Party for Mutualism and Cooperation: 101-Point U.S. Parliament Platform

GENERAL GOALS

1. Promote cooperation, mutuality, reciprocity, and voluntary action in political society and in interactions between citizens and government.
2. Promote social purpose, small scale, and locality of enterprise and property ownership.
3. Build a perfect and complete market free from monopolies and state intervention.
4. Increase transparency in government.
5. Build a party that represents the bottom 99%.
6. Achieve economic independence for the voluntary / cooperative / non-profit “Third Sector”.
7. Invest in local government (and reduce costs thereof) by networking with non-profit, mutual, cooperative, and community banking, credit, and finance agencies.
8. Promote mutuality, reciprocity, cooperation, voluntarism, consent, independence, self-sufficiency, and autonomy in interactions between workers and enterprises.
9. Reduce domestic property losses to foreign banks through increasing local self-determination over banking and investment policies.
10. Increase the extension of credit to people and businesses.
11. Improve the access to a wide variety of social, common, and public goods and services, to the homeless and non-homeless alike.
12. Especially improve the access of housing to the homeless (through reforming homesteading, settling, rental law, etc.).
13. Grow and promote the self-sustainability of the Third Sector (the sector of voluntarism, cooperation, mutuality, reciprocity, and community).
14. Allow the peaceful economic secession of bioregionalist states and nations.
15. Create a peaceful, amicable competition to provide consumers and citizens with the best public, private, common, and club goods.
16. Build coalitions between independent business alliances, labor unions, trade organizations, economic and industrial unions, social welfare agencies, and charity groups.

GOVERNMENT

17. Increase voluntary public service, and increase transparency, responsibility, and responsivity between citizens and government.
18. Increase autonomy and independence of communal, neighborhood, and unincorporated governments and associations.
19. Increase decentralization, localism, subsidiarity, and diffusion of the authority to make and enforce decisions.
20. Promote sustainable investment of public funds through credit unions, cooperative and mutual banks, non-profit banks, and independent no-collateral social-purpose financing agencies.
21. Promote local economic interests through increased cooperation between local associations, enterprises, business alliances, and consumer groups (including locavore groups).
22. Promote cooperation between advocacy groups, PACs, and political parties and party caucuses that promote consumers' and citizens' interests.
23. Allow and encourage local communities and private communities to experiment with Land Value Taxation (taxing the unimproved value of land, and the blight, abuse, and unsustainable development of landed property).
24. Defeat any attempts to tax pollution in an institutional and general manner, and especially attempts to base citizens' dividends on the taxation of pollution.
25. Promote understanding of bioregionalism and Cascadian independence in government.
26. Reform jurisdictions and borders to bound watersheds and follow mountain ranges rather than water features.
27. Grow Cascadian and other bioregionalist economies through creating local business alliances and networks thereof.

BANKING / FINANCE

28. Perfect competition, and complete the systems of market-oriented distribution.
29. Free the markets from coercive, monopolistic, and distortive market actors.
30. Promote equal access to the factors of production as a requirement for free competition in markets.
31. Prohibit deceptive profit-calculation, externalization, high leverage, debt collateralization, pernicious lending, insider trading, manipulative speculation, and short-selling.
32. Restore Glass-Steagall (or implement similar legislation) at the federal level, and implement similar legislation at state and local levels of government.
33. Obtain easy credit and low interest rates through decreasing and eliminating unjustifiable transaction costs and externalization, and through establishing the principle “cost the limit of price”.
34. Promote cooperation between non-profit and cooperative banks, companies, and financial services agencies.
35. Extend the federal tax exemption for credit unions.
36. Require that for-profit enterprises which lack a stated social purpose in their charter, surrender 100% of their profits to a social, community, or citizens' dividend fund.
37. Build independent and alternative networks and systems of community and social credit.
38. Promote cooperation between credit-union leagues, cooperative interbank networks, and other non-profit and mutual finance networks.
39. Prohibit usury and fractional reserve banking.
40. Permit the establishment of state and local public banks.
41. Allow experimentation with local and alternative currencies.

HOUSING / PROPERTY

42. Improve the ability of the homeless to access public and common utilities (including and especially housing).
43. Increase penalties for deception and fraud by landlords.
44. Reform homesteading, by reducing the time-frame of duration-of-occupancy requirements, and by abolishing the requirement that property owners practice exclusive ownership.
45. Sustainably improve the development of abandoned, unoccupied, and underdeveloped commercial and residential properties.
46. Repurpose any abandoned properties which are not improved for occupation and residency by the homeless.
47. Sustainably improve the development of abandoned transportation infrastructure properties, repurposing them for occupation and residency by the homeless.
48. Repurpose some public farm, park, forest, and camping lands for occupation and residency by the homeless.
49. Provide shelter to the homeless by building cooperative housing, promoting cooperative finance of public housing projects, and restoring and repurposing abandoned properties.

SOCIAL WELFARE

50. Improve the image and reputation of the homeless and disadvantaged among civilians and public employees, by promoting C.O.R.E. (Clean, Organized, Respectful, and Energetic) values in social activism.
51. Require the government to pay for any good or service it requires citizens to have in order to exercise basic freedoms (such as state IDs, voter ID, travel documents, legal paperwork and representation, health insurance, etc.).
52. Improve access to public facilities, by the homeless and the general public alike, by promoting mutual aid and voluntary charitable giving, and cooperation between charitable and direct action agencies.
53. Work with mutual aid and charity agencies to distribute maps to the public (whether homeless or not) detailing where free food, shelter, public restrooms, and electrical outlets are located.
54. Improve the coordination and efficiency of delivery of personal social welfare.
55. Build a mutual aid society by facilitating cooperation between charity agencies, mutual aid networks, benefit associations, and non-profit and social enterprises.
56. Build a mutual aid society into an Aid-and-Trade association.
57. Build Aid-for-Work agencies - through coordinating with veterans' and retired persons' groups, social welfare agencies, etc. - in order to improve access to employment, job training, and immediate on-the-job family aid.
58. Improve access to education through volunteer provision, Aid-for-Work, cooperative education, and restoring abandoned schools.
59. Fight for the unity of families by re-evaluating standards of child care so as not to judge proper care based on degree of access to certain conveniences wrongfully presumed to be necessary.
60. Fight for the unity of families by promoting awareness of the corporate personhood implications of birth registration.
61. Promote the independence, mutualization, and syndicalization of social service bureaucracies, through abolishing all compulsory taxes on all productive behavior (earned income, investment, sales, and savings).
62. Base all government revenue not deriving from voluntary contributions only upon the punitive taxation of unimprovement of the value of land.

BUSINESS

63. Promote sustainable improvements to the development of occupied and unoccupied business offices and logistics properties and private-sector landed property.
64. Perform the finance, planning, and regulation of business and commercial banking at the state and local levels.
65. Require enterprises' charters to contain specifically stated social purposes, with compliance assured through the establishment of independent licensing boards and the promotion of regulatory competition.
66. Improve the social benefit of trade and commerce, by coordinating activity between profit-sharing agencies, social enterprises, fair-trade businesses and organizations, and agencies supporting the creation of social and Citizens' Dividend funds.
67. Promote the idea of government as a business, by embracing business-oriented solutions to social problems; not through privatization to the private sector, but through “privatization to the non-profit sector”; through social entrepreneurialism, and through non-profit, mutual, and cooperative enterprises, and networks thereof.
68. Build independent business alliances by recruiting non-profits, mutuals, cooperatives, social purpose enterprises, and charities as members.
69. Coordinate cooperation between sympathetic enterprises across stages of production: (production/manufacturing, trade, and consumption), by partnering with and promoting wholesale stores, consumers' cooperatives, and purchasing cooperatives.
70. Build business alliances into coalitions thereof, confederations of cooperatives, cooperative wholesale societies, trade associations, and trade confederations.
71. Promote coordination with cooperative corporations and cooperative business associations.

LABOR / EMPLOYMENT

72. Promote the proliferation of egalitarian management by labor in enterprise.
73. Promote the operation of workplaces on cooperativist, mutualist, syndicalist, and social-purpose-enterprise principles.
74. Offer tax incentives to enterprises to transition to Egalitarian Labor-Managed Firm, consumer-driven, worker cooperative, and worker-consumer cooperative (i.e., mutual) models.
75. Support the rights of individual workers to form unions by reviving the Blue Eagle.
76. Promote collective bargaining agreements which support individual workers' rights, by eliminating the social cost and free-rider problems which result from compulsory unionism.
77. Augment and broaden the collective bargaining rights of workers and non-workers alike.
78. Create homeless persons' and welfare recipients' unions, and coordinate activity with and between these unions, and freelancers' unions, and New Mutualist groups.
79. Revive the International Brotherhood Welfare Association traveling workers' union and mutual aid society.
80. Wage a general strike in order to end exploitation, and to raise awareness of the Party's coalition building.
81. Achieve secession of the Third Sector economy from the establishment economy and the Private-Public Partnership.

JUSTICE

82. Oppose tort reform that inhibits the rights of juries to award compensation to victims as they see fit.
83. Make large-scale class-action lawsuits possible in order to compensate citizens for takings by government and its beneficiaries.
84. Abolish mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for non-violent crimes.
85. Liberalize drug laws.
86. Remove obstacles to non-violent felons voting, traveling, finding employment, and purchasing and qualifying for health insurance.
87. Fight tyranny, coercion, and the disproportionate and unaccountable use of force.
88. Increase public transparency into police activities.
89. Keep weapons of war (such as tanks and drones) off American streets and out of American skies.
90. Restore 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th Amendment liberties, through augmenting Miranda Rights.
91. Ensuring that juries and the accused are fully informed of their rights (such as refraining from entering a plea, and jury nullification), and prohibit the suppression of the spreading of such information.
92. Increase public transparency of the regulation of the legal professions.
93. Ending the self-management of the legal professions by bar associations and attorneys' guilds.
94. Ensure that all public officials provide evidence of their identity, oaths of office, and anti-corruption oaths, immediately upon citizen request.
95. Ensure that judges enter evidence of their anti-corruption oaths in court.
96. Ensure that judges and prosecutors submit their oaths of office in court.
97. Ensure that, in court cases, the judge, prosecutor, and witness do not all represent the State.
98. Promote the idea that indictment on information by the police may not be sufficient for a finding of guilt, especially if there is no Verified Criminal Complaint (V.C.C.) by a real person of interest, who is not the prosecutor, nor whom in any way represents the State.
99. Acquit all persons charged with violating statutes and ordinances, in whose violation no real criminal damage to personal property exist.
100. Prevent the unfounded dismissal of prospective jurors by attorneys in the voir dire (jury selection) process.
101. Replace multi-colored police, ambulance, and fire engine lights, in all jurisdictions and locations, with single-colored lights, in order to avoid triggering epileptic seizures.

Originally Written in August 2014 under the title

"Party for Mutualism and Cooperation: 100-Point U.S. Parliament Platform"

Originally Published on August 7th, 2014

Edited and Expanded in late May 2017 and March 5th, 2019

Bastiat's Chrematistic Reductio

Claude Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

 

Nineteenth-century French economist C. Frederic Bastiat observes that foreign producers can out-compete local producers anywhere that commercial infrastructure improves the integration of markets. He follows this idea to its logical conclusion, which is that local producers would come to support governments which favor their own competition, and / or penalizes the competition of foreign producers.

Furthermore, society would be best off for local and domestic producers if everything which increased market integration were poorly-funded, underdeveloped, and of poor quality. Basically, labor is most productive when it is most difficult.

A recent study in the British magazine The Economist revealed that lower degrees of market integration have been found to increase consumers' toleration of high prices.

Reaching out to poor, overpopulated countries with religion – such as by utilizing Catholic missionaries to teach people to identify with Jesus's suffering by learning to endure their pain – and with trade – encouraging interest in dangerous, valueless American products and beliefs - have, thus far, served to accomplish little else than create the conditions which are most conducive to causing local economic stagnation; international wage-slavery; fixed prices and standards of living which are forever on the rise; and large, under-educated, under-skilled, pro-life third-world populaces unaware that their efforts to enrich their families by increasing their sizes poses the threat of exacerbating impending famines which could potentially wipe out one or even two billion people within the space of several years.

If Bastiat's assumptions are true, then we may do away with the notion that all the poverty and the ills of the world are to be blamed solely on capitalism, an idea which is supported by various socialist media. Contrarily, Bastiat's findings point the finger at an axiomatic culprit, which is collusion between governments and producers to pass reforms which unfairly favor either form of producer – i.e., local or non-local – over the other.

When governments favor domestic local and nationwide businesses at the expense of international and foreign businesses while improving commercial infrastructure, market integration becomes concentrated and healthy only at home and in the major industrial centers, trade stays too low to keep up with public demand for economic choice and product diversity, the market is flooded with cheap, homogenous domestic goods, local supply of labor cannot be satisfied, and immigration and immigrant labor run rampant.

When governments favor international and foreign businesses at the expense of domestic local and nationwide businesses while improving commercial infrastructure, the degree of market integration gradually decreases in the major industrial centers and in the country in general, the market is flooded with foreign imports, the degree of product diversity is overwhelming and detrimental to the health of the domestic economy, local supply of labor is too great, and unemployment, underemployment, emigration, emigrant labor, and outsourcing run rampant.

When governments improve commercial infrastructure at the expense of alleviating the financial stresses of domestic and local businesses as well as of international and foreign businesses, trade and market integration stay higher than necessary to satisfy demand, both local and non-local (as well as both domestic and foreign) entrepreneurialism and innovation stay stagnant and low, and prices stay artificially low everywhere.

When governments alleviate the financial stresses of domestic and local businesses as well as international and foreign businesses at the expense of improving commercial infrastructure, domestic and foreign demand for one another's goods stays much higher than the quality of the infrastructure can satisfy; emigration, immigration, outsourcing, and unemployment run rampant; and prices stay artificially high everywhere.

But when governments improve commercial infrastructure while balancing the needs of local and non-local - as well as domestic and foreign - businesses, artificially high demand is alleviated everywhere thanks to improved market integration, the balance of trade evens out, neither excessive immigration nor emigration – nor outsourcing nor unemployment – remain problematic, and prices tend to go down as far as the newly-improved commercial infrastructure will reach.

    I believe that if Bastiat's assumptions are true, then if governments are not willing to allocate funds to equally and fairly financially encourage and reward both nationwide domestic and local business growth and international and foreign business growth as well as pass measures that increase market integration and improvement in commercial infrastructure, then they should encourage neither of these things.

Originally Written and Published on October 24th, 2010

Edited on January 21st, 2019

For more entries on commerce, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/06/obamacare-and-interstate-commerce.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/10/map-of-contiguous-united-states-in.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/notes-on-obamacares-unconstitutionality.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/economic-policy-for-2012-us-house.html

For more entries on free trade, fair trade, the balance of trade, and protectionism, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/03/911-heres-what-i-think-happened.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/08/population-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/10/comparative-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/panarchist-welfare-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/new-institutional-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/10/map-of-contiguous-united-states-in.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/labor-protectionism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/economic-policy-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/foreign-trade-agreements.html