Bailout for the People: “The Cook Plan” by Richard C. Cook

[Joanne98]

December 15, 2008

Prepared for the
U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network Annual Conference
New York, N.Y., February 27-March 1, 2009

Submitted by Richard C. Cook

December 12, 2008

This system is not free enterprise, and it is not capitalism.

It is a cancer that is destroying the world.

We Hold These Truths by Richard C. Cook

Originally uploaded by Lorri37
Isn’t it Finally Time to Enact a Basic Income Guarantee?

The lack of individual and family income security in the midst of a highly-developed economy is a travesty under any circumstances, but the basic contradiction of “poverty in the midst of plenty” that has plagued the world since the start of the Industrial Revolution is becoming much worse in the early years of the 21st century as the Recession of 2008 picks up speed.

Winston Churchill spoke on the subject when giving the Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on June 19, 1930, a few months after the crash of the U.S. stock market that started the Great Depression. He said:

“Who would have thought that it would be easier to produce by toil and skill all the most necessary or desirable commodities than it is to find consumers for them? Who would have thought that cheap and abundant supplies of all the basic commodities would find the science and civilization of the world unable to utilize them? Have all our triumphs of research and organization bequeathed us only a new punishment: the Curse of Plenty? Are we really to believe that no better adjustment can be made between supply and demand? Yet the fact remains that every attempt has failed. Many various attempts have been made, from the extremes of Communism in Russia to the extremes of Capitalism in the United States. They include every form of fiscal policy and currency policy. But all have failed, and we have advanced little further in this quest than in barbaric times. Surely it is this mysterious crack and fissure at the basis of all our arrangements and apparatus upon which the keenest minds throughout the world should be concentrated.”

Evidently we’ve learned nothing since Churchill spoke. Isn’t it shameful—or just surprising—that since the proponents of “post-modern” economics restructured the U.S. economy around the concept of a deregulated financial sector over the past 30 years, income and wealth disparities between rich and poor have become much worse?

Continued>>>
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/bailout-for-the-people-the-cook-plan-by-richard-c-cook/