rise to positions of power in business and in government, the world transformed to a global stage. While the post-war generation struggled to an impasse regarding competition for taxes to fund both warfare and welfare, we hesitantly overlooked the world’s competition for the American consumer. The true definition of a trust supersized past its concept as captured in the Sherman Anti-trust Act, crossing international boundaries in the process.

To compete on a global scale, corporations necessarily have had to increase size and scope to capture world market share. As sizes of the world’s largest corporations increased exponentially, their scale efficiencies and cost shifting capabilities offered significant trust opportunities at home. As a result, in the U.S. domestic market, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 became increasingly challenged as an albatross of regulation from proponents of free enterprise and as a weak, antiquated tool of defense among those charged with protecting the rights of consumers and domestic small businesses in America.

So now we have competing interests. On the one hand, Americans want to support our industries as they compete with those from other countries to secure a growing world market share. On the other hand, the free enterprise principles required to compete globally create scale that flies in the face of the very laws and regulations deemed necessary to protect our domestic competitive market. The resulting tension of this dilemma is easily witnessed in protected markets such as U.S. drug companies that charge U.S. customers ten times what they charge international customers for the same product. It is less easily seen in growing oligarchies like airlines and banks but the effects on the American public are just as onerous.

Once again, we have another growing immaturity on the part of our Federal government as it stares into the abyss, unable to ferret out sustainable solutions in a rapidly transitioning world. Of course, American businesses must be allowed to grow to compete on the global stage. However, if the ultimate size of a corporation needed to compete globally requires that it surpass the size limits that fit America’s definition of a competitive domestic market, then this dilemma must be resolved by the application of sensible historical principles.

What may be necessary to allow businesses to grow beyond a healthy limit for our domestic competitive market is that we allow businesses to cross boundaries of competitive size, but in exchange, we compensate with more regulation in the home market. This principle is alive and well in America in such industries as power and gas.

In banking, however, we did just the opposite. We cut banking regulations at the very time that we allowed big banks to consolidate the U.S. market. The result of such government immaturity regarding our understanding of the nature of trusts was that the world financial market is now imploding. It is time for our government to grow up.

The Solution is Relatively Simple if The Will is Relatively Strong

Without extraneous noise from various American factions over the past thirty years, the logic for how America fell into this economic mess is relatively straight forward. The reasons why previously tried and currently proposed solutions will not work are equally as coherent. A solution for digging America quickly out of the circular predicament we are in is relatively straightforward. What is not straight forward is the gerrymandered path through Congress to do what is needed on behalf of the American People. What follows are general truths (although each has exceptions to the rule). See if you agree.

What do we know?

• The Western World’s banks lent to both businesses and consumers beyond historically safe levels for three decades. As a result:

oThe West is now bloated with excess private debt
o The economy is struggling to pay debt loads and default rates are high
o Debt repayment has absorbed discretionary revenues that would otherwise be invested into a growing economy

• America used excessive bank credit to spend beyond its means for the past three decades. As a result:

o Money was available to fund speculative bubbles. Higher bubble values in turn made more money available to spend on consumer needs during the bubble rises
o Investment and housing bubbles propped up 15 million jobs beyond what the underlying economy would have otherwise if America simply spent within our means
o As real economy jobs transferred to the East, America’s underlying weakening economy was hidden by our continued excess spending

• America’s Federal Government borrowed to pay for welfare and warfare for four decades. As a result:

o America’s public debt grew to 100% of GDP, a level that could absorb all public discretionary spending if interest rates rise, spending that would otherwise assist a growing economy
o Further increases in Federal debt could result in America’s credit rating being lowered which in turn could force higher interest rates

• The rubber band of excess spending could only stretch to finite limits. As a result:

o When the limit was finally reached, Banks knew first and moved quickly to protect themselves from what they knew would be a free fall by closing credit lines, charging exorbitant rates on outstanding credit debt, and stopping lending even to credit worthy consumers
o Without access to consumer credit to cover the shortfall between incomes and housing debt, consumer demand stalled
o Without access to credit, the housing bubble popped and housing prices freefell
o To make ends meet, consumers cannibalized financial investments and investment prices fell
o Within a very few years, much of America’s housing and commercial real estate debt far exceeded the value of underlying properties

• With the collapse of housing values and credit, the plug was pulled on the artificial engine of growth. As a result:

o Consumer demand contracted
o Demand for labor then contracted and jobs were lost
o Federal tax revenues contracted as unemployment rose
o Lower housing values reduced state and local tax revenues

• State governments that required balanced budgets and local governments, dependent on housing tax revenues were rescued initially by Federal stimulus dollars. As a result:

o State and local governments failed to react quickly and responsibly to a permanently lowered tax base.
o Many states and municipal governments came perilously close to default

• American multinational businesses were buoyed by Asian GDP growth but our domestic businesses were hammered by a weakened domestic economy. As a result:

o Multinational businesses secured substantial cash balances but withheld investing over concerns of the world’s teetering economy
o Domestic businesses shrank with the contracting economy, lost access to credit, and laid off employees to survive.

How does America wish to respond to the crisis?

Republicans want to:

• Protect military spending
• Recover through less government spending, lower taxes, and less regulations

Yet:

o Even without cutting taxes, balancing the federal budget will require cutting 43 cents of every dollar the federal government now spends
o Military spending and its hidden ancillary spending cost a third of the federal budget. Without drastic cuts to military expenditures as well as all other federal expenditures, the federal budget cannot be balanced.
o If we do not curb deficit spending to quickly achieve a balanced budget, America’s interest rates will rise and cut off federal discretionary priorities
o Lowering taxes without cuts in government spending that offset not only the tax cuts but the extreme deficits now in place would exacerbate an already dangerous interest rate precipice

Compromise issues:
o Government spending is steadily increasing. Government spending increases and not just rate reductions in increases must be reversed.
o While lower taxes are one way to provide the private sector additional revenue for growth, it is not the only way. The private sector can acquire investment capital by other means if credit can be accessed.

Democrats want to:

• Increase social programs, secure social agencies, and protect entitlements
• Recover through stimulus spending and supporting state and local budgets
• Increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs

Yet:

o Even without reducing government spending, federal taxes would have to increase 75 percent across the board to balance the budget
o The United States could not spend enough to stimulate the entire world’s demand in order to recover from a worldwide monetary implosion. Thus far, $2 trillion in stimulus spending and $15 trillion in loans has budged the world’s economy little and has had no multiplicative effect.
o It is evident that the economy will not recover enough to offset stimulus spending with increased tax revenues. Therefore, stimulus will further exacerbate the federal debt and invites a faster debt rating reduction and higher interest rates

Compromise issues:
o To balance the budget, social welfare spending must be reduced, along with all other budget line items, to much less than America spends today
o To at least maintain America’s middle class standard of living, GDP growth must keep up with population growth. GDP growth must be supported by investment capital. Congress must either redistribute Federal spending to support higher private sector productivity, lower taxes to free up private sector investment capital, or entice business to invest domestically by creating a better business environment

America’s unemployed and underemployed want to:

• Find productive employment
• Gain access to credit
• Reduce their debt payments
• Eliminate their housing bubble debt overhang
• Regain savings for retirement

Yet:

o Jobs will not become available until businesses begin to rehire
o Businesses will not begin to rehire until the economy improves
o The economy will not improve until consumers increase purchases
o Consumers will not increase purchases unless they can pay existing debts and have enough left to increase discretionary purchases
o Consumers will not have additional funds without increasing incomes, repairing credit ratings, and gaining access to more credit
o Consumers cannot increase incomes unless the 25 million un-or-under employed gain employment, cannot repair credit ratings without increasing income, and cannot gain access to more credit without repairing credit ratings
o Consumers cannot gain employment until businesses begin to rehire
o And thus the circular argument of an imploded monetary economy………….

Compromise issues:

o In an imploded economy, consumer demand and business supply cannot be corrected in isolation, but must be repaired simultaneously.
o Democrats tried to fix both consumer demand and business supply through artificial government stimulus, but it was not large enough or economically diverse enough to reignite the economy, and it did not attempt to simultaneously correct the underlying debt and credit issues that also must be repaired in tandem for an imploded economy correction to adhere and affect a turnaround.
o To create enough turnaround friction, stimulus must bubble up from the economy wide full employment, improved credit ratings, and access to both consumer and business credit. Government cannot possibly spread stimulus broad enough or create a large enough stimulus through spending programs alone
o Republicans have offered to correct the economy by creating a better business environment through lower taxes, fewer regulations, and multinational businesses incentives. However, the Republican plan for reigniting the economy only addresses methods for attracting capital back to the United States, hoping to make the U.S. a better alternative for multinational corporations to spend capital than elsewhere. Yet multinational businesses are not spending their capital anywhere and will not until the global consumer demand improves. And at this time, Republicans are not offering any solutions to improve the global business environment.

A viable turnaround solution requires that:

• All able Americans immediately return to work
• U.S. consumers are freed from the weight of housing debt overhang and credit ratings that were damaged by the worldwide monetary implosion
• The dollar is uncoupled from attempting to stimulate the entire Western world.
• Multinational Corporations be enticed to bring investment capital into an economy that has already begun its turnaround
• Federal, state, and local governments not be allowed to skim needed growth capital out of a delicately growing economy

One viable solution includes:

• Job voucher plan to employ all able Americans immediately

http://jobvoucherplan.com/must-reads/

• Equity for debt swap to remove excess housing debt

http://jobvoucherplan.com/2011/08/04/hawaiians-have-the-hale-housing-solution-to-right-america-housing-bubble/

• Credit amnesty program to quickly repair business and consumer credit

http://jobvoucherplan.com/2011/09/08/yes-america-can-quickly-turnaround-heres-how/

• Modified Republican multinational incentives that entice domestic investment without giving carte blanche tax holiday and that does not entice further foreign domestic investment

https://jobvoucherplan.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/our-economy-can-be-re-ignited-like-a-boy-scout-fire/
http://jobvoucherplan.com/2011/06/18/can-the-coming-world-depression-learn-anything-from-the-great-blackout-of-1965/

• Republicans and Democrats do the heavy lifting of deciding together which programs will be cut, how to best run the military with a much reduced budget, how to extend the life of entitlements with a much reduced budget, and how to reduce Congress’s incentive to hold to a balanced budget.

Tea Partiers and Occupiers Should Take Up the Banner Together to Form a New Party

Despondency and Angst is peaking in America. Multiple movements are mounting opposition to what seems to be Congressional inaction toward the will of the people. Rhetoric is flying in attempts to find or divert fault for America’s ongoing and increasingly unstable financial crisis. Occupy Wall Streeters are organizing in opposition to international banks for their having extracted America’s wealth to China and having bank rolled a transfer of jobs and intellectual capital that would otherwise prosper the United States. A growing majority of Americans are sympathizing with the Occupiers, believing that banks and multinational businesses have corrupted Congress to pass legislation supporting their global aims at the expense of America’s future.

Americans are resigned that bankers and multinational businesses cannot be cajoled to protect our sovereignty over profits. It seems for many that America’s last bastion of hope lies in purging Congress of crony capitalism that weakens its resolve to place America’s interest above special interests. Tea Partiers suggest that if America reverts to strict constitutionalism that we might divert Congress from institutional corruption toward fiscal discipline. However, before concluding that our two-party Congress holds the solutions to America’s crisis, we should review whether there is a historical precedence to place our faith in its salvation.

Congress’s constitutional origin has been under miserable attack. As Roman legislators failed their countrymen, our Congress has taken up their fallen banner in succumbing to modern temptations. Congress fed off the world by deflating our dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and debt funded the selfish altruism of our baby boomer’s Great Society and obsession for military dominance with reckless abandon. Congress also vainly fell prey to Big Business’s courting to go along with legislation that greased the gold rush to China’s 1.3 billion consumer market. In so doing, they gave an inside lane for our elite to prosper from globalization at the expense of collapsing our Middle Class. Strengthening Congress’s will against these temptations seems a lynchpin for correcting America’s troubles, yet Congress has proven that it cannot protect Americans even from being devoured by our own.

An emerging theory is that by reverting to an earlier constitutional construct in history, we might be able to eliminate the power of big business and banking to influence Congress and to minimize Congress’s incentive to indebt America. If that were possible, America could return Congress to its historical role and we could regain America’s Constitutional Republic. Yet, if we look back to an earlier period in America’s history, Congress acted much the same as it has today. In 1811 and the fifty years leading up to the Civil War, business and banking dominated Congress under wildly differing circumstances. Their influence yielded the crippling morals of slavery and a devastating war between the states. If Congress was manipulated 200 years ago to such tragic ends, perhaps reverting to nostalgic fixes to mitigate Congress’s modern ills would end just as tragically.

In 1811, America had grown under the financial eye of the First National Bank and political support of Congress, whose strategy was to build America’s industry under the protection of tariffs to compete with the more highly developed commerce of Europe. By 1811, 87 percent of America’s exports were the South’s cotton and tobacco. The majority of these agricultural products were either processed in New England or transferred to England by American ships out of New York and Boston. This balance of banking, Northern industry, Southern agriculture, and shipping depended on slave labor to supply cotton to England, who employed 20 percent of her labor pool making cloth from America’s cotton. Yet, slavery was a growing abomination among many in America, and this shift in public opinion created a dangerous threat to America’s export engine that Congress counted on to bring back gold and foreign goods to America.

Earlier, in 1803, France’s Napoleon sold the Louisiana Territory to America for $15 million dollars to fund his planned invasion of England. Enraged, England retaliated by instigating insurgence of American’s indigenous natives against settlers, by impressing 10,000 Americans off of American ships to fight on English ships, by pirating American ships for the war effort, and by barring American ships from other ports. As a result, America’s slave supported, export industry was severely damaged and her economy was threatened.

Of the two paths, appeasement and war, America’s Federalist Party supported appeasing sanctions, a strategy that only further harmed America’s export industry. The Democrats favored War and in 1810 elected War Hawks to Congress to push for what became the War of 1812. Senators Calhoun (SC), representing the South’s cotton industry, Clay (KY) representing Kentucky’s tobacco industry, and Webster (MA), representing New England’s shipping industry, were the leaders of the war effort. While they suggested publicly that war must be initiated to salvage America’s honor, these members of Congress were much more interested in salvaging America’s business interests, and certainly were less concerned with the dishonor of slavery.

Nervous about the growing antislavery sentiment and the First National Bank’s growing financial power that could upset the balance of states’ power regarding slavery, the Democrats fought and won the congressional battle not to renew the bank’s charter in 1811. Steven Girard, the richest man in America, a shipping magnate who was the largest shareholder of the First National bank, was also a war hawk. When America needed money to continue the war, he lent her his entire fortune. He doubled his wealth during the war and was rewarded as the largest shareholder in the newly formed Second National Bank in 1816. Shortly after the war under his guidance, the Second National Bank focused its efforts once again on rebuilding the agricultural-industrial-shipping-slave dominated economic engine of America. Banking’s interest in 1816 was not in correcting social injustice but in continuing it.

From the Missouri Compromise of 1820 through the 1854 Nebraska-Kansas Act, Congress maintained on behalf of business the balance of power between slave owning states and non-slave owning states, ignoring the North’s increasing condemnation of slavery. This growing antislavery sentiment threatened to destroy the wealth creating engine that banks, factory owners, plantation owners and the shipping industry had built. Any imbalance of state power could have destroyed the export economy, yet the 1820 compromise kept an uneasy denial in place for 34 years.

Antislavery legislation would have impacted the South much more greatly than the North because its entire economy was slave driven. From America’s founding, the North had placed its financial capital into industrial assets while the South had placed the majority of its capital into land and slaves. By 1854, 3 percent of the population of the South owned 90 percent of the land and 20 percent of the population owned 98 percent of the slaves. The economic prosperity of the South’s gentry was too ingrained in slavery to turn from it without devastating the economic and social structure of the South and that fact was reflected in its political defensiveness.

The North’s growing prosperity was also buoyed by low cost, albeit consensual, workers. A steady influx of immigrant indentured servants filled New England’s factories before heading into the Western territories to start new lives as settlers. Senator Douglas (IL) pressed to build a transcontinental railroad that would send these immigrants out from Chicago into the territories, and that would bring immense riches back to the business leaders of his state. In 1854, needing to add the area of Nebraska and Kansas to America’s territories to support the railroad, Senator Douglas pushed to keep the balance of power between slave and non-slave states by increasing the geography of slave territory beyond America’s uneasy compromise of 1820. This reversal of America’s slavery containment policy was the last straw among abolitionists. With the rallying cry to end slavery, they broke from the Whig Party to form the Republican Party.

The 1854 act inflamed the passions of Americans who had grown increasingly intolerant of slavery. All of the Southern Democrats voted for the 1854 act. 44 of 91 Northern Democrats joined them in defying the will of the majority of their states’ constituents, even if their votes did support the business interests of their state elites. At the end of 1854 elections, Northern Democrats had been reduced from 91 to 25 congressman and only 7 of the 44 that had voted for the 1854 Act kept their seats. The Republican Party, founded on principle of human dignity, finally broke with the established business/political balance between the two main political parties. This break tipped the uneasy balance of power and thrust America into Civil War.

From the signing of the Constitution in 1787 until the elections of 1860, American politicians and businesses had attempted to avoid the growing moral voice of America. Had they listened, a new political party would not have formed to coalesce those without a political voice. Could the Whigs and Democrats in Congress have managed the growing animosity toward slavery while still meeting the needs of America’s businesses? In that same vein, could the Republicans and Democrats today give America’s Middle Class its needed political voice while still giving our industries the greatest chance to succeed in international business?

Until the dramatic political shift that led to the battles of the Civil War, Congress was unwilling to find common ground with abolitionists. In the wake of their indifference, a new party rose on the shoulders of the disenfranchised and charged America into a bloody resolution of its greatest crisis. History may prove once again that Congress has an institutional indifference to the will of the American people. Rather than a nostalgic turn to find a congressional balance from our past, Americans must now be willing to take up the banner of those courageous abolitionists and forge a new path forward that places the will of America first.