mike douglas,
Be careful of the Green Party. If you dig deeper into what this organization is all about, you might reconsider. I did, and I am concerned that this group could ever surface in America. There is much more shocking material on the website than than I have listed below. What I have listed below is only concerns the government ownership of publicly owned corporations and private owned property which they wish to abolish. Anyway, here are some of my comments, plus I listed excerpts from their website:
Plain and simple. This is communism under a different name.
Note: If you want to find this on their site, click on 'National Program', then at the bottom of the page, click on 'Economic Democracy'.
In addition to abolition of the capital markets, they also propose the abolition of private ownership of land. I have copied this item to the tread below the 1st item, so scroll down to find this.
greenparty.org
This is from the web site:
Capital: Greens support the abolition of markets in transferable corporate property rights and their replacement by democratic means of controlling capital. In private sector cooperatives and self-employed small business people, this means non-salable personal membership rights to participate in the democratic self-government of the work community and to receive net income from their enterprise in proportion to their labor contribution. In private sector credit unions, worker-controlled pension funds, and policy-holder insurance cooperatives, as well as public sector budgets, community banks, and investment boards, this means non-salable membership or citizenship rights to participate, or elect representatives to participate, in decisions regarding the allocation of investments.
In theory, capitalists risk losing their wealth they invest in productive enterprises and they should be rewarded for their risks with profits. In practice, most of this risk is socialized.
Hundreds of billions of dollars a year in corporate welfare in the form of tax abatements, infrastructure investments, loan guarantees, preferential contracts, and direct grants means the public assumes much of the risk.
When corporations down size, close plants, and move production, it is the communities left behind who pay the consequences.
When Big Business goes bankrupt, society cannot afford to let them fail and government bails them out: Lockheed, Penn Central, Chrysler, the savings and loan industry, the big banks' investments in Latin America, Asia, and Russia, among many other major bailouts in the last 30 years.
When corporate managements are driven by absentee-owned finance capital to make decisions to promote short-term financial returns at the expense of the long-term viability of the enterprise, as well as externalized social and ecological costs, it is workers, communities, and the environment that absorb the long-term costs.
Even most of the private money invested does not orignate from capitalists' but comes from the workers, either from their savings or from profits appropriated from workers' labor. Workers' savings in bank deposits and insurance and pension funds is the major source of investment funds in the US economy.
We also need to be clear that most so-called capital markets are giant gambling casinos where investors bet on the future value of financial securities and rearrange and concentrate ownership of productive assets. They are not efficient or rational means of raising and allocating fresh capital. Between 1989 and 1996, US corporations retired $700 billion more in stock than they issued.
In short, we have a system of capital markets where the risks and losses are socialized, but the profits remain private and ownership is being progressively concentrated.
Since most investment funds come from the labor and savings of ordinary people in the first place, either from profits or savings in banks and insurance and pension funds, it is only fair that ordinary people should share both the risks and enjoy the benefits that productive investments produce through democratic social control of investment.
Insurance is a means of socializing risk. A democratic investment process should be seen as a type of social insurance system that socializes both the risks and rewards of social investments.
A democratic investment system should be democratically coordinated and decentralized as well. It should incorporate national planning of basic economic objectives and also have a multiplicity of sources of democratically-controlled investment from which enterprises can seek financing. These sources would include publicly-owned community banks, a democratically restructured Federal Reserve System, credit unions, worker-controlled of pension funds, and policyholder-controlled insurance cooperatives.
Enterprises themselves should remain free to reinvest their earnings where they see money making opportunities. But socially planned investments need to cover two additional areas that are neglected under the current system of capital markets: marginally profitable but socially useful enterprises (e.g., rail transportation) and the free provision of public goods and services, such as education, health care, and infrastructure.
Land: The classic justification of private property is that people should be entitled to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. Land, natural resources, and the ecological systems of the Earth are the product of billions of years of evolution, not human labor. As such they should not be privately owned, but their use should be democratically planned. Democratic planning does not preclude the security of tenure on the land we associate with private land ownership and the right to own improvements on the land, nor does it preclude the extraction of natural resources by private enterprises. Democratic planning of the use of nature can be effected by a variety of means: ecological taxes that price resource extraction at its true costs to protect those resources; land value taxation that returns unearned income from ground rent back to society; zoning and other land use planning guidelines; and laws that phase out and ban toxic chemicals in production. |
