"I understand, for instance, how to read a balance sheet." I suggest that Mi$$ Rmoney will win

[jtuck004]

15. People who own assets, who can create, needn't worry so much about the Mi$$ Rmoney's of the world,

predatory assholes who own assets and use labor as a commodity. The "employee" will always be beholden to them and whatever charity they can muster above their own avarice.

For about 40 years or so a significant number of people had the idea that if you owned assets and employed people you had a responsibility to them and the community. (i.e. Henry Ford who paid his workers more, despite the protestations of others, because he thought they should be able to afford the cars they made).

That time is gone. Today we are owned by people who have used capital to buy and extract the wealth that our labor creates to line their own pockets, buying politicians as needed. Millions of people are heading into retirement thinking that the money in the stock market is what provides their retirement, just like the people in Obama's ads who now have nothing. It's like a kid who thinks milk comes from the store. The money they were going to get came from the production it provided the capital for. We have gotten rid of that production, along with the wealth it created, yet people STILL think their checks will be in the mail, despite the fact that they will be burning their principle years b4 they expected to. If they even get that.

Maybe it's time to stop schooling millions of kids and adults in how to grovel to others for a job, and instead how to create your own.

Ask the 25 million people who want work today. The single fastest growing job for the foreseeable future is home health aide. Maybe they would be better off with a government program which would get them work on a cooperative farm, or in a coop manufacturing environment, or just about anything where they won't have to work for a year and a half for barely above minimum wage only to be fired when the owner's half-cousin has a couple kids who need a job.

If workers buy into their own assets, operate their own business, they are more involved, more literate about their worth, and generally more active citizens. They may not make as much, they may make more.

If 850 people had owned a privately held steel company they may have rebuffed Mi$$ Rmoney, and found another path that would have preserved their jobs and retirement. Instead they, and thousands of others, were raided by someone who could sell other people junk bonds, buy ownership from just a few, then suck the company dry via credit instruments to take the wealth that the employees created.

Employees could do this just as easily as the junk bond folks, and stand a much higher chance of not only insuring their future but with a far higher creation of spin-off companies than any coffee bar ever thought of. And they probably wouldn't load the company up with the debt that provides the fees for the raiders and often becomes the instrument of death for leveraged buy outs.

Read the history of Springfield Manufacturing. That's one way.

Here's another - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Organizing principles - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale_Principles

Maybe the United Steelworkers and Mondragon are on the leading edge of helping their members own their own future. Doesn't do much good to picket in front of empty factories after KKR or Blackstone has extracted everything you've ever worked for.

Here are people who are thinking about these and other things - http://community-wealth.org/