John R. Talbott, author of "The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street"

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Sun, 05/17/2009 - 5:00pm

Hosts Cecil Prescod and Celeste Carey speak with John R. Talbott, former investment banker for Goldman Sachs and Visiting Scholar at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. His new book is "The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street." Talbott will talk about the lies and the truth of what it will take to rebuild our economy.

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How do we shift power (money) from government and its hand maiden the the big corporation to the owners of the national credit, the citizems?

Here are two one pagers with some ideas.

CITIZEN CAPITAL OWNERSHIP PLAN

Foundations:

The nation’s credit is created and owned by it’s citizens. Both monetary and non-monetary factors contribute to the formation of credit. Taxable earnings are one component. All the non-compensated contributions to community made by individual citizens are another component. Because all citizens contribute, whether employed for pay or not, all share ownership in the nation’s credit. Each citizen has a right to control a portion of the credit he or she has created.

Direct non-interest bearing investment in equities of productive companies using no-interest, Federal Reserve backed loans to individual citizens through a Citizen Capital Ownership Plan, is a non-inflationary, just and equitable application of the nation’s (citizen’s) credit. Large amounts of equity funding are thus made available for investment in the productive national economy.

Proposition:

It is just and equitable that all citizens have access to the nation’s credit which they have created. Each citizen can create a capital account and make a non-recourse loan for investment in a broad portfolio of productive capital equities. Each Citizen’s capital account is the citizen’s property characterized by divisibility, transferability and heritability. Citizen capital loans carry no interest and are discounted by their bank to the Federal Reserve at 0% interest. Dividends and capital gains on stocks held in citizen capital accounts are not taxed. There is no inheritance tax.

Consequences:

- Individual wealth is created for all citizens.

- Equity capital is provided for fueling the growth of the economy.

- Power is de-centralized and individual authority increased.

- Each citizen owns a “piece of the action” further enhancing the national community.

- Everyone has “skin in the game.”

CITIZEN CAPITAL OWNERSHIP

In the mid 1800s, the productive capital of the economy was largely made up of land. The Homestead Acts recognized the justice and equity of this capital being made available to the husbanding of and ownership by individual citizens. The Acts were the result of the recognition of the necessity of widely dispersed individual ownership as a bulwark against the rapid socialization that was sweeping the world. The Homestead Acts resulted in true individual capital that could be defined by its characteristics of being divisible, transferable and heritable. Systems that are based on the principle of undivided ownership interests “by the people” require central control of the allocation of credit and thus the distribution of capital. They are socialist.

We must seek new “Homestead Acts” to secure individual ownership of productive capital if we are to save the American experiment in the rule of law. The Citizens Capital Ownership Plan is one.

The wealth of nations depends on the credit of nations. The credit of a nation rests on the combined strength of all of its citizens and their institutions. National credit is “bottom up.” All citizens contribute to the creation of the national credit through their participation in the social contract and personal contributions, whether financial or, perhaps more importantly, non-financial efforts such as raising children and public service.

Fifty years ago, attorney and economist Louis Kelso and philosopher Mortimer Adler hammered out a just and equitable concept for providing capital to the equity markets by availing the individual citizen of a part of his or her share of the national credit to back the purchase of a diverse portfolio of equities. This portfolio would be individually owned, that is, in a form that is divisible, transferable and heritable. This is basis of the Citizens Capital Ownership Plan.

How this can be accomplished is presented in “The New Capitalists” by Kelso and Adler.

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