People of Faith CT

Time to Design a New Economy
Building a Huge Public Enterprise Sector
By STANLEY HELLER

Enough with criticizing Wall St and making suggestions on how to patch it up!The system has cracked wide open and we shouldn’t waste time inventingmethods for putting Humpty Dumpty together again. We need to constructalternative ways of living. We need radical plans for a new way ofguaranteeing the collective welfare of humanity and we need them in aform easily understandable to the hundreds of millions worldwide whowill be impoverished and enraged by the ongoing collapse.

I don’t have the answers, but I’ll dare to suggest certain principles in thinking and action.

1. Reject the notion that the crisis is all the fault of “liberals” whoforced, forced banks into lending money to poor people for mortgages.This idiocy is the line presented by the blowhard Rush Limbaugh andothers. Nobody pushed around the billionaire titans of Wall Street.Clinton-Gore bent over double for them. And the crisis wasn’t caused bya sudden fit of “greed” either. In our business world you go formaximum profit 24/7 or you’re out on your keester.

2. Reject the notion that there’s a shadowy world of finance separatefrom the good old real economy. They are intertwined. The so-calledfinancial crisis is a crisis of the whole international businesseconomy. What the hell is this stuff about ”Wall St.” vs. “Main St.”anyway? Who shops on Main St.? Main St. was Wallmarted out of existenceyears ago.

3. Realize that this country has the ability to raise massive amountsof money. If it can raise a trillion to bail out Wall Street andtrillions to murder Iraqis it can raise enormous sums to reshape theeconomy and the health care system.

4. It is madness for the government to take over dead corporations andtoxic securities. Instead it should seize whatever banks it needs anddirectly lend money to companies who make real products or provideservices to clean up and conserve the planet.

5. The prime reason the corporate chiefs resorted to paper schemes toenrich themselves is because they were so successful in keeping wagesdown. To keep up buying power they got Americans to work more and morehours and take on more and more debt. That couldn’t go on forever soWall Street went gaga producing financial paper. It blew bubble afterbubble declaring them to be 100 carat diamonds. The real way toguarantee buying power is to guarantee decent wages. To do that thegovernment has to create a huge public enterprise sector, businessescollectively owned by their employees.

6. We can no longer afford a medical system in this country lorded overby the medical insurance corporations. The waste is too damnedexpensive. Single-payer universal health care is an immediate economicnecessity.

7. We can’t afford imperial wars. We have to bring all the troops homenow. Most of our terrorist problem is caused by our insatiable meddlingand stealing of resources. The rest of the problem can be dealt with byintelligent police work and military measures within our borders.

8. The idea that people are going to finance their retirement withcorporate paper was a monumentally bad idea. Fixing social security,making it universal and greatly expanding its payments should be ano-brainer.

9. We should have a moratorium on home foreclosures for some set timeuntil citizen committees can determine if the overwhelmed debtor is aperson trying to hang on to his/her modest house or a speculator whoran into hot water while trying to flip real estate.

10. We cannot consume fossil fuels and other resources on the currentAmerican scale. It’s not just a matter of developing new fuels. Globalwarming is real. We have to think up ways of living smaller and closerto home.

11. We in no way want to repeat the tyranny and exploitation that wentdown under the name of “Communism”. We’re in a new century. Let’s usecomputers, the internet and trade unions to radically expand the scopeof democracy by bringing it into the world of business.

12. Understand that we’re going to have to go out in the streets andraise some major hell to get anything at all accomplished.

Stanley Heller is moderator of the listserv StopTheWarPolitics.

This essay first appeared in CounterPunch.