POPULIST CORRECTIONS

(or CaFMaC Fixes [almost] Everything)

©William D. Coffey

 

 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER                                                                                    Date Posted

CaFMaC Act

PART ONE:   CORRECTIONS TO CAPITALISM

1  Economic History Lesson: Next Big Crash Projected    Dec 1, 2015

2. The Capitalist Free Market Corrections Act (CaFMaC)   Jan 1, 2016

Too Big (Sections 1-2)

Monopoly (Sections 3-5)

3       Overpopulation and other big picture problems in modern America                       Jan 5

4          Cut corporations to 5% of market; convert them to co-ops                           Jan 8

5% Limit (Sections 6-8)

Conversion (Sections 9-12)

5          The punitive context: Poverty School & Gambling School                           Jan 12

6          How to stop exporting our jobs and earn enough to actually live on             Jan 15

Co-ops (Sections 13-21)

7          Introspective: Sensitivity and empathy training for politicians                      Jan 19

8          When employees own the businesses and means of production                    Jan 22

Co-ops (Sections 22-32

9       The New Ideal: Economic Freedom and Populist Corrections                   Jan 26

10        The market is us, Pogo: the goods we need equal the jobs we need             Jan 29

Markets (Sections 33-35)

11.        Economic Econspeak, the science of being poor, and throughput           Feb 2

12        Immigrant amnesty, limits on banking & other new US priorities               Feb 5

Priorities (Sections 36-44)

13        The seldom-noticed context: an economic/political yardstick                      Feb 9

14        Durable products, food, water shortages: CaFMaC Fixes Everything          Feb 12

Priorities (Sections 45-53)

15        Capitalism’s triumph: predictions from current trends                                 Feb 16

16        How to guarantee your comfortable retirement income                               Feb 19

Retirement (Sections 54-57)

17            Capitalism serving all the poeple; Populist Corrections Contents               Feb 23

 

PART TWO:   OTHER USEFUL CORRECTIONS

18         All stock markets in the United States are hereby abolished                      Feb 26

Stock Market (Sections 58-59)

Advertising (Sections 60-63)

19          Is fair taxing for the common good actually possible? You bet it is!          Mar 1

Taxes (Sections 64-69)

20         Taxing to the greatest good for the greatest number                                     Mar 4

Taxes (Sections 70-74)

21         Good old American ingenuity shows the way with third options                 Mar 8

Research and Development (Sections 75-77)

22         How to guarantee purity in foods and medicinal drugs                               Mar 11

Research and Development (Sections 78-80)

23         True competition on the home front; Bring all the troops home                 Mar 15

International (Sections 81-83)

24         Absolute rights to centrally plan U.S. budgets and control guns                 Mar 18

Constitutional  Amendments (Sections 84-85)

25         Teaching the courts the meaning of “self evident”                                      Mar 22

Constitutional  Amendments (Sections 86-87)

26         Correct the Court, publicly fund all elections and abolish lobbying            Mar 25

Supreme Court (Section 88)

Elections (Section 89)

Lobbying (Section 90)

27         Thinking our way into the education revolution                                          Mar 29

Thinking (Sections 91-93)

28         Good riddance to daylight savings time; the Purposes of Government       Apr 1

Nature (Section 94)

The Purposes of Government (Section 95)

29        National Intergenerational Wealth and Security Trust Fund                                April 5

Prospective

 

PART THREE:   REACTION AND CONSEQUENCE

30        A Grand Five-Masted Ship of State…and how to sink it ignobly                 Apr 8

31        After we’ve passed the tipping points, irreversibly                                       Apr 12

32        The great seismic risk zone across America’s heartland                               Apr 15

33        Fast evolution: Unexpected consequences of global warming…                  Apr 19

34        M’sippisea, beautiful waters of our children                                                 Apr 22

35        Title Page; Contents; Locator; Great Invitation; Suggested Reading           Apr 26

 

*          ©          *

 

LOCATOR 

Terms and Organizations Addressed in the CaFMaC Act

Acronym	Term or Organization	CaFMaC Section(s)
TAP	Adequacy Principle, The	Chapters 3,6,10,12,13,19, 27,28
ALW	Adequate Living Wage	18,28,36,38,44,66,69,74,78,83,Chapter 7
AMPR	Annual Merit Pay Raise	20,21,22
ALAI	Appalachia Leads America Initiative	76
AOTFP	Appalachian Organic Truck Farming Project	76
BMB	Bovine Methane Bonanza	77
BLM	Bureau of Land Management	5,36
CTNS	Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences	91
CIT	Common Intelligence Test	23
CFFT	Compensatory Fossil Fuel Tax	73
CIP	Constant Innovation Program	21
CRB	Cooperative Representation Board	95
CRTDA	Cooperative Research and Technological Development Administration	34,36,50,75,78,79,80, 81
CRTF	Cooperative Retirement Trust Fund	57
CBA	Cooperatives Bank of America	37,38,39,40,41,42,45,46,48,50,51,52,53,58,63,80, Chapter 29
CU	Credit Union	38,45, 57
DARPA	Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency	75
DRI	Defense Restoration Initiative	83
DAT	Democracy Assurance Tax	74
DOA	Department of Agriculture	48,49,80
DOC	Department of Commerce	1,2,3,7,38
DoD	Department of Defense	16,52,73, 77,83
DDO	Department of Defense Only	83
DEd	Department of Education	91,93
DOE	Department of Energy	77
DHHS	Department of Health and Human Services	76,83
DOS	Department of State	49,52,82,83
DOT	Department of Transportation	34,36
DSRB	Deportation Special Review Board	36
DDT	Dumb Dawkins Theory	Chapter 7
EB	Earned Bonus	20,21,22
EIT	Earned Income Tax	69
ER	Economic Rights	18,44,54,55,56,65,66,68,69,74,Chapter 29
EIHS	Eisenhower Interstate Highway System	77
EPA	Environmental Protection Agency	5,49
EPI	Essential Public Infrastructure	67,68,73, 77
FEC	Federal Elections Commission	74
FDA	Food and Drug Administration	78
FU	Food Union	45
FCDA	Foreign Cooperatives Development Agency	35,82
GAO	Government Accountability Office	41
GCCI	Great Corporations to Cooperatives Initiative	9,33,34,69, Chapter 29
GIRA	Guaranteed Income Retirement Account	56,57
HTT	How to Think	91,92,93, Chapter 29
IPW	Index of Prosperity and Wellbeing	39
IRA/401k	Individual Retirement Account/401k	55
IRS	Internal Revenue Service	2,7,66,69,70, 73
IMF	International Monetary Fund	81,82
LTAC	Literacy Targets for American Citizenship	Chapter 29
MCBA	Master of Cooperative Business Administration	91
NAC	National Academy of Sciences	91
NASA	National Aeronautics and Space Administration	77
NCP	National Cisterns Project	53,76
NDP	National Dirigibles Project	34,76
NIH	National Institutes of Health	78
NIAC	National Interest Advisory Council	33,36,39,42,48,49,50,70,72,80,91, Chapter 29
NIWSTF	National Intergenerational Wealth And Security Trust Fund	Chapter 29
NPR	National Public Radio	63
NTAED	National Think About Education Day	93
NWC	National War College	91
NRA	Natural Resources Administration	5
NIPS	New IDeal Public Service (Co-ops)	9
NITS	New IDeal Tax Structure	64, Chapter 29
NFI	Nuclear Fusion Initiative	77
OOOO	One On, One Off policy	77
PPB	Pervasive Predatory Behavior	Chapters 5, 30
PSC	Public Service Commission	72,73
RJSP	Railed Jet Sled Project	77
RFHTS	River Flow Horizontal Turbine Series	77
RRI	Rust-to-Riches Initiative	50
SSS	Social Security System/Trust Fund/Act	54,55,56,57
SRNM	Strategic Reserve Natural Monopoly	5
SEC	Supplemental Ethics Curriculum	92
TUSCG	Tithe for the U.S. Common Good	66,67,68
TCHT	Total Capital Holdings Tax	70,72
USPTO	U.S. Patent and Trademark Office	75
UICWT	Unearned Income from Capital Wealth Tax	70,72
UWIT	Unearned Wealth from Inheritance Tax	71,72
USECCP	United States Environmental Carrying Capacity Project	36
UST	United States Treasury	67,74
UBAC	Unproven But Apparent Correlation	79
WWB	What Works Best program	38
WVT	Wholesale Value Tax	66,67,68
WB	World Bank	81, 82
WTO	World Trade Organization	81, 82

 

 

ABOLISHED by THE CaFMaC Act (see inherent right of government to abolish….	CaFMaC Section …Sections 11 and 95)
Absentee ownership of US domestic commerce	16
Adjusted gross income	69
Advertising and marketing	60
Converting human-edible crops to biofuel	49
Corporate personhood, the concept of	86
Corporate sports	31
Corporations remaining after too-big-to-fail are gone	11
Daylight savings time	94
Defined contribution retirement plans	55
Diversion of rivers to irrigate arid lands	53
Education conceived as a supplier of human capital	91
Federal reserve system	37
Financial reporting that is confusing and misleading	51
Foreign Guest Worker programs	36
Fossil fuel-related subsidies and tax breaks	76
Hedge funds, mortgage bundles, monetized derivatives etc	58
Lawn watering	53
Minimum wage, the concept of	18
Misdefining employees as independent contractors	44
Monetary foreign aid	49
Monoculture, CAFOs and chemical agriculture	50
Moving US jobs abroad	16
Non-public funding of elections	89
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative	81
Outrageous executive pay	22
Preemptive war and preemptive military initiatives	83
Profit, the concept of	12
Prohibited forms of lobbying	90
Proprietary information among co-ops	38
Sales taxes	65
Stock markets	58
Subsidies to corporate agriculture	50
Tax evasion by inversion	4
Tenure, the concept of	21
The present U.S. income tax structure	69
The term “outsource”	78
Too big to fail corporations	4
Transferring surpluses to stockholders	12
U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management	77

 

*          ©          *

 

POSTSCRIPT:  THE GREAT INVITATION

I would unhesitatingly relinquish and walk away from the progressive ideals I’ve cherished all my life if a third option, a new and better way, were found that enabled proceeding henceforward together with my conservative colleagues, all of us proactively trying to achieve the same betterment for all our fellow Americans, poor as well as rich, together – one nation under our God-blessed constitutional right to sustain separation of state from any one particular religion, with political liberty and economic justice for all.

 

If my conservative friends’ reasoning leads them to conclusions that I think nutty and loathsome – so thinking because I see that those conclusions lead to conditions which impoverish and thereby harm many of our fellow citizens – that doesn’t make the friends themselves loathsome or nutty. Their mothers love them, I love some of them, and they mostly try to do what they deem right and good on most days, just like the rest of us. The problems we face, together, will not be solved by despising each other. We demonstrated that before, during and after our Civil War. If your philosophy, politics and sense of morality agree even ever so slightly with this paragraph, dear reader, please read on.

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little romp through my imagined third-option fixes. I certainly did. At the same time, I’ll bet you finished Section 95 with dismay that I left untended – unfixied as it were – so many more of the not-so-civil problems that beset our beloved America here in the early twenty-first century. “Isn’t he even going to mention expanding farmers markets, or women’s rights, or fairer criminal justice or [insert your own favorite big issues]?” – I’ll bet you thought.

 

I too felt this dismay when I’d filled up, sometimes overfilled, my self-appointed ninety-five (95) Sections and had to stop. You knew I chose that number because its insinuative suggestion of Martin Luther’s 95 theses just might lead a few minds to reflect anew on that nice little revolution Luther set loose with just a few heartfelt words representing very large, deeply felt, issues. Large issues are being deeply felt in our own time. A new Reformation might be a tad more than we need to correct the wrongs besetting our modern nation and our collective spirit, but not by much. If you find yourself agreeing, I have an idea to offer for your consideration.

 

I keep thinking of lots more populist corrections than could possibly be squeezed into my 95-section CaFMaC bill, and that’s not to mention the dozens more I haven’t thought of yet. More ideas pop into mind every day – and, like Bobby Kennedy, I think, why not?

 

Here’s the deal. If after having read CaFMaC you find yourself so excited, or pissed, or something, that you simply can’t sit still, write your thoughts down. Get it out. Say it on paper. Try to capture that dry legal style inexplicably used by people who draft legislative bills, but also try to say it your own way in language that might be considered “droll” – which my dictionary defines as “amusingly odd; whimsically comical.” The issues may be serious, but when we lose the ability to laugh at ourselves we’re truly doomed.

 

If you will then mail your best effort (no more than one page, please!) to the publisher* of this book, that publisher and I will select the best of the best received, on a wider ranging array of issues, and put forth a second edition (“Populist Corrections Expanded” or perhaps “Making New Trouble”) for your edification and, indeed, hopefully make new trouble before the original trouble has quite subsided. Call it momentum.

*I await a publisher at this writing.

 

And you needn’t stop there. Make your own trouble – put your own Populist Corrections on Facebook, on the worldwide web, on tweets and twits, on the bulletin board at Kroger, at your dog groomer’s. Provoke so many people into getting involved that the Occupy Movement will look like an Easter egg hunt. America has been changed before, sometimes for the better. Betterment is now needed again, more drastically than ever before. If liberal and conservative cannot be reconciled, a third option must be found. We are one people, we must find a way to make that reality prevail over divisiveness.

 

Out with the old, in with the new. Let us all mutually advocate for a fair economic model that cannot help but level the playing field, just as out-of-control unregulated capitalism cannot help but tilt that field to the disadvantage of every person who’s not firmly ensconced at the top of the tilt. Convert finance capitalism’s destructive manipulations into bona fide competitive trading of real goods and services – fair trading that makes everybody better off. Put monopolies under public control. On behalf of our nation and our people, stop the obscenely rich fanatic ideologues – I speak of those who will not compromise or be reconciled – from systemically taking the wealth away from everybody else, especially the poor. Call it “The Adequacy Principle.”

 

Send our Supreme Court a message to distinguish the American Revolution, in which the people rose up for political freedom, from the French Revolution, in which the people rose up for economic freedom. Tell them about Elmore’s yardstick. Remind them they’re supposed to be learned neutral judges, not advocates. Above all, abolish the out-of-control corporations the Supreme Court bizarrely treats as “persons.” Abolish them and good riddance – there is a better way that serves everybody well. And join with me in a third-option movement to replace them with employee-owned co-ops which have true incentive to truly compete, in a market that is truly free, for the common good of the nation and of equal treatment and opportunity for all U.S. citizens.

 

Speak right up, ladies and gents. I’ll provide here a little example to help you get started, prime the pump so to speak. It shows how, if you write a legislative bill in hopes of getting your elected Congressmen and Senators to pass it into law – maybe (which, don’t forget, also means “maybe not”) – you must learn to express your brilliant, original ideas in convoluted sentences that are way too long but nonetheless deliver unexpected punches. It gets easier with practice – you just have to write the way some people talk – no apparent breaths, lots of commas, few periods. Here’s my example:

 

SPIRITUAL GROWTH

Section 96.      Rock and roll music and every last one of its vile iterations and derivatives of every nature, which in their ubiquitous aggregate long ago initiated and have long since guaranteed the inevitable decline and ruin of the once-great United States and most of the surrounding civilization, such as but most certainly not limited to Bill Haley and the Comets rock, hard rock, acid rock, punk rock, so-called adult rock, misnamed soft rock, rap, blap, crap and all other associated rhythmic noise invariably and disproportionately featuring way too damn much drum, the concept of melody being replaced by looping, mindlessly repetitive and meaningless notational phrases composed by incompetent non-composers in substitution for real melodies such as Minuet in G, Mighty Like a Rose and The Sound of Music, all being accompanied by screechingly bizarre alleged harmony overlaid onto exaggeratedly, insanely raucous electric bass guitar and incomprehensible lyrics variously screamed and grunted out by profusely sweating permanently non-maturable pseudo-adults clad appropriate for the Roman games and in full seizure of pulsating, thrusting tribute to the most base, primal, bestial aspects of their dualistic animal-spiritual nature, the whole being emitted at ten thousand (10,000) blasting goddam decibels through speakers the size of Volkswagens turned up to deafening full crank, are hereby abolished pursuant to the spiritual advancement of humankind and a lasting memorial to the author of these words. Have a swell day.

*          ©          *

 

SUGGESTED READING

Following in no particular order are some of the many books which influenced the writing of Populist Corrections. At the heart of Populist Corrections, the CaFMaC Act goes into considerable detail in spelling out specific practical solutions to our economic problems. Most of these books speak only to the problems, though they all note that our biggest single problem is absence of political will (i.e. guts) to devise solutions. That’s probably because will-less politicians can’t bear to face the only truly logical solution, which is to replace capitalism with something humane that serves everyone. I strongly recommend them all to your reading and hope you can find time to do so. But do exercise due caution – Elmore read them all, acted on what he read, and you see where it got him.

Atkinson, Anthony. Inequality: What Can Be Done?  Harvard University Press, 2015.

Stiglitz, Joseph. The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them.  W.W. Norton, 2015.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash, 1929. Published 1954. Republished by James K. Galbraith, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Mason, Paul.  Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Faux, Jeff. The Servant Economy: Where America’s Elite is Sending the Middle Class. John Wiley and Sons, 2012.

Rifkin, Jeremy. The Third Industrial Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Baradaran, Mehrsa. How the Other Half Banks. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Cowie, Jefferson.  The Great exception. Princeton University Press, 2016.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Liu, Eric and Hanauer, Nick. The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government. Sasquatch Books, 2011.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Daly, Herman E. and Farley, Joshua. Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. Island Press, 2011.

Beinhocker, Eric. The Origin of Wealth. McKinsey and Company, Inc., 2006, 2007

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations (1776). Bantam Classic Edition, 2003.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything. Simon & Schuster, 2014.

Nader, Ralph. Only the Super Rich Can Save Us. Seven Stories Press, 2009.

Culver, John C. and Hyde, John. American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace. W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Rifkin, Jeremy. Spiritual Perspectives on Globalization. Skylight Paths, 2003.

Cochran, Thomas C. and Miller, William. The Age of Enterprise (1942). Harper & Row, 1961.

Korten, David C. The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1999.

Galbraith, James K. The Predator State. Free Press, 2008.

McIntyre, Lee. Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior. MIT Press, 2006.

Primack, Richard B. Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods. University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Wright, Robert. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Vintage Books, 2000.

Hamilton, Clive. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About climate Change. Earthscan, 2010.

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Henry Holt & Co., 2014.

Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations: and the Remaking of World Order (1996). Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Guzman, Andrew. Overheated: The Human Cost of climate Change. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and religion. Vintage Books, 2012.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011.

Gore, Al. The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.  Random House, 2013.

Conoghan, Daniel and Smith, Dan. The Book of Money: Everything You Need to Know About How World Finances work. Firefly Books, 2013.

Baggott, Jim. Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth. Pegasus Books, 2013.

Weisman, Alan. Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth. Little, Brown and Company, 2013.

Sagan, Carl. The Varieties of Scientific Experience. Penguin Press, 2006.

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Tobias, Michael Charles. Hope On Earth. University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Heffernan, Margaret. Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. Walker & Company, 2011.

McIntosh, Alastair. Hell and High Water: Climate Change, Hope and the Human Condition. Birlinn Limited, 2008.

Fukuyama, Francis. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology revolution. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002.

Wells, Spencer. Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization. Random House, 2010.

DeBono, Edward. New Think. Avon Books, 1967.

Welles, James F. The Story of Stupidity. Mount Pleasant Press, 1988.

Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John. The book of General Ignorance. Harmony Books, 2006.

 

*          ©          *

SHARE THE BLOG:  If you’ve enjoyed this tale of  POPULIST CORRECTIONS  in modern America, please tell your friends to tune in to  The Fixy Populist  …at…    fixypopulist.com

Herald of the coming popular fixes to America.  Tell others about The Fixy Populist.

MAJOR FIXES ARE ON THE WAY

 

This is the last posting of Populist corrections, but The Story’s Not Over.

Other postings will continue.

AND READERS ARE STILL INVITED TO ENTER THIRD-OPTION COMMENTS AND IDEAS.  WHAT FIXES TO  OUR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS CAN LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES BOTH AGREE ON?   WE ARE ONE PEOPLE, WE MUST COME TOGETHER!   THINK, NEIGHBOR, THINK HARD  – OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN ARE DEPENDING ON US.

 

READERS COMMENT: Your ideas are invited for dealing with the issues addressed here. These posts present new perspectives – THIRD OPTIONS – to move beyond the conservative-liberal divide that is so poisoning our national sense of shared community. New and wiser options are always available to make life in America better for all the people. What are yours?

Click on LEAVE A COMMENT, enter up to 200 words.