By Colin Whitmill

Unless one spends all one's time browsing on the internet's world wide web,
there are gems of truth that can only be revealed by someone else drawing
attention to them. The Saving Communites web site www.savingcommunities.org
had the following comments in an article about core issues.

Privilege

Behind all issues lies the problem of privilege - legal mechanisms that give some people artificial advantages over others, enabling them to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Political privileges give leverage in the political system, ultimately conferring a political monopoly over others. Economic privileges are similarly leveraged over time into economic monopoly.

Advanced societies cannot function without money. When money is loaned into circulation, its lenders and re-lenders can charge interest on values that they did not create. It is

impossible to pay back debt-money with debt-money, because the debt (including interest) exceeds the amount of money issued. As a result, society's producers are increasingly dependent on money lenders. The problem is not private lending of earned money, but the lending of new money into circulation.

The core privilege enjoyed by privately owned public utilities is the right of way - the exclusive right to deliver water, sewer, gas, electricity, telephone, internet and cable televisison services along public streets and other rights of way.

Privately owned turnpikes and railroad tracks are also right of way monopolies.

These distribution systems should be publicly owned at the most local level of government

possible. In some cases, the government should own and run the entire system. In others, private vendors should bid to provide services to the government. or the rights of way should be open on equal terms. We can see this with the public highways and public airways, where traffic safety is enforced by the government, but the vehicles using these highways and airways are mostly private.

It is not enough to point to core issues and declare them important. We accept that most people are interested in symptomatic issues.

Our task is to show how these core issues underlie the symptomatic issues, and how working together on core issues can be more effective for everyone involved than working separately on symptoms.

– from The Guardian Political Review, Issue 52, 2007

www.democrats.org.nz