Money vs. Wealth

["John Gelles" <johng@xxxxxxxxxx>]

      .  GLOBAL WEALTH TO END WANT MUST
            NOT BE HELD HOSTAGE TO MONEY
             PROFITS IMPOSSIBLE TO COME BY
                      AND EMPTY OF PROMISE
       UNDER CURRENT CAPITALISTIC SYSTEMS

    Reformers must not seek to return to the profit
    system in place between 1950 and 1965. It was not
    that much different, logically, than the system we have
    which is admittedly worse.

    Everyone wants profits--but only to turn them into
    wealth in the form a real water, food, homes, fac-
    tories, schools, farms, mines, laboratories, know-
    ledge systems, etc.

    But profits by definition dry up cash flows from
    the poor needed to grow wealth for human and
    planetary security.  For every dollar dried up,
    a new system, (to reform the old,) must spend a
    dollar to replace it.

    I'm open to anyone's advice of how to do this.
    I am not open to the idea that we already did it
    post 1950 and before the death of the welfare
    state idea.  Poverty and unemployment was
    common enough in those years. A few nations
    avoided it, like Japan, by exporting things as
    others exported jobs.  But what followed the
    rebuilding of Japan and Europe was not a recipe
    for the 21st century.

    If we would end want where it hurts so bad now
    we must think hard and suggest how to do it.

    Johannesburg and New York hosted conferences
    by elites (bureaucrats in J. and plutocrats in NY)
    aimed at economic development. Puerto Allegre
    too tried its best. None of the three explained
    that money spent to green the world and end
    want can represent new wealth NOT old debt.

    The world is awash in debt and some of it
    represents money. But we must be awash in
    real things, water, sewers, food, etc., and
    all of it can represent new money.

    I do not insist that there be no taxes, IF and
    only IF,  we unlock production potentials
    in Japan, Germany, the US, Australia, etc.,
    etc., to create the wealth we need that the
    profit system denies us for lack of coherent
    arithmetic.
                    Karl Marx was right: capitalism,
    without radical monetary reform, takes all
    the purchasing power of labor and squeezes
    it dry of real money. Hence it is self-limiting
    --far ahead of the time when an enriched labor
    force would go to the beach all day and see
    no need to work.

    Please reformers--enough of what we did at
    the time of the original Marshall Plan.
                    The need now is trillions. The
    cost of the old system you remember, which
    paid nothing for its trail of environmental
    damage, was falsely accounted for to yield
    temporary profits.
                    What we need now is an honest
    plan to spend--not at the mall and Walmart--
    but in the halls of Congress. We must explain
    to ordinary people how such spending
    (modeled on winning wars) can be accom-
    plished, how any inflation can be managed,
    and how the real wealth necessary for human
    survuval can be produced in democracies
    around the world.

    We seek freedom from want--not freedom
    from thought.

        John Gelles