Tag Archives: profit sharing

The Road to Diamond, Day 9: Veterans

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Posted by on in collaborating, Community, impediments, Inspiration, Personal Values, service, Social, Spiritual, Striving

December 7, 2024- Eighty-three years ago today, Japanese planes attacked the U.S. Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i. This resulted in the deaths of 2305 Americans and 129 Japanese. There are a few centenarians still alive today, who survived that attack.

Ironic, then, that an immigrant and the son of immigrants, neither of whom have ever served in the military, are leading the call for cutting funding for veterans’ health care. They are citing a report, written by a Harvard graduate student, who also has not served in the military-for a publication in the United Kingdom(home to free medical care for all), that says Veterans’ Disability funds are reducing veterans’ employment.

This is hooey. I know of several disabled veterans, who are either working, happily, at full time jobs, or are actively seeking employment. Several employers, coached by the Veterans Administration and US Vets, are taking on disabled veterans as workers. The Small Business Administration has programs that assist with veterans who are establishing their own businesses.

One of the biggest false starts in academia comes from the words, “The statistics say…” or “Research tells us….” . Numbers and data can be manipulated towards any agenda. Blind pursuit of cutting expenditures, without considering the true human cost of those cuts, is a dead end. Coupled with the belief that only an economic elite can actually solve the problems facing humanity, that Capital should trump Labour, the road to economic decimation is assured.

Both Capital and Labour are needed, in order to make an economic system function fully. This is one reason why Baha’u’llah calls for a system of profit sharing, for employee-owned enterprises, as a way of building an economy that has no disparity between the very rich and very poor. As hard as it will be, to get the Uberwealthy to see this, short of a damaging economic downturn, a push towards such economic justice would resolve a host of financial woes-including the perception that veterans should not be cared for, following their military service.

Those who have served their nation should not be beholden to those who have done nothing in the way of service. Resolving the nagging problem of national debt is a matter that must not be given to false solutions, or scapegoating of Protected Classes. We all have a role to play in debt reduction-including the wealthiest among us.

Curing Inflation?

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Posted by on in Community, distraction issues, impediments, Inner Struggles, Inspiration, Personal Values, Social, Striving

September 29, 2022- In the midst of the destruction that has taken place across Florida, and may well spread into nearby states, the mass media has chosen to focus on its answer to curbing inflation: Vote Big Business back into power. These are the same folks whose idea of stopping price rises lies in wage controls, tax breaks for the wealthy-and curbing high employment. Of course, not paying as many workers puts more money in the pockets of a favoured few. It just won’t be sustainable over time, and I dare say it won’t bring prices down by that much, for very long. The downward spiral will have to be maintained in perpetuity, and will probably be accompanied by stagflation-as it was from 1974 until 1982, or so. Then, of course, all the giddiness in the economic stratosphere led to over-speculation, and the Tech Stock crash of 1987. Fast forward to 2008, and another round of over-speculation led to the Madoff scandal, the Great Recession and a lot of bankruptcies-many of which were among the lower and medium middle classes.

So the media moguls instruct their puppets to promote the same shopworn ideas, yet again. After all, the alternative would be a greater degree of social equality, and who wants that? Certainly not the Federal Reserve, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

I am far from an economic genius, but I do see a different, and far more workable solution, than going around in the same circles: Profit-sharing, and joint ownership of enterprises, by both management and labour. The managerial class is needed, to keep enterprises going smoothly-but there is no reason that workers cannot be educated in the ways of systematic prosperity and genuinely share in decision-making and well-earned profits.

The other side of the coin, of course, is financial literacy; especially learning to make wise purchases, to navigate the worlds of simple and compound interest and to be able to avoid phony or unsafe investments. I had to learn some of that the hard way, but for a long time, I felt compassion for people whose view of life was strictly unilateral transactions. The recent downturn has extinguished that impulse, which I had already been curbing, anyway.

I don’t want to be a ward of the state, or other organization. Neither do I want to see many peoples’ hard -earned savings be absorbed by sell-offs, prompted by the Federal Reserve Board, or by accompanying greed at the upper echelons of business and finance. We have a worst case scenario that resulted from just those phenomena: October 29, 1929.

Those thoughts come to mind, as I read Yahoo’s call for a return to the governance of the past.