Occupy Congress

Posted on October 18, 2011 by rben13

I applaud all those who are participating in the Occupy/99% movement, whether they are doing so in person or just cheering from the sidelines. I think it’s great that this movement has taken off and provided a forum where people can express their discontent over the way the middle class has been trivialized by the rich and powerful all over the world.

I have a two suggestions that I hope will help us see some changes implemented that will address at least some of the problems being protested.

1) Occupy Lobbies – I suggest that the Occupy Washington movement branch out and send people out to the offices of their congressional representatives, where they should get in line and talk to their elected officials. The idea here is to force the representatives to talk to their constituents, not just the lobbyists. If enough people participate, it might even be possible to shut the lobbyists out for a while.

2) Occupy Congress – This isn’t a suggestion that we set up tents in the halls of Congress. What I suggest is that, besides protesting, that those who feel a kinship with the Occupy movement should participate in local government. Find candidates for office you can believe in and help them get elected. If your current representatives are always voting with Big Business, find someone better and elect the, or become a candidate yourself. Ultimately, the way to take power back in a democracy, is to elect people you believe will actually represent your interests.

Make sure this movement does more than generate headlines.

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Occupying Wall Street

Posted on October 6, 2011 by rben13

I applaud the citizens who have taken the protest of what’s happened to our country to Wall Street and to Washington. I wish I could be there and I hope this movement continues to grow. Maybe if it gets big enough, some of our congressional representatives will start to fear for their positions and start to represent their constituents rather than just take orders from their party leaders.

Corporate influence in Washington has been a problem for as long as I can remember, and it’s only gotten worse since the Supreme Court let in all the soft money and Congress failed to fix the problem. Now, as I’ve said before, it appears that money is the only thing motivating the Republican party and the Democrats are only marginally better.

We need real reforms, the kind that Obama promised we’d get. But before we lay all the blame on him, we have to recognize that, by design, the President doesn’t have absolute power. It takes the Congress and the President, working together, to solve the problems we face. When one branch categorically refuses to cooperate, in this case Congress, then we need to lay the blame where it belongs.

We need to eliminate the Bush tax cuts which have helped dig the hole we’re in. We need to limit the size of banks and demand that they hold the paper on loans they make for at least five years, so they can’t abuse the mortgage system like they did before.

I think we need to go farther. I think we need a Constitutional Amendment that would state that corporations are NOT people for the purposes of politics. The concerns of corporations can be properly represented by the stock owners and employees, provided they are citizens of this country. Right now, we allow corporations, some of which do the majority of their business over seas, into our political process.

It’s also time we debunked the idea that the rich and entitled are some magical job creating class. We aren’t the ones who depend on the rich for our existence, they depend on getting us to work for far less that we are worth, in order to accumulate their wealth.

I’d love to see a study done that analyzes what the rich really do with their money. Somehow, I suspect that much of the “job creating” investing that’s going on is happening over in China, not here.

There are lots of jobs to be had here, in the U.S. if only we had the money to fund them. We need to repair the infrastructure. We need to increase the funding for schools and lower the cost of tuition so we can have the best educated populace in the world. We need to find new ways to build more efficient homes, and think about redesigning the way we lay out cities to increase energy efficiency and take advantage of our communications technology. We also need to build out a technology infrastructure second to none, so that our citizens and academics have what they need to put us back in the lead in technology.

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Class Warfare Confusion

Posted on September 22, 2011 by rben13

I just watched last nights Daily Show, where Stewart interviews Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. Daniels represents himself as being a fair-minded fiscal conservative, but it’s clear, from his language, that he’s still following the party line of the Republican leadership. He accuses Obama of being obsessed with the wealthy, with bashing them, and skirts the issue of raising tax rates in order to balance the budget.

Let’s be clear. The 1% of Americans who have the highest income control over 25% of ALL the wealth in this nation. That is the kind of economic disparity that has caused revolutions in other countries. In those revolutions, the wealthy elite lost everything and their lands and money were redistributed. That’s real class warfare.

I don’t think anyone in America want’s to strip the wealthy of all their money. What we want if fairness. Many of the wealthiest Americans were neck deep in the financial shenanigans that have put our economy in peril. During the last couple of decades, while income for the majority has remained flat or fallen, the wealthiest Americans have seen unprecedented growth in their personal wealth. What we want is for those individuals, who are very well insulated against economic hard times, to pay their fair share, the same rates they were paying back in the 1990′s. (They also gained wealth steadily during that time.)

There is simply nothing but hot air to support the claim that raising the top marginal tax rates by 2% will cause any economic slow down. An individual who would normally have $400,000 after taxes, would still have ~$380,000 after taxes under the restored tax rates. While it would hurt to pay $20,000 more in taxes, it’s certainly a lot less painful to someone who still has $380,000 left than it is for me or you.

The Bush Administration saddled this country with two wars paid for on credit, a huge financial crisis that was let simmer until the very last possible minute, and tax cuts which stripped 1.5 trillion dollars of revenue from the budget. Then, to add insult to injury, the Republicans in Congress have been doing their best to slow any economic recovery, so they can use the bad economy for political leverage in the elections next year.

Everyone, Republican voters included, should be mad as hell at the Republican leadership. The first goal of all our government representatives should be economic recovery, not consolidating and expanding their own personal power. The Democrats deserve some ire as well, since they’ve failed to support the president and seem more concerned with preserving their jobs than with the jobs of the voters who put them in office.

I have a hard time believing that we’ll navigate our way out of this problem with the current group of players in Washington. As voters, we need to make it clear that we demand that our needs be the first priority of any elected official.

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Saying It Doesn’t Make It So.

Posted on September 17, 2011 by rben13

John Baehner apparently lives in a fantasy world that he shares with many of his fellow Republicans, in which saying something often and passionately makes it true — at least to him.

The “Super Congress,” made up of 12 individuals who are supposed to work out a workable compromise on debt reduction, was created with the understanding that anything they did would have to include new revenue. That’s taxes in normal English. Of course, Baehner now says that he can’t support any measure that increases “job killing” new taxes.

There is no evidence that raising taxes “kills” jobs. Both Reagan and Clinton raised taxes and both had booming economies. All it takes is a bit of common sense to realize that huge cuts in government spending will kill jobs, since the only way to get the huge cuts that the Republicans want, is to lay off people.

The fact is, we’re in this mess, not because of anything that the vast majority of Americans did, but because of the shenanigans of the wealthy who believe that Wall Street is Main Street. Now, when the bill comes due, the Republicans are fighting like crazy to defend tax cuts which were ill-considered in the first place, and which now threaten important social safety-net programs.

Baehner is an example of the worst kind of politician, one who believes that any tactic is justified as long as it puts Republicans in power. He and his fellow Republicans in Congress, are more loyal to each other and their party than they are to their constituents or to the country. How else can they justify blocking every bit of legislation that’s proposed that might help us climb out of this mess? How else can they explain why proposals in Obama’s Jobs bill, which are identical to ones they made, are now a bad idea.

The bottom line is that these people are willing to extend this economic downturn, putting off any recovery, until the next election, in the hope that it will help them defeat Obama and elect another terrible president like Bush, someone who will simply write checks and hand them out to Wall Street with no questions asked.

If you want an economic recovery, you need to make it clear to your representatives that you won’t tolerate this kind of political machination, that you expect your representative to be an advocate for you and your neighbors, putting your interests above that of his or her political party. If you don’t believe they can do that, maybe it’s time to find a better representative.

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Job Creators, Really?

Posted on August 30, 2011 by rben13

Our friends over at Fox News no longer call the Rich rich. They are called Job Creators, and we are all told we should be ashamed for even considering punishing these paragons of hard work by taxing them at the rate they paid in the 1990′s. That would, we’re told, keep these noble individuals from creating the jobs that will rescue us from this stagnant economy.

But, if giving the “Job Creators” a tax break is going to create jobs, where are the jobs? The richest people in our country have been enjoying this tax break since shortly after Bush took office. If this is what gives us a secure and healthy economy, how come we just had a big meltdown? And, weren’t a lot of the “Job Creators” involved in that meltdown?

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