A New Declaration of Independence America
The weight of the 1 Percent
has become intolerable. How can we take our country back? Here's a fresh draft.
Here’s where we are in the
course of human events right now: 14 million Americans are jobless and millions
more are underemployed. Those still working have seen wages fall after 30 years
of stagnation. The 1 Percent of top wage earners could buy and sell the rest of
us without so much as a low balance warning on their checking account apps. The
tenth-of-1 Percent earns millions more every year in barely taxed capital gains
and derivatives while everyone else struggles to pay down trillions of dollars
of debt. Massive, growing income inequality is now belatedly acknowledged by
political and media elites, but many of them seem befuddled as to its cause and
importance.
It is our belief that many
of the problems facing Americans today can be directly connected to the
unchecked power and complete unaccountability of the 1 Percent, a group that
benefits from every unequal boom of the modern era and escapes each disastrous
bust unscathed. The 1 Percent is insulated from the negative effects of its
disastrous policies by its paid representatives in government. The elite 1
Percent ensures the slavish loyalty of its political handmaidens by flooding
their campaign coffers with money squeezed from the 99 Percent as deposits,
fees and interest.
What unites the outraged 99
Percent is that we have all “played by the rules,” only to learn belatedly that
the game was rigged. Having been promised modest rewards for working within the
system, by taking on debt or voting the party line, we find ourselves, bluntly,
shit out of luck. Let the facts be submitted to a candid world:
For the young, higher
education was said to be a ticket to class mobility, or at least a secure
career. Instead, middle-class students have taken on billions of dollars of
inescapable debt during a prolonged jobs crisis. Lower-income students are
blatantly ripped off by usurious scam artists working for educationally dubious
for-profit schools. Even those seeking to join the professional class, through
medical school or law school, find themselves with mountains of debt and
dwindling job prospects. The rapidly rising cost of higher education pushes
bright students into lucrative but socially destructive fields, like finance.
Prestigious universities are still largely the finishing schools of the elite,
with the most common and pernicious form of affirmative action being that given
to the children of the 1 Percent most likely to write schools the biggest
checks.
For progressives, years of
working within the political system to elect Democrats led to a congressional
majority that was still more responsive to major corporate donors and powerful
industry lobbies than to grass-roots liberal activists — or even organized
labor, once the party’s most powerful and respected ally. The crimes of the
Bush administration remain uninvestigated, the national security state remains
unchecked in scope and size, the military-industrial complex ensures that
Dwight Eisenhower’s prescient speech remains relevant 60 years later, and the
useless tactics of triangulation and one-way bipartisanship remain inexplicably
popular among the Democratic Party establishment.
For millions of middle-class
and striving blue-collar American families, the promise of homeownership as the
world’s safest investment became another money-making bubble for Wall Street
that remains Main
Street
The mere specter of limited
relief for underwater homeowners inspired 1 Percenter rage so all-consuming
that they bankrolled a “populist” movement to channel it. Minority homeowners
defrauded by unscrupulous lenders are blamed for an international recession
sparked by the venal and simply foolish behavior of megabanks. The 1 Percent
aims to exploit a fiscal crisis caused by its own reckless behavior by wiping
out pensions earned (and paid into) by public employees and tearing up fairly
negotiated union contracts. Meanwhile, they use their media outlets, political
foundations and lobbying shops to foment resentment of unionized workers whose
crime is benefiting from a system that corporations and conservatives worked to
completely dismantle for private employees a generation ago.
The threat that our modest
social welfare system for the elderly will be sacrificed to the gods of
austerity has already led significant numbers of young people to assume that
there will be no Social Security in place by the time they reach what used to
be referred to as their retirement years. And that belief is tacitly encouraged
by the “moderate” members of the austerity club, who seek to maintain a system
of low taxation of the 1 Percent in the face of declining income for the 99
Percent by gradually phasing out the services government provides for the
majority. The austerity sages are considered the most serious and wise in all
of the nation by our corporate press, which defines “the center” of every
national political debate as “whatever the elites want.”
The weight of the 1 Percent
upon us has become unbearable and intolerable. We at Salon therefore
respectfully submit our own Demands.
In Liberty Plaza in Lower
Manhattan, in Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, and at other parks and public
squares across the nation (and the world), Occupiers are daily creating the
more perfect democracy they’d like to see. As part of that process, groups and
individuals and intellectuals and pundits have put forth proposed “demands,” to
address the myriad problems laid out above. From Occupy Wall Street’s
principles of solidarity to the General Assembly’s proposed New New Deal to Robert Reich’s list of
essential progressive
reforms to the Working Group of the 99 Percent’s Petition of Grievences , we’ve read the proposals
and humbly offer our own, for ways to begin to make the richest nation on the
planet fair for those of us who can’t afford a congressman.
Our list is meant to be the
beginning of a conversation, not a final product.
1. Debt relief
Total household debt in America
We demand immediate relief for the 99 Percent, particularly the
poor and young students and college graduates. The Debt Jubilee is an ancient
idea, and an attractive one in an era of growing economic feudalism, as the
poor increasingly devote all their labor to repaying the rich. It is not in the
national interest to force the impoverished to become wage slaves to pay off
insurmountable debts owned to payday lenders and hugely profitable bankers.
Every other rich nation on earth heavily subsidizes higher
education. We force mere kids to mortgage their futures, then ensure that the
debt follows them the rest of their lives, regardless of their living
circumstances. Student loan debt hurts not just the graduate but everyone else
in society, too: The cost of healthcare would surely decrease, and the
availability of primary care for disadvantaged populations increase, if new
doctors were not regularly graduating school $200,000 in the red .
And real and widespread relief for homeowners in crisis is urgent.
Even millions of homeowners who “did everything right” find themselves
underwater, or illegally foreclosed upon by banks running roughshod over the
rights of homeowners by robo-signing fraudulent foreclosure documents by the
thousands. Banks servicing mortgages are (rightfully) more worried about
getting sued by the owners of securities made up of Americans’ debt than they
are about getting in any sort of trouble for bullying or illegally seizing the
homes of regular people. Everyone should get a shot at a renegotiation of their
mortgage, at fair rates, and with support from the government.
2. A substantial jobs program
Most American cities are filled with beautiful old buildings and
monuments and parks dating back to the recovery programs of the New Deal, as
well as increasingly decrepit bridges and roads and structures that have been
neglected by the last couple of decades of shrinking infrastructure investment.
A real, direct jobs program, done in the WPA style, would rebuild our cities
and towns in addition to putting thousands of people back to work.
3. A healthcare public option
Medicare is probably the single most popular government program in
the country, which is no surprise, because government-subsidized healthcare
tends to be the most popular government program in every nation that has
implemented it.
If a true single-payer system would be too disruptive, we can put
the building blocks in place by giving people a public option. Expanding the
pool of Medicare recipients to include healthy younger people paying into it
would instantly improve the program’s fiscal outlook. Nationalizing the
underfunded Medicaid system would instantly reduce the deplorable inequity of
our healthcare system, too. If this new Medicare could negotiate drug prices —
like the Veterans Administration, our wonderful, totally socialized healthcare
program for one group of Americans — it would save even more. (Hey, why not
combine the proposal with debt relief for young doctors?)
Taking the “unsophisticated” broad view, it seems painfully
obvious that Wall Street deregulation undid the stabilizing effects of
1930s-era Wall Street regulation. We’re on a boom-and-bust cycle, and a
shrinking number of growing megabanks now regularly threaten the entire world
economy. It’s hard to imagine that we wouldn’t be better off with a worldwide network
of small, independent credit unions than massive financial institutions daily
innovating new and more arcane methods of shifting vast sums of imaginary
capital around, but in lieu of smashing the banks with brickbats why not just
reinstate the rules that effectively limited their behavior for 40 years or so?
Bring back Glass-Steagall. Pass the Volcker rule, too. Ban banks from trading
derivatives. Limit their behavior and tax their earnings.
5. End the Global War on Terror and rein
in the defense budget
The billions spent yearly to rain death on faceless strangers
thousands of miles away should be the first program on the chopping block if
we’re serious about tackling the deficit. That money could better be put to use
both here at home and abroad. USAID and the State Department could surely do
more to defeat those Who Hate Us For Our Freedom with that money than the
Defense Department has so far managed to.
6. Repeal the Patriot Act
Speaking of expensive wastes of resources that are also in direct
violation of the nation’s founding principles, let’s dismantle the expansive
domestic surveillance state, hurriedly established at a panicky period of
national crisis and then enshrined as permanent without a word of serious
debate.
The extra-constitutional “delayed-notice search warrants” given to law enforcement by
the Patriot Act have been used far more for fighting the war on drugs than the
war on terror, which is to be expected from a law that was essentially a
massive laundry list of tools and privileges that prosecutors and FBI agents
had wanted for years that had thus far been denied to them by pesky
constitutional checks on their powers. The government even has its own secret legal readings of
the act, allowing it to do secret things we can know nothing about.
The government now has vast powers to track and spy on us for
whatever reasons it chooses, and both parties are mostly fine with that. When
the NSA was found to be engaging in illegal domestic wiretapping and data
mining, Congress responded by granting them more domestic wiretapping and data
mining powers. As we’ve moved further from those panicky days that birthed the
Patriot Act, the law and its associated unaccountable domestic
surveillance state have, perversely, become more normalized. Those in favor of
limited government should be the most alarmed at this.
7. Tackle climate change
We may be rapidly approaching the catastrophic point of no return
when it comes to preventing major, devastating climate change. To keep warming
below “dangerous levels,” one recent study says, we’d need to “reverse
the rise in emissions immediately and follow through with steep reductions
through the century.” Immediately — like now.
Frustratingly, even half-measures have found no support in
Congress, where the industries doing the polluting have far more clout than
mere scientists or human beings who’ll be alive in a future period of mass
extinctions, hunger, flooding and drought. At the very least — and this
is literally the very least the government should be doing right now to combat
climate change — a price should be put on carbon emissions, either in the form
of a direct tax or as part of a cap-and-trade scheme. This is a policy so
self-evidently beneficial to the vast majority of mankind — it taxes a bad
thing, so that corporations do less of the bad thing, while also giving the
government revenue to spend on good things — that cap-and-trade’s defeat in
Congress says just about all there is to say about the corrupting power of
industry money on the government process.
8. Stop locking everyone up for
everything and end the drug war
The American incarceration rate dwarfs that of our closest
competitor, Russia
The problem is that there is no political will to do anything
about it. In fact, locking people up tends to be a popular campaign platform.
In some locales, felons are both denied voting rights and also counted as
residents of their prisons for the purposes of congressional apportionment,
causing a perverse incentive to lock up more inmates. Tens of thousands of
inmates are in long-term solitary confinement , which is essentially torture by
another name.
As violent crime rates have fallen, the prison population has
continued to grow, because of longer terms and mandatory sentencing and denial
of parole. The U.S. America
A major contributor to our mass incarceration state is the “War on
Drugs,” which after years of waging we’ve yet to win.
Full legalization of marijuana would lead to many fewer people
being jailed for victimless crimes and immediately destroy a critical income
stream for gangs and increasingly violent drug cartels. Legalizing marijuana
would also give states and cities a desperately needed infusion of tax revenue.
(Legalization or decriminalization of other drugs would be similarly
beneficial, but a good deal more controversial.) Those who commit nonviolent
drug offenses should never be sent to prisons for years. Those currently in
prison for nonviolent drug offenses should be freed and rehabilitated into
society.
9. Full equality for the queer community
Gay marriage is a no-brainer — rights granted to a majority are
being denied to a minority based on arguments founded solely on bigotry — and
should be recognized nationwide.
Let’s not forget, too, that gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgendered Americans are denied other rights, including, in most states,
protection from workplace discrimination
and housing discrimination. I suspect lots of Americans don’t even know the
LGBT community lacks those basic protections, and that is itself an outrage.
10. Fix the tax system
There are a million ways the tax code could be made fairer,
simpler and more progressive, and most of those ways are opposed by powerful
entrenched interests. But it is an inescapable fact that for most of the 20th
century, federal income tax rates were very high on the wealthy — very, very
high, in fact — and most of that period also happened to be a time of
widespread prosperity for rich and middle-class Americans alike. The experiment
in slashing taxes on the rich seems to have failed everyone but the rich.
The system as it currently stands forces states to fund essential
services with the most regressive taxes possible, mainly sales taxes, in order
not to scare businesses elsewhere. The current system allows hugely profitable
transnational corporations to get away without paying anything, to make
killings “overseas” while operating at imaginary losses domestically. Warren
Buffett, as we all know, is paying less than his secretary.
So let’s create a millionaire’s tax bracket, and a financial
transactions tax. Let’s close the carried interest tax loophole and raise the
estate tax and taxes on capital gains. Let’s get the highest marginal tax rate
back up to, at the least, Reagan-era levels. Let’s stop all being held hostage,
as a nation, to the fanatical anti-tax doctrine of the 1 Percent.
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