Thom Hartmann and Paul Buchheit both are dumbfounded by what to do about the reality that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production and global downward pressure on wages is destroying jobs and devaluing the worth of labor. There solution: the State should step in a provide EVERY citizen a Minimum Guaranteed Income. This effectively means tax extract the production of those actually who are productive, whether through their labor or through their productive capital assets, which they OWN.

Wealth distribution assumes wealth creation, and productive capital (i.e., tools, machines, robotics, computerization, technological and systems advances and improved land uses), according to recent studies, accounts for almost 90 percent of productivity growth in the modern world. Thus, balanced growth in a market economy depends on incomes distributed through widespread individual ownership of productive capital, all non-human means of production. Without access to and the means to acquire productive capital, people cannot produce enough to purchase the production of others.

Most people on the planet have no legitimate ownership claim to, and have insufficient means to purchase, what technology’s phenomenal productive capacity can generate. On the other hand, the small minority of people who own and control most of the productive instruments of society end up producing more than they can humanly consume.

Both socialism and capitalism concentrate economic power at the top. It makes little difference that under capitalism the concentration is in private hands and under socialism the concentration is in the hands of the State.

What then would be a workable alternative economic model for moving toward a more free, more just and economically classless society?

The REAL solution is to restructure the underlying system, balancing the demands of participative and distributive justice by lifting institutional barriers that have historically separated owners from non-owners. This involves removing the roadblocks preventing people from participating fully in the economic process as both workers and owners.

The Just Third Way offers a just free market system that economically empowers all individuals and families through the democratization of money and credit for new production. Widespread citizen access to money power would create universal access to direct ownership of wealth-creating and income-producing capital.

Hartmann and Buchheit should support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/, http://www.cesj.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jtw-graphicoverview-2013.pdf and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.

Damned typos!
I think it was Lamarr Waldron who said on Thom's show that "socialism", as a term, is being rehabilitated among milleneals. He said that the hyperbolic use of it by Republicans to describe everything from Social Security to public education has caused them to react positively and even identify with the term.They say that if those things are "socialism" then they must be socialists because they are for all that.
Kend, why does it never penetrate with you that the debt is because of wilfull, reckless mismanagement, namely two wars kept off the books for 7 years by G.W. Bush, not by socialist policies - which we haven't had anyway.

mjolnir -- I agree that I would become irrational if someone beat the crap out of me.

RoseM481 -- That sounds like the repug solution. That is, let the churches take care of the poor. It has been tried all over the world, and always comes up short (according to Thom).

IRV -- Where do you get all the time to spend on the details of nuclear energy? Are you receiving any financial incentive?

I am working on a rebuttal of almost every single item on your defense of nuclear, but it takes lots of time.

Wow Thom! I posted the above before you did a whole segment on the 100th monkey!

In the 80s we had Reagan/Thatcher. The antithesis would be Sanders/Corbyn. The tide is turning. The Populists are rising! Has our time finally come?
You briefly mentioned the 100th Monkey theory this morning. I Recommend that you get Rupert Sheldrake on your show. He has a fascinating, and very science based, view on the 100th Monkey theory theory.

From Rubert Sheldrake's website:

http://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/frequently-asked-questions

The 100th monkey story is often told and appears to support the idea of morphic resonance. However, I never use this myself because most of the versions of it that are in circulation have drifted a long way from the actual facts. It is then easy for sceptics to debunk.
The original story appears in Lyall Watson's book Lifetide, where he describes research on Japanese macaque monkeys, which have been studied intensively for more than four decades in a number of wild colonies. In 1952, a researcher first provided monkeys in one colony on the island of Koshima with sweet potatoes, which were thrown onto the beach and hence were covered with sand. One of the monkeys, an 18-month-old female, called Imo, solved the problem of the sand on the potatoes by carrying them down to a stream and washing them before feeding. This new form of behaviour spread through the colony. By 1958 all the juveniles were washing dirty food and some of the adults learned to do so by imitating their children.
Watson goes on to say: "Then something extraordinary took place. The details up to this point in the study are clear, but one has to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened. ..... I am forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened." Watson then tells the original version of the 100th monkey story, making it clear that this is not literally what happened but a kind of dramatisation of it:
"In the autumn of that year [1958] an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea, because Imo had made the further discovery that salt water not only cleaned the food but gave it an interesting new flavour. Let us say, for arguments sake, that the number was 99 and that at eleven o'clock on the Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the 100th monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by that evening almost everyone in the colony was doing it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies in other islands and on the mainland in a troop at Takasakiama."
This story has been repeated by all sorts of new age speakers and writers, mutating as it is retold. I think that the observations to which Watson was referring do show something like morphic resonance, but exaggerated versions of the story often bear little relation to what really happened. I myself prefer the example of rats that learned a new trick in one laboratory (Harvard) and later groups of rats in other laboratories, in Scotland and Australia that learned the new trick quicker. The details are given in my book A New Science of Life chapter 11.

Hello Mark. Fancy running into you over here. :)

I'm in total agreement with the Colonel! His words were spot on. Cheney and others should be behind bars.

Alice could you say something nasty to me just to remind of of the good old days. LOL

Reply #4

Bernie is a socialist. What's the big deal? Bernie calls himself a socialist. He belongs to the Democratic Socialist Party. Read their website. They are socialists.

One more thing, until Bernie declares himself a democrat, he will not run as a democrat. Do you really believe the Democrat Party is going to let a self declared Independent (socialist) run for President under the Democrat banner?.