Introduction to Cooperative Capitalism

Superior rights for the few and inferior rights for many are structured into the subtle monopolization of land, technology, and money; all produced by nature or social technology and properly belonging to all. The unearned wealth from the subtle monopolization of those enclosed commons both reduces the efficiency of an economy and lowers the share of wealth for others. Having been born and raised within the current residual-feudal exclusive title legal structure and taught with sincerity—by those who learned those fables right in the university that this is the most efficient economy—we are unaware that these highly inefficient subtle monopolies even exist.

Society is a machine to produce and distribute the needs of the people. All inventions are a part of nature and thus a part of a natural commons. Privatizing this natural wealth has seriously reduced economic efficiency, that we are taught otherwise notwithstanding. All wealth is processed from scarce resources those resources are on or under the earth so land was the first commons to be privatized.a Restructuring to a modern land commons and ensuring each person the right to their piece of land would greatly increase economic efficiency while protecting earned private property rights far more thoroughly than the current subtle-monopoly system.

Technology is a part of nature and a common heritage to all waiting to be discovered and used. Both economic efficiency and rewards to inventors have been lowered by privatizing technology through the current residual-feudal exclusive patent structure. The claiming of rights to the communication spectrums by corporations is a great example of the continued structuring of inequality into law through privatizing what is the common heritage of all. There was a massive gain in rights by a few subtle monopolists, a loss of common usage of the TV and radio airways for the masses, and a huge loss to society through limiting the world economy to operating at a small percent of its potential efficiency.b

Money is such a powerful tool for producing wealth that the powerful have always reserved its creation and control to themselves and, as we all know well, money (which is only a social technique) remains subtly monopolized today.

Full rights and equality reclaimed for all people through a modern land, technology, and money commons within democratic-cooperative-capitalism (fundamentally a Henry George concept) would convert the economy to superefficient capitalism and, assuming a sharing of productive jobs, efficiency increases would equal the gains from the invention of money, the printing press, and electricity. Private property rights and individualism would be strengthened, competition would increase, and a quality lifestyle could be maintained by each while working only 2-to-3 days per week.

That these subtle monopolies are necessary to accumulate capital is a fable created to protect wealth and further privatize property that properly belongs in a modern commons. Capital can be accumulated much faster in an economy with full and equal rights. Removal of subtle monopolization and returning rights to the modern commons to all would not only increase your rights to land, your rights to the use of technology, your rights to finance capital, your rights to information, and your rights to your share of the wealth from their productive use, it will ensure those rights.

Proponents of the current excessive rights structured into law fail to understand that giving a few an excessive share of rights restricts the rights of others (inequality structured in law) and thus is a subtle form of monopolization. Through relatively small changes in the legal structure those subtle monopolies disappear, rights to the modern commons are reclaimed, the essentials of private property rights and individualism are expanded, and competition is increased.

Personal Property Rights, Community Property Rights, and Private Property Rights

Under the aristocratic system from which Western society evolved (and is still evolving) aristocracy claimed all property rights. As all other rights are closely tied to property rights, the common people had few or no rights. Instead of equal rights to nature’s wealth, property rights as structured today are direct descendants of these feudal aristocratic exclusive rights.

Personal property rights are properly total and unfettered rights to that produced with one’s own labor or that produced by another person’s labor purchased with one’s honest earnings. This includes personal possessions, homes, machinery, most industries, and all consumer products.

Community property rights are that produced by nature and which sustains all life. This includes land and resources on, above, and beneath the earth. Air, water, timber, oil, coal, iron, copper, communication spectrums, and the genes of all plants and animals which are all properly common property to be used by all. No person produced any one of these items and all are essential to life.

Claiming exclusive private property rights to air and water may appear to have social efficiency advantages while there is a surplus. A scarcity of such fruits of nature, however, would likely mean impoverishment or even death for those excluded through exclusive titles. Thus, in times of scarcity, community rights should supercede private property rights and that is recognized in Western law.

But the rights of all stakeholders to the fruits of nature are not recognized in residual-feudal exclusive private property titles. With only occasional exceptions, the rights of the community are ignored in those titles to nature’s wealth. Throughout this book we will be addressing how under Henry George’s concept of conditional title (though he may not have used that term) to nature’s wealth (land and the resources on and under the land) all will have rights to their share of this great wealth and it is far more socially and economically efficient than residual-feudal, exclusive subtle monopoly titles.

A Very Short History on the Few Claiming the Rights of the Many

While consolidating the first modern states, aristocracy and the Church defeated the free cities of Europe one by one and began privatizing the commons. The masses naturally wished to maintain control of their resources and retain their community support structures. “Only wholesale massacres by the thousand could put a stop to this widely spread popular movement, and it was by the sword, the fire, and the rack that the young states secured their first and decisive victory over the masses of the people.”1

As more and more of the commons were privatized, the 14th-Century saw the beginning of a 300-year effort to erase all trace of community support structures and community ownership of social wealth. The process to individualize the masses to limit their power had begun:

For the next three centuries the states … systematically weeded out all institutions in which the mutual-aid tendency had formerly found its expression. The village communities were bereft of their folkmotes [community meetings], their courts and independent administration; their lands were confiscated. The guilds were spoliated of their possessions and liberties, and placed under the control, the fancy, and the bribery of the State’s official. The cities were divested of their sovereignty, and the very springs of their inner life—the folkmote, the elected justices and administration, the sovereign parish and the sovereign guild—-were annihilated; the State’s functionary took possession of every link of what formerly was an organic whole. Under that fatal policy and the wars it engendered, whole regions, once populous and wealthy, were laid bare; rich cities became insignificant boroughs; the very roads which connected them with other cities became impracticable. Industry, art, and knowledge fell into decay…. For the next three centuries the states, both on the Continent and in these islands [Great Britain], systematically weeded out all institutions in which the mutual-aid tendency had formerly found its expression. It was taught in the universities and from the pulpit that the institutions in which men formerly used to embody their needs of mutual support could not be tolerated in a properly organized State.2

Periodically a researcher of economic history will run into the fable “The Tragedy of the Commons.” This fable uses the example of pastures used in common to prove this was an inefficient legal and social structure. Each farmer has rights to pasture his cattle. To earn more money, self interest dictates that some will turn more cattle onto that pasture than their allotment. The pasture is overgrazed, the soil erodes, and all will lose.

This author has experience with pastures used in common and the truth is the opposite of the fable. During the Great Depression, bankrupt ranchers on the prairies of the West were occasionally organized into “grazing districts” which are lands grazed in common. The fable ignores that those ranchers have equal rights, none have superior rights. Each has an allotted number of cattle they can pasture, and any excess cattle will be confiscated. The result: private land with residual-feudal exclusive private ownership is typically overgrazed as ranchers maximize their income by mining the topsoil through overgrazing while those grazing districts, the soils of the commons under conditional title, are conserved.

Where did that fable come from? Just as corporations today fund think-tanks to pour out social control beliefs that protect their wealth and powerc, the fable of the “Tragedy of the Commons” and other such social-control paradigms (Eric Fromm’s “frameworks of orientation”) were promoted by the powerful centuries ago to justify the reduction of others rights and the increase in their rights through the privatization of the commons.

The three centuries of the establishment of the British enclosure acts is only one of many examples of structuring inequality of rights into law through enclosure of the commons. We will be discussing how insurance, law, health care, and information are also a natural commons that have been privatized in that centuries-long process of providing excessive rights to the powerful through structuring inequality into law.

The powerful throughout the past centuries not only claimed an excessive share of the wealth of nature which was properly shared by all within the community, through the unequal trades of mercantilism they claimed an excessive share of the wealth on the periphery of their trading empires. Adam Smith describes mercantilism for us:

[Mercantilism’s] ultimate object…. is always the same, to enrich the country [city or state] by an advantageous balance of trade. It discourages the exportation of the materials of manufacture [tools and raw material], and the instruments of trade, in order to give our own workmen an advantage, and to enable them to undersell those of other nations [cities] in all foreign markets: and by restraining, in this manner, the exportation of a few commodities of no great price, it proposes to occasion a much greater and more valuable exportation of others. It encourages the importation of the materials of manufacture, in order that our own people may be enabled to work them up more cheaply, and thereby prevent a greater and more valuable importation of the manufactured commodities.3

William Appleman Williams describes mercantilism at its zenith: “The world was defined as known and finite, a principle agreed upon by science and theology. Hence the chief way for a nation to promote or achieve its own wealth and happiness was to take them away from some other country.”4

When the injustice of mercantilism was understood, it became too embarrassing and was replaced by the supposedly just Adam Smith free trade. But free trade as practiced by Adam Smith neo-mercantilists was far from fair trade. Adam Smith unequal free trade is little more than a philosophy for the continued subtle monopolization of the wealth-producing-process, largely through continued privatization of the commons of both an internal economy and the economies of weak nations on the periphery of trading empires. So long as weak nations could be forced to accept the unequal trades of Adam Smith free trade, they would be handing their wealth to the imperial-centers-of-capital of their own free will. In short, Adam Smith free trade, as established by neo-mercantilists, was only mercantilism hiding under the cover of free trade.

Through the subtle monopolization of highly efficient industrial technology (a privatized commons), control of the wealth-producing-process worldwide was to remain with the imperial centers while the periphery was to provide the resources to feed their industries. The imposition of structural adjustments upon the developing world today is little more than a continued expansion of the privatization of the commons. The developed world would never impose those structural adjustments upon themselves, rhetoric that they will notwithstanding. Efforts to do so in a very small way relative to adjustments imposed on the periphery of empire were met with immediate social unrest and abandoned.

When the old imperial nations broke themselves battling over the world’s wealth (World Wars I & II), the world began to break free. The only wealth left was in America which promptly attained full imperial status through suppressing those breaks for freedom (the Cold War) and taking over Britain’s job of imposing Adam Smith unequal free trade upon the world. Those breaks for freedom were successfully suppressed but the battle goes on.

Though our previously published research exposed the centuries-long process of the powerful few claiming a part of the rights of the many, we need to look closer. The suppression of the rights of the many by the governing few was possible by excluding the masses from consideration as people. This is seen most clearly in the description of natives of Africa and the Americas. The first black Africans brought back to Europe were described as looking like, but not really being, people. Later American Indians were described as not being people because they had no souls. After those ruses (social-control paradigms) were set aside, natives in the undeveloped world were said to be incompetent and incapable. By not being recognized as capable people, they could be enslaved and treated as private property.

But the same concept of non-persons was at work within European society. Within the slowly eroding community support structures, all were relatively equal. But the powerful (aristocracy) slowly gained more power and claimed ever more of the land. The claiming of that land gave aristocracy more power. They eventually claimed all the land, looked upon themselves as far superior to the common people, and maintained the subtle monopolization of wealth through forbidding intermarriage or even mixing socially.

Those aristocratic rights could not have been claimed without first inculcating within the population the beliefs of innate superiority of one group and the innate inferiority of others. This was accomplished through the fables of the heroic knights of aristocracy and our children read these fables updated to today’s world.d Control of aristocratic society’s literature was so effective that the masses accepted their lower status and developed intense loyalty to their kings and lords and many still revere them today. Note the intense loyalty shown to the wealthy and powerful (the system).

The loyalty of the masses, along with massive firepower and a sharing of the plunder, provided the manpower for the imperial nations to conquer the world. Through being Christians with souls, both aristocracy and the common people believed they were superior and thus justified their suppression and oppression of “savages” throughout the world. That belief in superiority through having Christian souls was eventually set aside but in many the belief in innate superiority remained.

As people of color on the periphery became educated, formed nations, and developed some power, beliefs in superiority were no longer fashionable. One simply could not control billions of educated people while simultaneously telling them they were inferior.

As people told they are equal have to be treated equal, more subtle ways of control were required. The subtle monopolies, financial warfare, economic warfare, covert warfare, and overt war as addressed in depth in this author’s Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century were all aspects of that control. Most battles throughout the world are the powerful attempting to retain or expand superior rights that have been theirs for centuries and suppress those attempting to regain their rights.

Inequality is still being structured into law today. The powerful, developed world established the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT), the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and are in the process of establishing the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI [resurfacing under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS)]) and FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) as the financial and legal structure under which it retains access to the world’s resources at a fraction of true value.

Final authority will rest with the Gats [MAI, WTO, FTAA] Disputes Panel to determine whether a law or regulation is, in the memo’s language, ‘more burdensome than necessary’. And Gats [MAI, WTO, FTAA], not Parliament, will decide what is ‘necessary’. As a practical matter, this means nations will have to shape laws protecting the air you breathe, the trains you travel in and the food you chew by picking not the best or safest means for the nation, but the cheapest methods for foreign investors and merchants.… Under Gats [MAI, WTO, FTAA], as proposed in the memo, national laws and regulations will be struck down if they are ‘more burdensome than necessary’ to business. Notice the subtle change. Suddenly the Gats treaty is not about trade at all, but a sly means to wipe away restrictions on business and industry, foreign and local.… The WTO reports that, in the course of the secretive multilateral negotiations, trade ministers agreed that a Gats tribunal would not accept a defense of ’safeguarding the public interest’. In place of a public interest standard, the Secretariat proposes a deliciously Machiavellian ‘efficiency principle’: ‘It may well be politically more acceptable to countries to accept international obligations which give primacy to economic efficiency.’ This is an unsubtle invitation to load the Gats with requirements that rulers know their democratic parliaments could not otherwise accept.… Hearings are closed. Unions, as well as consumer, environmental and human rights groups, are barred from participating – or even knowing what is said before the panel.5

This book is designed to combine our published research 11 and 16 years ago on the waste within the subtly-monopolized internal American economy with our later research on the waste through covertly and militarily monopolizing world trade. The only way the world can be developed to a sustainable level is if the wastes of subtle monopolization, both in internal trade and external trade, are avoided. e

The United States of America, founded on the great ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, and freedom from oppression, is a great country. This author cherishes those values as much as anyone else and believes firmly that the current war against terrorism must be waged.f But that war must be fought through granting full rights and equality to all the world’s citizens, not by military power. The immense gains in economic efficiencies through full equality and rights for all people under democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism speak for themselves.

Once a society has attained full equality and full rights for all, class differences will largely disappear. But society will not be the dull sameness propagandists have taught us to believe. Groups of people are not innately superior to others. Individuals within all groups have thousands of varied talents both innate and developed. With both family and community support, talents and individuality can blossom and flourish. Within reason, each person’s potential will be maximized.

Certainly there are great individual achievements under individualism. These achievements were pursued relentlessly but what is ignored is that they were, one way or another, given great community support. Unnoticed are the talents that have remained undeveloped because of the limitations of support for most in highly individualized societies. Under the enormous efficiency and supports of democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism, people and society will develop and blossom as never before.

Subtle-Monopolization is a Remnant of Feudal Exclusive Property Rights

Social customs are a form of law. It is well recognized that such customs are huge obstacles for societies to evolve efficiently. The fact that the debris of residual-feudal exclusive title to nature’s wealth severely reduces the economic efficiency of capitalism is not even considered.

We are taught that monopolies have been eliminated by law. This is not true. Laws are designed by the powerful, for their protection, they have specifically designed subtle monopolization into the laws of capitalism. Under feudal law granting exclusive title a tiny minority totally monopolized wealth producing property and the wealth produced. Western societies evolved from Feudalism and those who gained power only granted residual-feudal exclusive property rights to more people on a basis that could be mathematically proven a large percentage could not become property owners.

The basic principals of monopolization were never abandoned, that we are taught they were notwithstanding. We have full rights only in the sense that each have a chance at becoming a wealthy monopolist. But only a calculable few can attain those superior rights.

This is not visible to Americans and Europeans because of the large percentage that have a high standard of living and thus appears to have full rights. But, unrealized by the masses and most in academia, that high standard of living is only through the purchase of the wealth of weak nations for a fraction of its true value, and the distribution of that appropriated wealth through the massive expenditures (the multiplier factor) on the military which is the final arbiter to maintain the system of laying claim to the world’s wealth. This translates to an economic system not viable in times of peace. The powerful today are fighting to retain their monopoly property rights to nature’s wealth just as the feudal powers fought to maintain the monopolization of wealth based on their exclusive feudal property rights.

All this will become visible as we demonstrate how, through abandoning those remnants of exclusive feudal titles to nature’s wealth, restructuring to democratic-cooperative-capitalism and becoming superefficient capitalism, economic efficiency will increase equal to the invention of money, the printing press, and electricity. As we describe today’s internal economies and global trade, we ask the reader to take note of the close connection of current subtle-monopoly laws to the total monopoly laws of feudalism. Today’s wars are protecting a monopolized wealth-producing-process just as aristocracy fought to retain their feudal monopoly structure. Today’s partial democracies are only a stepping stone towards full freedom and full rights for all. Once the last remnant of exclusive feudal property titles to what is properly social wealth is converted to Henry George’s concept of conditional titles that recognize everyone’s rights to their share of nature’s bounty full democracy, true freedom, and full rights will have been achieved.

At each point in the centuries-long march to full rights and full democracy, the powerful have structured the laws for their protection. The rights of the masses were only considered when a crisis threatened and allies were needed. Full rights were not attained even after revolutions. There was simply too much debris of monopoly law and monopoly custom (residual-feudal exclusive property rights) to clean away.

Our previous research on the current inefficiencies and potential efficiencies of world trade keep referring to the savings possible within internal subtly-monopolized economies. The first five chapters summarize that earlier research

Historically, members of many hunter/gatherer tribes worked less than four hours a day and, in the few areas where they survive, some still do. Even during the Middle Ages, normally half of one’s waking hours were available for leisure time. But during the Industrial Revolution, the pressure to increase profits forced a steady increase in working time. Between the years 1600 and 1850, the average working hours per year doubled, from 1,880 to 3,650 hours. After 1850, the strength of unions reversed the process, and by 1939 had almost halved the average working hours. Although unions were moving toward the 30-hour week, from 1939 to 1992—due to WWII, the Cold War, and the following “prosperity”—union strength steadily declined and weekly working hours in America increased from 40.7 hours in 1973 to 47-hours in 1988.6

The reduction of working hours to 20 hours a week or less was a recognized possibility during the 1920s and 1930s; but then came WWII and the Cold War. Even as labor productivity doubled and then doubled again the concept of drastically shorter working hours disappeared from the social mind.g

While the Cold War was being fought, society was not permitted the luxury of toying with alternative social contracts. The status quo was protected by branding any challenging ideas as “communist,” “socialist,” or “un-patriotic.” This reaction is a conditioned reflex for most within the imperial centers who are trained to view people advocating such ideas as enemies.

For perspective, one should consider that nothing was more “communist” in America than Social Security when it was first proposed. But under the crisis of the Great Depression, when the threat of worldwide revolution was high, unemployment insurance and funded retirements were given to the powerless as their right.

No one today considers unemployment insurance and the community support structure of Social Security as anything other than a right, and everyone would scoff at the suggestion that it is “communist,” “socialist,” or “un-American.” The same would be true if ever the last of labor’s rights were claimed, i.e., the right to a productive job and a full share of the fruits of land, technology, created money, information, and free time. Once claimed, all would insist on and defend these newly won rights, which can only be realized by eliminating currently wasted labor, currently wasted capital, and the current waste of resources under subtle monopolization.

People are so accustomed to the current structure of residual-feudal exclusive property rights that they do not realize the gains that are possible if laws and customs were changed to correspond with the increased efficiencies of technology. Full rights would mean each obtaining a decent standard of living while working only 2-to-3 days per week.

Of course, those who have gained excessive rights by intercepting production from that increased efficiency would loudly proclaim that any change would harm everyone. This, of course, would be only for their protection. There is an enormous cost to the rest of society, and eventually to everyone, as the powerful continually expand their residual-feudal exclusive rights by restructuring laws and institutions to systematically intercept the wealth produced by our increasingly efficient technology. Most books describe problems but provide few solutions. Through exposing the true causes of poverty and wars the solutions stand out in bold relief.

Understanding economics becomes easy when we realize that the classical economists were also protecting wealth and power. They consistently insisted that labor should be paid just enough to reproduce itself and that all wealth produced by increased efficiencies of technology should go to capital even as they ignored that this primitive accumulation of capital went first and foremost to grand castles and high living.7

Gerard Winstanley in the 16th-Century, Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 17th-Century, Johann Herder in the 18th-Century, and Karl Marx in the 19th-Century spoke to the rights of the weak; primarily labor.8 Most other classical economists were protecting wealth and power.

Aristocrats would not be caught dead doing common labor. Thus those necessary to run an economy (the bourgeois) were given some residual-feudal-exclusion rights. Those beneath the new arrivals to polite society still were denied those rights.

Aristocratic feudal property rights were being implanted in America but the dispossessed only had to move to the vast expanse of unclaimed land and this left no one to operate the feudal estates. The common people were, only by default, given rights to land. Although a gain, land was, as Henry George taught us, still subtly monopolized by residual-feudal exclusive titles and, due to the high cost of that monopolized land, full rights were yet denied the majority.

The gain in rights in America spilled back into Europe. The short-lived French Revolution promising full rights to all was overthrown but, to prevent more revolutions, those in power released some land rights and, over the next 150 years, unemployment insurance, social security and other rights were granted to the common people of Europe. To prevent a ballot box revolution during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and other rights were granted to Americans. During that crisis the same threat again faced Europe and almost all governments were turned over to fascists to prevent a voters’ revolution.h

A ballot box revolution did occur in Spain. The powerful were voted out but fascists took that government back by force (1936-1939). That externally-orchestrated overthrow of a true democracy was improperly named in history as the Spanish Revolution. After WWII, the powerbrokers faced the prospect of the world taking the rhetoric of democracy seriously and breaking free. The process of denying those rights to most required imperial centers giving rights to nations on the periphery essential for allies and the immense expenditure of money on the Cold War gave buying power and the appearance of more rights to almost all labor in those imperial centers.

As the common people fought for equal rights, and did gain, the power-structure protected itself by trumpeting each partial gain of rights as full and equal rights. But the residual-feudal exclusive rights of capital promoted by classical economists have never been fully set aside and full and equal rights as promoted by a minority of philosophers has never been attained. It is this lack of full rights which creates the poverty and violence of today’s world.

Providing equal rights through Henry George’s suggested slight changes in the structure of residual-feudal exclusive titles to nature’s wealth would eliminate the current unacknowledged subtle land, technology, and money monopolies that are the essence of today’s economy. At minimum cost and without waste use-values would be distributed to all. The quality of life will rise rapidly even as the hours of required labor and the GDP drops possibly 50 percent. The drop in GDP, even as quality of life rises, measures the previously wasted labor, capital, and resources of a subtly-monopolized, residual-feudal, economy. The GDP then rises as people utilize their new free time for family interactions, to develop their many artistic talents, or to simply socialize with friends.

Under a modern commons within democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism, the just rights of private property are fully protected, individualism and competition are strengthened, and money no longer flows through those subtle monopolies to the interceptors of wealth. Society’s production is instead—through the mechanisms of equal rights to nature’s wealth, equal pay for equal labor, and equal sharing of productive jobs—distributed instantly and without unnecessary costs to the producers of wealth. Under those rules of equality, the need for massive military forces and their attendant massive slaughters disappear.

The efficient economy we are describing can not happen until residual-feudal exclusive titles to nature’s wealth are restructured into conditional titles. At each point in the centuries-long march to full rights and full democracy, the powerful structured the laws for their own protection. The rights of the masses were only considered when a crisis threatened. Full rights were not attained even after revolutions. There was simply too much debris of residual-feudal exclusive law and custom (monopolies) to clean away.

Theoretically we have democratic governments today. But in reality we have only partial democracies with the potential of full democracies. But we are getting closer. Once those residual-feudal exclusive subtle monopolies are abandoned, a full democracy will emerge. Likewise, if a crisis transposes partial democracies into a full democracies the simple legal changes to eliminate those residual-feudal exclusive subtle monopolies and establish superefficient capitalism can be made.

Those owning and working within the superstructure of those subtle monopolies are the world’s brightest and most talented. That is why they reached for and attained those positions and they will unanimously dispute their redundancy even as a few of them finance and guide the enormous propaganda process, as outlined in Chapter seven, which protects their excess rights.

The gains to society will be enormous when under a system of full and equal rights with a sharing of productive jobs these talented and brilliant people will be producing wealth instead of intercepting wealth.

If we are so militarily secure, why does America have such a violent foreign policy as this book exposes? It is because the rest of the world may declare their freedom and federate into powerful centers of capital just as America is so federated, as the former Soviet federation was at the height of its power, and as all of Europe is becoming.

If most of the developing world formed trading alliances, and assuming that cohesiveness held, they could negotiate with the imperial centers for equality in trade and would soon build equality in wealth. Thus the federation of weak nations is a threat to all imperial centers of capital. However, it is also the foundation for peace. Unless they are being destabilized by outside powers, federations typically do not have internal military struggles.

Once weak nations first ally, and then federate, there will be no periphery for the imperial centers to control. With the assurance of the destruction of all belligerents, surely the imperial centers will not go to war with each other. With most the world’s precious resources in a newly federated world, the federation of the entire world is the route to equal access to resources and a quality life for all.

The first five chapters condense the concept of distribution through unnecessary labor which is the central theses of The World’s Wasted Wealth and The World’s Wasted Wealth 2. Later chapters borrow heavily from Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st-Century. The thesis of a modern commons and residual-feudal exclusive title to nature’s wealth in this manuscript developed so much strength that we inserted those concepts into WHY? The Deeper History Behind the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack on America and later editions of Economic Democracy to give those readers the benefit of those thoughts. However, each book has its own focus which gains strength when built upon the central theses in our magnum opus, Economic Democracy. We trust our readers will bear with us on the duplications.

We highly recommend picking keywords, key people and countries off these pages and run Google/Nexus-Lexus Internet searches. One will be surprised at what has been missed in the news and history books and each search only takes minutes. With normally hidden history right at the reader’s fingertips, in a few years authors will insert only a few citations. A search for alternative views on subjects on the evening news will be a great education.

The title of John Perkins’ book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004), alerts us that this is a must read. Finally, one of the managers of state defected and exposes the heart of the beast; our analysis was right on target.

Michael Hudson’s Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance, giving a point by point description of how financial warfare and economic warfare are waged, is also crucial.

Likewise Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber’s Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State. These authors explain how once a week the hard right pass out crucial talking points to their radio talk shows, to news outlets they control, and to key government officials. The essence of those talking points flow out of those news outlets simultaneously building an “echo chamber” which imprints upon the American mind a view of the world that protects their excessive rights.

Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine’s Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical World addresses the 5,000 years of the ebb and flow of privatization. We outline how, in one stroke, Henry George’s conversion of exclusive titles to natures wealth to conditional titles restores those original commons in modern form and is the answer for full and equal rights with a quality life for all.

As all stops will be pulled to prevent loss of monopoly power and its unearned wealth, we do not expect Wi-Fi’s (wireless fidelity’s) potential for a return to a modern commons with full and equal rights for all to happen soon. But only the iron grip of fascism or World War III (an extension of fascism) can prevent it. Quite simply, if each citizen of the world can talk to any other citizen worldwide for free, or at minimal cost, if news and cultural TV and radio of every society is beamed into the living rooms of every other culture, the propaganda system necessary to sustain the massive worldwide repressions protecting monopolies will collapse.

With 10 times the capacity at 10% the cost (meaning one percent the cost per unit of information) of the current communications structure, Wi-Fi has that potential. If structured to its maximum efficiency potential, every TV and radio station anywhere in the world can have access to every Wi-Fi wired living room in the world.

Current secondary carriers of Radio and TV programming (which is most stations) will fail to gain an audience. Access to every living room worldwide by progressive groups purchasing those bankrupt stations for a song will break the monopolist grip on information reaching the masses.

That massive programming will be so overwhelming that viewers and listeners will withdraw to a few programs they like and stations owned and operated by groups in which they have a deep interest. Those deep interests (environmentalists, sustainable living, the peace movement, minority rights, labor rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, antipoverty, and a thousand more causes) will be able to buy bankrupt stations for pennies on the dollar.

For the first time in history the voices of the world’s dispossessed will be heard. Their message will be louder than the voices of the dispossessors. Propagandists only pour out a few repetitive buzz words and buzz phrases. Since viewers will have gone through an economic crisis during this transition, those deep and moving messages carried by the concerned will trump those buzzwords. A peaceful, prosperous world is possible.

Footnotes

1. Real wealth is produced by combining resources, capital (both industrial and financial), and labor. It has been proven that labor anywhere in the world can be trained to run modern factories so there is a large surplus of labor. We will learn below that both technological and financial capital were historically kept scarce through subtle-monopolization but will be plentiful in a modern commons. This leaves availability of resources as the primary limitation on the production of wealth. Back to text
2. Witness corporations currently successfully structuring into law a denial to the public for community Wi-Fi connections which would reduce costs of phone and Internet service by over 90% even as it provides access to national and international TV and radio feeds and movies. As it is 100% free, the fast developing Skype phone service may derail those communication monopolies before all those laws can be put in place. Back to text
3. J.W. Smith, Economic Democracy:
   The
   Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century, expanded and updated 4th edition (www.ied.info/: The Institute for Economic Democracy, 2005), Chapter six. We researched in depth how democratic societies were controlled for the masses to accept policies which, in final analysis, were against their best interest. Back to text
4. Control of a societies foundation beliefs is well understood by powerbrokers. Few books dare to be so politically incorrect as Chapter seven exposing how history and literature of a free society are carefully controlled to protect a power-structure and their unearned wealth. Back to text
5. The United Nations was designed specifically to be controlled by the imperial-centers-of-capital. Before it can effectively federalize the world it must become democratized along the lines of the World Constitution and Parliament Association Constitution in, (http://www. radford.edu/~peace/ippno/doc.html, and other groups pushing for federation of poor nations: Earth Federation http://old.jccc.net/~mfoster/rs/constitution. html, Commission on Global Governance http://www.cgg.ch/, United Planetary Federation http://www.upf. org/ index.html, World Citizen Foundation http://www.worldcitizen.org/, United Nations http://www.un.org/. Back to text
6. As the anthrax used in the anthrax scare immediately after 9/11 was DNA-traced to the CIA’s Fort Dietrich labs almost certainly that was a CIA strategy-of-tension to create more fear in the American people to further justify the War on Terror. This brings into serious question on the claims that Al Queda is the extensive worldwide organization as claimed. When one understands strategies-of-tension to justify foreign policies one realizes that Muslim terrorists may be much smaller in number and weaker than we are being told Back to text
7. Juliet B. Schor, Overworked American, (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 2. Social studies textbooks still mentioned the potential of short working hours as late as the 1950s and the concept is again becoming fashionable. Back to text
8. An attempt to turn America’s government over to fascism at the same time was made but General Smedley Butler refused to head the overthrow and exposed their plot. Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003) Back to text

Endnotes

1. 
   Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1914), Chapters 6-8, especially p. 225. Back to text
2. Ibid, especially p. 226. See also Renard, Guilds of the Middle Ages, p. 66 and Chapters 7-8; Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, pp. 523-626, 713; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, (New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1974), vol. 2, pp. 5, 37, 245, vol. 3, p. 137. Back to text
3. Adam Smith, The
   Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 607. Back to text
4. William Appleman Williams, Contours of American History (New York: Academic Press Inc., 1974, p. 41. Back to text
5. “Necessity Test is Mother of GATS Intervention” The Observer (April 15, 2001). See also: John McMurtry, “The FTAA and the WTO: The Meta-Program for Global Corporate Rule,” Economic Reform (April, 2001). Back to text
6. Schor, The Overworked American, chs. 1. & 3; Peter Drucker, The New Realities (New York: Harper and Row, 1989) p. 123; Roy Morrison, We Build the Road as We Travel (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1991), p. 221; Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America (New York: William Morrow and Company Inc., 1992), p. 53; Lester Thurow, “Investing in America’s Future,” Economic Policy Institute, C-Span transcript (Oct. 21, 1991): p. 9; Kevin Phillips, Boiling Point (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 24; Walter Russell Mead, “After Hegemony,” New Perspective Quarterly (1987), quoted in “As Reagan Crumbles,” p. 14. Back to text
7. Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (London: Duke University Press, 2000), especially p. 91: Thomas C. Patterson, Inventing Western Civilization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). Back to text
8. Perelman, The
   Invention of Capitalism, Chapter 3.
   Back to text

This is a chapter from the book, Cooperative Capitalism. A Blueprint for Global Peace and Prosperity. Visit that link for more information about the book.