We Are The
99%: The Focus of Our Rage
I
have given a lot of thought and engaged in plenty of research
regarding the plight of “the 99%” of America's population, and
what should and should not be done to bring the top 1% in line with
the rest of us. Having
written two books about this topic, I will now attempt to spell
out the basics of what we want, and why we 99%-'ers are undertaking
the various “Occupy” protests that are springing up all over the
world. We all want basically the same things. We want all the
legalized bribery out of politics. This can be accomplished by strict
regulation of the lobbyist profession at the very least, but most
likely we should consider outlawing the lobbyist profession as it
currently operates. If Washington won't do it then “we the people”
will have to do it for them. We can accomplish this by, among other
things, “occupying” K Street and the offices of the lobbyists, or
by laying siege to their offices through human barricades (nobody
comes and nobody goes), or other forms of nonviolent protest. Either
take the rampant corruption out of our nation's politics and fully
prosecute those responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown on Wall
Street and for creating the housing bubble just before they
intentionally popped it, or else we may well be destroyed by Wall
Street and their armies of lobbyists, shady co-conspirators and other
henchmen, starting with the Federal Reserve and working our way down
from there.
From
my vantage point, and based on my own experiences, the least common
denominator to everything that we are protesting, marching and
occupying for can be boiled down to 2 things: the rights of workers
and independent contractors, and the right to economic equality
including the peaceful restoration of the American middle class to
its former economic and social position in American society. Allow me
to use the next few pages to explain exactly how we can go about
accomplishing these goals in a manner that is legal, peaceful and
orderly so we can set a good example for our nation's kids and
grand-kids. One very good way that we could go about accomplishing
this is to emulate the peaceful and nonviolent tactics of Rev. Dr.
King, Jr. that were utilized during the civil rights marches and
protests of the 1950's and 1960's. In so doing, history will be on
our side and victory against the top 1% will ultimately be ours.
Let
me add one more thing before I get into this. You will notice as you
read the rest of this essay/op-ed that there are a lot of ideas in
here about how to restore America and its middle class, and how to
re-balance the distribution of wealth in a peaceful and orderly
manner for the mutual betterment of everyone. These ideas I am about
to share are simple and practical solutions to some huge problems
that America faces. You will also notice that these ideas can be
easily implemented using our existing governmental framework and
technology. It won't be necessary to reinvent the wheel in order for
America's people to accomplish their goals for the perfection of our
society, starting with a rescue of the poor and middle class.
The
first and foremost issue of what we 99%-'ers want should be the
rights of all workers and independent contractors. We want a $12.00
per hour minimum wage combined with the abolition of the federal
income tax and an end to the withholding of US income tax from our
paychecks. This would give everyone who makes less than $108.000.00
per year a pay raise amounting to an average of 20% immediately,
pumping billions of fresh dollars into the US economy that generates
many millions in new tax revenue without raising any existing taxes.
Full employment should become the new standard of the world, and that
standard should be set by the USA.
The
second issue I wish to mention is the right to higher education
and/or vocational retraining at will and at nominal cost. This is
what we should do for all the long-term unemployed, all the homeless
who are healthy enough to work, all unemployed veterans, and for all
newly released prisoners who are re-entering society. This is how we
can end homelessness for good; simply give these people a trade.
Every human being on the face of the earth has the unconditional
right to a livelihood and to a living wage. Those unable to find
work, or who are having difficulty locating suitable work, and those
needing to learn new job skills in order to be self-sufficient have
the basic human right to professional retraining without cost. Let
our colleges and universities remain as they are, but let our public
institutions of higher education consider becoming nonprofits so
that higher education is unconditionally accessible to everyone. The
days of exclusively for-profit educational institutions must come to
an end, because I am convinced that it is immoral and mean-spirited
to prevent another human being from being able to sustain themselves
because some CEO or policy wonk somewhere thinks that retraining
America's workers would be “too expensive”, as if they are not
worth the trouble. The best part about this as far as I am concerned
is that America can easily afford this, and I will use the war in
Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan as an illustration.
If
the US government took all the money spent in one single day on the
illegal occupation of Afghanistan and put it into a basic savings
account, there would be enough money to put every school kid in
America through 4 years of college fully paid for, including tuition,
books, dorms, food, transportation and Internet access, plus a new
desktop or laptop computer. Let me give you another example. If the
US government took all the money spent in one single day on the war
in Afghanistan and put it into a savings account, there would be
enough money to put every homeless person or family in America –
all 2 million of them as of 2012 – into a new 3,000 square foot
home fully paid for, fully furnished, with the utilities turned on
including Internet access (which the UN declared to be a basic human
right as of 2011), and stocked with a years worth of groceries. This
is what converting to a peacetime economy can do for America. And all
on one day's military expenditures. Then, send them back to school to
teach them new trades so they can keep those houses forever.
There
is one more important thing that I have yet to mention. The world is
changing and developing so rapidly as scientific and technological
advances are made that the job market has become very dynamic. As you
know, the pace of this advancement is accelerating, resulting in
different types of jobs coming and going rapidly in order to meet an
ever-changing demand. Higher education, the US public school system
and for-profit vocational schools will most definitely have to adjust
their curriculum accordingly. You have probably noticed that some
very traditional jobs are disappearing. Just ask anybody who used to
be in the travel industry, or direct sales, or a factory worker, or a
former computer repairman like I was for 23 years. When I went back
and tried to get retraining I was told that my credit rating was not
good enough to qualify for a student loan. Many of the courses
taught in various vocational schools cost tens of thousands of
dollars, and I was broke at the time (come to think about it, I still
am, but I digress). So, I found myself shut out from any chance at
changing careers. As I began to research this I found that it is
actually quite commonplace in today's dreary job market. Instead of
going back to work like I wanted, I was forced into early retirement,
and forced to depend on a government that I despise for my
sustenance. I would much rather be self-sufficient, but never mind
that. My government has already decided to throw me away because I'm
allegedly too old (I'm in my mid-50's as I write this), and therefore
too expensive to keep around. Therefore I insist that this practice
must come to an end, that higher education should be free for
everybody, and that higher education is a basic human right. The days
of a college education or vocational retraining being only for those
who can afford the tuition (or who “qualify” for predatory and
unethical student loans) must come to an end. Do you want to have a
better educated country? Fine! Let everybody who wants to get
educated – or reeducated – go back to school, and let the
government and corporate America foot the bill. The funds are
definitely available, as I wrote above.
Of
course, I can hear my critics laughing already. Where, they will say,
do we get the money to fund re-educating the whole country? We're
running a $14 trillion deficit as it is! You know what? You're
absolutely right, we do have a seemingly insurmountable federal
deficit. How do we tackle both problems together? By creating new
taxpayers who have found new careers and gotten their incomes
restarted, and there is ample precedent for this very thing. At the
end of World War 2, there were about 600,000 former GI's who had just
returned from the European and Pacific theaters in the wars against
Germany and Japan. Many of them didn't have any marketable job
skills, so Congress passed the GI Bill and put all those soldiers
through 4 years of college. It paid off handsomely, paving the way
for the record economic expansion of the 1960's. Well, if they could
do that in the 1940's, why can't they do it in 2013? The answer is
that the system most certainly can, and we of the Occupy and 99%
Movements must count reeducation as one of the things that we occupy
and protest for. Either employ us or retrain us, and we're not
leaving until we get what we want.
One
final thing about the basic right to higher education. According to
data I obtained from the US Department of Labor, and some additional
information I obtained from “CareerBuilder.com”, the average
student graduate from college today will have to change careers
anywhere from 5 to 8 times during the course of their lifetime of
employment. So, by today's standards, and assuming career changes
involve getting 2-year degrees, somebody going back to school a total
of 8 times multiplied by the average cost of obtaining each of those
degrees – roughly $30,000.00 times as much as eight – could be as
much as a quarter of a million dollars, plus interest. Do our
colleges and universities seriously believe that people will be
willing to go into that much debt from student loans in their
lifetimes, just so they can remain employable? How ridiculous! The
cost of tuition for higher education in the early 21st
century has reached a level that is so unreasonable that getting a
degree has become financially out of reach for all but the top few
percent. Excluding the overwhelming majority of all others for purely
financial reasons is a social injustice and a human rights violation
if there ever was one. We must start demanding our right to higher
education as part of our goals. And so we will continue to “occupy”
and protest peacefully until we get what we want. We are the 99%!
The
third fundamental human right that I want to write about is to be
free from poverty and hunger, with an equal chance at prosperity, in
a clean and peaceful environment. How do we do all that? We clean up
the environment that we already have, and for that you will need lots
of people. That brings me to the topic of a huge public works program
that this country urgently needs, and this is part of the solution
that I see. Therefore, this is indeed another basic human right. This
is something that should already have been done at the Presidential
level, but unfortunately it is not as of yet. We need massive
protests and demonstrations, and a major effort through the social
media to get this passed into law. My proposed solution is that all
the long-term unemployed people plus all the others I mentioned above
be put to work in this new series of public works projects. Some will
be doing environmental cleanup, others will assist with bridge and
highway repairs, and still others will be repairing sewers and
sidewalks. The homeless will be put to work revitalizing abandoned
homes left over from the “great foreclosure robbery” (as I called
it in my
first book). When they are finished with the first home, they can
go live in it as they begin repairs on others. We do have the
capacity to have full employment at a living wage, and to end
homelessness while ending the foreclosure crisis. This is one way to
accomplish just that. I encourage anyone having additional ideas to
publish them as I have, and the more input the better. And what about
all the households where both parents work, or single-parent
households? Who is going to watch all those kids? I think we should
have on-site daycare available for everybody free of charge. It would
be yet another way to create jobs with a starting wage of $12.00 an
hour, income tax free.
The
fourth fundamental human right, and another way to articulate what we
want, is to address the problem of health insurance and its
ridiculous cost, pricing 54 million Americans out of the health
insurance market and forcing many of us to rely on the local
emergency room for medical treatment. It is a fact that every
developed country in the world has national health insurance except
for the United States. From Europe to Canada to Japan, getting sick
is never a problem unless the illness is terminal. Not so in the USA,
where health care is on a for-profit basis, and we are the only
country in the developed world where this is so. We have the highest
cost for health care and the most expensive prescription drugs of any
country in the world by far. In other words, good health care in this
country is only for those who can afford it. The rest of us are left
stranded on the side of the road to health and wellness and without
remedy, eventually to die, and well before our time. Speaking as an
Internet pastor, I find
the idea of denying healthcare to nearly a fourth of the US
population (about half of whom are children) just because they can't
pay for it to be immoral, unjustifiable, and utterly barbaric.
So
what is the solution to this pressing problem? One thing is for sure,
every human being on the face of the earth has the unconditional
right to good health care. It's as basic as access to clean water
(another area where mankind has some work to do). I strongly maintain
that it should be a crime for any patient to die because they lacked
access to treatment due to having no money or health insurance. There
is simply no excuse for that to be happening in the richest country
in the world, and I for one am ashamed that it is occurring, and I
doubt that I am the only one who has this opinion. Also, people with
preexisting conditions or who are beset with a catastrophic illness
should always have unconditional access to health care. One possible
way to do this would be to change the health care industry in the US
from for-profit entities to nonprofits.
Anyone
seeking treatment for substance abuse or mental illness, or who are
in need of any organ transplants, or kidney dialysis, cancer
treatment, or any other serious illness requiring constant monitoring
or ongoing therapy, must be able to get treatment without financial
qualification. This is not a privilege of the well off, it is a basic
human right. It is pointless and very expensive to prosecute and
incarcerate nonviolent drug users. They don't need jail, they need
treatment.
The
question remains then: How do we get caught up with the rest of the
developed world when it comes to universal health care? Also, how do
we do this within the framework of the existing US health care
system(s) in order to conserve on start-up costs and minimize
overhead? The plan I propose is simple: Take all currently available
medical care in all its forms and put it under one umbrella, so to
speak. Merge private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, government health
insurance for civilian employees at the state and federal levels, the
military and Congress' (including the President's) healthcare plans,
plus the entire Veterans Administration hospital system into one
single-payer system so that no one is left out. Next, streamline the
new universal single-payer health care system by eliminating all the
duplicate departments, and by making it an online, Internet-based and
paperless system utilizing leading edge information technology in
order to lower operating costs and cut way down on paperwork. And
third, once this new online system gets rolled out and becomes
available to everyone, we'll simply eliminate Medicaid – by putting
everybody in the entire country on Medicare, and all persons will
have unconditional access to the same level of care, from the
President down to the dishwasher at your favorite restaurant. And
now, before I move on, let me point out another equally big advantage
to having a universal healthcare system such as this.
Having
the government take over the administration of healthcare for the
entire country is a solution that is long overdue. Don't worry about
what might happen to the existing insurance industry, it isn't going
anywhere and I will explain why in the next paragraph. Allowing a
hypothetical universal healthcare system to work in this manner (and
so-called Obamacare comes up way short) would take the burden of
providing health insurance for its employees off the backs of
businesses, substantially enhancing the profit margins of all US
companies both great and small. This will give the American economy –
together with US businesses – a far greater financial shot in the
arm than any government tax cut could ever hope to. In the process,
making US medical care into a series of nonprofit entities will bring
American health and wellness up to 21st century speed with
comparatively nominal operating costs.
So
what happens to the existing insurance industry? These very companies
will be the ones who will administer this new digitized healthcare
system. They will do so by way of a competitive bidding process to
ensure that costs are kept under control, effectively farming out the
day-to-day operations of the healthcare program. The companies with
the lowest bids will get the contracts, which will be brought up for
renewal periodically – say, every 5 years. Running the new
universal healthcare system this way will ensure that only the best
insurance companies will be administering the program, and that the
marginal or substandard insurance companies be ultimately either
forced to improve or go out of business.
The
fourth and final main thing I want to write a couple of paragraphs
about is that of economic inequality, or what I call in my
first book “enforced inequality”. Class warfare has been
declared by the top 1% against the rest of us, meaning the 99% who
are losing our jobs, our homes, our cars, our savings and eventually
our health as the enforced liquidation of the US middle and working
classes continues. What is needed is a peaceful and orderly
redistribution of wealth that is done in a non-violent manner. So how
do we accomplish this? I have a couple of ideas, but the first step
for America would be to enact an all-new tax system, abolishing the
federal income tax and replacing it with a national sales tax. This
proposed new tax system will be a 2-tiered system, with the national
sales tax – or consumption tax – set at 9% (excluding groceries,
fuel, utilities, wholesale goods, raw materials, and all government
entities). Why 9%, you ask? Well, according to some data that I
obtained from the IRS, as well as from the alternative media, the
average personal income tax rate in 2011 was roughly 18%, so I am
proposing cutting that rate in half. The second tier of this proposed
new tax system will be what I call an “excess wealth tax” for the
mega-rich, and for any financial transactions that are over a certain
limit. For individuals, there is no income tax on the first $1
million, but anything above that gets taxed at a rate of 50%. So, a
wealthy household or individual who made $25 million last year would
pay no tax on the first $1 million, but they would pay $12 million on
the remaining $24 million. For businesses, the proposed consumption
tax rate is noticeably more generous, with the first $700 million tax
free, and a tax rate of one-third on anything over and above that.
So, a company that made $1 billion dollars the previous year would
pay no tax on the first $700 million, but they would pay $100 million
on the remaining $300 million. On the other hand, a multinational
corporation that had $300,000,000.00 in gross proceeds in a given
year would also pay a rate of one third, so their tax rate would be
$100,100,000.00, or $1.001 billion. As a result, all itemized
deductions would come to an end. Ditto for the estate tax and capital
gains tax, both of which would be replaced by my proposed Excess
Wealth tax. The alternative minimum tax and self-employment tax would
also be phased out, replaced by the national sales tax. And the
motivation under the current unfair system to stash trillions in
profits in overseas bank accounts would become a moot point,
generating still more revenue while cutting the tax rate as it stands
today.
Under
this plan, there is ample incentive for the rich and big business to
get enthused about my idea. First, the necessity of providing group
health care would go away for US businesses (due to my proposed
Medicare-for-all system), followed by the repeal of the income tax.
All the money being spent on income taxes and group insurance could
be put back into these businesses, making them more competitive than
ever before. In fact, I would estimate that such a move by the
federal government would go a long way toward making America very
competitive in the global economy because the costs associated with
operating a business will drop so drastically due to the elimination
of these two expenses. And second, the “excess wealth tax” that I
just proposed would still provide sufficient funding for costly
government institutions like the military and the space program, not
to mention the cost of public reeducation and the public works
projects I mentioned previously.
Another
way to redistribute wealth is by converting unwanted or surplus
housing and commercial or office structures into residences,
live-work-play developments, green or urban garden space, or new
worker-owned businesses such as cooperatives. One of the things that
can and should be done with my proposed national public works program
is to get rid of all the empty, boarded-up houses that have been
abandoned to foreclosure and neglect. Put all the homeless and
jobless to work remodeling this otherwise worthless real estate.
There are millions of unemployed construction workers who would love
to get a chance to do something like this, so why not let them
(especially if they have families)? And when they are finished
rebuilding them, let them live in them and so revitalize America.
Reward them by turning them into homeowners. This is how we can end
unemployment and homelessness while turning around the US foreclosure
crisis. We can do the same with healthcare and with higher education.
Make them both available to everyone unconditionally as a way to
enforce economic equality and social parity. This is how we can
redistribute American wealth in a peaceful and nonviolent manner, and
in so doing set a good example for our kids and grand-kids. The days
of making good healthcare and higher education available for only
those who can afford it must come to an end. That is unfair,
discriminatory, it is a social injustice and therefore a civil rights
violation of the worst magnitude. To tell anyone that they can't stay
well, or that they can't improve themselves because they have
insufficient funds with which to pay, should be a crime.
In
closing, everybody needs to have an income and a livelihood. It is
cruel and mean-spirited to tell anyone that they are not needed nor
wanted, or that they can't be hired because there is allegedly no
money to pay them while corporate America sits on trillions of
dollars in excess cash. If unemployment is brought to an end using
the methods and ideas that I have written about, poverty, hunger and
crime will be brought to an end as well – not in a matter of
decades, but rather just a couple of years, or the time that it takes
them to finish their (free) education. We already have the means to
do this, so it would be irresponsible and immoral for us not to act.
However, some will say yes, but employed at what? I've been looking
for a job for years and I haven't found squat. I have found this to
be particularly true among older workers, minorities and people of
color.
Brothers
and sisters, this is not your fault. Your government, together with
some of this country's most well-known institutions such as the US
public school system and the multinational corporations, have let you
down. All the jobs that could be outsourced overseas were sent away,
never to return. The ones that couldn't be outsourced were mostly
downsized out of existence, ending millions of careers prematurely.
It is for these reasons that we are now protesting in the streets and
occupying
America in New York, Boston, Washington, DC and Atlanta, among
others. Because the truth of the matter is that since these jobs
aren't coming back, we as a country should be making new ones, and
this should have started decades ago. We have a lot of catching up to
do in the area of job creation. The good news is that there are new
industries currently being born that can replace all those lost jobs
that I wrote about. Green industries like solar power, windmill power
generators, the construction of a low-voltage national electrical
grid and of fusion reactors, not to mention biotechnology, stem cell
research, nanotechnology, robotics, seashore desalination plants for
an endless supply of clean water, and a greatly expanded and
revitalized space industry are the new growth industries of the 21st
century.
Seriously,
people! We first landed on the moon in 1969, took our last trip there
in 1972, after which our country's “leadership” mysteriously gave
up and quit. This was alleged at the time to be due to insufficient
funding, but if the US hadn't been involved with the war in Vietnam,
America could easily have afforded to continue NASA's Apollo program.
The immoral and strategically questionable occupations or wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan today are preventing our country from returning
to space in much the same way as Vietnam did. It's all a matter of
the proper allocation of resources. So when do we start a grassroots
campaign to stop the wars overseas so we can fund our needs at home?
How much longer are we going to delay? How about starting today?
Once
that serious matter is taken care of, the next step will be for us to
decide how to allocate all the money the country will save by ending
the wars overseas and bringing our troops home. All right, check this
out. We are supposed to be in the space business already! Hello!
Instead, we debate among ourselves whether or not women should have
abortions, or whether gay marriage is acceptable or not. Speaking as
an independent Internet
preacher of the more radical kind, if we are serious about
wanting to lead good lives and to be productive contributors towards
the common good, then we need to be creating jobs and helping to
rebuild people's lives. We need to be helping people regain their
sustenance and self-sufficiency. I also am appalled that the
mainstream church is so against abortion while being in favor of the
death penalty and of waging war. I am equally appalled at the
mainstream denominations for their condemnation of gay marriage while
the divorce rates for evangelicals are about the same as for the
secular world. These are glaring contradictions to their faith, to
say the least.
OK,
so here's how we fix our public schools and accelerate the start-up
of all these new 21st century businesses, all at the same
time. First, government and business should get together and find a
way to give large grants to these fledgling companies that are
already started up in one form or another. They need start-up
capital, and they're not going to find it at the bank branch down the
street. Government can and must step in. Our only alternative is to
become a second-rate country, a has-been of military and economic
power. The other thing that needs to be done is to start training
future astronauts now. Update public school curriculum, and put it
on-line. Turn the public schools into an Internet-based system that
is paperless and that doesn't need to buy expensive textbooks every
year (save the trees!). Then, start teaching the kids skills that
they will need for a technology-based world and a digital workplace,
with an emphasis on science and math. Start teaching them to be
astronauts when they're 12 years old, because by the time they
graduate from college there will be thousands of astronauts needed,
not just a select lucky few like today. I can easily explain this.
At
the peak of the US space shuttle program, NASA was launching about
three missions per year. Having just witnessed the birth of the
privatization of space by the recent docking of the first commercial
space flights to the International Space Station, I can tell you that
by the end of this decade there will be about three launches per week
instead of per year. Ten years after that in 2030 there could easily
be more than 3 launches per day, and so on. The time to begin getting
ready for our space-faring future is now. Then do the same with the
adults. Retrain everybody who can't find work, or who are in need of
a career change, and pick up the tab just like the GI Bill.
Performing this service for America's workforce will literally lift
them all up to the next level and make it much more competitive. I
have heard people complain over and over again that “we can't
compete” with some dude in China who does the same job we do for
$2.00 a day. What America needs is new careers to replace those that
have been eliminated. We not only have the capacity to do this
already, we are way behind and we have some catching up to do. But we
are Americans. We can and will succeed if only we will unite together
in this effort. Let's all get started today.
