Peacable Kingdom or Apocalypse?

"The policeman who climbed on the hood of a car last month in Cleveland and fired 49 shots through the windshield at an unarmed couple has been found not guilty on two counts of voluntary manslaughter. Last week. Judge John P O’Donnell said prosecutors failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the bullets fired were the cause of death of Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell. USA Today May 20, 2015

   

Would this common realm of purchased judges and corrupt city government be different if it offered people a decent and fair world for their lives? Could we expect that this daily havoc, riven as it is by racial and religious resentment and growing inequality, might turn out differently if it offered people everywhere a set of  different expectations? In the face of the prevailing madness a new threshold for change is beginning to open and brave hearts, young and old, mid-life adults all  need to walk toward it. Below is a summary of new policies as well as the hypocrisies that challenge it. 

These serious steps on a path forward grow from a global context and international perspectives. Economic policy experts including Thomas Piketty (France), Anthony Atkinson (England), Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner (USA)—joined by many others--are laying out major suggestions for a radically different social and economic antidote to the rising tide of violence in the U. S. and around the world. These "peacable kingdom" stepping stones include:

• A Rising Real Wage for all
• Guaranteed Public Sector Jobs for the unemployed at a living wage
• Debt free college
• Universal Family Benefits
• A Pension for all
• Inheritance for all
• Asset Development for all, including property ownership
• Transferring stock market wealth to the citizenry
• Progressive Taxation especially on wealth
• Capital endowments for each new young adult financed from estate taxes.      

Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School helps launch the new agenda for a Peacable  Kingdom with historical perspective.

“The postwar boom [fifty years ago] was a time of broadly shared prosperity, when working- and middle-class people not only enjoyed steadily increasing incomes but were also able to accumulate lifetime wealth. The measures that made possible this wealth-broadening included expansion of home ownership under a reliable, well-governed system of mortgage finance; the development of a retirement system, with Social Security complemented by private pensions; debt-free higher education; and rising real wages. Each of these instruments interacted with the others.”

"Today, these mechanisms have all gone into reverse. Meanwhile, the capacity of the already-rich, the parentally endowed, and the well-situated to accumulate financial wealth has only intensified. Wealth inequality gets less attention than income inequality, but it is every bit as important. And the two are related. Wealth helps generate income and the capacity to earn income. Decent income increases the capacity to save and to amass wealth. As public systems for wealth-broadening collapse, private wealth within families provides asset endowments to the young and positions the next generation to become upper-income earners like their parents.

British economist, Anthony Atkinson, as cited by French economist, Thomas Piketty (New York Review of Books, June 25, 2015) calls for

"Universal family benefits financed by a return to progressive taxation, guaranteed public-sector jobs at a minimum wage for the unemployed, democratization of access to property ownership via an innovative national savings system, with guaranteed returns for the depositors.

"Atkinson, writing in the context of British policy issues proposes establishing an “inheritance for all” program. “This would take the form of a capital endowment assigned to each young citizen as he or she reached adulthood, at the age of eighteen. All such endowments would be financed by estate taxes and a more progressive tax structure. In concrete terms, Atkinson estimates that, with current revenue from the British estate tax, it would be possible to finance a capital endowment of slightly more than £5,000 for each young adult. He calls for a far-reaching reform of the system of inheritance taxation, and especially for greater progressivity with regard to the larger estates. (He proposes an upper rate of 65 percent, as with the income tax.) These reforms would make it possible to finance a capital endowment on the order of £10,000 per young adult." 
Much of this has application in somewhat different language or terms in the U. S.

Current very negative social trends illustrate why the election season must grow into a season of non-violent political reform; non-violent but nevertheless, reforms that are revolutionary. From the Federal Reserve and economist Paul Krugman we learn that:

* For the most affluent 10 percent of American families, average incomes rose by 10 percent from 2010 to 2013. For the rest of the population, average incomes were flat or falling.

* The least affluent families had the largest declines. Average incomes dropped by 8 percent for the bottom 20 percent of families

* The top 3 percent of families hold 44.8 percent of wealth in 1989, then 51.8 percent in 2007 and 54.4 percent in 2013.

* a single Hedge Fund manager makes more than all kindergarten teachers  in the U. S. combined. 

The top ten percent of wealth holders--own 75 percent of the Capital  and 50 percent of all income

        Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich summarizes our current context: “The key to understanding the rise in inequality isn’t technology or globalization. It’s the power of the moneyed interests to shape the underlying rules of the market.”    USA Today on May 20th reported that although the Obama Administration postures in the direction of a clamp–down on market rules, actual enforcement by the Securities and Exchange Commission casts this in doubt:

         “Outlining what she termed a "brazen display of collusion," the new U.S. Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, charged that traders in the nearly unregulated $5.3-trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market colluded in rigging foreign exchange prices of U.S. dollars and euros from Dec. 2007 to Jan. 2013. Five major banks: Citicorp(C), JPMorgan Chase(JPM), London-based Barclays(BCS) and Royal Bank of Scotland(RBS) agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay more than $5.5 billion in collective penalties to settle charges that their traders routinely manipulated the world's foreign-exchange market for their own profit.”

      

           "Yet no bank official was required personally to admit personal guilt nor were any charged; just their companies.  Banking experts predict the settlements are not expected to have a material impact on banking financial operations. Lynch even confessed, so to speak, that the banks are "working with their regulators" to obtain any waivers that might be required to continue normal operations.                                                                                    

               This is the agenda that must be pursued over the coming election months and should become the subject of study and discussion among community organizations, public interest groups and faith groups.  It's the path to a more peacable kingdom.

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