Cay Hehner, I, a member and another former member of CGNYC, and two interested parties, all went to dinner in Little Italy afterwards, to catch up, celebrate a successful panel, and generally enjoy New York's sidewalk cafà © scene.
Why do we do this? The Left Forum was "occupied" by activists young and old, some of whom had been doing this for years or even decades -- indeed in some cases their messages at the exhibition space could have been from the 1960s. That is not a selling point! They, like Georgists, have seen more promising times. Yet, we persist, out of a sense that "justice must be done" or camaraderie, habit, obligation, or any combination of these, and more.
We don't seem to be winning.
Part of the advantage of being the 1%, or maybe even the .1%, is that there are so few of you to disagree. You can get on with your plan because, after all, all the .1% could fit in a gathering at Davos. The 99%, on the other hand, even if they accept that the system is unfairly rigged, and instead take a direct interest in making a more just and sustainable model, squabble, disagree, and even take constructive criticism as a philosophical attack, or worse. This results in a splintering of activist groups well beyond what would be caused by mere political-economic disagreements. A great deal was made of solidarity and comradeship at the Left Forum, since numbers are about all the 99% has left, when money, power, and Land have all been mostly taken away. But where the policy meets the road, disagreements remain, and personalities clash, sometimes fatally for the common cause. This splintering, of course, simply helps the elites remain in power. We need more venues like this to find our commonalities, to bind and plan, and figure out ways to regain our rightful heritage.
Perhaps in the end, we do what we do because we must, because to go along with an unjust system is simply psychically intolerable. Hopefully, we can find kindred souls who feel the same along the way. I know I did.
[i] Former President of the HG School, Dan Kryston, died on January 6, 2012. The school has been undergoing significant changes since then.
[ii] Hudson says the word "rentier" is no longer used on most college campuses, just as classical economics, with its Ricardian roots, and Georgist emphasis on land, is no longer taught either. He says it's mainly wage and price theory that is being taught to vulnerable freshmen. Thus, he says, you will find a better analysis of economics in French novels than in universities. Hear his recent radio interview here, especially the end part on land: click here
[iii] Land is capitalized in this paper to indicate the classical definition of ALL material resources as Land. Actual land will be indicated by a lower case "l.'
[iv] Classical economics has been completely erased except at a few alternative schools like the Henry George School, and the emphasis is on taxing labor or fixed capital (not the misnamed Capital Gains), and not on taxing Land, as it was under previously. Read Mason Gaffney's "The Corruption of Economics" to see how Henry George, and with him, Classical economics with its emphasis on Land, had been systematically expunged by the land-grant universities and their benefactors.
[v] In perhaps a more honest age, today's "private equity" was called "corporate raiding." The ability of the raider to self-enrich from the remnants of plundered businesses and workers, is beyond the scope of this paper, but the modern celebration of these former scoundrels speaks for its success - for them at least.
[vi] Kucinich lost his recent primary for a redrawn and gerrymandered Ohio district to a technical incumbent whom Kelley says fought a dirty and under-handed campaign, something Kucinich refused to engage in. Although Kelley, and his scheduler and I, had tried to get Kucinich to appear at the Left Forum, the strain and attention brought on by the campaign, ending March 6, 2012, made this impossible.
[vii] Other observers have noted that the top 1% now owns 90% of the wealth, an even more staggering disparity than mere income numbers suggest, and a reminder that, left unchecked, wealth begets wealth, accumulating forever, even if unearned.
[viii] I have documented similar failures, from George's time forward, here in this newsletter, and cross-posted to Op Ed News: "The Least Productive People in the World," http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Least-Productive-Peopl-by-Scott-Baker-100220-21.html. Meriweather, Kelley advises, adopted strategies of massive leveraging along with sophisticated mathematical models in his undertakings. In 1998 he and his stable of math geniuses crashed with the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management when his system failed in spectacular fashion. The Federal Reserve organized a private banking rescue of the "billionaire's boys club" because it was thought too dangerous to let it fail. In 2009 JWM Partners LLLC, his next endeavor, closed after its primary fund lost nearly half of its value. His next hedge fund seemed to have difficulties raising money. At one point he had only raised some $29 million.
[ix] Andy Mazzone and I have a friendly little spat to decide what is the best label to attach to the elite 1% parasite class. He says they are the smartest, but I, and now Kelley, think that is not it at all, and that their advantage is more due to something like psychopathy, which has now come to be rewarded much as productivity used to be.
[x] The author has 2 petitions supporting elements of this bill: http://www.change.org/petitions/end-the-debt-crisis-with-debt-free-united-states-notes and http://www.change.org/petitions/reclassify-the-fed-s-account-from-private-to-public and is an adviser to a petitioner seeking redress for false statements about the equivalency of United States Notes and Federal Reserve Notes on the treasury website. See v. treasury: http://tompainetoo.com/.
[xi] I have documented elsewhere that State Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) have shown a similar (deliberate?) confusion between ability-to-pay and ability-to-pay-from-market-returns, thereby justifying politically the gutting of pension payouts and the preserving of principal for failed fund advisors, and their complicit State comptrollers, to gamble further with. For example, there is ~$140 billion in the NY State Pension fund, with net payouts of ~$5 billion/year, after contributions, yet because returns have been so subpar over the last few years, pensioned employees are being told they must make due with less, while the fees of the advisors are never cut, and nor are their political supporters' careers much threatened by a public that assumes TINA. Under a pay-as-you-go system, like Social Security, a ~$140 billion pension could continue to pay out ~$5 billion/year for a long time, with a modest tax increase at some future point. Alternatively, the fund could be invested in a State Bank, investing in the State instead of far-flung places like China, which actually compete with America's workforce. This is another case of American workers being forced to vote for their own downfall.
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