the stock markets around the world are crashing, only one solution for the overall long term recovery of the globe has been suggested.
Look, I’m not an economist, but I’m a problem solver and trouble-shooter. I have solved so many problems in my own life, I should have a Ph D. in problem solving. They don’t have such a thing, so I can’t claim any merit badges of this kind. Over the years, I’ve found that these kinds of monikers deceiving.
But, it’s clear to me from all of the evidence that the basic source of our economic problems today is that there is no one in government or in the corporate world who has any real allegiance to the ordinary people. The shareholders of many publicly traded corporations are often shafted when the executives take BILLIONS OF DOLLARS out of the corporation in stock options and salaries and other benefits, without any regard to paying the shareholders these profits, instead of channeling them to themselves. Employees are laid off by the TENS of THOUSANDS every few years, just to purge the corporation of costs so that, you guessed it, the key executives can channel BILLIONS of dollars again to their own private bank accounts.
In the public sector, the President of the United States, this country’s primary CEO, with the collusion of our Congress, also steals money from the taxpayers, without asking our permission, in many various and stealthy ways, such as by raising the price of oil, raising the cost of food, health care, home heating, or simply by doing it the age-old, tried and true rip-off, simply raising our taxes.
In short, there is never any real consideration for the taxpayers of this country or the shareholders of major corporations. And, as everyone knows, employees are lucky if they can collect a little Social Security when they retire, just enough to pay for their barest essentials. The Small Business Administration, for as long as they have been keeping records, shows us that 95% of all employees retire absolutely BROKE. They have nothing except their meager Social Security benefits of a few hundred lousy dollars per month. AND nowadays, even that paltry amount is being cut from retirees and blocked by the Social Security Administration, with a waiting list to hear appeals cases many decades into the future. Many retirees will be dead before the Government releases their funds.
So, something has to be done in this country to stop the absolute runaway greed which has overwhelmed this country. The main reason the stock market is crashing today, does not attach to the reasons all the pundits are telling us on TV and Radio and Newspapers. The real reason this market is crashing is because we have all lost confidence in America. We see all this greed and selfishness in our corporate leaders and in our government leaders. President Bush has been the most egregious example of selfish greed in certainly the history of this country and quite possibly even over the history of the world. IN FACT, I cannot think of an example in history where a national leader has been more self-oriented. Even Hitler gave his constituents a better standard of living, at least until the war. But, George W. Bush, along with most of this Republican cronies, like Tom Delay, Ted Stevens, and so many others who were caught red-handed with their hands in the till, have been lining their pockets almost daily and making decisions out of this need to continue to accumulate wealth, even at the cost of the American taxpayer. There is no disputing this now and hearings during the Obama Administration will bear this out, I’m quite confident.
Even Bush himself has stated on many occasions that he can’t wait to leave office to start enjoying the perks that he has “Earned”. In my opinion, he has earned a jail cell, no more from his 8 years of manipulating the world markets. We will undoubtedly uncover the evidence in the hearings over the next few years that the Bush White House, with the aid of his appointees, former Goldman Sachs executives, Hank Paulson and Josh Bolton, manipulated the oil and commodities markets first and then the stock and bond markets while private trading accounts were maintained somewhere around the world where the profits would somehow enure to the President and his cronies, probably through highly secretive off-shore bank accounts, blind trusts and numbered trading accounts, and very possibly brokered through the elder Bush, his father, so that no profis could be directly traced to the President himself.
This kind of thing has been going on for years. We all remember Hillary Clinton being blessed with a private commodities trading account by a cronie investment firm, obviously in return for some favor she did for them while in the White House and the amount of her little prize was around $100,000. Bush took this as a training course and decided that it was a paltry sum and so his reward, I estimate is somewhere in the 100 Million to ONE BILLION sitting somewhere in the world, most likely Switzerland or Lichtenstein, due to their long held bank privacy rules.
TO SECURE OUR “INALIENABLE RIGHTS of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, as guaranteed to us by our basic fundamental laws and traditions, I suggest that We The People must now band together to selfishly represent our selves, the ordinary working stiffs of the planet. The way to do this, I feel, is to INCORPORATE the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT in such a way that the BOOKS will always be balanced and TRANSPARENT for all of us to see and understand, where they are getting their money, where they are spending it and how much they are earning for their services to us.
Perhaps more importantly, I feel it is a way for us to TAKE STOCK in AMERICA, literally. We all want to live long and prosper, to support our families, put food on the table, get our kids into college, have enough health insurance to protect us from the many and varied life-threatening diseases. So, what would be so bad, if the Government, a private corporation issued stock to all of us as we progressed through the system. When we graduate high school, we get say a couple hundred shares of Stock in the United States of America. When we graduate college, we get another couple hundred shares. When we work for a company for more than 5 years, we earn say, 1,000 shares in America. When we work for 10 years, we get another couple thousand shares of stock. If we start a company and grow it to more than 5 employees, we get 1,000 shares of stock. When we grow our company to more than 100 employees, we get 10,000 shares of stock. When you invent something useful to society, you earn another 10,000 shares of stock and so on and so forth.
The exact formula for earning shares can be worked out later, but the major point I’m making is that by the time we reach retirement age, we should have all accumulate enough STOCK IN AMERICA to pay for our retirement, pay off our mortgage, pay our Health Insurance, etc. In this period of our working lives, it is very likely that the value of our shares will increase as the value of our nation, now a holding company of all the corporate assets in the country increases in value too, especially since this plan would create armies of better informed, more involved shareholders who learn to VOTE THEIR SHARES in more responsible ways, eliminating the selfish and incompetent leadership in their own working environment.
Imagine, if we had this kind of responsible shareholder during the time when GM should have been making ELECTRIC CARS, instead of the big GAS GUZZLERS. This economic crisis could not have happened because ALL CORPORATE leadership would have the good shepherds of their own employees to keep them out of the land of dubious decision, such as ten years ago, when GM decided to CRUSH ALL the Electric Cars they had produced, instead of making more. This was probably the MOST HIDEOUSLY EVIL DECISION in the history of bad business decisions. Here you had thousands of customers who were HAPPY TO PAY GM EVEN DOUBLE what they were being charged for their Electric Cars, the EV1. Yet, GM, tore them from their owners and sent them to the DUMP to be destroyed, even OVER THE PROTESTS of their owners marching with SIGNS at the GATES of the DUMPS. This had to be a decision based on CORRUPTION of some kind. THE OIL COMPANIES, undoubtedly PAID OFF THE EXECUTIVES in charge of this GM division.
NOW, GM and the rest of the economy is paying the price. STOCK HOLDERS SHOULD HAVE FIRED THESE PEOPLE IMMEDIATELY and restored the EV1′s to their rightful owners and then they should have required that GM make more of them. Today, GM could have been the STRONGEST CORPORATION IN THE WORLD, but instead has left that to the JAPANESE, as they saw the demand and built a car, the PRIUS and the Honday CIVIC Hybrid to meet that demand.
Breaking the CARDINAL RULE of BUSINESS in such an egregious way should be a crime punishable by INSTANT FIRING without PAY or BONUSES of any kind. Why have the SHAREHOLDERS of the WORLD NOT UNITED to demand good governance from their own companies that they, the SHAREHOLDERS OWN? THEY DO NOT UNITE simply because they don’t have anyone in GOVERNMENT who will support them. There are laws that actually PREVENT SHAREHOLDERS from getting too much power, obviously put their by the CORPORATE LOBBYISTS who have BRIBED our CONGRESS to do the WRONG THINGS over and over and over again.
<!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:”Arial Unicode MS”; panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1 -369098753 63 0 4129279 0;} @font-face {font-family:”\@Arial Unicode MS”; panose-1:2 11 6 4 2 2 2 2 2 4; mso-font-charset:128; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1 -369098753 63 0 4129279 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:”"; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} p {margin-right:0in; mso-margin-top-alt:auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Arial Unicode MS”;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> By INCORPORATING the United States Government, an entity that is really today the HOLDING COMPANY of all other companies, we accomplish all of the following by one simple stroke of the pen:
1. Increased awareness of the duties, rights and ownership due to the Shareholders of this country and of our corporations.
2. We put the government on notice that they must run their entity like a business where we expect good business-like decisions that are made for the benefit of all the shareholders, not just a few who get the Golden Parachutes.
3. We take control of the decision making process by putting more power on the VOTERS and LESS decision-making power on the elected officials.
4. We allow only those people who are qualified to make sound business decisions to hold higher office. Senators, Congressmen, Presidents, appointees will all have to have far better RESUMES than they have now to work for the People. Resumes must show an actual proven record of success in some related field to gain our trust.
5. Voting our SHARES means that We The People will be able, for the first time in History to veto the really stupid decisions, such as the War in Viet Nam, the War in Iraq, the ban on Stem Cell Research, so that we wind up with laws that are reasonable, logical, well-thought out, have a basis in fact, not in someone’s deluded fantasies.
Under the Voting our Shares concept, We The People will not only have the power to VETO the bad decisions handed down to us from on-high. We will also have the power to CREATE legislation on our own when Congress or the CEO, the President fails to act. We give examples of these NATIONAL BALLOT MEASURES, a key cornerstone of America 2.0, Inc. in later chapters.
These are the major benefits that will accrue to the American People when and if we decide to take this action. It will be a controversial one and in the last chapter of my book, I list what I can guess will be the most obvious criticisms of such a plan.
But, I am confident that upon study of this plan, and some debate, the vast majority of American citizens will come to realize that this is the best way to control our government and to ensure a more safe, sane and prosperous way of life for all our people. And, if this catches on, this concept could even take a life of its own and spread to all governments of the world.
America 2.0, Inc. will certainly make our country more competitive again on the world economic stage and perhaps, if we do it right, make us NUMERO UNO once again in the world in terms of average waves, productivity, and even in the Pursuit of Happiness once more.
Stumble It!
