Comprehensive Progressive Agenda & Wishlist Report
By M.Bali
Source: https://progressivewishlist.wordpress.com
“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.â -Confucius
Background
In New York City’s Financial District, hundreds of activists joined on Lower Manhattan in September 2011, challenging as a feature of the rise of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, representing an important stage in the political reawakening of the new generation in the US and worldwide. The demonstrations, which later spread throughout the country, were to a great extent rallies against the impact of corporate cash in governmental issues, however members additionally were disturbed in regards to what they see as corporate greed, and, monetary and social disparity.
The Occupy Wall Street of 2011 in Zuccotti Park in New York and the rest of the country, but with its weak points: with its alleged âspontaneityâ, and therefore naivety, in confronting corporate capitalism, however, failed to turn public mobilizations into mechanisms in delivering concrete political changes partly because the protesters became spectators of their own protests that led into failing to build a hybrid between a social movement and a political party that does not have leaders, but has spokespeople and an organizational structure that lasts more than few years.
In spite of the fact that the Occupy Wall Street developed in the fall of 2011, it had more profound roots in the amassing protests against the monstrous inequities of wealth and influence generated by neoliberal capitalism. Occurring along side of a worldwide crisis against dictatorships in the Arab Spring and and anti-austerity in the Spanish Summer, through the indignados, the Occupy characterized its motivation as standing up to the 1% that had benefited from 40 years of income and riches disparities helped by the ruling class. Understood in the Occupy’s critique of the role of cash in governmental issues was a more profound disquiet with the disappointments of representative democracy and a swing to efforts of making direct popular government, for example, the individuals’ assemblies.
The strategies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warner are plainly informed by an interpretation of the more radical edge of Occupy politics into populist movement. Their populist message which includes calls for breaking up too-big-to-fail big banks, a free public college tuition in light of trillion dollar student debt, calls for overturning Citizens United, reducing economic inequality, challenging oligarchs on Wall Street and advocating for working class workers and their refusal to take corporate donations are echoes of the Occupy movement demands.
Now together, the candidacies and policies of real progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Congresswoman Donna F. Edwards (Maryland), the election of Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York, the election of Kshama Sawant as a socialist in Seattle in 2014, the Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon in UK, and the 72 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus would give the best hope to build long-lasting political structures that establish the foundations of a progressive state
My wishlist then includes: Such state would, inter alia,
Term limits
1. Enact Term limits for all elected politicians. It’s unfortunate that this issue divides people more than any other on this list. Should people value more integrity, fresh ideas or expertise and stability? Along with publicly funded campaigns, term limits could help clean up politics of corruption and prevent life-time office holding, such as the cases of Congressman John Dingle, Sen Robert Byrd, Sen Strom Thurmond, Sen Ted Kennedy, Sen Jesse Helms, Jr. and many others.
This issue can cut both ways and that is the reason why it’s generally controversial. It could impact institutional memory that builds expertise and stability. This may be undermined by some lobbyists and staff members by gaining so as to profit from it more influence or power from a higher turnover of elected politicians, whether executive or legislators. Lobbyists and numerous staff members are in many regards indistinguishable in that a considerable lot of them are plants serving special interests or, fundamentally, that in numerous congressional and different agencies, the majority of the staff are controlled from outside. The surest thing term limits could do is to prevent life-long careers like those listed above, and additionally some way or another upset staff-lobbyist long-term relations. A substantially more viable solution for all that institutional corruption and infiltration is a public and local campaign financing combined with some term limits.
Citizens United
2.Overturn Citizens United v. FEC that stripped out government rules constraining free political campaign financing by non-profit groups. The decision is in view of a fantasy – that enormous gifts won’t impact or degenerate the candidates and authorities who benefit from them. Under this light, it gave non-profits and unions, now called SuperPacs, the green light to spend limitless amounts on political promotions and other political instruments, promoting or thrashing of individual candidates.
Conservative tycoons, hedge funds and Wall Street titans, are spending incredible measures of dark cash to purchase races. The Koch Brothers (David and Charles) alone have arrangements to burn through $889 million on 2016 election cycle. Enormous cash in legislative issues is the most concerning issue we confront as a nation.
Corporations in the U.S. exercise an unreasonable measure of impact over the administration. The measure of corporate cash in decisions makes it for all intents and purposes unthinkable for individuals need to serve the general population’s interests to be suitable competitors. Bringing down the voter’s maximum gift to $100 guarantees that the rich won’t just purchase elections.
For starters, implement the Disclose Act proposal of 2010 ( H.R. 5175 (S.3628-Senate), bill introduced in the U.S. House by Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) and in the U.S. Senate by Charles Schumer (D-New York)). At a minimum, it would have enforced a mandatory disclosure of the sources of campaign spending. Also, progressive candidates for Democratic nomination should pledge to their voters to appoint Supreme Court justices who oppose Citizens United. “If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be Citizens United.I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to beâ, said Ruth Bader Ginsburg, an associate Justice of the Supreme Court in September 28, 2014.
Empowering developments are mounting because of the defilement of our political system. As such, 70 previous individuals from Congress have met up to frame the bipartisan ReFormers Caucus press for campaign finance reform. Also, another group, 99Rise, has pushed for a battle to reveal and dispose of secret cash from Washington’s campaign system.
Campaign Finance
3. Implement publicly and locally financed political campaigns.Public funding of election â that is, depending on taxes more than private gifts to fund campaigns. Public financing is regularly thought to free candidates from the immense burden of raising money and decrease the impact of wealthy contributors and special interests. In this way, the principle aims are this funding diminishes the money related point of interest of power holders and lessens the officeholders’ edge of triumph, which renders elections much more competitive.Public finance reduces corruption by limiting conflict of interests and opens elected public service to the qualified from all walks of life.
An especially inventive and possibly powerful arrangement originates from the Brennan Center of New York: Small gifts are coordinated and increased by voters, making money-related motivations for candidate to speak to every one of their constituents and urging normal residents to take part in the political procedure. Under the Brennan Center model, a $50 gift would be coordinated and after that duplicated by, say, five â making it worth $250 to the applicant. The Brennan study concluded that “Big money in politics is a system that is excellent at perpetuating, replicating and building on itself. The task of reformers is to stop this vicious cycle at its source, by upending the campaign financing system”.
For starters, adopt the Fair Elections Now Act, (S.2023 – 113th Congress (2013-2014) introduced in Congress in April 2011.
In Sept 9, 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton unveiled a plan if elected for comprehensive campaign finance reform, including seeking a constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Courtâs Citizen United, that led to the rise of super PACs, appoint Supreme Court justices who value the right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections, advocate for the SEC to issue a rule requiring all publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending, including currently secret outside spending, to their shareholders, issue an executive order requiring all government contractors to reveal their campaign contributions, ending secret, unaccountable dark money, and establish a small donor matching system for presidential and congressional candidates.
In Congress, in Jan 21, 2015, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) presented the Protect Democracy from Criminal Corporations Act (H.R.450-114th Congress (2015-2016)) to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to prohibit criminal corporations from making distributions of funds regarding a campaign for election for Federal, State, or local office. This bill would counteract corporations that have committed crimes or settled for more than $1 million over felony offences from offering cash to any political candidates or SuperPACs.
Public education
The No Child Left Behind act, the current U.S. public education law was passed during the administration of President George W Bush (and whose arrangements were to a great extent expanded by President Obama) significantly expanded the government part in K-12 training as a prerequisite for accepting federal dollars. States were required to make new, expansive based school responsibility arrangements centered around testing of all students in evaluations three through eight grades.
4. Over-haul the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy to require either full high school or technical school graduation. In school year 2012â13, although in the range of 3.1 million high school pupils, or 81 percent, graduated on time with a standard certificate, it still leaves behind 19% drop out rate, comprising of 1.2 million students who drop out of secondary schools.
The policy thinking behind NCLB has been that of “a law that not only ensures students are prepared for college, careers and life, but also delivers on the promise of equity and real opportunity for every child.” The currently amended version should “include a increased targeting of high-quality preschool, boosting resources for K-12 schools and a reduction of duplicative tests at the state and local levels”. John Gomperts, president and CEO of America’s Promise Alliance, which leads a campaign to reach a national 90 percent graduation rate by 2020, indicated increases in the last decade have led to nearly 2 million additional students earning high school diplomas.
Universal Pre-Kindergarten
5. Implement Universal Pre-Kindergarten.
Universal Pre-K is a development inside of the American instruction system to make access to preschool training accessible to all families, like the way kindergarten is accessible to each of the 5-and 6-year-olds. Like kindergarten, the Pre-K thought is to give deliberate education projects that incorporate self-teaching and alternative instruction.
The term universal Pre-K implies that these programs are accessible for any youngster in any state, paying little respect to the child’s capacities and family income, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).
Additionally, there is a growing consensus that early-education opportunities hold the key to help closing the achievement gaps between students of different backgrounds.
Earned income tax credit
6. Expand Earned income tax credit for the working poor WITH qualifying children. The amount of EITC benefit depends on a recipient’s income and number of children. The Congress intended to lessen the burden of paying Social Security taxes and provide incentives to both work and to raise children in married family arrangements.
The earned income tax credit (EITC) sponsors low-pay working families. The credit rises to a settled rate of credit from the first dollar of income until the credit achieves its greatest; both the rate and the most extreme credit rely on upon the number of kids in the household. The credit then stays flat at that greatest as earning keep on rising, yet in the long run income achieve an phaseout range. Starting from that level the credit falls for each extra dollar of salary until it vanishes altogether.
Climate Change Challenges
7. Implement low-carbon energy base that promotes conservation, conversion into renewal energy sources and fusion technology, providing a fair transition from fossil fuels and a âglobal treatyâ to block the export of fossil fuels.
(a) Implement the climate protection bill by Sen. Barbara Boxer and Sen. Bernie Sanders that includes a carbon tax on the nearly 3000 of the largest fossil fuel polluters, covering about 85 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
In his bill, Sanders cautioned that the main researchers who study environmental changes now let us know that their projections in the past weren’t right. That, actually, the emergency confronting our planet is significantly more genuine than they had already believed.They now let us know that on the off chance that we proceed with our cheerful way, where 12 out of the most recent 15 years were the hottest on record, and make no definitive move in changing our vitality framework and cutting green-house gasses, this planet could be 8 degrees Fahrenheit or more hotter than is right now the case.
(b) Implement the modest Obama’s Clean Power Plan that pushed for 32 percent diminishes in carbon dioxide surges from power plants by 2030 with the base year of 2005, and requiring a 28 percent of a power plant’s yield to be generated from renewable sources.
In comparison, California’s ambitious Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) right now requires utilities to supply 33 percent of their power generation from renewable sources, for example, sun, wind, and geothermal force, by 2020. The new bill, The Clean Energy and Reduction Act, that goes more further than that would expand that objective to 50 percent by 2030. It would likewise require a 50 percent expansion in energy efficiency in structures by that year. The state means to lessen the state’s green house gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 â a major stride to the larger 2050 objective of decreasing carbon dioxide by 80 percent under 1990 levels.
Republicans, famously, are to a great extent deniers of environmental changes, hating green energies of any kind. Yet a June 2014 ABC/Washington Post survey reports that 70 percent of Americans believe that the central government ought to require states to limit the measure of carbon dioxide gasses created inside of their borders.
(c) End tax breaks and subsidies for big oil, gas and coal companies. Representative Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act to stop taxpayer-funded $135 billion giveaways to oil, gas and coal companies.
Tuition-free community college
8. Institute tuition-free community college. Public education should be considered a basic human right and not be just a function of the students’s capacity to afford, but also should be considered as the country’s investment in its own future.
To make college cost-effective and to reduce the wasteful drop out rate, or the “leaky pipeline”, there should be four conditions for attending tuition-free college. For students to qualify for free college, (1) they should pass a college test to ensure college preparedness and (2) students be required to work 10 hours a week of public service on campus or around, (3) require students to complete at least a trade certificate or an associate of arts diploma. For students who choose to drop out, however, (4) they should pay back the state for the costs of the courses already paid for. For those who are unable to afford repayment, they could qualify for a public service waiver. These terms would ensure that almost all students will graduate on time. According to National Student Clearinghouse, the six-year graduation rate for students was only 60.5 percent at public four-year colleges, and 62.5 percent at private nonprofit colleges in 2014.
In May 19, 2015, Senator Bernie Sanders authoritatively presented “College for All Act,” bill that would wipe out undergrad educational cost. The bill would slice the $70 billion dollar tuition costs at all 4-year open schools and colleges. Under the arrangement, the Federal government would cover 67% â $47 billion dollars every year â of the costs. States would be required to deliver the remaining 33% of the costs, or 23 billion dollars.
Workfare
9. Implement Workfare, which refers to the training for and gaining of work as a condition for social assistance, in others words, a safety net that undeniably binds public assistance to gaining formal employment. This recommends how a need-based entitlement to be supplanted with a work-molded security net. Thus, it is about time to implement an unpaid public service work requirement on able-bodied in order to receive welfare, disability assistance, public housing assistance and food stamps. This was a key reform left out of the 1996 welfare overhaul that was intended to move people from receiving long-term public assistance to self-sufficiency.
10. Prison reform
Implement overral Prison reform. This reform should emphasize “individual responsibility and while continuing to call for incarceration, but that amends the frequency and length of prison stays and vastly corrects the internal circumstances and conditions within prison walls”. Any rehabilitation regimen, including mental illnesses, alcohol and substance treatment, personality-building, literacy classes, and so forth- provides the best chance of success if it is mandatory.
(A) Impose mandatory 25 hours a week workfare public service and general education requirements, where classes to be offered to inmates/students who lacked a high school diploma or a high school equivalency certificate.
(B) End incarceration of juveniles. “The American rate of juvenile incarceration is seven times that of Great Britain, and 18 times that of France. It costs, on average, $88,000 a year to keep a youth locked up â far more than the U.S. spends on a child’s education,” wrote Nell Bernstein who authored Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Even as many states have attempted to alter their adolescent prisons, Bernstein says that incarcerating kids is the wrong strategy to manage most early life wrongdoers. Their detention in those prisons in the future will shape who they are.
(C) Reverse Bill Clinton’s cutting funding to 350 college programs in prisons around the country in 1994, as a part of his Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which also imposed draconian measures that included longer jail sentences, expanded financing for prison facilities, put more police in the cities, and honored police with award cash for drug-related arrests that numerous minority groups now see it as a cause for police brutality. (see # 11)
(D) Implement Obama’s Second Chance Pell program to reestablish the federal grant to prisoners looking to enroll in college. A 2013 study by the Rand Corp, financed by the U.S. Dept of Justice, showed that detainees who got some broad instruction were 43% more averse to re-carry out criminal acts and go back to jail inside of three years than the individuals who didn’t get any educating.
(E) Felony disenfranchisement. Restore voting rights to former felons. About 6 million American citizens, staggering 1.5 million are in Florida alone, are incapable of voting as a result of a past criminal conviction. Upwards of 4.4 million of these persons live, work, and bring families up in our cities. Every state has its own particular laws on disenfranchisement. While Vermont and Maine permit criminals to vote while in jail, 11 different states permanently limit certain felons from voting.
These laws, profoundly established in our grieved racial history, have an disproportionate effect on minorities. The nation over, 13 percent of African-American men have lost their entitlement to vote, which is seven times the national normal. (It is believed that nearly 30% of black males in Florida are presently ineligible to vote.)
Defenders of re-enfranchisement say that criminals who have paid their obligation to society by finishing their sentences ought to have the majority of their rights and benefits restored. They contend that efforts to deny ex-criminals from voting are out of line, undemocratic, and politically or racially propelled.
It’s time to pass the Democracy Restoration Act (DRA), bill that has been presented in 2015 in the 114th Congress (H.R.1459) by Representative John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD). It seeks to restore voting rights in federal election to the 4.4 million disenfranchised Americans who have been discharged from jail yet are still denied the right to vote.
11. Civilian Oversight & Police Accountability
Ta-Nehisi Coates, an author of a new book, titled “Between the World and Me,” recently spoke of police misconduct in a way that resonated with a real lived urban life, by saying, “It seems like thereâs a kind of national conversation going on right now about those who are paid to protect us, who sometimes end up inflicting lethal harm upon us,” Coates said. “But for me, this conversation is old, and Iâm sure for many of you the conversation is quite old. Itâs the cameras that are new. Itâs not the violence thatâs new.”
Police departments’ excessive use of lethal force has become more of a national issue following the highly publicized deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, and others, a victimhood that was aided by easily accessible digital technology that has democratized eyewitnesshood. The Black Lives Matter movement that was the protest message advocated after the exoneration in 2013 of George Zimmerman in the shooting of the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin and the Mothers Against Police Brutality have effectively brought the protests into national issue, and is attempting to accomplish social and policy change.
Although numerous urban areas have regular citizen oversight commissions that research cases including improper utilization of power and to consider police responsible and that even the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing recommends all areas to create oversight procedures to improve police responsibility, such structures are just effective when they have a lawful power, for example, subpoena.
According to Human Rights Watch, most effective review agencies are those who have full authority “to audit police files and reports, and who are able to scrutinize the entire departmental structures, and convince police departments to back more oversight”. The most effective citizen boards also have âindependence, civilian control, and some role in disciplinary hearings, and have enough public support and engagement to withstand legal challenges and backlash from law enforcement”. (“De-militarize Police and settle lawsuits involving police misconduct/ brutality/ murder with Police Union funds instead of taxpayer dollars”. (Thanks to NJ Progressive Indie for adding the last comment)
12. War on Terror
End the false, shadowy and global War on Terror, (“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous”, George Orwell).
The policies assumed by the Obama regime directly throughout the last few years indicate probably they are quickening, not slowing down, the war on terror that has been tirelessly reinforced in the course of the most recent decade. For the sake of the War on Terror, the present president has weakened decades-old Miranda protection; systematized another plan of inconclusive confinement on US soil; plotted to move Guantanamo inmates to inland in Illinois; expanded secrecy, restraint and discharge limitations at the sources; invented another hypothesis of presidential powers for the first time to kill US natives, including an American child, Abdulrahman Awlaki; recharged the Bush/Cheney warrant-less listening in structure for an additional five years, and additionally the so-called Patriot Act, without a single change; and simply marked into law every new limitation on the detention of suspiciously and illegally-held prisoners.
13. Healthcare
Implement Single Payer health insurance that provides better care at less cost to all without a “Mandate”. Also known as âMedicare for all”, it is a system in which a “single public or quasi-public agency organizes health care financing, but the providing of health services remains largely in private hands”.
According to Physicians for a National Health Program, the project would be supported by the funds received from supplanting today’s wasteful, profit-oriented, different insurance payers with a single streamlined, non-profit, single payer, and by unobtrusive new taxes taking into account capacity to pay. Premiums would vanish; 95 percent of all family units would save.
14. Child’s rights
Ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) of 1989. The CRC “incorporates the full range of human rights â civil, cultural, economic, political, and social â into one text that promotes and protects the well-being of the worldâs children and their families.” America signed it in 1995 but never ratified it. More countries have ratified the Convention than any other human rights treaty in historyâ192 countries had become State Parties to the Convention as of November 2005. The remaining two countries which have not ratified the Convention are famously Somalia and the United States.
In spite of the fact that Presidents Clinton and Obama have supported approval, resistance from Republicans in the Senate and their conservative groups have hindered the ratification of the treaty. Religious associations including the Christian Coalition, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, the John Birch Society are a portion of the gatherings who have initiated the most resistance to passing of the treaty.
15. Confederate Flag
Remove the Confederate Flag from all government sites. (“Symbols of hate and division have no place in our government. It’s time to stand up for what’s right and take down the Confederate Flag!”, sign MoveOn.org petition).
16. Equal Pay for equal work
Pass the Equal Pay Act of 1963: Equal Pay for Women, signed by President Kennedy with the intention of ending gender-based pay discrimination. Recent reports estimate women now make 78 percent of what male counterparts make.
But after 40 years, female workers are still robbed of 23 pennies for each dollar a man makes in the U.S. Indeed, even with the sections of five key laws to forestall discrimination in the working environment â e.g., the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act â the gender pay hole is still an intractable issue.
Congressional Republicans sneered at pay equity enactment as a race year pandering. Be that as it may, but a September 2015 Gallup survey reported that pay value was the main issue confronting working females in today’s economy. A 2014 July survey by the Democracy Corps found that 90 percent of Americans favored measures to help women get equivalent pay for equivalent work, accordingly raising incomes for women and families.
Fair Taxation Issues.
Conservatives are proposing an adjusted budget plan throughout the following 10 years and large tax breaks for the well off and corporations. To balance financial backing without raising new incomes, they will need to slice $4.5 trillion in federal spending, influencing essentially every service the government provides. To adequately counter these recommendations, progressives need to request “tax fairness” instead and that the rich and huge enterprises ought to pay their fair share. Surveys demonstrate that the tax fairness is firmly upheld by people in general â not simply by Democrats, but also by a substantial segment of independents. Furthermore, contingent upon the inquiry, greater parts of Republicans, or majorities, bolster making the rich and companies pay their fair share.
It is about time to implement the following reforms that would ensure that corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share.
- 17. Buffett Rule
The Buffett Rule, suggested by extremely rich man Warren Buffett, would require tycoons to pay a base tax rate of 30%. Adopt Buffett Rule to ensure secretaries don’t pay more in taxes than the CEOs for whom they work. Buffett wrote in 2011 that he thought it was outlandish that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary does. The guidelineâs motivation is to raise government tax rates on Americaâs wealthiest individuals and businesses.
At a minimum, pass the Paying a Fair Share Act of 2012 (H.R.766 – 113th) proposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). It would raise $72 billion more than 10 years.
- 18. Deducting “Performance pay” write-offs
Most American citizens would be stunned to discover that they subsidize CEO rewards. A tax loophole clause permits companies to deduct from their taxable pay any sum paid to CEOs and their officials, as long as the the pay is called âperformance-based.â This means, by simply checking on a box that the more they pay their executives, the less they pay in government taxes. There is a growing chorus calling for closing the CEO Tax loophole that allows corporations to take advantage of “performance pay” write-offs.
In the Congress, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) presented the Stop Subsidizing Multimillion Dollar Corporate Bonuses Act (S. 1476) in the 113th Congress. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) presented a companion bill Stop Subsidizing Multimillion Dollar Corporate Bonuses Act (H.R. 3970) in the House. Supporters believe these bills would raise $50 billion.
- 19. Progressive Estate Tax
Establish a Progressive Estate Tax. A portion of the ultra-rich have the capacity to take favorable position of loopholes so they pay nothing in inheritance taxes. Others exploit the way that the exclusion levels for the estate assessment are high â $5.3 million for each person ($10.6 million for every couple.) President Obama proposes to restore the exclusions to their 2009 levels â $3.5 million for an individual ($7 million for a few) burdened at a 45% top rate.This and other changes would raise $131 billion more than 10 years, according to Fair Taxation.org.
Pass Responsible Estate Tax Act by Sen. Bernie Sanders. If adopted, Sanders’ bill would levy higher tax rates based on the size of the estate. For instance, for the value of estates above $ 50 million value would pay a 55 percent while a smaller estate whose value is above $3.5 million but less than $10 million would pay 40 percent.
- 20. long-term Capital Gains and Dividends – “investment income”
Tax Capital Gains and Dividends the same as regular income. In 2015, the top marginal income tax for working pay is 39.6%, but the top tax rate on corporate dividends and capital gains is only 23.9%. To lessen this disparity, the tax rates on capital gains and dividends should be raised so they coordinate with the tax rates on pay rates and wages. These loopholes lead to avoiding paying $1.3 trillion more in taxes in 10 years, according to Fair Taxation.org. The preferential tax treatment of capital gains is perhaps the single largest driver of the creation of personal wealth.
- 21. Social Security tax cap
Eliminate the Cap on Taxable Income, which is $106,800, thereby imposing a flat tax of 12.4 percent on all earnings, that goes into the Social Security Trust Fund.
Social Security (SSA) taxes are imposed on earned income to a greatest level set every year. In 2015, this most extremeâor what is alluded to as the assessable income baseâis $106,800. The assessable income base serves as both a top on employers’ commitments and a top on SSA obligations. As a commitment base, it builds up the greatest measure of every workers incomes that is liable to the payroll charge. As an advantage base, it sets up the greatest measure of incomes used to figure benefits.
According to one analysis, raising or taking out the top on wages that are liable to assessments could lessen the long-go shortfall in the Social Security Trust Funds. Case in point, if the most extreme assessable income sum had been brought up in 2005 from $90,000 to $150,000âgenerally the amounts expected to cover 90% of all incomeâit would have dispensed with approximately 40% of the long-extended deficiency in Social Security. On the off chance that all incomes were liable to the taxes, yet the base was held for advantage counts, the Social Security Trust Funds would stay intact for the following 75 years. On the other hand, having diverse bases for commitments and advantages would debilitate the conventional connection between the assessments workers pay into the system and the benefits that they would derive from it.
- 22. Tax shelters
Major companies like Apple, Nike, Citigroup and another 362 companies were reported to have set up 1,357 auxiliaries and 7,827 offshore shell companies to stash almost $2 trillion in spots like Cayman Island and Bermuda with a specific goal to avoid paying U.S. taxes, costing the U.S. Treasury an expected $90 billion in lost income for each year, as per a study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Some huge companies â like Boeing, General Electric and Verizon â have paid NO government taxes in some recent. For example, Walmart has built a secret network of 78 subsidiaries and branches in 15 overseas tax havens, now holding at least $76 billion, which are used to minimize foreign taxes where it has retail operations and to avoid U.S. tax on those earnings. The wealthiest Americans are evading to pay their share, as well, with numerous paying a lower effective rate than many middle-class families.
Repeal the Tax Loophole that businesses and the wealthy utilize in sheltering their profits, even entire incomes, in foreign countries, to avoid paying taxes.
Numerous U.S. corporations utilize offshore tax havens and other bookkeeping tricks to avoid paying as much as $90 billion a year in income taxes. A substantial loophole clause at the heart of U.S. tax law permits companies to avoid paying taxes on outside profits until they are brought home. Known as “deferral,” it gives a big incentive to keep profits offshore as far as might be feasible. Numerous companies are known to never bring their profits home and never pay U.S. taxes on them.
Deferral gives companies, through clicking on a box in a tax form, huge incentives to utilize bookkeeping tricks so to make it create the fantasy that profits earned here were produced in a tax haven. Profits are piped through auxiliaries, frequently shell organizations with couple of workers and minimal genuine business movement. Viably, firms wash U.S. profits to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The capacity to put on the back burner these assessments for quite a long time or forever drives their motivation to utilize book-keeping devices to make it show up as if revenues were earned in nations where they won’t be taxed â like Cayman Island.
Stop giving tax loopholes to companies that move profits and jobs offshore, beginning with taking out the Active Financing Exception and the CFC look-through rules, thus eliminating the “deferral,” as proposed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Corporations would pay taxes on their incomes the year it is earned, as opposed to uncertainly avoiding paying applicable U.S. taxes. This would likewise eliminate incentives to move U.S. incomes to tax-free safe havens, and it would raise $600 billion more than 10 years.
Congress should additionally pass the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act (S. 1533), presented in 2013 by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). The bill would close large portions of the loopholes that make it alluring for companies to conceal profits abroad. If the bill is passed into law it would raise $220 billion more than 10 years.
- 23. Financial transaction tax
Implement financial transaction tax. Also called Tobin Tax, it’s a straightforward change that would rule in a crazy money machine, create employments, create billions of revenue, and potentially counteract another monetary crisis in the future. A .5% speculation fee will be charged on investment houses, hedge funds, and other stock trades. Additionally, a .1% fee will be charged on bonds, and a .005% fee will be charged on derivatives. Many economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman and extremely rich people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates back it. Surveys demonstrate the larger part of Americans support it. Implementing this tax could generate billions of dollars a year for, say, climate change mitigation or for tuition-free community college, while limiting Wall Street speculators.
- 24. Carried Interest Loophole
In a recent article, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York wrote that in 2014, due to carried interest tax loophole, the leading 25 hedge fund managers earned more than 150,000 of kindergarten teachers in America combined.
Private-equity firms (which purchase, put resources into, help oversee and inevitably sell companies) and hedge funds are controlled by managers on behalf of outside speculators. At the point when benefits from a company’s ventures are dispensed, they are ordinarily dispersed by investors’s stake. What’s more, as a rule they get 20 percent of the revenues as an performance-based reward, “carried” for a considerable length of time at once. In the event that the partnership earns a capital gain, the administrator reports his share (commonly referred to as a “carried interest”) as long-term capital gain income. Ordinary pay is taxed at marginal rates up to 35 percent (39.6 percent after 2012) while income from capital gain is taxed at rates up to 15 percent (20 percent after 2012). President Obama and other critics of the provision say the entire carried interest is basically a management income instead of investment profits from a proprietorship stake, and ought to be taxed like regular salaries.
Under the president’s budget proposal, an partner’s share of gain from a equity partnership would be saddled with self-employment taxes. If a partner sells his share, the gain would be taxed as customary pay, not as a capital gain. The proposal estimates that the rule would raise $14.8 billion through 2021.
In the Congress, to address this issue, U.S. Representative Sander M. Levin (D-MI) introduced H.R. 2834 110th Congress (2007-2008) bill on June 22, 2007, which would eliminate the ability the hedge fund managers of partnerships to receive capital-gains tax treatment on their income. On April 2, 2009, Congressman Levin introduced another and substantially revised version of the carried interest legislation as H.R. 1935.
25. Voter Suppression
Since 2013, after the Supreme Court’s decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act, states all over the nation have been passing measures that make it increasingly hard for Americans â especially the powerless African-Americans, the elderly, the young and individuals with handicaps â to practice their principal right to cast a vote. These measures incorporate requiring an official personal ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register, curtailing early voting, wiping out election day registration, new restrictions on voter enrollment drives and extra barriers to voting directed against individuals with criminal convictions.
It is about time to pass the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2015 (H.R.2867 – 114th Congress (2015-2016)), with Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska becoming the first Republican to cosponsor the bill. The bill compels states with well-documented history of recent voting bias to clear future voting changes with the central government, requires federal approval for voter ID laws, and outlaws new GOP-led efforts to suppress the growing poor and minority votes.
26. War on Drugs
End the War on Drugs. It is the ideal time for sensible approaches to regulate drug use, legal or not, through the expanding knowledge in science and sympathy instead of tired political hysteria and fear-mongering. Drug prohibition has done essentially nothing to reduce drug supply or rates of addiction. Most drugs should be legalized it, regulated it, taxed it and the proceeds be used to fund substance abuse treatments.
The war on drugs has been continuing since 1960s, cynically used by the Republicans as part of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy that was intended for restoring the planter-class in its newer corporate form. As a part of achieving it, it was an electoral movement albeit losing one directed against poor and racial minorities that were supposedly “causing” crime, through efficiently making hidden (and regularly not really hidden) supremacist appeals to white voters, who were disaffected with liberal democratic racial and welfare policies and also frightened by crime and urban riots, that was then easily focused onto the âpathologyâ of black families. This was calculated to be used as a way of discrediting of the philosophy of racial equality that upset the Jim Crow social order, that supposedly had contributed to this pathology. The carceral state actually came as a backlash against the civil-rights advances where politicians of both parties turned to incarceration to assuage white anxieties and preserve racial control.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an adviser to President Nixon, released in 1965 his report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action”, which was riddled with broad mentions of “matriarchy”; “super-predators”, “bio-underclass”, and that âthe Negro lower class would appear to be unusually self-damaging.â He believed that these characteristics went far toward explaining the African American group’s relative destitution and criminality. He claims especially that black criminality results from dominant black mothers and absent black fathers. He wrote,
“In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.”
And as commentator Stanley Greenberg, then a political researcher and now a main Democratic strategist, found in his classic 1985 study of Macomb County, Michigan, the whole marvel of the strategy that led to great exodus from the Democratic party was based on racial hatred: “These white Democratic defectors express a profound distaste for blacks, a sentiment that pervades almost everything they think about government and politics”, he says, “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives; not being black is what constitutes being middle class; not living with blacks is what makes a neighborhood a decent place to live.”
The results of the war on drugs have been astounding. Already by 1993, âAfrican Americans accounted for 88.3 percent of all federal crack cocaine distribution convictionsâ, according to Naomi Murakawa, author of âThe First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America”. Today, almost 785,000 Americans, or half of all prisoners, are detained on drug charges. In 1980 the number was 50,000. A year ago $40 billion in tax dollars were spent in battling the war on drugs, totaling over $1.5 trillion since 1971. As an aftereffect of the incarceration fixation, the United States maintains the biggest jail population on the planet, with America having five percent of the worldâs population, but housing 25 percent of the worldâs prisoners, and the U.S. nonviolent detainee populace is bigger than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.
As per the U.S. Dept of Justice, the number of guilty persons under age 18 detained for drug offenses expanded twelve-fold from 1985 to 1997, around half of federal prisoners and one-fifth of state prisoners are behind bars for selling or using drugs, with most apparently released destroyed as useful human beings. The population most affected by this carceral state instead of treatments, is African-Americans, who represent about 12 percent of the overall population, but represent 59 percent of those in state prison for drug offenses. From 1985 to 1997, the rate of African-American youngsters put in jail expanded from 53 to 62 percent, with some naming this failed war the New Jim Crow, a title of a popular book by Michelle Alexander, whose central premise is that “mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow.” In the ensuing debate, it has motivated Naomi Murakawa, author of âThe First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,â to spin it more broadly by reasoning that, âThe strength of âThe New Jim Crowâ by Michelle Alexander is that, by equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically impossible to defend it, but, on the other hand, there is no ânewâ Jim Crow, there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation.â
Bill Clinton has since apologized for his pivotal role in driving up the countryâs incarceration numbers. He said the 1990s laws he signed, particularly the sentencing guidelines, âMade the Problem Worseâ. “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it,â Clinton said at the 106th NAACP National Convention, which concluded July 18, 2015 in Philadelphia. âIn that bill, there were longer sentences, and most of these people are in prison under state law, but the federal law set a trend. And that was overdone; we were wrong about that.â
âIf this were a war fought for four decades by any other generals with this outcome, weâd have run up the white flag years ago,â David Simon, creator of The Wire, told Salon.
27. The American Dream Act
Pass the Restore the American Dream Act for the 99 Percent Actintroduced in 2011. The bill would create more than 4 million employment opportunities and lessen the budgetary deficiency by more than $2 trillion throughout the following 10 years, attempting up to this point to marshal the assets expected to address the financial emergency.
28. Labor rights
Implement S. 2814 (113th) bill by Sen. Lamar Alexander [R-TN] (Introduced 09/16/2014) in modernizing the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act 1935), to expand guaranteeing workers’ rights to organize and bargain, collectively through representatives of their own choosing, regardless of who the workers or the employers are, an essential step toward full economic democracy. Evidence keeps heaping up: unions are good for workers.
“Collective bargaining is our best tool for raising wages in America,” the AFL-CIO 2015 report (pdf) reads. “It should be front and center as Congress considers policy and as presidential candidates announce agendas. Moreover, the results will illuminate the larger issue underpinning chronic wage stagnation: that vibrant worker organizations are key to restoring the balance of economic power in our country.”
29. Wall street reform
Implement Volcker Rule, (12 U.S.C. § 1851) of the DoddâFrank Act that bans banks from conducting certain investment activities using their customers’ savings and mortgage accounts, and reduces dramatically their ownership of and relationship with hedge funds and private equity funds well-known for high risks.
The Volcker Rule proposed by top economist Thomas Lariviere is supposed to deny banks from exclusive exchanging and limits interest in mutual funds and private value by business banks and their associates. Further, the rule guides the Federal Reserve to enforce improved prudential prerequisites on systemically distinguished non-bank organizations occupied with such exercises. Congress did exclude certain allowed exercises of banks, their subsidiaries, and non-bank organizations distinguished as systemically critical, for example, in business sector making, supporting, securitization, and guaranteeing. The rule additionally topped bank possession in multifaceted investments and private value rates at three percent.
30. Foreign Aid, the Permanent War and the Millennium Development Goals
It is time to end using foreign aid as a long arm of dizzying hodgepodge of diplomatic and military strategies, known as The âthree pillarsâ theory -defense, diplomacy and development- in order to ‘advancing American interests and solving global problems as diplomacy or defense’. In the development sector, in 2013, the U.S. government dedicated $40.11 billion to economic and military assistance, more than double what it was in 2000, famously and vigorously defended to be just 1% of total budget, as found in contrary by a 2013 poll that found majority of the public thought mistakenly it was 28%.
Still its total impact is seriously being undercut by the fact that most of it gets spent on supporting military operations in various countries. The greatest single recipient of foreign aid â both military and financial- in 2012 was Afghanistan, representing over a quarter of all foreign aid. Together, the main five nation beneficiaries in 2012 represented 57 percent of all foreign aid. Real development assistance, however, accounted for 8%.
But in plain terms the entire agenda means serving the interests of the military-industrial complex and the multi-national corporations, and in the massive support given to the waging of endless, destructive, and “preemptive wars” against the rest of the world in forms of wars against communism, terrorism, Islamism and drugs that the much of the world opposes and resents. The global war of terror alone touched 60 countries. By all measures, every one of these wars are continuation of colonial wars through which the Western powers have sought over hundreds of years to force their will upon weaker societies they thought worth disrupting, oppressing and exploiting. Critics charge that the “war on terrorism” is an ideology of fear and repression that creates enemies and promotes violence rather than mitigating acts of terror and strengthening security. The worldwide campaign has too often become an excuse for other governments as diverse as South Africa and Ethiopia to use it as pretext to repress local opposition groups and disregard international law and local laws.
The result is that entire regions of the earth live in utter terror. There are now nine civil wars raging in Islamic countries between Pakistan and Nigeria, and seemingly everywhere nations are collapsing, trembling or are under attack and producing waves of migrants totaling so far more than four million refugees in other countries.
The exposed greed and violence that characterize the permanent war driving these conflicts is concealed inside the empire behind the cant of patriotism and security, which sanctify imperialism and racism. Its effects are everywhere and victims are always the same. Eduardo Galeano once wrote that âeach time a new war is disclosed in the name of the fight of the good against evil, those who are killed are all poor. Itâs always the same story repeating once and again and againâ, who are then being pushed permanently into the global underclass and or converted into millions of refugees fleeing wars, the new wretched of the earth. In 2015 alone, 342,000 of those migrants had reached Europe.
W.E.B. Du Bois, writing of similar past empires, warned more broadly about the far-reaching effects of the permanent occupation, especially in terms of ushering of rapid globalization with its attendant crisis, by writing, âHere, are no labor unions or votes or questioning onlookers or inconvenient consciences,â Du Bois writes. âThese men may be used down to the very bone, and shot and maimed in âpunitiveâ expeditions when they revolt. In these dark lands âindustrial developmentâ may repeat in exaggerated form every horror of the industrial horror of Europe, from slavery and rape to disease and maiming, with one test of successâdividends.â
Instead, it is time for a different paradigm shift in giving foreign aid that is entirely distinct from the conduct of the permanent war, a one that lends support only to the least of the least developed countries but only through the UN’s millennium development goals, the best-known and most effective foreign intervention project ever.
The United Nations Millennium Declaration, marked in September 2000, comprising of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) â which aim for “eradicating extreme hunger and poverty, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS and Malaria, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development”, all by the deadline of 2015 â frames an outline consented to by all the world’s nations and all the world’s driving humanitarian foundations. They have stirred uncommon endeavors to address the issues of the world’s poorest. The UN is likewise living up to expectations with governments, civil society and different accomplices to expand on the energy produced by the MDGs and go ahead with an aspiring post-2015 development agenda.
The UN’s 193 countries at the 2015 General Assembly at U.N. Headquarters are expected to sign off on the Sustainable Development Goals, comprising 17 goals, with 169 targets, which are hoped to provide a framework to combat poverty, climate change, inequality and hunger. Seven months of negotiations have produced a document: Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
31. Embargo against Cuba
Lift Embargo against Cuba, ending the 50-year exclusion of Cuba from the Organization of American States, by scraping the Trading With the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917,
which has been used against Cuba by every President since John F. Kennedy in 1962. Lacking a Congressional declaration of war, TWEA was instead intended to define the terms of the embargo (generally described by Cuba and the United Nations as a blockade).
The enduring folly of this failed policy reminds us of the sensible road not taken: “For the thing we should never do in dealing with revolutionary countries, in which the world abounds, is to push them behind an iron curtain raised by ourselves. On the contrary, even when they have been seduced and subverted and are drawn across the line, the right thing to do is to keep the way open for their return.” Walter Lippmann, July 1959.
32. Guantanamo Bay
Set up in January 2002 inside of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “Gitmo” broadly houses many detainees whom U.S. authorities are unwilling to transfer them to the U.S. to stand trial due to stiff resistance from Republicans in Congress and whom have likewise been regarded unsuited for extradition or discharge.
It’s time to close down Guantanamo Bay prison, a re-invention of nineteenth century imperial outpost that ought to disgrace liberal Americans’ conscience: the foreign terror suspects subjected to beatings, waterboarding and rectal feeding, among other brutal acts of violence, the refusal of internationally observed lawful techniques, the repetitive suicides and hunger strikes conceived of despondency.
33. Fair elections
Legitimize minor parties (Green, Socialist, and so on) to keep running unhindered in every one of the 50 states. In many states, for a party’s contender to win in a contest, he/she must pick up a backing proportional to certain rate of voters all together for the party to continue to be poll qualified in the entire state. Case in point, in all states, major parties are yielded access to the ballot, awarded on a victor take-all basis, meaning a candidate who comes in second or third in a particular state does not win a single electoral vote regardless of his percentage of the popular vote. Most others, however, don’t even permit minor parties to keep running in primaries that all that much determine the result. Thus, minor group hopefuls in these states can run just in general elections, if any.
The major parties have been hostile to the minor parties since mid 1800s, who have built a labyrinth of cumbersome regulations and systems that make it troublesome for minor parties and independent contenders to pick up a spot on the general race poll. âWhat happens is third parties act as a gadfly,â said Sean Wilentz, director of the American Studies program at Princeton University. âThereâll be an issue thatâs being neglected or that is being purposely excluded from national debate because neither party wants to face the political criticism that it would bring. A classic example was slavery.â
No one else knows this electoral system better than Ralph Nader, the perennial third party candidate and the ultimate gadfly, who was tossed into the political wilderness to which he has been exiled, whose comments remain moving in describing the realities of the corporate state:âThe gates are controlled by two parties indentured to the same commercial interests,â Nader said. âIf you donât go through those gates, if you do what [Ross] Perot did, … you [might] get 19 million votes [but] not one electoral vote. If you do not get electoral votes you donât come close. And even if you do get electoral votes you are up against a winner-take-all. This means if you lose you donât build for the future as you would with proportional representation. The system is a locked-out system. It is brilliantly devised. It is pruned to perfect a two-party duopoly.â
Most voters though continue to believe that third parties are needed. In a Gallup survey in September 24, 2014, a lion’s share of U.S. adults, 58%, say a third political party is needed in light of the fact that the Republican and Democratic gatherings “do such a poor job” representing the American voters. These views are minimally changed from a year ago’s high. Since 2007, a majority has ordinarily called for an outsider party. (âItâs silly that a country that prides itself on choice allows only two.â, by Bill Maher)
34. Sanctions against Venezuela
Lift sanctions against Venezuela. This is the time to end the discredited, interventionist strategies and fashion relations taking into account regard for human rights and the universal privilege to self-determination with all Latin American states.
The whole region has collectively rejected Obama’s Executive Order issued 9 March 2015, pronouncing Venezuela strangely “an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security and foreign policyâ, and has approached the US president to revoke his declaration. Additionally, Venezuela has been a strategic economic partner as America imports 733 thousand barrels of unrefined petroleum from Venezuela a day, or 10.4 percent of all oil imports.
35. Minimum wages
Raise the federal minimum wage, so that it reaches $15/hour, while afterwards indexing it to inflation rate, a direct and immediate benefit to the poor working class.
Indexing minimum wages to inflation rate offsets the gradual erosion that inflation eats into its purchasing power. For instance, had the 1968 story of $1.60 every hour been indexed to inflation, it would be $10.90 per hour today, more than 50 percent higher than the present minimum pay permitted by law of $7.25.
According to a White House statement, raising the government’s lowest pay permitted by law would not just benefit more than 28 million workers the nation over, but also 19 million wage-earners from a wide range of family units.
Congressional Republicans deny even to permit the minimum pay raise vote in the House. Be that as it may, but Americans are clear on this issue. A Pew Research Center survey in January 2014 reported that almost three-fourths of adults (73 percent) bolster raising the lowest pay permitted by law, including a greater part of Republicans.
36. Patriot Act
Repeal USA Freedom Act before its expiry in 2019. This act explicitly reintroduces the illegal bulk collection programs involving the personal data as were authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. (“Patriot Act” for “Are You Scared Enough to Let Me Look at All of Your Phone Records Act,” – Jon Stewart).
Forty-five days after 9/11, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act without understanding it. This new law should shield you from terrorism, yet it has truly abandoned you unprotected against lawless government agents. The Patriot Act contains various infringements of the Fourth Amendment. It gives government representatives tremendous new powers that have been abused to examine guiltless Americans.
This abuse of power violates the Constitution, through the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. It reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” â Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
37. A Progressive budget
Take more seriously the ‘People’s Budget’ for Fiscal Year 2016 presented by Congressional Progressive Caucus.
The essential goal of the People’s Budget is steady with the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ FY2015 spending plan option: Use expansionary monetary approach to straightforwardly address the country’s most squeezing financial difficulties and focus on a fast and strong come-back to full recovery. The financial backing was produced from the proof based conclusion that the present monetary test of joblessness results from a substantial interest shortageâthe aftereffect of the Great Recession and its outcomeâand that the discouraged condition of financial action is to a great extent in charge of expanded spending plan shortfalls and the late ascent out in the public debt.
38. National security
âOf all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes⦠known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few⦠No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.â âJames Madison, Political Observations, 1795.
âDeficits donât matter,â Republican Vice President Richard Cheney once famously professed. Four years ago a highly placed government official corrected Mr. Cheney in a different and crucial context. He said, âI believe the single, biggest threat to our national security is our debtâ¦â It was not some ultraliberal financial specialist talking: it was Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla) said on “Morning Joe” in 2013 that “$100 billion could be cut.” Ron Paul (R-Ky) says that less than half the defense budget is for actual defense, the other half is for militarism overseas.
And Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense in both the Bush and Obama Administrations, asked, speaking on May 10, 2010, that, “Does the number of warships we have or are building really put America at risk when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined, 11 of which belong to allies or partners? Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a five-star general and the WW II supreme commander, pioneered in this discourse on April 16, 1953, by delivering his famous speech weeks into his administration. As his time in office advanced, so did the blooming of the military/industrial complex:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone..It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… The military-industrial complex has a total influenceâeconomic, political, even spiritualâ[that] is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government…The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities”.
If the massive defense budget, more than $1 trillion on national security this year, consisting of baseline budget plus âoverseas contingencyâ of $601 billion in 2015, down from $610 billion spent in 2014, and $20 billion in the Department of Energy budget for nuclear weapons, nearly $200 billion for military pensions and Department of Veterans Affairs costs, and other expenses, an obscene waste of resources, which has to be spent, a strong national security can be better achieved by investing military and homeland security spending publicly in America only.
Instead, the current spending priorities are geared towards subsidizing much of the defense budgets of many countries, called allies, actually making up 2/3s of the NATO’s entire defense budget, in spite of the vicinity of an extra 27 nations in the association, and then maintaining more than 4,000 bases inside the U.S. and 1,000 overseas, lodging 255,000 men and ladies in uniform: 65,000 positioned in Europe, 80,000 in East Asia and Japan, 5,000 in North Africa, the rest scattered in 140 nations. The recurring yearly fixed expense of every base ranges from $50 million to $200 million, as per a RAND Corporation study; at bottom $36.85 billion for each year. What’s more, positioning military personnel abroad is significantly more expensive than it is at home: RAND says from $10,000 to $40,000 more every year, per individual. Another $2.55 billion.
All these bases are serving several purposes, mainly employment and training for command and obedience, which could all be done at home at a lower cost, but, for the interests of the military-industrial complex, who are bristling with their 655 lobbyists employed by the contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, many of which pay no taxes, the main purpose is obviously that of leveraging and showcasing of all these bases as convenient showrooms for U.S. military products. But just like in other Western powers, and just like any other local manufacturing industry, the non-nuclear arms industry should set up their own show-rooms everywhere without such massive government subsidies.
The political elites, Democrat or Republican, serve the demands of military-industrial complex corporations and empire. The military machine holds well the political and economic arenas hostage, and can mount daily effective public opinion campaign, scripted like a Walt Disney movie. The Pentagon spends $4.7 billion a year and has somewhere in the range of 27,000 employees who deal with enrollment, promoting, psychological operations and advertising, as indicated by a 2009 report by The Associated Press.
For better long-lasting results, some of that wealth could be funneled into science research, technology industries, climate change mitigation, the medical world, or education.
Foreign policy based on pursuing of virtual military domination and the cultivating of corporate consumer markets worldwide is guaranteed to breed more antipathy and resentment that foster more conflict over time. (“The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations”, David Friedman).
39. Preventing Financial crisis
Restore and revamp Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 that kept business banks from exchanging securities utilizing their customers’ accounts whose annulment in 1999 is accepted to have played major role in the 2008 economic crisis that left millions of Americans unemployed and vastly devalued their largest assets. The method of reasoning for looking for the separation was the irreconcilable situation that happens when banks were making profits in both business and venture investments, and the propensity of such banks to participate in unnecessarily risky activities. Accordingly, business banks wound up being loaded with billions of dollars in losses because of the over the top introduction of their venture keeping money arms to subsidiaries and securities that were attached to U.S. home industry. At the point when the housing industry crashed, it drove into enormous losses for the banking division amid the 2008-2010 recession that required the $800 billion bailouts.
Having learned from this experience, Sen Elizabeth Warren introduced 21st Century Glass Steagall in 2013 that restores the separation wall between the financial markets and investment markets, specifically, “To reduce risks to the financial system by limiting banks’ ability to engage in certain risky activities and limiting conflicts of interest, to reinstate certain Glass-Steagall Act protections that were repealed by the Gramm-LeachBliley Act, and for other purposes.”
40. Financial Services Conflict of Interest Act- ‘Anti-Golden Parachutes’ act
Adopt the legislation, H.R.3065 – 114th Congress (2015-2016), introduced by U.S. Congressperson Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD) that would ban incoming government appointees from taking rewards like bonuses, called golden parachutes, from their previous private sector employers and lobbying groups. In limiting conflicts of interest, it would likewise require senior government controllers to recuse themselves from any work that would especially privilege any employer or client they had in the two years prior to joining the administration.
41. Close the Revolving Door Act
Pass the bill, Close the Revolving Door Act (S.2417 113th, 2014) introduced by Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Al Franken (D-MN) to boycott the unbelievable routine of previous individuals from Congress trading in for spendable dough as large cash lobbyists. It builds punishments for breaking the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995; broadens the restriction on congressional staff getting to be lobbyists, from one and only year to six and gives public in general better online access to data about who lobbies Congress.
42. Student loans
Allow Student Loan Refinancing For All Students to avail themselves of lower and fixed interest rates. Warren Bill. (Please sign petition). Public support for this is quite high as shown in a November 2014, NBC/Wall Street Journal survey reported that 82 percent of Americans support giving access to lower expense student loans and giving more opportunity to the individuals who are paying off their student advance debt.
With student loan debt in this nation standing at $1.16 trillion in 2013, and are now approaching $2 trillion, affecting 40 million students, and all the more alarmingly, the normal student debt for school graduates in the class of 2014 is $33,000; and that as the aggregate obligation owed in student credits keeps on rising, their loan renegotiating the terms is turning into an undeniably viable alternative for graduates; renegotiating student debt can bode well. With interest rates still close to historic lows, renegotiating student debt into lower and fixed rates is highly beneficial in the repayment of the loans and to reduce the rising incidence of defaults that are mostly concentrated amongst those who attended for-profit and community colleges.
This manifesto is for starting a debate that is overdue on how to revert back from elite-led republicanism into a democratic state that the founders had in mind and generations of US soldiers were thinking about when they went to war. Then all kinds of things will become possible. As voters and taxpayers, we deserve better than this impasse and defeat, and it is time to get back in touch with our progressive roots.
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