Shared prosperity is the authentic progressive meme opposing the economically nonsensical John-Boehner-Barack-Obama-Bernie-Sanders one, “shared sacrifice.” ‘Shared prosperity’ derives from Keynes, who saw no good reason economies should operate at less than capacity, when “pump priming” is available and not fully employed* (common sense pump priming: at least hand it out to those who need it and will spend it). So I hope all real progressives can agree that shared prosperity is our meme.

Voters can and should demand more, of course. Here’s a distilled down anti-neoliberal program that satisfies voters’ righteous anger (which will be more widespread and powerful as times get worse, which they will) and seems at least marginally realistic even in these overwhelmingly borg-ish, ‘there is no alternative’ times:

1. Shared prosperity: Keynesian stimulate the economy back to full employment.

2. Take back the money we gave the big banks, sitting uselessly in their vaults. Impose a tax that gets the job done.

3. Break up the ‘too big to fail’ banks and restore the banking laws to how they were pre-1979.

4. A one-time wealth tax, taking half of individual wealth exceeding a million bucks or family wealth exceeding two million. This is to partly correct, for the rest of us, 30 years of government-sponsored wealth re-distribution the wrong way.

5. Build a green infrastructure. Use much of the revenue from ‘2’ and ‘4’ and Keynesian deficit spending to re-build the infrastructure and create green transportation systems and housing convenient to those systems. (Of the eight proposals, this is the one I’m least in love with strategically; it may be too vulnerable in the short-run real political world.)

6. End legalized bribery. Make campaign contributions over $250 illegal; greater than that the law infers bribery. So be it if this requires a constitutional amendment. Of course a constitutional amendment is very difficult to achieve; any ideas? This one is essential.

7. Democratize the mass media. The FCC through a fairness doctrine on steroids should force the public airwaves – radio and TV are ours – to reflect in their news and opinion programs the rough range of opinion indicated by U.S. elections.

8. Make membership in a democratic union a fundamental right, like the right to vote.

9. Cut defense and closely related funding at least 50%, so that the U.S. ends its imperialism and globo-cop acts. This connects with most Americans’ natural ‘mind our own business’ instinct that the imperialist mainstream calls ‘isolationism’. (#9 is the UPDATE.)

None of the above is original, and none are radical with the possible exception of ‘7’ and its implications (“Aren’t you really saying ‘free press’ has failed and that you want to replace that basic meme with ‘democratic press’?” Yes. And I admit I haven’t fully explained my thinking here.) Also, none are fully fleshed out, this being a blog post nothing more. But, anyway, any question? What do you think?

*Admittedly, there is a familiar, foolish, and ineffective ‘quasi-pump-priming’, where the government gives trillions to the banks which they sit on. That obviously doesn’t work, isn’t pump priming in my dictionary, and wouldn’t have been in Keynes’s if anyone back in the 1930s had been brazen, stupid, and ‘banker tool’ enough to suggest it. (This can be inferred from the problem that Keynes thought ‘pump priming’ was the solution for: an economic downturn exacerbated when a fearful public decides to stuff its money in mattresses.) But, we live in different, brazenly stupider times. (Hip tats to donkeytale and mcmurphy for inspiring the preceding.)

P.S. – Inspired by this great post by jeffroby, and by my previous failure to propose a going forward 2012, 2014, 2016 program. Specifically, I wrote the following at jeffroby’s post yesterday:

That far-sighted vision is exactly what is needed. A 2012, 2014, 2016 campaign is realistic, and we need realism from the anti-neoliberal movement. The mainstream media is overwhelmingly negative, the money is all on the other side, the unions are so small and what’s left of them are bought off or stupid, and so on. All we have is being right. We need a clear, simple but powerful and in part angry message. I suggest something like this:

End Wall Street rule, end legalized bribery of politicians, take our money back from the banks and strengthen Social Security and the rest of the safety net, and stimulate the economy back to prosperity — do what it takes — with smart Keynesian deficit spending.

That’s an attractive and reasonably simple message for a beat-up, alienated, austerity-ized populace, but even so it won’t be enough in 2012. Ending neoliberalism, returning to Keynesianism, and enacting real popular rule (by ending legalized bribery of politicians) will take time. And, the other thing is, that the austerity is still not bad enough in the U.S. Sadly, though, it will get worse.

[UPDATE: I apologize, this is apparently/really the first draft of a more coherent post. All the comments at pffugeecamp and myfdl were helpful, and helped me realize that I have more work to do explaining what I really mean. The real focus of the material below, it seems, is 'What a united front could unite around (besides economic stimulus)', but I wasn't at all clear on that till after the comments.]

The economy is doing badly and things will get worse, the political anger will increase, a do-nothing Obama will lose in 2012, a far right Republican will win, the economy will do even worse, and then, in 2014, a real leftist alternative will have a chance to take command of the floundering mess.

Real leftists and progressives look at the above and wish it weren’t so, but then we move on, I think, to a couple of notions:

1. The real leftist alternative must win in 2014 and/or 2016.

That’s the main prize.

2. That ‘leftist alternative’ must be real.

“2” is the obvious subsidiary ‘must’.

No need to remind how hard either or both of the above will be. (Bowing a little to realism, I’m excluding 2012 from leftist goals, but certainly how loud real leftist noise is during the 2012 presidential campaign will be critical to the chances of leftist success in 2014/2016.)

But let’s get to the meat of the post: for me, “2” is not especially problematic, because for me “real left” fundamentally means “real social democratic.” Which doesn’t mean “direct democratic,” “anarchistic,” or “socialist,” to name a few. I don’t disagree with the goals those three phrases encapsulate, but I don’t think they’re a necessary part of an immediately social democratic political system that might then choose, for example, to become a society organized under the principles of cooperative anarchism. It’s a two-part process. Government ownership of most businesses, for another example, is a choice that a social democratic society would have the option of making. I.e., like cooperative anarchism, socialism might be one thing a social democratic society would do with its newfound authentic power. It is both getting ahead of ourselves and anti-democratic, though, to define now, in 2011-2012, how a social democratic society should govern or organize economic life.

With one exception: a social democratic society _must_ create a wall between private capital, private money, and the political system, _and_ between private money and the mass media. Real social democracy doesn’t exist without democratically ‘owned’ mass communication of most political news, discussion and debate. (This doesn’t mean a government-owned mass media; my sense is that the five or six largest political parties in a multi-party political system would and should semi-privately (democratically supervised by their memberships) manage most (not all) of the mass media.) There’s no getting around it: to make it real we have to wrest most of the mass media, at least most of it where political conversation takes place, from private hands.

Think about how hard just democratic ownership of a meaningful chunk of the mass media will be to get across to the majority of Americans, even though it’s an essential part of the real social democratic idea. But, happily, that’s it as far as I’m concerned with ‘radical’ (from the perspective of the majority of hard-pressed Americans) ideas.

If we’re in this to win it, ideas that strike most Americans as radical or ‘crazy’ should be kept to a minimum. So, except in the case of the mass media, it’s extraordinarily counterproductive persuasively (and nonsensical in other ways that I’ve explained) to go into the details of what a representative social democratic government would do with the private ownership of the economic system. (As for the “should do’s,” though, let’s have at it.)

Positively, does anyone besides me see the strategic beauty, the persuasive beauty, of _not_ having to go into the foibles of ‘capitalism’ while we persuade the majority of Americans to turn to a real leftist alternative? Note that even Maoist, Stalinist and Leninist political systems have (sometimes reluctantly) come to appreciate at least small-scale capitalism. Note also that it is not even particularly clear where capitalism ends and worker-controlled or semi-governmental ‘non-capitalism’ begins. Yeah, I get how appealing ‘capitalism is bad’ feels among like-minded folks. What I don’t get is how that transfers to a message to the real masses in the immediate future (and the sh!t _is_ hitting the fan in that immediate future). But most importantly, as I’ve said above, it is anti-democratic to prescribe basic economic policy ‘your’ social democracy will make. It won’t be yours, it will be the people’s, if it’s real.

But this is the opposite of excluding anti-capitalism from a movement for real social democracy. All sorts of proposals and concepts, from anti-imperialism to ‘green-ism’ to Trotskyism to anarchism, even libertarianism, can be and must be embraced (if we’re to be successful) under the umbrella of ‘what to do after we the people take power’. It’s essential to the excitement and attractiveness of committing to social democracy now, and of the popular conversation and learning leading up to social democracy. So, as for the “should do’s,” let’s have at it and have fun while doing so.

Also persuasively/strategically, I hear “social democracy” echoes all the time in the everyday talk of most Americans. ‘Social democracy talk’ is energized directly from ‘taking back the country’ talk, whether we are to ‘take it back’ from the rich, the bankers and the big corporations, or from ‘special interest’ groups and corrupt politicians. (Okay, you might want to point out that “we the people” have never had power to take back, but you don’t have to.) On the other hand, I never hear “if only the government owned everything” talk, or even very much “if only we didn’t have any government” talk. But that doesn’t mean those are not worthy goals we can and should discuss…

I don’t know how this vision of how to proceed collides or doesn’t with the actual thinking of real leftist and progressive groups planning for what to do with the deepening political and economic crisis in the U.S. Any feedback on that, which is worthy of a future diary, will be appreciated.

(Thanks to jeffroby for inspiring this explication of my point of view with his always ‘get to what matters’ posts.)