Agreed. We need a public option to counter any economic activity that has an inelastic demand. Health care is the best example of this. Education is close. Water and utilities are already functional monopolies, but exploit people when they are private. Power supply using natural resources should be public, not just regulated. One item missing from your proposal is public land, the commons, that Trump, MAGA, Republicans are trying to privatize. We need to keep ecological health as a centerpiece of our entire governance. It is not there for exploitation. It has a right to exist in a healthy state apart from us. Therefore, it needs management that keeps it healthy as priority number 1. This issue may not win elections, but it is crucial to survival, perhaps even more than our healthcare system.
Keep going. This is exactly the kind of conversation that we need to have, the plans we need to write, and the consensus we need to build. The mission for America, Innovating for the public good (https://innovatingforpublicgood.org/), and the work we are doing at Public Money Action are all based on a basic understanding that the right has changed the basic rules of the game to favor Capital. While we still win tactically, they have a broader strategy and have thus gained more power. And how do you return power to Labor? Point #16 for mission for America is a start - but why is that not point #1? This is where the people and the votes are!
And why does it not include a Federal Job Guarantee to pick up any workers who their plan misses? We have over 25% functionally unemployed (Lisep.org), and the best way to get more power for Labor is to create a public option - direct job creation - a floor under which no American can fall, and under which no company can pay. https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pn_2018_3.pdf
And a quick note: the debt is not a problem per se, see the Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, among others. The public dent, or US treasury market (they are the same thing!), = Private sector savings, dollar for dollar. It's an accounting identity. As John Maynard Keynes said, We can afford anything that we can actually do." Modernmoneylab.org
We also need to do something about propaganda outlets. Otherwise, they will bad mouth and undercut and lie about everything, turning people against the efforts.
The Right has been planning this for DECADES. They were willing to take temporary losses to build the bigger program and it seems they have won beyond their wildest dreams. They have an easily manipulated, egotistic, senile madman as President, a Congress that appears to be afraid of its own shadow and a SCOTUS that seems not to have attended any law schools.
WE, the PEOPLE, need to ACT with determination and vigor to oust this charade of a government, to rewrite a Constitution for these times and to become Lincoln's dream of a government of, by and for the people.
FDR used the power of the government to directly & immediately help Americans & fight WW2. He started Social Security to protect the elders, he start Unemployment Insurance & hired 15 million out of work Americans. He directed private industry to produce the planes, tanks, trucks needed to fight Nazis & generously supplied Russia who did most of the fighting against Hitler's hoards. We need a government that builds public hospitals, public energy companies, public pharmaceutical companies. The current system is sick with greed & cannot help Americans.
Corbin, may I recommend that you frame the public option as a public alternative by talking about concrete national systems that are owned and built by the government — such as a new, all renewable electric grid that replaces the fossil fuel system? I think it’s easier for people to visualize an actual plan, complete with where to put wind and solar farms and where to put the factories to make the solar and wind equipment. Same for a high speed rail network, or a new high speed internet. I detail these at GreenNewDealPlan.com. The political payoff is that the labor market becomes so tight that the promise of working class power collapses maga
What is the weakest link in this capitalist system of parasitic self-destruction????? It is not public debt, the national debt, which is backed by almost an unimaginably huge infrastructure and land/water base that can be manipulated in a valued way, just like private property or the 'power' of capital. What is the weakest link? It is private, corporate debt. You know, the debt that gets borrowed away by corporate powers borrowing public money from the Fed and its ilk. This is the money/valuation shuffle that Bernie talks about. Rob Peter, pay Paul, create debt, re-define it as paper valuation based upon public consumption while the paper constantly gets stuffed into private coffers. The stock value is manipulated upward, the infrastructure owned by corporate gets manipulated upward as well. A massive, massive bubble financed by public money lending called savings and consumption. What allows this to continue? Interest, which is just extortion created by lawyers to further bilk the public and keep them on the edge of wetness. Why is credit card interest so High???? The answer is found in Why the corporate subsidies are so High. Extortion. Graft. Payola. Interest on the public debt is Private Interest paid to Private banks. Who owns Private banks? Private corporations. This is the reverse sieve that everyone experiences daily via consumption - prices go up, quality goes down, interest on money borrowed by corporate is 1/10 of what interest is for public use. Theft from both ends. Why was Hugo Chavez so reviled by corporate 'murka? Why, so long ago, were the socialized govts. of Iran, Iraq, Portugal, Chile et. al. destroyed by Kermit Rockefeller and his gang of economic hit men? Inflation is a definition of the extortion level of capitalism, and it is never below zero. Why are huge tax breaks given to wealth? Because not only do the wealthy not want to pay taxes, they want to extort even more via Interest they do NOT pay of their borrowing while the public pays huge interest for its borrowing, FROM THEM. Kill the parasites. Kill private banking. Kill for-profit corporations. The public MUST own everything it uses to survive. That is how you destroy INTEREST, the giant sucking sound heard round the world. The least efficient practice of living a biotic life in a synthetic world run by LIES and Extortion and bully Laws that strip the citizen consumer of any power. In effect, chattel slavery via so-called capitalist economics. BS to that. It is 0000000000000000000000000.1 percent efficient. Why? Just look honestly at the trainwreck this planet is in. All due to human avarice. Bernie is right. Citizens United is the head of the snake. Corporate privacy is corporate piracy.
I love Bernie, too. But he fails to grasp the concept of windows of opportunity, as when he turned down Jill Stein’s offer to run as a Green candidate following the Dem convention in ‘16, saying he was afraid of being Nadered, and again in ‘20 when he couldn’t break from his buddy Biden, who led us on the genocide train.
I support all the candidates you mention, but all have the potential of being co-opted, like AOC has been, by a corrupt system owned by monied interests.
The candidates I contribute to are socialists, Sawant in WA, Ware in CA, who fully understand your argument than pubic has to trump private, and are willing to articulate that, and actually fight for it, regardless of consequence.
Corbin, I just reviewed Mission for America and was in complete agreement with you and Saikat Chakrabarti on all of it until I got to the section on Nuclear. Nuclear power, to paraphrase Amory Lovins, is an extremely expensive, incredibly dangerous and highly toxic methodology for boiling water. And it is not needed. See Mark Jacobson, Stanford U. professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for all the detail that you and Saikat need to change this section of Mission for America so it aligns with the progressive values that fuel your work. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/
I took a quick scan of the Mission for America. Wow! About 12,000 words in the website summary alone with thousands of pages in the underlying detailed PDFs. At glance a very comprehensive and well done document in terms of reconstruction goals and flushing out what a Green New Deal means. And that’s great. What’s also needed as a companion document is a social and political strategy to get the super-majorities and progressives elected, from school boards to municipal/state/federal and judicial positions, necessary to enact the Mission. This is first and foremost a social issue. If we don’t address the social construct as well as the economic and political structures, at best all we’ll get is the pendulum swing of incremental change countered by conservative backlash.
This is a great piece of inspirational writing, but what are the steps that I as an individual can take to help move the needle? In other words, I think framing the problem and solution is important, but if you can identify specific things regular people can do with some of their free time, that would be helpful too.
I resonate with your thinking, but don’t believe a wealth tax is a misguided focus — however it’s only half of a plan. Virtually all of the evils committed at home and abroad ultimately tie back to some person or group attempting to accumulate, siphon, hoard vast sums of money. With some sort of a limit on held wealth, that incentive would be removed.
But you're totally correct in the sense that Step #2 is what *should* we be doing with national funds? Obviously, it is to meet the true needs of the country and its people through building the necessary infrastructure - as you suggest.
P.S. National debt isn’t a problem in the way most people think it is. We have a debt-based currency system. Nation debt is simply the money supply. The problem - as you point out - is whether the funds are being used to meet the true needs of the country or are they largely squandered on further enriching those who already control too much.
It doesn't even take four people to come up with a revolutionary socialist plan, one that universalizes all basic needs. Even a single person can do it in a revolutionary novel. Say, Most Revolutionary, or Ultra Revolutionary: https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/what-is-to-be-done
Absolutely there should be a massive wealth tax. In fact, billionaires should be abolished. But no progressive political program should be dependent on any tax. Ten trillion dollars should be credited out of thin air into a national bank to fund the many badly needed programs (in addition to taxing extreme wealth).
The People “own” the money supply, not Bank of America and Ecrap Muck. And the People can and should freely coin as much of the money supply as needed that they already “own.”
Of course, a vast wealth tax is needed for all kinds of reasons related to the annihilating dangers of the current extreme inequality. That’s actually the real imperative reason for a wealth tax — not supply, but social corrective — since the People are entitled to create otherwise as much money as is needed to meet full human needs.
There is no alternative to implementing many sweeping universal programs, including as Presidential Orders, on day one of a new term. It’s a litmus test for candidates, and can be an inspiration to all. It’s as material as can be. Progressive and socialist emergency universal orders and acts for emergency times. To actually represent and fulfill the interests and the needs of the people.
Implementing universal programs that cover the entire human rights spectrum would greatly stimulate, improve, and transform the economy, people’s lives, and society.
And doing so would enable the demilitarization of everything, as everything must be demilitarized, the police state and the surveillance state, rolled back, the prisoner state and the debtor state eviscerated.
A strong progressive push in electoral politics and social organizing could get this done. Strikes and actions, organizing and propagandizing. The good kind of propaganda. The power of propaganda is crucial. The state, after all, has a monopoly on violence but not propaganda, not organizing, not acting, not striking.
Paid holidays expanded, wages raised for federal contract workers, which lifts wages for others, far more access to improved food, housing, education, health care, recreation, parks, and other communal public spaces. Doubled Social Security payouts, and at younger ages. Marijuana decriminalization with nonviolent convictions cleared, post offices transformed into free public banks, a new national bank established and freely funded ex nihilo, out of thin air, like the big private banks do for their rich buddies but not for the people, in fact against the people, to pillage and profiteer.
And then nationalize the banks, the hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurance, big energy, big ag, big everything. Why should the billionaires and trillionaires own the country and not the People?
I'm 75. I sympathize with the youngsters of today who cannot afford a home - the best wealth builder for the middle class. In 1975 my wife and I bought a beautiful home in Miami for $2,000 down and a $40,000 mortgage. I had a good job and 2.5 times my annual salary equaled the purchase price of that house.
And Trump is destroying the value of the dollar with his Tarrifpalooza, threats and increase in costs going around the world killing and bullying. Things will get worse in the future as the permanent damage to our economy will last well beyond Trump.
Agreed. We need a public option to counter any economic activity that has an inelastic demand. Health care is the best example of this. Education is close. Water and utilities are already functional monopolies, but exploit people when they are private. Power supply using natural resources should be public, not just regulated. One item missing from your proposal is public land, the commons, that Trump, MAGA, Republicans are trying to privatize. We need to keep ecological health as a centerpiece of our entire governance. It is not there for exploitation. It has a right to exist in a healthy state apart from us. Therefore, it needs management that keeps it healthy as priority number 1. This issue may not win elections, but it is crucial to survival, perhaps even more than our healthcare system.
Keep going. This is exactly the kind of conversation that we need to have, the plans we need to write, and the consensus we need to build. The mission for America, Innovating for the public good (https://innovatingforpublicgood.org/), and the work we are doing at Public Money Action are all based on a basic understanding that the right has changed the basic rules of the game to favor Capital. While we still win tactically, they have a broader strategy and have thus gained more power. And how do you return power to Labor? Point #16 for mission for America is a start - but why is that not point #1? This is where the people and the votes are!
And why does it not include a Federal Job Guarantee to pick up any workers who their plan misses? We have over 25% functionally unemployed (Lisep.org), and the best way to get more power for Labor is to create a public option - direct job creation - a floor under which no American can fall, and under which no company can pay. https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/pn_2018_3.pdf
And a quick note: the debt is not a problem per se, see the Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, among others. The public dent, or US treasury market (they are the same thing!), = Private sector savings, dollar for dollar. It's an accounting identity. As John Maynard Keynes said, We can afford anything that we can actually do." Modernmoneylab.org
Onward.
Thanks so much for mentioning Stephanie Kelton's work! I made a similar comment.
We also need to do something about propaganda outlets. Otherwise, they will bad mouth and undercut and lie about everything, turning people against the efforts.
The Right has been planning this for DECADES. They were willing to take temporary losses to build the bigger program and it seems they have won beyond their wildest dreams. They have an easily manipulated, egotistic, senile madman as President, a Congress that appears to be afraid of its own shadow and a SCOTUS that seems not to have attended any law schools.
WE, the PEOPLE, need to ACT with determination and vigor to oust this charade of a government, to rewrite a Constitution for these times and to become Lincoln's dream of a government of, by and for the people.
FDR used the power of the government to directly & immediately help Americans & fight WW2. He started Social Security to protect the elders, he start Unemployment Insurance & hired 15 million out of work Americans. He directed private industry to produce the planes, tanks, trucks needed to fight Nazis & generously supplied Russia who did most of the fighting against Hitler's hoards. We need a government that builds public hospitals, public energy companies, public pharmaceutical companies. The current system is sick with greed & cannot help Americans.
Corbin, may I recommend that you frame the public option as a public alternative by talking about concrete national systems that are owned and built by the government — such as a new, all renewable electric grid that replaces the fossil fuel system? I think it’s easier for people to visualize an actual plan, complete with where to put wind and solar farms and where to put the factories to make the solar and wind equipment. Same for a high speed rail network, or a new high speed internet. I detail these at GreenNewDealPlan.com. The political payoff is that the labor market becomes so tight that the promise of working class power collapses maga
What is the weakest link in this capitalist system of parasitic self-destruction????? It is not public debt, the national debt, which is backed by almost an unimaginably huge infrastructure and land/water base that can be manipulated in a valued way, just like private property or the 'power' of capital. What is the weakest link? It is private, corporate debt. You know, the debt that gets borrowed away by corporate powers borrowing public money from the Fed and its ilk. This is the money/valuation shuffle that Bernie talks about. Rob Peter, pay Paul, create debt, re-define it as paper valuation based upon public consumption while the paper constantly gets stuffed into private coffers. The stock value is manipulated upward, the infrastructure owned by corporate gets manipulated upward as well. A massive, massive bubble financed by public money lending called savings and consumption. What allows this to continue? Interest, which is just extortion created by lawyers to further bilk the public and keep them on the edge of wetness. Why is credit card interest so High???? The answer is found in Why the corporate subsidies are so High. Extortion. Graft. Payola. Interest on the public debt is Private Interest paid to Private banks. Who owns Private banks? Private corporations. This is the reverse sieve that everyone experiences daily via consumption - prices go up, quality goes down, interest on money borrowed by corporate is 1/10 of what interest is for public use. Theft from both ends. Why was Hugo Chavez so reviled by corporate 'murka? Why, so long ago, were the socialized govts. of Iran, Iraq, Portugal, Chile et. al. destroyed by Kermit Rockefeller and his gang of economic hit men? Inflation is a definition of the extortion level of capitalism, and it is never below zero. Why are huge tax breaks given to wealth? Because not only do the wealthy not want to pay taxes, they want to extort even more via Interest they do NOT pay of their borrowing while the public pays huge interest for its borrowing, FROM THEM. Kill the parasites. Kill private banking. Kill for-profit corporations. The public MUST own everything it uses to survive. That is how you destroy INTEREST, the giant sucking sound heard round the world. The least efficient practice of living a biotic life in a synthetic world run by LIES and Extortion and bully Laws that strip the citizen consumer of any power. In effect, chattel slavery via so-called capitalist economics. BS to that. It is 0000000000000000000000000.1 percent efficient. Why? Just look honestly at the trainwreck this planet is in. All due to human avarice. Bernie is right. Citizens United is the head of the snake. Corporate privacy is corporate piracy.
I love Bernie, too. But he fails to grasp the concept of windows of opportunity, as when he turned down Jill Stein’s offer to run as a Green candidate following the Dem convention in ‘16, saying he was afraid of being Nadered, and again in ‘20 when he couldn’t break from his buddy Biden, who led us on the genocide train.
I support all the candidates you mention, but all have the potential of being co-opted, like AOC has been, by a corrupt system owned by monied interests.
The candidates I contribute to are socialists, Sawant in WA, Ware in CA, who fully understand your argument than pubic has to trump private, and are willing to articulate that, and actually fight for it, regardless of consequence.
They need to do what Teddy Roosevelt did against monopolies
Corbin, I just reviewed Mission for America and was in complete agreement with you and Saikat Chakrabarti on all of it until I got to the section on Nuclear. Nuclear power, to paraphrase Amory Lovins, is an extremely expensive, incredibly dangerous and highly toxic methodology for boiling water. And it is not needed. See Mark Jacobson, Stanford U. professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, for all the detail that you and Saikat need to change this section of Mission for America so it aligns with the progressive values that fuel your work. https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/
Thank you.
I took a quick scan of the Mission for America. Wow! About 12,000 words in the website summary alone with thousands of pages in the underlying detailed PDFs. At glance a very comprehensive and well done document in terms of reconstruction goals and flushing out what a Green New Deal means. And that’s great. What’s also needed as a companion document is a social and political strategy to get the super-majorities and progressives elected, from school boards to municipal/state/federal and judicial positions, necessary to enact the Mission. This is first and foremost a social issue. If we don’t address the social construct as well as the economic and political structures, at best all we’ll get is the pendulum swing of incremental change countered by conservative backlash.
This is a great piece of inspirational writing, but what are the steps that I as an individual can take to help move the needle? In other words, I think framing the problem and solution is important, but if you can identify specific things regular people can do with some of their free time, that would be helpful too.
I resonate with your thinking, but don’t believe a wealth tax is a misguided focus — however it’s only half of a plan. Virtually all of the evils committed at home and abroad ultimately tie back to some person or group attempting to accumulate, siphon, hoard vast sums of money. With some sort of a limit on held wealth, that incentive would be removed.
But you're totally correct in the sense that Step #2 is what *should* we be doing with national funds? Obviously, it is to meet the true needs of the country and its people through building the necessary infrastructure - as you suggest.
P.S. National debt isn’t a problem in the way most people think it is. We have a debt-based currency system. Nation debt is simply the money supply. The problem - as you point out - is whether the funds are being used to meet the true needs of the country or are they largely squandered on further enriching those who already control too much.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. Nobody can eat because of the Constitution. Just ignore it.
It doesn't even take four people to come up with a revolutionary socialist plan, one that universalizes all basic needs. Even a single person can do it in a revolutionary novel. Say, Most Revolutionary, or Ultra Revolutionary: https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/what-is-to-be-done
Absolutely there should be a massive wealth tax. In fact, billionaires should be abolished. But no progressive political program should be dependent on any tax. Ten trillion dollars should be credited out of thin air into a national bank to fund the many badly needed programs (in addition to taxing extreme wealth).
The People “own” the money supply, not Bank of America and Ecrap Muck. And the People can and should freely coin as much of the money supply as needed that they already “own.”
Of course, a vast wealth tax is needed for all kinds of reasons related to the annihilating dangers of the current extreme inequality. That’s actually the real imperative reason for a wealth tax — not supply, but social corrective — since the People are entitled to create otherwise as much money as is needed to meet full human needs.
There is no alternative to implementing many sweeping universal programs, including as Presidential Orders, on day one of a new term. It’s a litmus test for candidates, and can be an inspiration to all. It’s as material as can be. Progressive and socialist emergency universal orders and acts for emergency times. To actually represent and fulfill the interests and the needs of the people.
Implementing universal programs that cover the entire human rights spectrum would greatly stimulate, improve, and transform the economy, people’s lives, and society.
And doing so would enable the demilitarization of everything, as everything must be demilitarized, the police state and the surveillance state, rolled back, the prisoner state and the debtor state eviscerated.
A strong progressive push in electoral politics and social organizing could get this done. Strikes and actions, organizing and propagandizing. The good kind of propaganda. The power of propaganda is crucial. The state, after all, has a monopoly on violence but not propaganda, not organizing, not acting, not striking.
Paid holidays expanded, wages raised for federal contract workers, which lifts wages for others, far more access to improved food, housing, education, health care, recreation, parks, and other communal public spaces. Doubled Social Security payouts, and at younger ages. Marijuana decriminalization with nonviolent convictions cleared, post offices transformed into free public banks, a new national bank established and freely funded ex nihilo, out of thin air, like the big private banks do for their rich buddies but not for the people, in fact against the people, to pillage and profiteer.
And then nationalize the banks, the hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurance, big energy, big ag, big everything. Why should the billionaires and trillionaires own the country and not the People?
It’s time to universalize everything — all for one and one for all.
It’s time to reject Trump’s bigoted capitalist bullshit, us against them, bigoted profiteering.
It’s time to reject establishment Democrats’ perpetual profiteering, and often equally brutal bigotry.
To get this done, the country needs to get its head out of its ass. It needs to reject supremacy and profiteering. It needs to embrace universality.
I'm 75. I sympathize with the youngsters of today who cannot afford a home - the best wealth builder for the middle class. In 1975 my wife and I bought a beautiful home in Miami for $2,000 down and a $40,000 mortgage. I had a good job and 2.5 times my annual salary equaled the purchase price of that house.
Today that house is worth $900,000. I would have to earn over $350,000 today to have the same purchasing power. https://davcer.substack.com/p/wha-hoppen-purchasing-power
And Trump is destroying the value of the dollar with his Tarrifpalooza, threats and increase in costs going around the world killing and bullying. Things will get worse in the future as the permanent damage to our economy will last well beyond Trump.