EMPOWERMENT: Citizen or Pension Fund Capitalism?

[Shann Turnbull <sturnbull@mba1963.hbs.edu>]

Dear colleagues

As the Vice President of the local Fabian Society in the State of NSW in
Australia I organised a couple of debates among members of our former
socialist labor party as to what type of capitalism they wanted to
create!

The prime attraction was the involvement of a high profile member of
parliament, Mark Latham who is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer and Shadow
Minister for Economic Ownership.  The last part of his title is of a
particular interest as I have not heard of such a position any where else
in the World.

Beside Mark Latham and myself we had a third member representing the
union based pension or what we call Superannuation Funds.  In
Melbourne this was Garry Weaven, the Executive Chairman of a group that
has over four billion $A under management.

The arguments of each of the three speakers are now linked to the
Australian Fabian Society web page at
http://www.fabian.org.au/newp.html
that is managed by Race Mathews who is the driving force behind the Society as its very long term Secretary.

The individual link for Mark Latham's talk on "Ownership for all" is http://www.fabian.org.au/NEW%20PAPERS/Super2002/Ownerlatham.html

The individual link for Garry Weaven's talk on "Broadening Ownership" is http://www.fabian.org.au/NEW%20PAPERS/Super2002/BroadWeaven.html

The link to my contribution presenting "The case for Citizen Capitalism" is http://www.fabian.org.au/NEW%20PAPERS/Super2002/Citizensuper.html

My contribution explains why I consider pension funds and ESOPs as producing second class capitalists and that they can be counter productive in enriching democracy.

The Fabian site also contains my essay on "Reforming Covert Capitalism" at http://www.fabian.org.au/NEW%20PAPERS/2002/TurnbullS.html

My essay on "The Seven Deadly Sins of Capitalism" is at   http://workers.labor.net.au/147/c_historicalfeature_sins.html

Regards

Shann

Shann Turnbull  Ph.D.

P.O. Box 266 Woollahra, Sydney, Australia, 1350

Ph: +612 9328 7466 office; +612 9327 8487 home; Fax: +612 9327 1497;

Life long E-mail: sturnbull@mba1963.hbs.edu  Alternate:sturnbull@optusnet.com.au

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~sturnbull/index.html

Papers at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=26239

with other papers & book at http://cog.kent.edu/library.html