JimBlog.net

my thoughts on my life and my world

Soak The Rich

Just one of the many positive and workable suggestions made by The Smirking Chimp’s Stephen Fleischman is to Soak the Rich. Here’s a quote from the article, found at smirkingchimp.com:

  1. Reverse Reaganomics. Re-institute regulation of industry. Make the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, do their jobs, so that we don’t have US corporations off-shoring their manufacturing to another country, like China, for example, and then importing their product, like toys, for example, painted with lead, for our children to play with.
  2. Soak the Rich, a phrase coined by FDR when he spoke about the “Economic Royalists” who brought this country to its knees. Instead of cutting taxes for the rich, as Bush has been doing, raise taxes for the rich and their corporate enterprises, as they did during the great depression when FDR laid a tax rate on them of over 90% in the upper brackets.
  3. Marshal Plan on Energy — Go cold turkey on our addiction to oil. Massive investment in the new technologies of alternative energy sources, wind, solar, geothermal. Halt the return to nuclear, and head off the development of biofuels that will put our food into your gas tanks. We can create new high-tech industries and high-paying jobs with a new energy world.
  4. Single Payer Universal Health Care - end the merry-go-round on health care by political candidates. Get rid of the blood-sucking health insurance companies, once and for all. And make health care for our citizens a right and not a privilege. Any candidate for office will get elected on that platform.
  5. Stop the Hemorrhaging in Afghanistan and Iraq - Four thousand dead American soldiers is four thousand too many. Two trillion dollars to destroy two countries is two trillion dollars that could have been used to rebuild the infrastructure of our country and have enough left to enhance the lives of our young and our old.

David Korten says, “Capitalism, which means quite literally rule by financial capital–by money and those who have it–in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit. There are other ways to organize human societies to actualize the positive benefits of markets and private ownership. They require strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules that assure costs are internalized, equity is maintained, and market forces are channeled to the service of democracy, justice, life, and spirit.”

No Responses to “Soak The Rich”

Leave a Reply

xHTML: You may use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>