Tax the Rich and Abolish the Debt
If you owe the bank $100,000 it's your problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 it's the bank's problem. If the banks owe each other $15,000,000,000,000 it's the taxpayer's problem. We shouldn't have such problems. Getting rid of that 15 trillion dollar debt by getting rid of the banks that hold it is the simplest way of getting ourselves out of the mess the rich have dumped us in. We the People are also We the Taxpayers and We the Voters and if we stick together we can pass a Constitutional Amendment that abolishes debt, just like the one that abolished prohibition.
The Constitution allows an amendment process that can accomplish the cancellation of all debt with a simple political process: If the voters want all debts to be cancelled they elect only senators and representatives at both the state and national levels who want the same. If the politicians in Washington won't pass this amendment, then the state legislatures can do an end run around Congress and pass resolutions calling for a Constitutional Convention for the purpose of passing a universal debt forgiveness amendment.
The Amendment is then ratified by the same legislatures that called for the Convention, and it becomes the law and all debt is gone! The only ones hurt are the rich, the Communist Party of China, and the Corporate State. Everyone else, 99% of us, is home free. What a brilliant escape hatch the Founding Fathers left for We the People giving ample evidence that the Founder's enlightened democratic vision penetrated hundreds of years into the future. The Spirit of '76 is here to save us!
After the Amendment passes, everything else will, at first, remain the same but as this debt laden albatross is finally lifted from America's weary neck various savings will become apparent. Employers, no longer having to use business (and sometimes personal) funds to pay the debts, will suddenly be free of debt and could then make a greater personal profit while expanding the business and simultaneously giving significant raises to their employees, many of whom are clutching mortgages that will just as suddenly be marked "PAID IN FULL," all while lowering the prices charged to the firm's customers, who respond in kind. This is the "rising tide" you've heard tell about and the only obstructions standing in the way of our economic salvation and national re-liberation is our onerous debt and the opposition of the greedy rich. We can kill two birds with one stone.
All debt, foreign and domestic, will be lifted off our country but if we elect the right legislators they can finesse the amendment by exempting current corporate debt from the general forgiveness and directing all future debt payments by corporations be made directly to the US Treasury as innovative "liberty taxes" to finance the government. So, whatever the corporations now pay to banks and bondholders in interest and principle will instead go to general treasury funds thus lowering the average American's tax bill along with eliminating his debts to his creditors. It's a win-win situation for the large majority of Americans. Since most Americans owe more than they own, most Americans will come out of it considerably ahead. All they have to do is vote for their OWN economic interests, just like the rich do now.
The banks think they've got us over a barrel owning both our current debt and our future need for ever more massive financing but in reality we can hold a gun against their head and make them an offer they can't refuse. We can pursue the debt elimination amendment and show them, in no uncertain terms, that it is We the People who hold them the oligarchs, over a barrel and that we can castrate their wealth and power with one decisive stroke, amending the Constitution for the People's benefit and achieving real change.
The passage of this Amendment is the great elixir our country needs to get back its financial and economic health and the choice is between the status quo and the future quo. Which is more important to the majority of Americans? Do the American people really wish to continue to give everything to the well being of the rich, including their future? Do the American people really want to put the interests of the princelings of the rich ahead of those of their own children? Why do Americans defend the rich so blindly? Why won't Americans stand up for themselves and learn that their lives have waaay more value than the lives of the rich? Why do we volunteer to loyally labor for the rich when there is no reward?
America is the most productive nation on earth, with record profits for the rich and their corporations, but things are getting worse for us below the top. America led the world with the first five day, 40 hours work week, but that was two or three generations ago and the times have certainly changed. Many Americans have devolved into sheeple. They are afraid to stand up for their rights, afraid they might get fired, afraid someone might think they are liberal. Sheeple are not free.
A free people can't be cowed by the Corporate State. There is no denying that if we are the world's most productive, due to our traditional work ethic, that accomplishment most definitely deserves a rich reward that will adequately compensate us Americans for all the grotesqueries of greed we've had to put up with for the past three decades. A four day, 32 hour work week, with no decline in take home pay, would tell Americans that their hard work is certainly, (and finally) appreciated.
We are being held prisoner by obedient little corporate cogs and by ourselves as confused conformist consumers. We have a right to know and understand what is being done to us. Being forewarned is being forearmed. When we lay out for all to see the various crimes perpetrated by the elite against us, the average American will realize that he is coming awake from a nightmare and has a real life to live, a life that has value, inherent value, God's gift of intelligent consciousness that all of us possess. This truth shall set us free.
The rich are not our friends. They never have been and they never will be. They have historically been our exploiters but have now graduated into being our oppressors. The rich are our enemy and We the People must treat them as such.
The ruling class has been stabbing us in the back for decades (because they learned they could get away with it) so now if the only way to get all our freedom and prosperity back is to cut their collective throat we'd be completely justified in doing so. We need to put our well being, and that of our children, ahead of the rich, who have plenty enough already.
Populism is back, but with two branches this time. Traditional populism, exemplified by the devout William Jennings Bryan, (who tragically slipped into historical obscurity, crucified on a cross of evolution,) has morphed into a decidedly undevout, narrow minded, reactionary faction, the exclusionists, which wants to keep out as many folks as they can from the traditional American smorgasbord, and pull up the drawbridge and exclaim: "first come, only served." They even don't like it when certain people vote and so try to erect barriers to prevent them from exercising this right, inventing new types of immoral poll taxes designed to defeat the very idea of democracy, which, after all, is what America is all about. Beware of these people.
Many of these people actually salute the star-crossed flag of treason because they hope that Dixie can still pull off an extra innings political coup that will snatch victory from the intestines of defeat and so regain their rightful place in the dusty annals of wealth bought honour. (Although they sure act a heck more like Donald Duck than Rhett Butler.) Be afraid, be very afraid if this crew ever gets real power.
Can a hand that salutes the star crossed flag of treason ever be trusted to swear on a Bible to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic? Congress is polluted with those who freely give such a salute, who even claim to be patriots and Christians. We need to ask each and every politician if they do the salute themselves or support those who do. We need to discover by which government their loyalty stands. We must demand they renounce the star crossed flag of treason and the vile ideas it symbolizes. Will they reveal their true colors or will they remain hooded? Will they cheer when they see that flag burned?
Mark Twain once remarked that there are two types of Christians, the professing and the professional, "and hain't the professors a majority in any congregation?" There are many people who sincerely wish to be professional Christians but allowed themselves to be captured by a Satan who thrives on ignorance, confusion and bigotry. But there are many more Christians who are disciples of democracy who can bring reason, enlightenment and love to these benighted prisoners of Mammon. Our national re-liberation will be inclusive to all, especially those who have been bamboozled by Beelzebub. There is nothing wrong with a little evangelism when there is a soul at stake.
The other branch of populism is much closer to the political and economic ideas of Bryan but for some mysterious reason shuns his religiosity. They have a smug, superior attitude and adore showing off their sophistication to each other and use the word "superstition" a lot. Many of these are card carrying members of the Stoopid Party and can't figure out why many Americans won't warm to them.
They cannot even conceive that the inner soul of the civil rights movement was deeply Christian in nature, so disdainful are they of the inspiration of the cross that they cannot even glimpse the smile of the rational God who infused every civil rights rally, march and demonstration, bestowing bottomless courage on millions.
Nothing convinces like success as we Americans enjoyed a front row seat and viewed history blossoming every evening until one of the greatest moral victories of all time was delivered by the hand of God almighty (with an assist from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.) with the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (Oh yeah, LBJ helped too.) There and then we saw the power of the pulpit in action but nowadays the only thing that seems to be blossoming are the same tired old attempts to deny the right to vote to the very people who most need to, or to single out and deny the First Amendment right of free speech to those who wear the clerical collar and preach politics from that same pulpit. All this distracts us from our righteous suspicion of Mammon's heir, the Corporate State.
We're bankrupt. We might as well admit it. It's like when you feel all queasy to the stomach, head aches, but once you vomit and rid your stomach of the offender you immediately start to feel much better. Our society has been queasy for some time now, enough time to make it seem normal, even natural. Our society is sick because it has been adulterated by the rich for their own greater profit. We need to heave one big, collective puke to cleanse ourselves of the Corporate State debt poison that we've been forced fed.
We used to have a business climate that respected its customers but then figured out ways to manipulate the consciousnesses of our people to hand them over more of our money. They win, we lose. Then we give them more of our money.
Most Americans believe that an individual who has a degree in psychology walks around all day in a lab coat bearing a clipboard trying to help the disorganized and confused. Nope. Most psychology degrees nowadays are used to serve masters in the business community, especially in the dark realm where people (individually or en masse,) are manipulated and controlled without their knowledge or consent by Phd type "Doctors" who use their knowledge (and power) to help the rich get richer while reserving for themselves, of course, a piece of the booty.
The field of social psychology, or mass psych, has been left intentionally obscure so as not to alert the public that institutions that do not have the best interest of the American people in mind are herding the American public and homogenizing them into one easily controlled mass state of mind, one begging to be directed and policed, oozing meek conformity wrapped in quiet desperation, the Corporate State's model citizen.
Using various psychological tricks designed to sell products the consumers don't need and get them to spend money they can't afford, the Corporate State's henchman, Madison Avenue, spends billion$ to get the poor and middle class to part with their precious money and exchange it (including a portion of their future well being) to Wall Street for its overpriced, overhyped junk. We deserve better.
Advertising is so expensive because it is so effective. Corporations pay well to get the results they want. What they want is more wealth and power. What we get is degradation and lower living standards. What we need is to give them a big, fat Revolution.
The Corporate State also creates advertising to get its favored politicians elected to office. They use advertising like a blunt weapon to beat us into submission so we will believe the big lies they constantly try to drum into our heads. We see their propaganda continuously, everywhere we look, and it even suddenly pops up in front of us, and it is our money that finances it all. We are paying the Corporate State for the privilege of being enslaved by it. The Corporate State, by will and conspiracy, has turned our once proud nation into a very sick society dependent on it. The cure for We the People is the death of the Corporate State. We cannot continue to be willing hosts of this un-American parasite.
They try to intimidate and destroy anyone and any institution that attempts to help us. They try to keep us alone and divided against each other, uncomforted, angry, cynical, powerless and indebted. They deliberately created a stagnant economy, with lopsided payoffs to the rich, that severely limits the number of good jobs and even not so good jobs, so as to make the people desperate enough to take anything and keep their mouths shut, shun all unions and not rock the corporate yacht. In the good old traditional days, when people were desperate for work and improved working conditions, they created labor unions to protect their interests, unions that functioned as lobbyists for the working class and as agents for employment.
Now corporations try to portray unions as public enemies so to divert the public's attention from themselves, the real public threat. They have their own lobbyists, their own agents and their own lawyers. They don't want us to have equal access to such modern necessities. They want to destroy our unions because our unions have historically stood in their way. They hate opposition, so we need to opposition them to kingdom come.
Wall Street uses us for cannon fodder. It loves when the average individual trusts his or her hard earned money to its proven incompetence. It knows how easily swayed our people are. With tens millions of average folk entrusting their life savings to these buzzards, the term "sheep to slaughter" springs to mind.
Every time the stock market takes a dive the corporate owned TV networks trot out a parade of average investors who proudly announce that they are "in it for the long haul." Over and over again so that tens of millions of average investors would reach the "logical" conclusion that since all these nice, regular people just like them were staying in the market, they would too. And in so doing they prop up the market long enough to give the big guys a safe exit so they could use their money for better things and leave the middle class holding an empty bag. And, of course, they get back in for a big profit later.
During the eighties corporations discovered that they could ramp up their stock prices by "downsizing" their work forces and closing American factories and opening business in Third World authoritarian hell-holes that feature cheap labor and sport non-existent labor, environmental and ethics laws. All these internationalist corporations care about is their bottom line and crippling the ability of taxpayer funded watchdogs to do their lawfully appointed job of protecting the public from them.
The Constitution clearly states that the proper duty of government is to "promote the general welfare" of We the People and there is nothing in it that says corporations should be "just one of the guys." Federalist judges, who are self appointed judicial activists for the corporate state, claim to have discovered penumbras and emanations in our National Charter that give corporations rights and powers undreamed of by our Founding Fathers.
As a result, ordinary citizens have been relegated to the back of the corporate owned bus, with corporate lackeys in the driver's seat and the best seats reserved for the rich. We the People are now secondary to the rich in both law and national hierarchy and would do well to right things by engaging in a campaign of "highway robbery" to get back what was stolen.
The Corporate State bellows and blusters about matters that touch on its favorite philosophical props such as "free trade" and the strict interpretation of the Constitution. It wants the American people to believe that corporate issues have been carefully thought out and the Corporate State is a bastion of reason and rational action that can be counted on to lead us to some economic nirvana in which warm hearted executives have nothing but a keen desire to provide decent jobs to all the American people.
But between the ideal and the real falls a shadow that keeps the people in the dark when it comes to the actual fulfillment of the promises of jobs and prosperity. The Corporate State never mentions how their ballyhooed philosophy concerning "free trade" and "strict constructionism" is, in reality, a mutually exclusive set of deeply opposite ideas that cannot rationally co-exist in the same place at the same time.
The Constitution is crystal clear about the struggle between free trade and protectionism. The propagandists of the Corporate State ignore that the Founding Fathers put in the Constitution, right at the beginning, that the proper role of the government is to "provide for the general welfare" of the American people and said nothing about the general welfare of the Corporate State or the Communist Party of China. In reading the Constitution we can see with our own eyes what the Federalists are desperate that we'd miss.
According to the Founding Fathers the proper way to finance the government is not with an income tax, but with a tariff. (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1) There is no mention whatever of an income tax for this purpose, only import duties (tariffs.) The Constitution literally says it is these duties (and not the income tax) that must finance the government, but this Originalist interpretation is ignored by the Corporate State ideologues on the Court in order to allow the Internationalist Corporate State to unite and slit our throats and drain us of our wealth, redistributing it to the rich.
If we go back to this tariff system we can practically finance the government with what we buy from China alone, while simultaneously boosting small business, which could then afford to compete with foreign subsidized goods. If we go back to tariffs we can increase small business revenue and employment while lowering the tax burden on Main Street enterprises.
It is starting to look like the unions will be the key to our national rejuvenation. Working people have been deliberately misled as to what unions are all about. Corporate State propaganda portrays union membership as a chore and a burden and a relic of the past. It is no coincidence that this "relic" steadily lost members and power at the same rate that American factories closed and the Corporations sent our jobs to China. That was one of the purposes of playing the China card, to undercut union jobs and drive workers to desperation by extorting their fear of losing their jobs. Corporations never miss an opportunity to warn workers that if they unionize, they, too, will be out of work.
America's great age of middle class prosperity was also the high point of union membership. The average corporation president earned about 17 times what the average office worker, or unionized factory worker made at his company. As the unions declined, executive pay sky-rocketed. We need to get back to a balanced economy and to do so, we need to kick China cold turkey and we need to "just say NO to Mao," and regain our national sanity.In union there is strength and in solidarity there is victory. Just ask Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II. Most people don't realize that office workers can unionize and they don't know (yet) that there are lots of things a union can do to make life better. Some people won't join or support a union because they have been led to believe the dues would be a financial hardship. No, the Corporate State is the financial hardship. Some workers get a "free ride" on the backs of dues paying union members, but it is largely unknown that an outsider can "adopt" a free rider and pay his dues for him. People also don't know that they can contribute to unions to help them organize.
Unions can evolve into a "one stop" financial institution than can provide services such as a credit union with lower rates on borrowing and higher rates for savings. Unions can help their members get home, car and health insurance products (in union there is financial discounts,) and all sorts of goods and services.
And just as we have the right to form unions we also have the right to decertify a union and replace it with a better one. One hidden power of unions has to do with union pension programs. Even though union membership has declined precipitously in recent years they still have large holdings in the U.S. stock markets and have the duty to protect the financial interests of their membership. While the rich tend to buy and sell stocks on a nearly daily basis, unions hold on to their stocks and sit tight.
We can make demands of our unions to provide greater profit from their holdings, a process that can be combined with demands that corporate employers not take any actions that will harm the workers. If a company seeks to close up a factory here only to reopen it in Communist China, unions can punish that company by dumping its stock. Not only should the union divest of the stocks it holds of the offender, but all the other unions that hold that stock should also dump it in solidarity.
This type of action usually drives down the price of the affected stock but the rich have long ago devised ways to make a profit even if a stock declines. This device is called "short selling" and it simply allows owners of a stock to make money even if the price goes down. Indeed, the way this is set up, the greater the decline, the greater the profit.
So, if enough shares go on the market simultaneously the decline could be very large and thus very profitable. Some Wall Streeters might claim that this action is illegal "insider" trading in which only a few have specific knowledge of their trading plans and use that knowledge to gain an advantage over the rest of the market. But if the unions would put in their charters the requirement that such unified dumping occur whenever a company takes actions against the workers, or against America, then all the stock analysts on Wall Street will know that and be ready to discount that possibility, which eliminates the insider accusation. The company, faced with a possible steep decline in its stock price will think twice and thrice before taking such actions. Because of the magic of leverage, short-selling will incur much larger profits in a much shorter time thus benefiting the union members in both the short and long hauls.
Unions can use their financial might to prevent the corporations from screwing their workers. Unions could also demand that companies improve working conditions, pay and benefits, keep the executives from living high on the corporate hog, not take any actions that might negatively impact our national security (especially relating to China,) and not give any money to reactionary, un-American politicians. Unions can use their clout to force a system that will open competitive bidding by qualified applicants for executive positions in the corporation. The low bidder gets the job. This way we can make fewer executives work harder for less money, just like they do to us now.
Unions can also demand that companies notify each and every individual share holder to approve by vote any expenditures of shareholder money that the company might be contemplating spending on political action. One of the reasons the unions have declined is that their huge stock holdings are used by corporations to cut the throats of the unions with downsizing, political contributions and propaganda. Union pension funds must be protected from corporate malfeasance.
If unions refuse to do this the workers can demand a union decertification election to get rid of union fat cats with their Bal Harbor suntans and replace them with activists who are lean and mean and committed to union resurgence.
This might be the right time for all unions to gather their resources into One Big Union that will fill the role of full service worker lobbyists that will provide for employment and better conditions, better banking and insurance products and an easy way to get legal advice, cut through red tape, and answer members' questions about the confusing vagaries of modern life: One Big Union, a cradle to grave guide for the perplexed.