I said just yesterday or the day before that he never had anything good to say about continentals - he just proved me wrong:

The other lesson of this conflicting tale of two French corporate champions [Alstom and Alcatel] is that the French interventionist way of fixing industrial problems seems to achieve better results than the American way. The US also appears to have reached the same conclusion - at least judging by the way the government is now intervening to save everybody, from the bankers on Wall Street to the hard pressed carmakers of Detroit.

It's time for State interventionism again, of the kind long promoted by France - the kind that plans things for the long term, focuses on infrastructure, social resiliency and cohesion, and basic (public) services for all.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

1/ Taxes on Privilege

(a) Location Benefit Levy or tax on Land Rental Values - a simple, fair and unavoidable tax on the privilege of the exclusive right of occupation of the Commons of land;

(b) Carbon Levy - a levy on the privilege of use of the Commons of non - renewable energy;

(c) Intellectual Property Levy - a levy on the privilege of exclusive rights of use of the "Creative Commons".

(d) Limited Liability Levy - a levy on the privilege of "free" limitation of liability for investors.

Apply the proceeds to remove indirect taxes, drastically reduce income taxes for low and mid-level income earners, abolish Corporation Tax, and with it most of the need for accountants and tax specialists.

2/ A National Equity

(a) Public Equity - use partnership and trust based frameworks to "unitise" revenue earning public assets, and pay a reasonable, index-linked "Capital Rental" to long term risk-averse investors;

(b) Debt/Equity Swap - convert all distressed secured mortgage debt to quasi REIT "Rental Pools" of properties on a "Rent to Buy" basis for Occupiers.

3/ Carbon Dollar

Use a Carbon levy to fund a "Carbon Pool" to be "unitised" and used for investing directly in production of renewable energy and in energy efficiency savings.

Monetise the intrinsic energy value of carbon, rather than attempting to monetise by "fiat" CO2 and tradable energy quotas with no intrinsic value.

Modern conservatives engage in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.Galbraith

I'd develop, so to speak, Cambio Chavez.

Let 'em go bankrupt. Fuck 'em. Then buy out a few choice firms lock, stock n barrel --the BoA Option, only the "nice" assets-- with US debt, since US has no funds. Contract, say, Robert Half International to recommend management hires and retain labor, pending redundancies. Run the whole damn thing NON-PROFIT to repurchase treasuries, THEN run 'em FOR PROFIT to competete with FRB subsidiaries.

That's the way a government TRUST does business.

Pay dividends to common shareholders, ya know, all the contribution defined 401(*) plan participants who currently believe their "retirement" mutual funds --strictly capital gains, mind you, on cash out-- are sufficient living wage beyond one year.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Could we get some strong regulation as to size and domination of single companies, then that would be nice. As merger upon merger creates behemots of companies it is becoming increasingly clear that our current regulations to stop monopolies and oligopolies are insufficient.

Companies that are to big to fail are to big to exist.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

My recomendation is CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM FOR ALL WHO WHISH TO CALL THEMSELVES DEMOCRACIES: About 5 euros per citizen per year should do, straight out of the treasury as part of the fundamental overhead of being a true democracy.  

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Telegraph: US taxpayers are being enrolled in an economic chain gang

In between the Jeffersonian quotes, Jeff Randall lays out the good stuff...

"To preserve their [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude" - Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson, America's third president (1801-09), is widely regarded as the White House's most intellectually gifted occupant. He believed that "banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies", and that "the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity ... is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

Which brings us back to Jefferson. Two hundred years ago, he demanded: "The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs." Twas ever thus.

You can't be me, I'm taken

You're hard to follow, Jérôme. Your 4-point programme nails the main things.

I think it would be useful to examine how to cap the return-on-capital requirements of pension and other big funds. The 20% rule has, over the last 2-3 decades, turned real-value businesses into shareholder cash machines.

In any event, the role of pension funds is going to have to be re-evaluated after this meltdown. We're going to have to go back to working out a solid system of nationally guaranteed retirement pensions by allocation rather than listen to squawks about how such systems are doomed, cannot work, etc; and how workers need to entrust a lifetime's savings to the markets.

Do not forget housing isolation support, taxes on cars Co2 emission (like in Spain), zero taxes on renewable enrgy, flexibility on labor hours so as to introduce collecive bargaining and increses in minimum wage.

Implementation of strong punitive measures with tax-heavens.

I would like to have aclear emssage on trade, but unfortuantely it is too complciated to give a general recipe.

Public-private reseach partnerships.

Public offering of retns, huge increase in second residence taxes.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Comprehensive media reform.

Public discourse - that is, the range of subjects which people discuss, and the way in which they discuss them, right down to the language that they use and the inflections of meaning that those words have - is incredibly powerful.

What people can say in public, and how they can say it, defines the range of possibilities and options that are available to THINK.  It is a very, very short step between able to say and able to think, and it is an only somewhat longer step between able to say in public and able to say at all.

In the current system, the mass media sets the terms of what can be said in public - not by outright censorship and thought police, but simply by marginalizing and ignoring those who do not respect the bounds of debate set by the media entities.

In this way, the media controls what can be thought and what can be done.  So long as the media is controlled by a few consolidated powers with visible political agendas, those powers will set the terms of debate, and thus effectively control the future. This is fundamentally incompatible with any notion of a democratic society.  Furthermore, this same consolidation leads to a homogenization of viewpoints in the media, so that all one sees are the rich urbanites of the metropole, and all one hears are their thoughts and ideas.  This is a gross injustice in and of itself.

While the Internet helps quite a bit with this problem, it's still a fact that it requires a substantial bit of infrastructure to put together high level audio or video programming, and it seems that regardless of the transmission medium, there is still a huge market for audio and video material, and a large number of people who, given their choice, will inform themselves about their world through audio and video materials.

My preferred solution would be a massively decentralized network of local public text, radio, and video content production studios, funded and run to encourage local reportage, by locals, on local and regional issues, and to produce locally-oriented entertainment materials.  Distribution could be wired, wireless, or both, depending on the situation and demand.  There is such a wealth of talent and creativity out there that is ignored by the centralized system, and it's a shame for everyone when it's allowed to wither from lack of support or exposure.  Further, local independent media producing a wealth of narratives and perspectives would help shatter the echo-chamber that is the current centralized media system.  A multiplicity of independent voices would also dramatically expand the range of what could be said, and thus what could be thought, and would it dramatically easier for dissenting voices to be heard and for their complaints to make it into the mainstream.

Most economists in Europe still say the region needs more free-market changes to improve long-term growth.

Market fundamentalists masquerading as mainstream economists are part of the problem, not part of the solution.


A vivid image of what should exist acts as a surrogate for reality. Pursuit of the image then prevents pursuit of the reality -- John K. Galbraith

Lots of good comments. My addition - I believe in more regulation as always. There needs to be DEATH OF DEREGULATION once and for all.Why it is so incomprehensible to make financial institutions and their leaders accountable and make them operate within very strict guidelines? Why is it ALWAYS those of us at the bottom who have to "tighten our belts" and do without, while those at the top go scotfree? There was an Austrian economist, Leopold Kohr, who said that these behemoths merging would not last - he was a colleague/friend of Schumacher's - and that in future small and local would be more prevalent. Listen more to the so-called "devolutionists." There is a tiny movement in US led by economist Thomas Naylor which focuses on secession, but I'm not interested in that - as I wrote to Prof. Naylor, more interesting are his local economics ideas. Some of the Peak Oil writers say the US WILL have to go to the informal economy - you guys are all talking macroeconomics, fine, but what does a working-class stiff like me do with that? To survive I'd have to do something like they do in Ithaca NY - have an alternative currency and much more bartering. But on the macroeconomics scale - wasn't it FDR who imposed a 75% tax rate? They have hated him ever since for that - he wanted I think a 90% tax rate, but Congress would only give him 75%. Absolutely, Jerome - invest in infrastructure and employ all the people as long as there is a huge centralized government. There was a conference here back in May of labor/religious/activist leaders that called for just that but no one listens to them - they're too busy listening to Faux News - good that Faux says "capitalism as we knew it is dead!" The leadership here near where I live in Dayton, Ohio are a bunch of idiots - they have invested in a military future. I think there needs to be a tax revolt, or some kind of revolt by American citizens - and that's the energy Naylor wants to tap into. I like the quotes from Jefferson - like FDR, despite being a man of privilege, he grasped the limits of his position and wanted to do the right thing. So far my countrymen/women are still too glued to their TV sets and idiotic comparisons of Palin versus Biden to do anything useful. Many of my friends from California to NY call us a "nation of sheep." I'm hoping the sheep wake up to something more than ripping off gas stations or blaming their fellow citizens, or believing some kind of hate rhetoric.

In addition to Jerome's well-taken proposals, I would like to suggest (to Mr Sarkozy, no less, since he claims to be concerned) that less noise on red herrings (such as golden parachutes or stock options, which rub the French the wrong way because they sound English, but are really very small culprits, if any) and more action on actual villains would be appreciated.

My pet peeve: the financial ambulance chasers who pester people with wonderful offers for unconditional, practically unlimited "revolving credit" at rates close to usury. Of course only the very poor with no access to real credit will even consider this kind of sweetened poison. If the offenders were shady characters operating out of suburban cellars, the picture would be clear. As it is, they are (in France) subsidiaries of big financial institutions which make the bulk of their profit from legitimate, asset-backed lending (automotive, real estate). Why play that ugly game at all?

One has to wonder if this is not a deliberate policy to bolster the (miserably low) French rate of terminal indebtedness, which has been shielding us from some effects of the subprime crisis. A nation of hopelessly indebted consumers addicted to extended credit is such a breeze to steer and drive... no strikes, no demos! (I won't name countries, but the high priests of fundie liberalism in France and across the seas have been lamenting the reluctance of the stubborn French to borrow at all).

Even if the above is a paranoid fantasy, the 'easy credit' street pushers should be identified as dangerous, especially in the light of the subprime crisis, which their US cousins started, and put out of business by the law. This would signal an earnest will to address the issue of financial chaos, rather than throttling and gutting a few sacrificial fat cats.