Hello Jock and All,

I liked you bar analogy. It fits very well.

I look at it something like this--we are not saints; we are all members of this weird species that we have all sort of agreed to call humans (in Kings English, anyway). We are not Gods, for god's sake. If we were Gods--well, we wouldn't be experiencing this bizarre, crazy ecstasy we again have all sort of agreed to call *Life.*

I don't know about ya'll, but being a God like most humans seem to imagine Him (I like Her myself), sure would seem b-o-r-i-n-g to me...

I like this rough-and-tumble existence of being human through-and-through. It's outrageous at times, dispiriting and bitingly sad, but then those episodes are balanced by ones of sheer joy, awe and inspiration of what can happen in this gift of life that we somehow have all been given...

I had this pilot friend of mine one time sit me down and explain that getting to heaven was the only thing that really mattered (the Christian heaven, of course; and heaven being a place, I guess, where you sit on a cloud, swinging one leg hanging over the side, strumming a harp). He was totally shocked when I told him that that was the last thing I would ever want to do, and that Jesus Christ, Muhammad and the Buddha never taught any such thing.

If I understand just a wee bit what these amazing prophets tried to teach us, it's we create heaven or hell on EARTH. It's up to us. We all make our own little realities that add up to a joint or social BIG reality. We don't have to travel anywhere. And now, you can create your own little hell or heaven with the pushing of the *send* button on a computer...

Right now, worldwide human affairs appears to be more on the HELL side of the duality *equation.* But you know what? Life takes that right in stride with what you can observe in Nature and all around us of a stabilizing, neutralizing and counter balancing force. It's the darnedest thing. Sometimes it takes a human life span or two to kick in--but who are we to dictate time?

Discussion groups at COG, of course, don't float on some island separate from all of this.

With all the ranting and raving, and words flying around like rocket arrows--I still have learned a ton about money, banks, corporations, securities--and possible ways we could all share more in ownership. And I thank you all. Owning sure beats working for ever-lowering wages!! In many ways I've changed the way I currently live! based on the contributed wisdom I have read here!

I think we can get past this. We just gotta get past ourselves, and realize Life is one really BIG place~~Steve

p.s. For my birthday, my middle son gave me a license plate holder OWN OR BE OWNED, which I have proudly mounted on my bucket of bolts 1978 Chevy van that I call Toots. Soon I will paste on a bumper sticker that says: Consume New Production!!

Dear Steve:

As far as I can see, the only thing that's going to work is to convince workers that ownership — real ownership, with the full rights of property — is far more secure than any wage system job. You can fire a worker at virtually no cost (assuming you do it "right," i.e., toss enough dust in people's eyes to obscure what you're doing), but you have to buy out an owner. To get the point across means educating people primarily on what, exactly, property is (and, almost as importantly, what it is not), and why the vote — control — is an integral part of what Belloc called "the restoration of property."

The way I see it (and watch out that I don't poke your eye out with my stone tablets as I come down from the mountain), people don't trust ownership via corporate shares for two reasons. One, the only way to make money with corporate shares is to engage in speculation. Most shares, as Kelso pointed out almost half a century ago in The Capitalist Manifesto, don't pay enough in the way of dividends to buy a cheap suit. Speculation is not the foundation of an "ownership society" because the only way to receive an income is to divest yourself of ownership by selling your shares.

Two (and much more important), people don't trust corporate shares, per se. They don't trust corporate shares because they don't trust corporations. They don't trust corporations because they don't trust the people hired to run the corporations for the owners. They don't trust them because they don't trust the board of directors who hired them. They don't trust the BoD because they don't trust the people who elected them — the annonymous owners ... who usually don't trust the workers, and the circle begins all over again.

So everything has to start all over again at ground level. People aren't ever going to understand property until they own some — we can't wait for people to understand property in order to want it (Chesterton said something about people in former days having respect for property probably because they owned some). Thus, although it was clearly not ideal, framing the ESOP as an employee benefit was probably the most politically feasible way to get the first ESOP legislation through. ("Ownership? Feh. More and higher benefits? .... let's talk.") Unfortunately, the next step has been slowed almost to a standstill — that is, going from the "beneficial ownership" of the ESOP, which allows things like voting as "prudential matter," to direct ownership (through capital homesteading) in which things like voting are inalienable rights.

We have a chance to get something done with the social security crisis in concert with Mr. Bush's vague desire for an ownership society (give Norm fifteen minutes with Mr. Bush, though, and I think you'd see some clarity, not to mention action) — not because people think that a direct private property stake is what they want or need, but because it seems like the only thing that will work. Capital homesteading implies a reform of the corporation — a demand for which will grow, particularly with respect to voting and governance in accordance with Justice-Based Management (necessarily ownership-based) as soon as people have specific and definable direct ownership interests in corporations. If they don't get what they want individually, they will organize with others who want the same things — and with a lot of owners, there will be a lot of people interested in corporate reform. If those people are the workers, customers and suppliers of a corporation, they will have a double interest in cleaning things up. None of them will realize until much later that they were carrying out acts of social justice. All they will want is to fix the corporation so they get their rights.

In conclusion (as if you didn't already know all of this), any time someone starts grousing about the evil corporation, you can either zing them with a quote from Edmund Burke (one of the few members of the British Parliament who tried to defend the American Revolution) that the only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing (or something like that), or take a page from Norm's book and demand to know what they have that's any better than an ownership union to acquire and protect the rights to and of property.
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Steve Nieman wrote:
Hi Mike,

Fascinating, trying to get at how the hourly-wage mindset began.

Obviously, the American Puritan work ethic predated stock corporations and other "securities" ways that people can earn income from common stock ownership.

Do you think that earning money off of owning and being involved in securities trading (pension investors gotta find someplace to put their trillions) is considered not working "hard"?

It appears from what you've uncovered below is the waning of the Puritan work-hard ethic. Can anyone conceive of a leisurely way of living as truly meaningful?

What workers have to realize as hourly wages jobs are eliminated or farmed overseas--there will be no income to form the basis for living and enjoying life.

The road leads to and through voteable securities, which is what Capital Homesteading is...

But I continue to talk to workers who continue to demand ever-escalating hourly wages--damn the securities, because they don't trust anything corporate. Plus, management won't offer anything dealing with securities, because, I guess, they want all of it...

I talked to the CEO of Alaska at the stockholders meeting after the company axed 500 ramp jobs, querying why they didn't offer a formula of lower wages (to compete with the contractor who eventually took over those 500 jobs) combined with income from capital wages. The CEO knew exactly what I was talking about--but he said the union (IAM) would not allow capital wages into the negotiations. So bye, bye American pie.

Moving a human mindset is a BIG ordeal. It will take time--so enjoy your life NOW. Grinding away on something that may take a generation or two more of time--you may feel like you never lived...~~Steve
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On Jul 11, 2005, at 10:05 AM, Michael Greaney wrote:

Dear Steve:

I thought you might be interested in the following quote from The Proletariat by a Georgetown University professor with the tongue-twisting name of Goetz Briefs. Dr. Briefs (1889 - 1974) was a member of a discussion group in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s with the even more unpronounceable name of Königswinterkreis ("King's Winter Circle"), which included Fr. Oswald von Nel Breuning, Franz Müller, Heinrich Rommen, and some others, all students of Fr. Heinrich Pesch, S.J., who died in 1926. After escaping from the Nazis, most of the group ended up in the U.S., teaching at Chicago, St. Louis, or Georgetown. The chapter from which it is taken traces the development of the wage slave mindset in Americans. Anyway,


The New American Philosophy of Life

A new philosophy of life apparently is in the ascendancy, represented by the job-dependent and security-seeking groups, and most of all by the youth. Labor for them has ceased to be a means of probation hallowed by traditional religious convictions, neither a means toward economic progress nor a chance to rise, but just the basis of living and of enjoying life. This indicates that two roots of American individualistic dynamism are dying off — the metaphysical incentive to work as a means of salvation, and the dynamic materialism of getting rich by hard work or, occasionally, by gambling. Traditional American values like freedom and equality, independence, and economic progress are interpreted and re-evaluated in a new way by the rising social group and by the American youth of today.

Goetz Briefs, "The Proletarian Potential of American Labor" The Proletariat (1937), p. 225.

Yours,
Michael D. Greaney
Director of Research
Center for Economic and Social Justice
www.cesj.org