Path to Prosperity for US All

Our current crisis has highlighted sundry problems we now confront. However, these problems arise from looming defects in our institutions which cannot be addressed with band-aid solutions. We face:

1. increasingly disparate and already malignant distributions of income, wealth, and power incompatible with a democratic or republican form of government.
2. pervasive financial fragility led to the recent financial collapse, and continues to fester posing a serious danger of further financial troubles.
3. a mortgage-housing bubble and the subsequent collapse in that bubble suggests that though credit and other financial powers have been highly centralized in Wall Street plutocrats, these institutions instead require tight legislative stewardship to avoid the massive and now legalized fraud permeating these financial institutions.
4. our recent mortgage crisis-housing bubble led to a pandemic of home foreclosures since 2008, depriving millions of the homes they worked hard to acquire and lost because of forces beyond their control.
5. dangers still of further mortgage crises because  Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae now hold an enormous portfolio of mortgage notes for underwater homes with the US taxpayer on the hook for these toxic mortgage backed assets.
6. rentier attacks on government have intensified creating a public treasury crisis for federal, state, county, and local governments. The public treasury crisis is leading to declining public revenues for federal government, state governments and local governments and a decline in essential services as well.
7. a looming pension crisis due to insufficient comprehension of the baby boomer generation’s impact on financial markets. During the 1980s, the Social Security Administration recognized the impact of this phenomenon on Social Security revenues and established a trust fund to accumulate the savings of the baby boomers. However, in private retirement accounts, nothing was done. So rentiers on Wall Street have largely absconded with the retirement savings of the baby boomer generation, logging impressive capital gains and stellar rates of return based on their draining of these funds only available due to the baby boomer savings. It would be as if the Social Security Administration simply took the social security trust fund spent all the money and congratulated themselves on the high rate of return for Social Security contributions. Such draining of those funds from private retirement accounts means the funds are simply gone. They do not indicate such stellar rates of return will be available when the baby boomer generation needs those funds. Quite the contrary we can expect more financial collapse as the baby boomer generation seeks to redeem the capital gains on their long term retirement investments without sufficient new savings to purchase those securities in order to support their retirement profit-taking.
8. financial fragmentation has permeated our economy so that now our financial system and our monetary system conceal from us the vital market signals indispensable for informed decision-making, when instead these institutions should facilitate clear market signals and crucial price and cost information. Many talk about relying more on Wall Street as a mechanism to take personal responsibility. However, personal responsibility and Wall Street have little, if anything, in common.
9. growing governmental fragmentation also erodes republican forms of governance guaranteed by our Constitution and contributes to plutocratic control of government and thus further loss of our republican forms of governance. While decentralized decision-making works best and brings political deliberations closer to the personal level, out-of-control local fiefdoms tend to deny us our individual, human, and civil rights.
10. A growing culture of contempt for the republican forms of governance and our Constitution among public officers, judges, and legislators and leaders in enterprise. Few would insist that profit making should extend to emptying the collection plate at Sunday service, yet government is seen as perfectly acceptable for plunder even in polite society.
11. a damaged public trust and eroding confidence in government fostered by the very rentiers who have already enjoyed the spoils from their plunder of government and continue their demoralization of public trust to further that plunder and recent US Supreme Court decisions have expanded abusive governmental powers to charter organizations with more free speech rights than actual persons.
12. an improperly placed wall of separation between private enterprise powers and public governmental power: making any attempts to rein in corruption and graft futile. The wall should not be between commercial services and non-commercial services, but between necessarily monopoly services and non-monopoly competitive services that we can potentially provide for ourselves – regardless of whether those services are financed by commercial sale revenues or other more tax-like and rent-like mechanisms.