I suggest we all pitch a small tent in our front yards along with a sign showing that we support the movement. If you don’t have a tent, put up a sign.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Right now, health care insurers work like a virtual monopoly. They simply don’t compete in many areas. That’s because they are afraid that if one of them starts to clean up it’s act, they’ll all have to follow suit, and that would me lower profits for themselves and their share holders. So you don’t seem them advertising about how they’ll drop pre-exisiting condition clauses, or guarantee that you don’t lose your insurance when you get sick. The best way for them to make profits is to collect as much money in premiums as they can, without paying any of it out. That way, money can be paid to stock holders instead of paying for patient care.

I love the idea of insurance co-ops, and it’s one of those things that should have happened a long time ago. In a co-op, just in a banking co-op, the insurance company will actually be owned by the customers. If you are paying in on an insurance policy, you are a part owner of the co-op. There are no share holders, so all the money, in theory, can be used to run the company and pay medical bills. The problem is that co-ops will be under exactly the same pressures as the private insurance companies. They will quickly realize that they will have lower costs if no one is sick, and since healthy members will outnumber sick ones, it is easy to see what could happen. Insurance co-ops might become even more draconian than the private insurance companies when it comes to trying to keep sick people off the rolls.

The public option would give us an insurance plan run by the government that would never refuse someone, and could provide good basic care at reasonable prices. In order to be attractive, private and co-op insurance would have to beat the public option.

Just by having the option in place, a lot of waste will go away. We won’t have hospitals constantly trying to shuffle poor and homeless people out the door. The hospitals won’t have their emergency rooms crowded with people who may or may not be able to pay. Since people will have insurance, hopefully they will go to doctors before they get so sick they need emergency services. That might actually make it easier to get care

There are a lot of details to be worked out, but I believe that the best system right now would include a public option and insurance co-ops and that they should be given as much freedom to compete against private companies as possible. There also need to be provisions that will keep private insurance companies from just dumping expensive patients into the public and co-op systems. But I think we have a good start here, as long as we hold onto the public option.

Unfortunately, the option I think is the best, a single payer system where we can choose between a number of insurance companies, including public and co-op, but it’s all paid for by the government, is apparently off the table. You don’t hear about this much in the press, but if you look at the boards of directors of media companies and those of pharmaceutical companies, it’s not hard to figure out why. Take a look at this article for more: Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates

There is a lot that can be done directly, but the various special interest want to cloud the issue so as little as possible is done. For instance, we could simply pass a law that says that insurance companies can not pick and choose. If an applicant can pay the premiums, the insurance company must accept them. No forcing people with pre-exisiting conditions to wait a year or two before they are covered. As long as you make the rules the same for everyone, it would work just fine.

When you don’t have insurance, what do you do? You don’t go to the doctor. You keep hoping you’ll get better. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you just die. But too many times, you wait too long and then you wind up going to the emergency room. By then, what you have is very serious and it costs a whole lot of money to fix it.

How do I know? Because it happened to me when I was twenty. I got sick but had no insurance. If I had gone to the doctor and been properly diagnosed, it would have costs less than ten dollars a month to treat my disease. Instead, I didn’t go in until I was nearly dead and had to be carried in by friends. I had to spend two days in intensive care and another twelve days in a ward. It cost over twenty thousand dollars, and that was almost thirty years ago. I’m sure it would have cost a lot more now.

I’ve talked to other people who have the same disease I had, which is chronic, and many of them didn’t have insurance. They also couldn’t afford the medicine. So, in one man’s case, he would be back at the hospital every couple of months. He’d use up resources and take up a be for several days before he’d be well enough to leave. He couldn’t hold down a job because of his frequent absence due to his illness. He had to get by with day labor. If he’d had insurance, his disease could have been managed as mine was after my incident in the hospital. I only went into the hospital because of that disease one more time, and that was fifteen years later, and it was to have the offending organ removed.

Treating that poor gentleman probably cost far more than my insurance premiums. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that treating him cost more in a single year than my insurance has cost myself and my employers that whole time.

I suspect that the man I’m refering to is probably dead by now, even though he was the same age as I was. Had he had insurance he could have worked a better job. He would have been a productive member of society. Instead he wound up having a miserable, and probably short, life. If I’d not been very lucky, that could have been me. It could have been you.

My father did some work for a hospital down in Florida. He was a marketing consultant. They asked him about a problem they had. They were a private hospital, but they were the only game in town, and never turned anyone away who needed care. They had just invested in a couple of birthing rooms.

Unfortunately, because of the way the county was zoned, everyone was either VERY rich, or VERY poor. The very poor women in the comunity were coming in with premature labor, underweight sick babies. The hospital often had to use the birthing rooms for these indigent patients. It was costing them a great deal of money.

My father made a simple suggestion: he told them that the best way to solve this problem was to send a van out to the poor part of the county once a week. The nurses in the van sought out pregnant women and taught them about proper diet, excercise, and the need to refrain from drug use. The nurses also handed out pregnancy vitamins and helped the women have full term pregnancies, which resulted in healthier babies.

The hospital was able to go back to charging an arm and a leg for the birthing rooms. The poor women in the community were taken care of and had healthier babies. The van and the nurses cost the hospital some money, but far less than the profits they were losing on the birthing rooms.

Good community healthcare just makes sense and it saves money.