Communism, Capitalism & Mita-ism

Humanity is always in danger from those who suffer from outrageous and spectacular extremes, irrespective of whether those extremes are of depravity or virtue.

Regrettably we are now under threat from the extreme of depravity and we are hurtling headlong towards a world-wide revolution that will be bloodier and more destructive than anything human civilization has known to date. Luckily for most of us we will not be around to see it, but our grandchildren will most likely be participants in it, whether they like it or not.

There is no way to avert this. Greed and injustice has taken too much of a hold on our everyday existence and no simple idea could possibly sway those currently benefitting from the current situation into changing course.

However, if only for the record, I want to park here on this site the IDEA and the proof that things might have been different. That the greed that is hurtling the manipulators to self-destruction could have still been given its rein, produced its profits, but have had positive results in the lives of the masses, instead of creating the misery we now see all around us.

The IDEA I refer to is the idea for a new political system which is the only system that would ensure true freedom for all concerned; both for the employers and for the employed. And yes, even for the politicians.

In order to get to the idea itself, I must first bore you with a few introductory remarks. And I explain:

Ever since I could begin to think half independently for myself - and I consider that to be at about age twelve - I felt that Communism could not possibly survive. It lacked one fundamental ingredient: It would not allow me, the twelve year old, the leeway to be an innovator and an entrepreneur for myself. I had dreams of fantastic projects – all perfectly impractical - that would make me millions and I was willing to be generous and share my wealth with others, but not under duress. I wanted to do it of my own free will.

I am happy to report to those who might not have noticed, that the thoughts of a twelve year old have proven to be prophetic and that Communism has failed.

The same innocent twelve year old believed in a Capitalism with a Heart. A Capitalism of fair play; of justice; of compassion; of charity and of generosity to those less fortunate than the ones on top. If you are smiling ironically at this naiveté, well, what did you expect from a twelve year old?

Despite unbelievable hardships and painful misadventures, I am rather glad now that I managed to carry those beliefs on my back into adulthood and even into retirement. Glad of it because of the simple reason that I have proven to myself (at least) that one can succeed in business without cheating or by any other type of unfair or illegal means. Yes, along the way there have been innumerable mistakes, I have hurt others (unintensionally I like to think) and a great deal of luck was the main condiment to whatever success there was. But I think that mule-headed perseverance also gave luck a helping hand along the way.

Simply to make a point - and not to brag – at one time I was employing over one thousand people on board ships and unlike everyone else in my line of work, amongst other things, I employed a full time doctor to offer free medical care to all my employees, their wives and children but also their parents and their grandparents, even when the men were between contracts.

Please bear with me, because there is a point to this.

At a later stage I partly owned and run a factory for making building materials. When one of the local unions came to demand that my employees become members of that union, they discovered that in order to do that, I would have to reduce my employees’ wages to the level of the union wages. In other words I was paying more than the union demanded. The union representatives left and never bothered me again. As an aside, I should like to say that though I am still in favour of unions, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that Unions have served a worthwhile purpose in the west until democracy replaced the dictatorship of the rich; but when Unions became dictatorial, and under the control of dubioius entities, in some cases they have outlived their purpose and became counterproductive. Now that they are needed the most, they have become useless.

Again, please bear with me, because there is a reason for this unpleasant part that involves one-sided, uncontested personal history.

Capitalism is gradually, but with certainty, coming to be synonymous with huge conglomerates. Conglomerates which are gobbling up everything in the periphery of their business interests and slowly but surely turning the small self-employed shopkeeper or small businessman into an employee. One such conglomerate was in the news recently and that is how I know that it has 300,000 employees. The reason it was in the news is that it is cutting costs by reducing its work force by 30,000 employees.

Human beings have an inherent faculty for myth and we are willing to believe anything. Not only to believe it, but to perpetuate it. We are now in the process of undergoing brain-washing to the effect that when a conglomerate cuts 30,000 jobs it is for sound and practical reasons, essential for the survival of the other 270,000 employees. We are being trained to accept that taking the bread out of the mouths of 30,000 families is an innocent act with innocently pure motives.

However, I say to you that the apparently innocent acts of despicable people must entail despicable intent. Such despicable people are reversing the course of human evolution to its most primitive state and inevitably there will be a price to pay. Human evolutionary development is a wonderful thing to contemplate; particularly how the community created the laws which are essential for its own preservation and the conscience to judge and to ensure that we do not break them. The despicable people I have referred to are now breaking those laws of preservation and the repercussions shall be terrible.

The above might sound pretentious and we of course we can never admire pretentiousness in others; and we must temper any such tendencies in ourselves with the ever present anxiety of derision from others. In my case I am fully aware that I may very well be presenting a most singular spectacle in the human ludicrousness, but I feel that I must attempt to (less than tactfully) convince you of the logic of what I am about to suggest. A tactful speaker must find a fine balance between circuitousness and lies, reticence and hypocrisy, silence and treachery, bravery and hostility, forcefulness and bullying and I have no doubt that I shall fail in all of these, but I still feel the need to try.

Let me briefly try to give you an indication of why I believe a revolution is inevitable. And what better way to do it than with our recent financial banking woes. Bankers should be the children of Prudence and Logic. But we live at a time which is most curious. A time in which these children of Prudence and Logic would have us believe that they are not on speaking terms with their parents. The disastrous consequence is that we meet and shake hands with reality on a daily basis, only her handshake is crushing us. For example:

Goldman Sachs has been accused of (allegedly) knowingly selling Toxic Bonds to its clients/investors. They have been accused of DELIBERATELY making a bad investment that they could bet against and then loading it onto their clients so that the clients would be ruined. Deliberately robbing their own clients/investors in other words.

Now this conglomerate going by the name of Goldman Sachs feels so powerful, so politician-proof and so consequence-proof that by making ‘changes to geographic earnings mix’ they have immediately afterwards reduced their tax liabilities from $6 billion in 2007 to a measly $14 million in 2008. At the same time they have paid their employees who have perpetrated the above fraud $10.9 billion in wages and benefits. According to Representative Lloyd Doggett, "with the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore."

Politicians accept contributions from conglomerates like Goldman Sachs, in order to forget. Goldman Sachs and the other conglomerates know that the inability to remember inconvenient events at opportune moments is a prerequisite to a successful career in any chosen 'respectable' profession, and especially so in politics. The one with the most conveniently deficient memory at the appropriate time will inevitable find himself in the fullness of time at the helm of highly regarded institutions such as the Presidency of the USA, the Foreign Service or the Church.

What do you think? Are we likely to end up with a bloody revolution, or not?

I have found the exception to this unfortunate rule of greed on the site of our very talented and invariably human friend Shadesbreath, who in one of his comments has given a link to an article by Warren Buffet

But unfortunately it is only an exception to an otherwise generally very solid rule.

If you want to flood the world with, say, well designed and competitively priced bicycles, you cannot do it by turning your garage into a bicycle workshop. You will need a huge factory with at least 5,000 employees. For such a factory you need millions. Who has the millions? The Conglomerates.

BUT there is also someone else.

· Imagine a really wealthy institution investing $100 million in building our theoretical bicycle factory.

· After the start up and the successful flooding of the world’s bicycle market with the new factory’s well designed, wonderful products, the factory is placed on the stock exchange with a value which is ten times the original value of the investment (which is the norm – sometimes a lot more), meaning that the company now has a value of $1 BILLION!

· 25% of the shares will be allocated for purchase by the 5,000 employees of the company, should they wish to exercise this right. This will ensure that the employees will have the opportunity to increase their future pensions through investment in the company in which they are employed.

· Should employees decide to exercise their option to buy shares, they will be allowed to pay for them through salary deductions of 5% – 10 % per pay-check, over (say) a ten year period.

· No single investor shall be allowed more than 0.01% of the value of the company.

The result will be that: The investor shall have multiplied his investment by ten times, the 5,000 employees will be assured an easy means of increasing their final pension, and the factory will be assured of employees who will want to protect their interest as shareholders in the factory.

Think of the same investor then investing his profit of $900 million into a car manufacturing plant. After multiplying his investment by another 10 times through the same means, he then invests in (say) agriculture. Or anything else you can think of, ad infinitum.

With this system, eventually every family in, say, the USA will end up being part owners of productive units of the economy, with a direct personal interest in the success of their investment.

And the final twist? No company shall make an eventual net profit of more than 10%. I used to be on the board of directors of such a company, with a budget in the hundreds of millions and I can tell you that when you are restricted in making a profit, then you become very charitable towards your community. We built roads for the community. It costs us nothing, because we were guaranteed our 10% net profit. We helped the needy and we financed the arts. We were still allowed to make our 10% net profit. In other words, we became very generous because it did not cost us anything.

So who else can afford such an investment besides the Conglomerates? The government. A government which will invest tax dollars to put up productive business units which will employ large numbers of people and then immediately afterwards get rid of the those units by selling them to local households and employees.

Eventually even the ultra-greedy Conglomerates will see the benefit of increasing their investments tenfold and will end up competing with the government for the various projects.

Think about it.

I cannot help being a dreamer and I still believe that if this idea reached some politician who wanted to make a name for himself - purely out of self-interest of course - it may still be possible to implement it. So please, pass this along to as many people as you can in the hope of reaching that one politician. You might be instrumental in saving your grandchildren.

Dimitris Mita - DeGreek