Inequality vs Economic Democracy by Dr. J. W. Smith of the Institute for Economic Democracy
2 November 2008
Early corporations burned all the spice trees which they could not control in order to retain their high charge for spices. Modern corporations control America’s foreign policy the same way. They destroyed the farming industry of poor countries by selling highly-subsidized, low-priced grains to developed and undeveloped nations. Under their self-designed monopolization of the world’s food supply, those corporations doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled their grain prices as food supplies grew scarcer. This monopoly structure is specifically designed to plunder the wealth out of nations, drawing them in so that extrication is almost impossible, and now hundreds of millions now face starvation. These people are helpless against the corporate controlled world structure, and they die. Hundreds of millions dollars of (mis)appropriated wealth becomes hundreds of billions of dollars, while innocent people entitled to a secure food supply die. Both of these crimes of inhumanity against humanity are the result of greed, called ”the Plunder by Trade system” and the “property rights structure” that have been designed into our laws during the last more than 700 years.
This was done under the name of “privatization” which the perception managers of the power brokers have taught us is a good thing. (It’s only good for them. They get away with these outright frauds because advancing technology is so efficient, they can distribute half the gains of technology, and retain the remaining gains in the form of massive capitalized unearned profits. Immense as those unearned profits are, they are only a fraction of the gains in living standards.Technology is monopolized.
How can a nation or region attain security so as to avoid starvation and poverty as faced by hundredds of millions today due to intentional destruction of the viability of local farmers and corporate control of world food supplies?
1) Establish local perma-culture and abandon corporate control of food supplies. Plants providing thread for cloth such as hemp are among the most prolific in the world. Perma-culture can be expanded to produce fiber for clothes and exotic threads made from oil or coal will not threaten the environment.
2) Houses built from rammed earth or rock with ceramic interiors that will last for centuries is also a local industry.
Within those two local industries, perma-culture and housing, are the essentials of a secure society, food, fiber, and shelter. When regional soils are used with attention to protection of nature’s wealth, these necessities of life are not intense consumers of resources.
If nobody get unearned wealth, money in a secure social structure represents real values. Taxes disappear and health care, retirement, governments, and more are all funded from those natural flows of money.
See ied.info to find out more about the Institute for Economic Development.
