SRF Heavy Industries

The goals:

And here’s how:

1) Reinstate the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1933 as enacted June 16 of 1933, removing the damage done by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. Investment banks and commercial banks should be separate so that Wall Street can’t gamble with our checking and savings accounts. Bank holding companies should also be banned, since that’s just another way to use what should be stable funds to cover bets and gambling and speculation.

2) Investment insurance and credit default swaps and other ways to hedge against risk should be limited to parties who are actually involved in the investment and cap payoffs to the amount being risked. YOU should not be allowed to bet $10,000 to be paid back $1,000,000 if I default on my $150,000 mortgage — because then you would be sorely tempted to find some way to make me default. I can insure my mortgage, or the bank can, but it’s really nobody else’s business — and the insurance payoff should not be so high as to be more attractive than finishing paying off the debt, for the same reasons.

3) Speculation for the purposes of investment isn’t a bad thing across the board, but it should be tremendously curtailed in commodities and currency markets. Don’t buy grain futures if you’re not prepared to take delivery of a warehouse load of grain to resell. Don’t buy a country’s sovereign currency unless you plan to do business in those amounts with the country in question. Cornering the market in food you can’t eat and money you can’t spend literally starves people.

4) Break up the monopolies. If your industry can support twenty competitors and there are four of you, then you either have to submit to pricing and service oversight or split up. No more super-mergers of banks, of airlines, of telephone carriers, of media companies, etc., without abandoning market freedoms.

5) If a corporation makes money from US labor, resides on US land, uses US agricultural resources, manufactures products or improves materials to be later used in production in the US, provides services to US residents using US infrastructures of road and pipes and wires and satellites, excretes wastes into US environmental resources of land or air and water, then it should pay taxes to the US people for the use, upkeep, and repair of the commonwealth and its valuable infrastructure. NO EXCEPTIONS. Practices allowing shuffling of assets overseas to prevent paying owed taxes should be banned, with fines for infractions set at at least double the amount originally owed.

6) Donations to a political party or political campaign — ANY political campaign, local, state or federal — should be capped at $1000 per ACTUAL HUMAN BEING OF VOTING AGE and -$0- for any group, club, or incorporated entity. Any corporation or organization that distributes funds to individuals for the purposes of being further donated on its behalf is to be guilty of money laundering. Organizations or PACs that collect these funds should be registered and tightly monitored.

7) …and it should be exactly the same for lobbying. If you accept money to produce material designed to sway public opinion on a matter of policy or potential policy, or, more explicitly, the opinion of a legislator, your income should be capped at $1000 per actual human being of voting age that is donating, with -$0- coming from corporations, businesses, organizations, or clubs.

8) End conflict of interest. If you have income coming from a company or a sector of industry, you should not be allowed to legislate or judge or enforce policy that affects that company or sector — concurrently or within five years of having served in an office that affects that company or industry.

9) If having an ethical business and financial sector makes us uncompetitive with businesses and markets abroad, then create tariffs on imported goods and services to be levied against companies and markets abroad that behave in ways we know are unethical. And stop loaning countries money if they’re going to be competing with us unfairly and undermining our standards — or embargo them altogether.

10) Nationalize or re-nationalize government infrastructure industries that have no business making a profit. The prison industry. Mercenary organizations. Police protection and law enforcement. The Federal Reserve Bank. And yes, this should include healthcare. If the industry earns money at the expense of producing, spreading, and extending human misery, then there should be no profit-minded motivation to try to grow the industry. Additionally, at no point should government powers be delegated to private business.

An addendum to #10 there, in case it’s not obvious. Causing misery is the government’s job. And we should limit it by funding it with tax money, because everyone wants to pay less taxes or spend what we collect on cooler stuff. If someone else does it for profit, then they’ll find a way to justify the results so they can make more money. It’s that simple.

Good enough for a first pass, I think.

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