FULL EMPLOYMENT AND SOCIAL INVESTMENT

...And Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon told the House Ways and Means Committee that the ratio of profits to GNP, when cor127 Socialism for the wealthy rected for depreciation and the replacement cost of inventories, had actually turned negative...

...They "own" them in the same way that a depositor at a savings bank "owns" the bank...

...They are designed to avoid take-overs...

...One more example, chosen from among a multitude of inequities, should further illustrate this point...

...the Carter Administration sees the route to recovery led by investors not consumers...

...Credit allocation is an important example...

...It is obvious that these ideas, reasonable and logical as they are, far exceed the bounds of the politically possible in American society today, and must be regarded as long term goals...

...TVA demonstrates that huge, centralized private corporations are not the only instruments that can deal with the energy crisis...

...The economists of a liberal Administration admit as much and are explaining that this failure is a necessity for the system...

...For instance, the UAW contract negotiations in 1976 opened a campaign for the four day week...

...In the Kennedy, Johnson and Carter Administrations, as we have seen, a liberal version of "trickle-down" prevailed...

...The full employment coalition favors direct social spending rather than trickle down spending...

...It is also a key instrument for the management of the entire economy, with deficits used for stimulus and surpluses for restraint...

...And now the Swedish labor movement is seeking to extend that concept to all of industry...

...And there have been serious s. ggestions about putting employee and public representatives on the boards of major corporations in order to monitor price, technology and plant location decisions...

...The problem is, the "owners" of these pension funds have a totally passive relationship to them...

...There must be a vast expansion of the non-profit sector...

...And then there was the experience under Lyndon Johnson's JOBS program where companies took subsidies to hire workers they would have hired anyway...

...There is a related point...

...But there are relevant guidelines which socialists would urge in the open debate which is central to this proposal...

...This does not mean that socialists disdain immediate reforms, particularly if they are the work of people in motion...

...Hubert Humphrey, explaining the job training feature of his full employment bill, says: "Federally funded job training, job placement, public works and facilities projects and public employment programs are included in the bill as supplements to help meet private sector labor needs and to temporarily provide jobs to fill the gap between private sector performance and the employment goals of the legislation" (emphasis added...

...The third reason why corporate domination of investment must be challenged has to do with what gets produced...

...A non-profit sector would not have to behave in this way...

...That could be done in one of two ways...

...The most egregious example is when investment tax credits designed to spur employment are used to buy labor-saving machinery...

...Obviously, the people would decide...

...Such groups could be given access to the government's own planning technology, requiring, for instance, that Washington compute the consequences of a three-day week as well as of its own proposal for four days...

...The system overbuilt Florida condominiums and Las Vegas casinos while construction workers in the Northeast lived under depression conditions and central cities rotted away...

...Let me generalize these instances...

...We want to create an economy of meaningful, useful work...

...Why then insist that a movement go all the way...

...Private investment decisions are based on where private profit is most readily maximized...

...So it was that Irving S. Shapiro of DuPont, perhaps the most prestigious corporate spokesperson in the country, described the political situation in 1977 in this way: "A new attitude is taking hold in Washington...

...It is an inherent tendency of the system which asserts itself even when liberals are in power...

...Getting such a return is obviously a matter of simple justice...

...Why not be satisfied with immediate reforms now and talk about more basic change at some future date...

...In what follows, then, I am not simply presenting a socialist doctrine, but the empirical case for non-profit property...

...Carter, I argued, were poor descriptions of reality but excellent rationalizations of the corporate program for America...

...the society could decide to subsidize some losses in order to achieve large social gains...

...Liberals rightly reject this Adam Smith notion of harmony...

...There is no such thing...

...As Business Week made the point, there must be changes in the tax system which "would provide greater incentives for savings and investment and greater disincentives for consumption...

...This is not only an ethical goal...

...But within the space limitations of a pamphlet, I must focus on those aspects of a socialist program that are most clearly and urgently related to the central demands of the full employment movement in this country...

...Congressional committees and government commissions descend on an area and a stream of witnesses are heard...

...What about the content of any plan...

...First, such a strategy is necessary to make the elected government of the people independent of the economic veto power of a corporate minority...

...It fired workers and raised prices, as we have seen, as part of a strategy to maintain profits at a targetted level...

...The fallacy in this approach is exposed in the very effort to justify it...

...The New York Stock Exchange published an analysis designed to show that the Federal government must cut back its outlays, that "excessive current consumption" must be curbed, and that there should he more tax handouts for capital gains income, i.e...

...A non-profit enterprise would also have to yield a surplus (or rather the totality of such enterprises would have to), but it would not have to define that surplus in an anti-social way...

...They'll take the money but, following the ethic of private enterprise, try to shape and skew the public intervention so that it meets their private purposes...

...Obviously, there would have to be national economic priorities and each factory or cooperative could not be a law unto itself...

...for the corporate rich...

...It has been gaining momentum for some time...

...given private control of the investment process, government policy inevitably promotes it...

...TABLE IV FEDERAL BUDGET RECEIPTS By Major Source-Per Cent Distribution 1960 1965 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 (Est...

...125 Jobs as corporate supplements Jobs: for workers or for corporations...

...If one thinks of corporate property not as a single "thing," but as a bundle of rights—the right to decide prices, to hire and fire, to move a plant, to start new products, and so on—then these various initiatives of the existing full employment movement could be thought of as proposals for "partial socialization...

...According to the "Meidner Plan" every corporation will be required to place a portion of its profits, in the form of shares in the company, in an employee controlled fund with an elected board of directors...

...Table IV shows one disturbing aspect of what this has meant over a decade and a half...

...This is the second reason why private control must be challenged...

...The Tennessee Valley Authority provides a concrete demonstration of the way in which regional planning can have enormously positive results...

...If the society really needs them then interest will be high enough to motivate people to save rather than to consume...

...This thesis was picked up and embroidered by the conservatives...

...For example, Washington is, in effect, nationalizing broken-down, losing railroad lines while permitting the profitable systems to make even more money...

...In large economic units, say a publicly-owned factory, there would be worker representation at every level where decisions are made, from the shop floor to the board of directors...

...an expansion of cooperatives...

...The business economist, Peter Drucker, claims that "pension fund socialism" exists in America because those monies are already so important to the investment process...

...And, Business Week reported, in 1976 the government was paying for 62% of the nation's research and development, the results of which are turned over to the corporations for private exploitation...

...Second, and much more important is because that immediate program will work only if its proponents are ready and willing to take it to a much more radical conclusion...

...it is the policy...

...In recent decades, the American economy has become even more dominated by corporate power than ever before...

...The law setting up a democratic planning mechanism should provide that any significant group of citizens has the right to the resources that will enable it to develop its own serious counter-plan...

...Those levels are fixed without regard to social consequences and without any necessary relation to efficiency...

...And in the longer run, as I have argued in my book, Socialism, we should try to emancipate more and more people from compulsory labor altogether, so that all may have the time to develop a full, multi-faceted personality...

...There must be a surplus in each year's annual production...

...First, this is the best way to guarantee that social funds will actually be put to social use...

...Before this question can be answered, a critical distinction has to be made...

...TVA itself is now the largest utility in the country...

...Such "ethics" cannot prevail with non-profit property...

...The problem is that Social Security taxes are the most regressive Federal tax since they only cover a portion of the income of the middle class and the rich but are set at 100% of the income of working people and the poor...

...Ironically, a great impetus to this development came from a liberal economist, William Nordhaus, who is now a member of the Carter Council of Economic Advisors...

...Socialists also see an extremely important role for cooperatives in medium-sized and smaller units...

...And the reason this happens is that corporations control the crucial economic function—the investment process...

...But as that process progressively comes more and more under democratic control, that faulty rationale loses even the semblance of a justification...

...Let us now examine why Carter accepts the premises of his defeated opponents...

...The challenge is to get democratic planning that develops appropriate definitions of efficiency yet gives the proper weight to social loss and gain, something that the private profit criterion does not, and cannot, do...

...Why did Humphrey insist that public sector employment must be a temporary supplement to private sector employment...

...This would mean jobs in an area of heavy unemployment by the development of a solar technology that could be operated at the community level...

...Small businesses are, however, still allowed to go under...

...Non-profit property could give the public control of the surplus its investments had generated...

...Probably no aspect of democratic socialist theory is more systematically, and sometimes maliciously, misunderstood...

...There is an alternative to this scene...

...At the end of a given period of time, that fund would become the majority stockholder and the workers' representatives would make the basic policy decisions...

...Therefore, when the government wants to stimulate the economy, it is "natural" to give privileges to the upper strata and hope that something will trickle down to the masses...

...134 Social spending is a must Social control is a must The long run can be sidetracked Third, the coalition has already moved in the direction of asserting democratic social control over investment...

...World War II taught patriotic businessmen that "cost plus" contracts were not socialism but subsidized capitalism...

...Does this mean that the non-profit sector would keep people at work on enterprises that don't pay their own way...

...The program of the Seventies conservatives, on the contrary, urges that capital become the dominant and all-embracing priority of the society...

...The Right is now talking openly about what has been happening all along...

...Unless this principled issue is resolved in favor of social spending, the full employment efforts are doomed...

...to enhance the reputations of managers...

...But at the same time the Authority has been suffused by corporate values...

...136...

...President Ford knew this and it is clear that President Carter knows it...

...There are proposals on the boards to provide one hundred billion in easy money for the energy industry so that it can correct the calamities it did so much to generate...

...Therefore the elected representatives of the people would not be afraid of the economic blackmail known as building "business confidence...

...The people versus the corporate minority The democratization of the investment process is the key to a socialist strategy for full employment during the short and medium term...

...Their uses would be democratically determined on the basis of need and the people would be guaranteed an effective right of participation...

...This is not a policy of capitalist society...

...Therefore the question is not, as corporate ideologists often pretend, whether Washington will keep its hands off the private sector...

...In an influential 1974 article, Nordhaus argued that there had been a significant fall in the after-tax share of profits in the national income, beginning in 1967...

...Tax policy, as it is now conceived, is not simply an instrument for collecting money in order to pay for government services...

...Moreover, such a policy would carry within itself the seeds of totalitarian domination by a new class of bureaucrats, some129 Expertise for the people Expanding the non-profit sector thing which can be seen in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries...

...It is also the basis of a full employment policy that would see increasing the buying power of the masses as the engine of economic development...

...The experience of the New Deal suggests an answer...

...But there are obviously limits to such practices...

...Corporate investors cannot be counted on to arrest the rot in cities, to erect decent homes, to improve public transportation, to provide adequate health maintenance—in short to substitute public needs for private ends...

...132 Paying for non-profit enterprise Pension funds for social Investment In the United States, democratic planning and non-profit enterprise must operate in a hostile atmosphere and therefore the results of such efforts are more likely to be mixed...

...But corporation taxes were dramatically reduced-almost halved -while social insurance taxes (mainly Social Security) were nearly dou128 Public needs versus private ends Democratic national planning bled...

...But the New Deal's liberal reforms turned out to be the salvation of capitalism...

...There are three reasons why democratic control of investment, while not the totality of a solution to our crises, is absolutely essential to it...

...Thus does conservatism embrace socialist methods for its own reactionary purposes...

...Consider how the existing movement already points toward the longterm goal of structural change...

...And there is no dictatorship in Sweden...

...It does mean that the full employment coalition must fight for democratic planning, for a broadened and improved public sector, for a redistribution of wealth by taking the rich off the dole in the Internal Revenue Code, and so on...

...Rather they establish planners' goals: they decide what the society "ought" to have in 1985, and figure out how much it will cost...

...Or funds could be made available to such groups to hire their own experts and computers...

...The most striking aspect of this conservative theory is that its method contradicts hallowed conservative principles...

...Inequality, then, is built into the system...

...Personal Income Taxes 44.0 41.8 44.7 46.5 46.7 45.8 45.4 44.4 44.9 42.2 Corporation Income Taxes 23.2 21.8 18.7 19.5 16.9 14.2 15.4 15.6 14.6 13.8 Social Insurance Taxes and Contributions 15.9 19.1 22.5 21.3 23.4 25.8 23.8 27.8 28.9 30.9 Customs...

...There can be, as we have seen, no effective planning in a roller coaster economy...

...In outlining a few of them I cannot here cover all significant areas...

...Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, expansion of the non-profit sector is an absolutely essential weapon in the struggle to eliminate the business cycle...

...But we do have an analysis that points public policy toward our common goal and makes it possible to begin exploring workable solutions...

...In other words, America was committing the most heinous of capitalist sins: it was living off its capital...

...We socialists will struggle alongside people of every persuasion in this battle...

...If the elected representatives of the people pass a socially oriented law and the unelected representatives of capital refuse to cooperate, the law is effectively vetoed...

...A socialist concept of planning also envisions democratization within the enterprise itself...

...The Wall Street Journal wrote gloomy editorials predicting that huge Federal deficits would "crowd" private capital out of the money market...

...savings banks refusing to invest money in the very neighborhoods in which they raise it...

...In order to win the support of the executives, they must adapt to corporate values and priorities...

...In the United States, pension funds, even those set 133 Short term programs need long term goals Non-profit sector is a must up by the most progressive unions, tend to be invested according to standard corporate priorities...

...So the way in which Washington stimulated the economy was by increasing the inequality of the tax system...

...But Drucker's slick argument for defending a bastion of the capitalist ethic could be taken seriously...

...As a source of Federal revenue, personal income taxes fluctuated quite modestly...

...neighborhood enterprises...

...the people should get less...

...But socialists seek to orient those reforms toward the structural changes which alone will allow them to have their intended effect...

...So the movement is already committed to the expansion of public sector employment...

...That is why the people must move to control the investment process—to control it democratically for social ends...

...It can be programmed to serve the majority...

...Community activists want banks to extend credit to areas of desperate need instead of sending funds to the anti-labor South, and even to the Third World...

...It is ironic that big business, which fought the New Deal tooth and 135 The long run is now nail, benefitted more from its achievements than did the vast popular movement that struggled and sacrificed to bring them about...

...The Seven Sisters have not done so well with the world's oil that they should also be given the sun...

...The only serious claim that the corporate rich can now assert is that their concentrations of money are necessary to the investment process...

...National health security, funded through progressive taxation and operated by local units with community representation on all boards, would provide a valuable service at less cost than we pay now...

...Today these hearings are dominated by well-financed and tightly organized lobbies that, more likely than not, are already tied in with the bureaucracy...

...If this were not done, the society would not have the wherewithal to meet its needs and there would be a "savings gap" of $645 million by 1985...

...That has already been a severe, and limiting, constraint for the Carter Administration...

...It is, remember, only an example of one structural reform, not a description of an alternative social system (though it moves us in that direction...

...Under the conditions of late capitalism, the government is already engaged in underwriting—and in a sense socializing—the losses and risk capital of the giant corporations...

...The crises of the Seventies have put the nation on notice that it cannot tolerate this arbitrary condition much longer...

...But the fluctuations derive, precisely, from the fact that profitmaximizing decisions dominate the economy and call for periodically disastrous non-allocations of resources...

...So to reverse the tide, we must find ways to make the private sector change its locational prejudices...

...Using the lessons of TVA, the Northeast should be developed, on a non-profit basis, as the solar energy center of the nation...

...An efficient national rail network—which is unthinkable under private auspices— would produce high revenues because it would meet real needs in an environmentally benign, energy-saving way...

...Later, in the Eisenhower years and during the Kennedy-johnson Administration, corporate Keynesianism became a massive trend, one that liberals had to adapt to...

...Richard Hofstadter went so far as to invest the New Deal with a "social democratic tinge...

...John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson both handed out lavish subsidies to the private sector but they did so within the context of policies which also sought to increase mass consumption...

...The real issue, then, is whether the people of the United States are going to receive any equity for the billions they are plowing into the economy...

...Moreover, as I have already documented, business wants tax revenues to provide it with cash for investment...

...There could be a pension fund socialism—without the quotation marks...

...Here and now, that is an important tool for achieving full employment...

...According to the traditional free enterprise doctrine it is impossible for a capital shortage to exist...

...Thus, for all the modifications of American capitalism, private decisions designed to maximize profit still guide public policy and determine the collective fate of the society...

...It might be argued that Jimmy Carter never was a traditional liberal and perhaps his ideological transformation as President only marks a reversion to type...

...In saying this, I do not suggest that we socialists have "the" answer...

...We set no ideological preconditions for our participation...

...The Chase Manhattan Bank took up the cry in a series of ads which threatened the nation with seventeen million unemployed in 1985 unless there was more preferential treatment for the unearned income of the wealthy...

...For instance, one serious estimate figures that 40% of all corporate debt capital, and 25% of corporate equity, is now owned by public employee retirement funds...

...In effect, the conservatives now reject this notion...

...But here it runs into the prejudice I have just defined...

...Let me give a specific example of what that might mean, a measure which could be adopted during the next ten years given the political will...

...That is why, as Chart I (Page 10) showed the wages of the workers constantly lag behind their productivity, for a portion of what they produce is being appropriated by the wealthy...

...The "natural"—profit maximizing—tendency of business is to avoid old city areas...

...In other words, a publicly-owned enterprise does not inevitably follow societal priorities, not in the U.S...

...And income tax cuts buy goods and services in a market rigged by advertising that encourages the installment buying of consumer trash...

...How, then, would the non-profit sector be able to act differently from the corporate sector of today and be solvent at the same time...

...You give the corporations and the rich privileges on the assumption that they are motivated to share their good fortune with the working people and the poor...

...The hearings become travesties of the democratic procedure...

...The second reason is that government economic policy, in an economy in which corporations are in charge of investment decisions, promotes inequality...

...It enabled the Swedish socialists, governing in an economy which is 90% privately owned, to escape the recession of 1974-75...

...Thirdly, there is one area in which the Swedish socialists have pioneered and another in which they may be on the verge of a breakthrough...

...Sometimes that might be done as a matter of conscious policy, i.e...

...They want Washington to push aggressively for the social priorities which the companies slight, ignore or undermine...

...In part, this is because the enemies of socialism equate non-profit property with centralized, bureaucratic national ownership of the entire economy...

...He and his staff people have been sending out the signal that the nation should rely more on the private sector and be less dependent on the government...

...But the liberals are trapped in the same blind alley...

...They do not challenge corporate property as such, but they encroach upon its prerogatives...

...Non-profit property, then, is the best way of ensuring that funds allocated for a social purpose will actually be used for that purpose...

...And this is even more obvious under current conditions when gigantic multinationals dictate their profit rates to the market...

...In 1974-75, General Motors did not throw people out of work because that was the only way to maintain its profits...

...Guaranteeing that majority the right to get enough is a central strategy for putting everyone to work...

...The out-and-out conservatives understand this, and they sincerely believe that if only the government will guarantee the private sector its profits, but otherwise leave business alone, all will turn out for the best...

...Then there is the proposal made by the United Auto Workers and other unions which would deny corporations the right simply to leave town when higher profits beckon in some sweatshop area of the nation or the world...

...it is, as well, a precondition for democratic planning...

...In considerable measure, they will pay for themselves...

...If, for example, it was democratically decided to develop the Northeast railroads under public ownership as part of a program to make that area the center of a new solar energy industry, the money could not be diverted to any other purpose...

...It would indeed be disastrously inefficient to centralize everything in a "command economy...

...and individual efforts...

...On practical, non-socialist grounds, the coalition finds itself pointed in the direction of socialist structural reforms without defining them in these terms...

...They openly demand a reactionary socialization of investment on behalf of the rich, an approach which has such perverse clarity that it is almost the mirror image of a basic socialist strategy for full employment...

...Finally, they casually suggest that Washington should fill this gap-that the public sector should provide the private sector its risk capital by lowering taxes on unearned income and raising the levies on earned income...

...Against any and all evidence, many Americans know that private property is good and public property bad...

...That does not mean that instant socialism is the only answer to all our problems...

...And tax cuts designed to "stimulate" the economy simply increase the corporate power to make anti-social decisions...

...Washington, in fact, intervenes massively into the investment process, the national pieties about "free enterprise" to the contrary notwithstanding...

...In 1974 Cadillacs were turned out and bought by the affluent in great numbers while workers making cars for ordinary consumers—who couldn't afford them—were being laid off...

...The core of this problem is not to be found in the personal characteristics of liberals, and especially not in the preposterous (and arrogant) assumption that liberals are corrupt while those to their left are pure...

...But it is clear to all that the private economy will not fulfill that right...

...The same holds, we have seen, in the handouts to agribusiness...

...We hit a low point in the past when political rhetoric put business in the role of enemy of the people, but since then there has been a growing awareness that this sort of thing makes no sense...

...And similarly, the government, with full employment its top priority, was able to get business to produce for stockpiles during what would "normally" be a crisis...

...During the Thirties, as I pointed out earlier, business was in disarray and still clinging to pre-Keynesian concepts which were hostile to government intervention per se...

...The problem is, Moynihan said, "that the economic return from investment has not been high enough...

...Readers who might wish to have the entire pamphlet should send $1, plus 25t for mailing charges, to the Institute—not, please, to Dissent.—Ens...

...And it might provide an opportunity for the emergence of cooperative property as part of the solution to the crisis...

...That is the basic reason for our unprecedented plight of simultaneous recession and inflation...

...Lance's rhetoric," Evans and Novak said, "was as impeccably orthodox as William Simon's, if not Andrew Mellon's...

...Even the most primitive agriculturists do not eat their seed corn...

...And that man was elected with AFL-CIO support...

...It not so incidentally makes full employment all the more difficult to achieve, since the stunted buying power of the people periodically can't purchase the output of publically subsidized private investment...

...Individuals may or may not be seduced by power, but the massive movements of American society are to be understood in terms of corporate domination, not as a drama of individual psyches...

...They support them enthusiastically...

...The institution that could accomplish the work of redistribution is already in existence: the Internal Revenue Service...

...The simplifications of the Phillips curve espoused by Mr...

...The non-profit sector includes publicly owned industries with decentralized decision structures including worker participation at all levels...

...A publicly owned auto industry, for example, could have maintained high employment, satisfied a social need, and recovered enough for depreciation and socially useful, democratically determined investment such as in mass transit...

...Essentially because they are content to leave the basic economic power— control over investment—in corporate hands...

...We are not, after all, in favor of everyone having "a" job—any job—without regard to its impact on the individual and the society...

...This is wrong in terms of simple justice...

...In Sweden, the pension system is the prime source of investment funds for the housing industry...

...In good times, the government requires companies to pay a tax into a special account in the state bank...

...Such themes could serve as the basis for a book-length discussion...

...Since capitalism leaves it to private individuals and corporations to make the social decision of how the national surplus shall be invested, those individuals and corporations must have an enormous and disproportionate share of society's wealth...

...Secondly, socialists favor a society which is much more egalitarian than the present one...

...Independent challenges of the bureaucracy's proposals are handicapped by lack of access to relevant data and knowhow...

...The market, it is said, accurately prices investment funds...

...And as long as private corporations control the investment process in this country, the future of full employment inevitably will be decided in their hoard rooms, not in the Congress...

...Never mind that private, profit-maximizing control of the oil industry has been socially disastrous...

...Our brief history yields an extremely important proposition: as long as the basic structures of the system are not transformed, just so long will liberal reforms, even bold and militant reforms won by a mass movement, eventually be co-opted by the corporate power which pervades this economy...

...This completely practical kind of planning is already being done...

...In the early Fifties it moved from hydroelectric power toward steam and over the years underwrote strip mining of Appalachia by anti-union companies and further desecrated the environment by burning low quality coal...

...How do we explain Moynihan's advocacy of a view identical with that of William Simon...

...I raised this point earlier in discussing the transition from candidate Jimmy Carter, a quasi-populist who spoke boldly of jobs for all and radical tax reform, to President Jimmy Carter, a leader who often seemed to subordinate everything to "winning the confidence" of the businessmen his coalition had defeated at the ballot box...

...As long as this irrational dogma prevails—as long as the public sector is often programmed into inferiority, or worse—the immediate full employment program cannnot be realized...

...It now functions to discriminate in favor of the upper class...

...The incentives therefore run counter to what the corporations really want to do...

...And it seems to work...

...Big business wants the government to intervene, but only to federalize risks and losses, 131 Planning away the roller coaster Planning for non-profit solvency Socially useful surplusses and not to shape the profits or take part in the decision making...

...This is where a specifically socialist analysis becomes particularly relevant...

...In the middle distance, it poses the question of the very nature of work...

...In that case, why discuss them in a pamphlet addressed to a mass movement seeking immediate gains in employment...

...This, again, is the reason why Jimmy Carter is considerably different from candidate Jimmy Carter: he is confronted by the veto power of corporations with a program of their own for extensive government intervention into the economy for the greater glory of private profit...

...To do that, there must be democratic national planning...

...That, as I have already noted, socialists reject...

...it is also a source of the deficient buying power of the majority and therefore a major impediment to full employment...

...As a result, there was no crisis...

...There is no such thing...

...There is no reason why these monies cannot be put to social use...

...This practice emerged fully during the Kennedy-Johnson Presidencies when Washington began to use the budget as its major tool for promoting full employment...

...The assembled executives from Morgan Guaranty, Lehman Brothers, the Oppenheimer Fund and other such companies responded, Evans and Novak commented, like "barricudas," demanding even more concessions from Carter...

...In March, 1977, the columnists Evans and Novak reported that Bert Lance, then Carter's most intimate personal confidant as well as his budget director, met with "28 representatives of financial institutions aggregating $100 billion in investment power...

...But here again, the immediate program runs into the stonewall of corporate hostility to such social expenditures...

...With the right kind of incentives—for instance, low interest loans and other things we're working on—we are convinced we can induce the private sector to make business decisions it wouldn't make without these incentives...

...In all these cases, there would be a democratic input into the formulation of the plan from the representatives of those who would actually carry it out...

...So, Moynihan concluded in defending his proposal for a special investment tax credit, he is for "an interest free loan to business in areas of high unemployment...

...Do socialists then propose that Washington make all of the investment decisions for this gigantic economy...

...The funds for such investments would be more plentiful under democratic socialization than they are now...

...In short, the long run is now...

...In a similar vein, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan explained to his colleagues that the low rate of private investment in America was preparing the way for a drastic relative drop in our standard of living compared to that of our capitalist competitors...

...Such demands are, in effect, demands for democratic social control over the investment process...

...Investment tax credits are used by the private sector to mechanize and automate jobs out of existence—in the name of full employment...

...But that primordial necessity is not the same as the specific form which the surplus takes under capitalism (and only under capitalism): private profit...

...to finance speculative adventures in unrelated industries—as when oil companies recently bought out both Montgomery Ward and the Ringling Brothers circus...

...Conservatives have become remarkably—indeed indiscreetly—candid about their demands...

...And, at the same time, we say candidly that the radical reforms which are necessary if we are to have full employment point toward a new society in which a democratized economy will be totally at the service of human need...

...So the first reason for making democratic control of the investment process a central demand is that structural challenges to and changes in the private control of investment are the preconditions for the political possibility of making full employment the nation's decisive priority...

...But they do so within the framework of a corporate 126 Corporate decisions promote inequality Wages versus capital gains dominated system...

...Big business should get more...

...Secondly, it is essential to understand that private entrepreneurial ownership on an Adam Smith model is not the alternative to non-profit property...

...The Swedes have already moved in that direction...

...Per capita income in the Valley—which includes parts of seven states—rose from 44% of the national average in 1933, when TVA began, to 79% in 1976...

...And in the Seventies we saw ideologues like William Simon come up with the reactionary socialization of investment on behalf of the corporations...

...In periods of potential downturn, the company had the choice of either using that money for new, job-generating investments or surrendering it as a tax...

...All dynamic economies must produce a surplus to take care of depreciation and new investment...

...Everything would not be centralized under Washington and non-profit property would take many forms, the public corporation only one among them...

...As long as control over investment is in corporate hands, just so long will the most liberal government imaginable have to ransom itself to its political opponents in order to win their economic cooperation...

...It is precisely the restricted ability of the majority to consume that creates the conditions for a crisis of "overproduction" in the midst of underconsumption...

...We have already seen how this is true in the area of energy policy where governmental subordination to corporate priorities led, at the cost of hundreds of billions of tax dollars, to a social disaster...

...Arguing along the same lines, labor in the building trades, which are suffering from a depression, seeks Federal regulations requiring that credit be allocated to specific social uses, such as building new housing...

...The point is to get the efficiencies but to subject the institution to truly popular, democratic control...

...Serious full employment planning must rest on expansion of the nonprofit sector for three practical reasons...

...Here, to take an example from the Carter Administration, is the comment of a "key member of the White House domestic staff" as quoted by the Wall Street Journal: "We presume in this administration that government simply doesn't have the resources to create long-term employment in these [older city] areas...

...The public sector is thought of as second rate, inferior, its jobs a stopgap designed to give way to private employment as soon as possible...

...In addition, there is the pervasive American dogma that masquerades as common sense: private, corporate property is the only form of productive property...

...Because of the irrational prejudice against non-profit enterprise, such undertakings are normally designed for failure in America...

...Then, in a series of highly speculative projections, they estimate the amount of savings that will be available and discover the "gap...

...The full employment coalition insists that every man and woman has a right to a job...

...Estate and Gift Taxes 2.9 3.6 3.3 3.1 3.1 3.4 4.2 3.5 3.2 3.1 Miscellaneous Receipts 1.3 1.4 1.6 1.5 1.8 2.0 1.7 1.7 2.0 2.8 Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1976...

...Moreover, the expansion of the non-profit sector would undermine the rationale for maldistributed wealth...

...There is the campaign against "red lining," i.e...

...In the United States everyone has the right to present his or her views on various issues...

...Those choices are now much too important to be left to corporate executives seeking maximum profit...

...Thus far I have concentrated with ways of making planning democratic...

...First, because the actual program of that movement already moves in the direction of the long-term goals...

...How do we pay for these enterprises...

...This trend, however, is not merely the result of the reactionary politics of the decision makers (though this was obviously a factor during the Nixon and Ford years...

...So full employment, which was once only a liberal demand within the system, is now a much more radical goal, requiring structural changes of the system...

...today...

...It is, then, quite possible to outline a plausible alternative to the present American system in which private corporations make investment decisions on the basis of a profit calculus which results in a business cycle...

...On the other hand, the workers were making the most rapid, significant advance in their history...

...And the second part of that equation is often rigged so that it turns out to 130 Social funds for social use Capitalism's creeping socialism be true...