Introduction

Just a year after the release of the 1st edition of our primary work, Economic Democracy, terrorists hijacked four airliners and flew three of them into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, crashed the fourth, and killed over 3,000 people. The attention of the world is now focused on the War on Terrorism and the occupation of Iraq triggered by that terrorist attack on America.

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 war against terrorism must be waged.a But that war must be fought through understanding and removing its rather straight forward cause—the most massive transfer of wealth in history from the periphery of empire to the imperial center.

Almost every book is written with a view on being politically correct. As we are attempting to look reality right in the eye, we do not worry about such niceties. Our research is simply finding honest history and there is much in history that does not square with justice, ethics, or doing what is right. Those unjust and unethical aspects of our history must be analyzed and understood; so it is capitalism’s history we will be studying closely.

On this we wish to be clear. The unjust and unethical state policies we will be addressing were put in place by good people, no different than you and I. Managers-of-state are simply locked into a system of unequal trades which began in the Middle Ages. The very life-blood of powerful societies flow through those arteries of unequal trade and, until advancement to today’s level of industrial technology and further advancement in social technology (truly democratic governments and a peaceful foreign policy of equal and fair trade), conscientious leaders could not rebalance that unequal flow of commerce without creating a severe crisis.

The gains from efficiency of technology and from restructuring from residual-feudal subtle-monopoly capitalism to democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism, provides the opportunity for a historic shift to just and ethical state policies of equal and fair trade. That transition would quickly eliminate most poverty which, in turn, would eliminate terrorism and wars.

The elimination of the wastes of violence, if the benefits are shared, will wipe out most poverty. After all, only an additional $40-billion a year would provide clean water and sanitation, care for women’s reproductive health, basic health and nutrition, and basic education for all the world’s citizens. The money spent on arms annually is $800-billion, the wealth destroyed is surely an equal amount, and the wealth production forgone by these wasteful efforts is by far the greater waste.

Superior rights for the few and inferior rights for the many are structured into the subtle monopolization of land, technology, money, and information (Section B). The unearned wealth of the subtle monopolists of those enclosed commons both reduces the efficiency of an economy and lowers the share of wealth of others. Having been born and raised within the current 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.

An economy is a social machine to produce and distribute the needs of the people. People associate together in a society for mutual benefit; the basic civilizing impulse is the protection of the weak from the tyranny of the strong. Economic value is created by working, eating, drinking or, to put it simply, by ‘living’. Through creating subtle-monopoly property rights structuring inequality into law, the cunning have convinced the unwitting to willingly hand to them a large share of the world’s wealth.

That these subtle monopolies are necessary to accumulate capital is another fable (see subchapter The Tragedy of the Commons). Capital can accumulate much faster in an economy with full and equal rights for all. Removal of subtle monopolization and a return to the full and equal rights of a modern commons 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 returns from their productive use, it ensures those rights. A modern commons becomes democratic-cooperative-capitalism which is superefficient capitalism.

So long as all have access to land, technology, finance capital, and communications, those monopolies cannot reconstitute themselves and the huge overcharges which currently lay claim to the wealth produced by others will disappear. The managers of capital will be under such intense competition that the incompetent will quickly disappear, economic efficiency will rise steeply, and the competent will be held to a fair profit. That fair profit will then be recognized for what it really is; their fair wages.

It is unequal pay for equally-productive work which creates an extremely wealthy few and an impoverished many. Not only is unequal pay a cause of poverty, through failure to build buying power in step with productive capacity, it severely reduces economic efficiency, wastes industrial capacity, and creates wars. Those wars waste, and destroy, even more labor, capital, and resources.

Subtle-Monopolization is a Remnant of Feudal Property Rights

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

We are taught that monopolization has been eliminated by law. This is not true. Laws are designed by the powerful, for their protection, they have specifically designed subtle monopolization into laws of capitalism. Under exclusive feudal property rights a tiny minority totally monopolized both wealth producing property and the wealth it produced. Western societies evolved from feudalism. Those who gained power and what appeared to be full rights were only being granted a share of feudal monopoly rights.

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 has a chance at becoming a wealthy monopolist. But only a calculable few can attain those residual-feudal monopoly rights. This is not visible to Americans and Europeans because of the large percentage that has 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 on the military (the multiplier factor) 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 just as the feudal powers fought to maintain the monopolization of wealth based on their residual-feudal exclusive property rights.

All this will become visible as we demonstrate how, through abandoning those remnants of feudal exclusive title to nature’s wealth and restructuring to democratic-cooperative-(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 current subtle-monopoly laws have to the total monopoly laws of feudalism. Today’s wars are protecting a monopolized wealth-producing-process just as aristocracy fought to retain their monopoly on power and wealth. Today’s partial democracies are only stepping stones towards full freedom and full rights for all once the last remnant of feudal exclusive property titles to what is properly social wealth is converted to conditional property titles that recognize everyone’s rights to their share of nature’s bounty.

Accumulating capital through monopolization may have been unavoidable while evolving from up-front monopoly feudalism to subtle-monopoly capitalism. The unequal rights derived from that early history and firmly established in custom and law could not be quickly changed. But accumulating capital through subtle monopolization is not only unnecessary, it drastically lowers economic efficiency.

Proponents of the current excessive rights structured into law fail to understand that giving a few an excessive share of rights while restricting the rights of others (inequality structured in law, that remnant of feudalism) is a subtle form of monopolization. Our concluding chapters will demonstrate that, through relatively small changes in the legal structure, rights to the modern commons can be regained while expanding private property rights, individualism, and competition. Democratic-cooperative-capitalism, is so efficient that each can provide themselves a quality lifestyle working only 2-to-3 days per week.

Following the currency collapses in 1997-98 of the once-robust Asian tiger economies, equally-productive labor’s pay in parts of the developing world dropped to 10% that of workers in the developed world. This is not just a 10-fold difference in buying power; wealth accumulates exponentially with the wage differential between equally-productive labor (Chapter one). That 10-fold differential in wage rates for equally-productive labor translates into a 100-fold differential in wealth accumulation power and accumulated wealth (capital) is the engine of capitalism.

Current free trade is just as unequal as the mercantilist trade it supposedly replaced. Indeed, if unequal pay for the equally-productive work of weak nations were reduced to a 50% pay differential, the potential wealth accumulated by nations with high-paid labor in direct trades with low-paid labor nations would be reduced from a 100-times wealth accumulation advantage to an advantage of only four times.

Controlling technology in the outlying countryside so as to maintain access to resources and the wealth-producing-process originated in the city-states of Europe in the Middle Ages. As control of resources and trade determined who would be wealthy and powerful, those city-states battled over who would control the countryside and the wealth-producing-process.

Those city-states evolved into nations whose wealth was also determined by control of resources and trade beyond their borders. The need to control a vast countryside to maintain power and wealth led to the colonization of the world by the imperial nations of Europe. Control of vast territories meant immense wealth to the imperial centers and there were many wars as these empires fought over who would control these territories and that vast wealth.

When industrial technology became more refined and expensive, the British concluded they could monopolize the wealth-producing-process through a restructured mercantilism hiding under the cover of free trade. Certainly Adam Smith sought to discredit mercantilism and replace it with his vision of free trade. But he still envisioned the rest of the world as the countryside providing natural resources and Britain as the industrial center converting those resources into finished products.

So long as weak nations could be forced to accept those unequal trades, they would be handing their wealth to the powerful nations of their own free will. Through the monopolization of highly efficient industrial technology, control of the wealth-producing-process was to remain with the imperial center while the periphery was to provide the natural resources to feed those industries.

The American colonies rejected those rules of unequal trade, protected their industry and markets, and became wealthy. Other European imperial nations easily understood Britain’s plan to establish an imperial-center-of-capital. Competition between the established and the emerging-centers-of-capital for control of technology, resources, and markets eventually led to the two world wars that broke all the European imperial-centers-of-capital and the Japanese imperial center.

With the old imperial centers now too poor to finance the military forces necessary to maintain control, the colonial nations began breaking free. All wealth is processed from natural resources and without the natural wealth from the old colonial empires the shattered nations of Europe and Japan could not rebuild from WWII. The only intact center of capital left was the United States. The baton was passed to America to bring the periphery of empire back under control and retain those resources for the old imperial-centers. This is known in history as the Cold War.

The world looked up to America as a champion of freedom and rights. To admit to a suppression of freedom and rights under the rhetoric of free trade would be to lose the Cold War before it started. America solved its dilemma through demonizing as enemies any who had broken out from under, or were attempting to break out from under, the control of imperial-centers-of-capital. Unequal trades imposed by military power under colonialism were transformed to unequal trades imposed by financial and economic power supported by covert warfare. A few (Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq) were brought to heel through open warfare.

Given opportunities and rights, people within all societies are equally capable. With most of the world’s natural wealth within their borders, currently destitute regions of the world should be wealthy and strong. But those nations were impoverished by colonialism and they are further impoverished by current structural adjustment policies that lower their education and health levels, limit their access to technology, and force them into unequal trades. Thus resource-wealthy nations remain as impoverished providers of cheap resources and cheap labor to the resource-poor imperial-centers-of-capital.

In spite of the deepest beliefs of the masses that they have full and equal rights, representative democracies, such as are established throughout Western culture, are not full democracies. Financial and political powerbrokers have firm control over the greater percentage of nominees. Citizens of a representative democracy or an imperial democracy (puppet governments on the periphery of empire) have little idea what is going on in either state or national legislative bodies yet are subject to those decisions. Thus they are still “subjects” and not yet full citizens.

In a participatory democracy, new laws or changes in laws are debated on and voted on by the citizenry. They are very knowledgeable about what is going on in regional and national legislative bodies, vote directly on the laws, are subject to their own decisions, and thus are fully free citizens.b

In the same way that a power structure has denied its citizenry (subjects) an understanding of full and equal political rights, they have denied them an understanding of full and equal economic rights. Residual-feudal exclusive titles to nature’s wealth are the centerpieces of that deception.

Though he may not have used that term, Henry George’s philosophy of “conditional” title to nature’s wealth exposes that betrayal. Which, of course, is why powerbrokers went to such great lengths to suppress that philosophy (see Mason Gaffney’s and Fred Harrison’s The Corruption of Economics). Using the terms “exclusive” title (though sparingly, HG used that term) and “conditional” title to nature’s wealth moves HG’s philosophy clear across the economic spectrum.

Production of wealth is, at every turn, a utilization and transformation of nature’s wealth. Chapters 24 through 28 address how restructuring land, technology (a part of nature), money (social technology, thus a part of nature), and communications (still technology, thus still a part of nature, nothing could be discovered [invented] unless it was there all the time waiting to be discovered) exclusive titles to conditional titles will increase economic efficiency equal to the invention of money, the printing press and electricity and giving full and equal rights (economic and political) to everyone.

Under full and equal rights the need for those huge glass skyscrapers in the heart of any city (the operational centers of those land, technology, money, and communication monopolies) disappears. Subsidiary monopolies (insurance, law, health care, taxi medallions, et.al, part of the infrastructure within the heart of any city) disappear. Natural monopolies (railroad, electric, gas, and water) become, or remain, a modern commons.

The potential efficiencies of Wi-Fi communications within the retail industry means that somewhere between 30% and 60% of the buildings, furniture, and equipment of the retail industry are no longer necessary (Chapters 27 and 28). All that unnecessary infrastructure of today’s monopolies are as big a waste to modern society as the pyramids were to Egyptian society 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.

But production and services currently provided by those monopolies do not disappear. Productive industries and services stay in place, as a modern commons, providing those products and services to society’s citizens at roughly half the cost (meaning roughly half the labor expenditure) as charged by those monopolies that we are told do not exist.

Under monopolistic practices traceable to aristocratic custom and law from which we evolved, external trade is just as wasteful as internal trade. Financial warfare, economic warfare, diplomatic warfare (sanctions), covert warfare, and open warfare all over the world are little more than battles to retain exclusive title to nature’s wealth, control resources, control the wealth-producing-process, and thus guide the wealth of the world to these monopolists and their enormously wasteful infrastructures.

All our livings are tied to these enormously wasteful arteries of commerce, through control of our belief systems, it all looks essential to us, and thus we are unaware of the calm, quiet, productive, and emotionally satisfying life that could be had by all by simply converting those exclusive titles to conditional titles, establishing a modern commons throughout our economic system, and relegating monopolies to history.

Though one does need an understanding of waste through monopolies within internal economies as laid out in this author’s The World’s Wasted Wealth 2 (also Thorstein Veblen’s, Stuart Chase’s, Ralph Borsodi’s, and others’ work), we ask the reader to pay close attention to the enormous waste of monopoly capitalism. Restructure to democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism through establishing a modern commons and we have both the social structure and the resources to avoid an economic collapse and massive die-off that has befallen almost all empires.

Never did a Nation Develop under Adam Smith

That current free trade is just as unequal as the mercantilist trade it replaced is easily demonstrated. The structural adjustments imposed upon weak nations as necessary for free trade are the opposite policies under which every successful nation developed. Virtually every nation successfully developing did so under Friedrich List’s philosophy of protection of tender new industries and markets. That they developed under the philosophies of Adam Smith is a myth designed to hide a continuation of plunder through unequal trades.

One cannot separate economics, political science, and history. Politics control the economy and history, when accurately and fully recorded (which it seldom is), is that story. In most textbooks and classrooms, not only are these three fields of study separated, they are further compartmentalized into separate subfields which hide the close interconnections between them.

To understand how the world’s wealth is controlled and distributed we must study centuries of suppressed history. Over eight-hundred years ago the powerful of the city-states of Europe learned to control the resources and markets of the countryside by raiding and destroying others’ primitive industrial capital, thus openly monopolizing that capital and establishing and maintaining extreme inequality of pay. This low pay siphoned the wealth of the countryside to the imperial-centers-of-capital (Chapter one). The powerful had learned to plunder-by-trade and have been refining those skills ever since (Chapters two through nine).

Over two-hundred years ago, Britain’s William Pitt (1759-1806) realized that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (if interpreted carefully and selectively), would be a great philosophy under which England could consolidate those unequal trades into customary practice and maintain dominance in world trade. As a cover under which England could maintain that dominance, British government, British intelligence, and British industry supported lecturers throughout the world promoting their interpretation of Adam Smith’s philosophy.1 That imposed “framework of orientation” successfully protected powerful nations’ access to resources and markets and, for the same purpose, continues as the world’s dominant philosophy today.

Every nation that successfully developed did so following the protectionist philosophy of German economist and naturalized American citizen Friedrich List (1789-1846) even as those same nations were mouthing the free-trade philosophy of Adam Smith. This includes Britain, America, Germany, Japan, the Asian tigers (that were so essential for economically and philosophically containing the post WWII rapid expansion of socialism) and now China.

Friedrich List observed the collapse of European industry when Napoleon’s continental system was dismantled after his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. From those observations, and after watching firsthand America’s rapid development through ignoring Britain’s imposition of Adam Smith’s philosophy, List published his protectionist classic, The National System of Political Economy, in 1841.

When British power was shattered by World Wars I and II, America was the only remaining wealthy imperial nation. To protect herself and her historic allies, and against the interests of the economic liberation of the colonial world from the weakened imperial powers, America took over the job of maintaining the imposition of the neo-mercantilist/neo-liberal interpretation of Adam Smith upon the world (Chapters six through 11).

In The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi outlines “systemic cycles of accumulation” of capital that have occurred, starting with the trading empires of Genoa and Venice. Throughout those cycles of capital accumulation one spots the same financial warfare, economic warfare, and open warfare to control world trade and the wealth-producing-process that we address throughout this book. After building this solid base for understanding financial empires, Arrighi addresses the U.S. abandoning the historic monopolizations of the wealth-producing-process and describes America as championing the accumulation of capital and wealth for the once-colonized nations.2

We like Arrighi’s optimism, wish it were true, and his analysis of the historic evolution of capitalism is crucial to understanding economic history. But the record proves that the West’s financial empire is no different than all other financial empires in history. Those necessary as allies to control the wealth-producing-process are developed quickly and they rapidly become wealthy. Nations not needed for allies remain impoverished providers of cheap resources and cheap labor for the wealthy and powerful imperial-centers-of-capital. The allied financial, economic, and military might of the imperial centers maintain the continued siphoning of wealth from the weak to the powerful.

We all understand that dictatorships have secrets because they do vile and unjust things that they do not want known. But what could be so secret in democratic societies where governments are supposed to be employees of the people? Quite simply, most wealthy societies have very few resources and even the resource-wealthy American consumer society is dependent upon resources and markets throughout the world. The secret that cannot be told is that the wealth of an imperial center requires controlling the “countryside” to provide cheap resources: the minerals, timber, fuel, and fibers necessary for a comfortable society. Increasingly, that dependency extends to products manufactured with cheap labor on the periphery. Thus the terms “national security” and “national interests” and our acceptance of those spoken words as all we are entitled to know.

Although believing it is always other nations that are the aggressor, not their nation, most people understand that, if this continues, powerful nations battling and the wastes of mass production and mass consumption will eventually seriously degrade the world’s ecosystem. To avoid that, we need only restructure from the violence of neo-mercantilism/neo-liberalism (metamorphosed to corporate imperialism) monopolizing the world’s resources into all the world’s people sharing those resources through democratic-cooperative-capitalism. Once that choice is made, all need for national secrets disappear and the goals of all—world peace, sustainable development, and elimination of poverty—can be attained, and all while rebuilding and protecting the world’s soils and ecosystems.

The Legal Structure assuring the Imperial Centers access to the World’s Resources

Denial of technology to the periphery by the cosmopolitan centers in the early centuries of capitalism is the cause of wealth concentration in the resource-poor, but powerful, regions of the world and impoverishment in the resource-rich, but weak, regions.

Inequality continues to be structured in 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 is 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 cheap resources:

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.3

The wealthy world both creates and protects its wealth through processing those cheap resources into valuable products and powerful military weapons. Thus, the natural wealth of the impoverished regions finances the military of the wealthy world that protects the unequal trade structure and maintains the status quo. This wealth-confiscation process, ostensibly to accumulate capital, is not the efficient developer of the world we are taught to believe. That worldwide battle to maintain the dominance of imperial nations in world trade leads to nothing less than “capital destroying capital” (Chapter 18) and far more wealth is destroyed than is accumulated as capital. Yes subtle-monopoly capitalism is efficient when compared to any other form of monopolization but fair trade democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism, which eliminates all monopolization, is many times more efficient than Adam Smith free trade/subtle-monopoly capitalism.

Accumulated capital and consumer purchasing power are both derived from title to natural resources, title to industrial capital, title to distribution mechanisms, and adequately paid labor. Creating high capitalized values require mass markets, and mass markets develop only from well-paid labor. Therefore, whenever possible, developing nations should be trading with each other. If wages paid for production of the products traded are equal and each have their share of productive industry, neither appropriates the wealth of the other and trade functions efficiently and honestly.

Because much more wealth is retained when nations with low-paid labor trade with each other, emerging nations can develop their economies much more rapidly than when trading with a high-paid nation. Capital accumulation is not the limiting factor. Capital can be accumulated more easily, more equitably, and far more rapidly under democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism than through the current subtle monopolization of the world’s land, technologies, money, resources, and markets.4

The subtle monopolization of world trade and internal commerce, having been hidden under imposed beliefs so long, makes it hard to conceptualize a world with true equality, true freedom, and full rights. All this thesis is saying is, “Be who we say we are. Do what we say we do. Have honest free trade and honest free enterprise.” This requires equalizing wages worldwide for equally-productive work and thus eliminating the system of subtle monopolization of the world’s resources and industries under which those inequalities of trade are maintained.

There are three foundations to production: natural resources (land), labor, and industrial capital. Freedom and rights cannot be obtained until there is equal sharing of the money creation process. Under conditions of full equality of rights for money creation, any region may create the money to combine surplus resources and labor to produce industrial capital and consumer products or services. Those industries, the products produced, and the increase in both money and production, through the multiplier factor as this money is spent again and again within the economy, become the wealth to back the created money.

The World Bank says it is moving toward these Suggestions

The underlying discussions at the 1999 World Bank meeting in Tokyo on the 1997-98 financial meltdowns of former healthy economies were: “American style free-market policies are seen as finished … government should guide development, … if necessary protecting key industries from competition and rely on bureaucratic wisdom instead rather than market forces, … and expanding political rights and freedoms are the best means to development.”5 There is much more to do but that is a major shift by the World Bank, at least in words, towards what this book is recommending:

“The World Bank … describes ‘the full complement of core public goods and services’ [for the developing nations] as consisting in ‘a foundation of lawfulness, a stable macroeconomy, the rudiments of public health, universal primary education, adequate transport infrastructure, and a minimal safety net.’ ”6

But don’t count on the World Bank living up to those words. Their chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, suggested this change in policy and was summarily and immediately pushed out of the World Bank. In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his efforts.7

Even if the full extent of the injustice of inequalities of trade were realized by enough people and change forced upon the world, adjusting to equal trade will be a slow and traumatic process. The world’s arteries of commerce are built upon inequalities of trade, and severing those arteries will create extreme political crises. Whenever those arteries of commerce are threatened, the historic response has been to activate political, financial, economic, and military resources to re-impose the philosophies that have protected the beneficiaries of those unequal trades.

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 programming 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.

Most redundant secondary carriers of Radio and TV programming 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.

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 a song.

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

Full rights were not attained even after revolutions. There was simply too much debris of law and custom to clean away (those residual-feudal exclusive property rights again). But each gain in rights would be trumpeted as full rights and this hid the fact that full rights had not been attained.

Theoretically we have democracy today. But that is only theoretical. We only have partial democracies with the potential of full democracies. But we are getting closer. Once those subtle monopolies that evolved from feudal total monopolies are eliminated, a full democracy can emerge. Likewise if a crisis transposes today’s representative democracies into full democracies simple legal changes can be made to eliminate those subtle residual-feudal monopolies and establish efficient democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism.

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 Union 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 primary concept of a modern commons and residual-feudal exclusive property rights in Cooperative Capitalism was so powerful that, to give all readers the benefit of these concepts, we inserted it into this book and that of WHY? The Deeper History Behind the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack on America. The central focus of each book gains strength from the others’ primary concepts. We trust our readers will agree on the necessity of inserting these concepts into all three books.

We highly recommend running keyword Internet searches on Google and/or Nexus-Lexus. Try many combinations of keywords. One will be surprised at what news and history books have failed to tell us. With those sources at the reader’s fingertips on a Google or Nexus-Lexus search, in a few years authors will insert only a few citations. The really curious and motivated will make that Internet search at important points in all books and articles they read. 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.

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, explains how planned talking points simultaneously flow through the news outlets creating an “echo chamber” imprinting upon the American mind a view of the world protecting the status quo of the system.

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. Reading it permitted us to 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.

Footnotes

1. 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
2. In Chapters seven and eight we address nations which we are told were bloody dictatorships while actually they were participatory democracies. The purpose of massive propaganda (Chapter six ) was, of course, to deny “subjects” the full and equal rights they would demand through an understanding of a true democracy. Back to text

Endnotes

1. Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1977), in Memoirs and Extracts. Back to text
2. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 2000). Back to text
3. “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
4. See subchapters “Accumulation of Capital through Cooperative Capitalism” and “A Banking System Structured to Protect the Rights of All” in Chapter 27, “Investment” in Chapter 27, and Chapter 23. Back to text
5. Cameron W. Barr, “Making the Financial Architecture More Crisis Proof,” The Christian Science Monitor. March 3, 1999, pp. 1, 7. See also William H. Hatal and Richard J. Verey, “Recognizing the ‘Third Way,’” The Christian Science Monitor, March 3, 1999, p. 9. Back to text
6. John Gray, False Dawn (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p. 202. Back to text
7. Lucy Komisar, “Taking on the Debt Collectors, Joseph Stiglitz” (The Progressive, June 2000), p. 34. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New York: WW Norton, 2002). Back to text

This is a chapter from the book, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century. Visit that link for more information about the book.