Reply #49: list of things to do

[Locrian]

From Thom Hartmann's New Book Screwed:
The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11195


-- let the public again have the right to own the military (without the high-priced private contractors), prisons, and the electoral system.

-- keep private for-profit companies out of education and have government run it free without phony programs that don't work like No Child Left Behind.

-- demand a national single-payer health care system for everyone based on how Medicare is run.

-- demand private companies keep their hand off Social Security and keep it as a government-run retirement program and safety net for the disabled.

-- demand a progressive tax system reinstating a meaningful 35% rate on corporations and a 70% rate on the richest 5% of Americans. Use the extra revenue received to repay the Social Security system and fund an economic investment program.

-- demand a living wage and the right of labor to organize again unhindered by laws or business-friendly government policies restricting its ability to be treated fairly.

-- demand a national energy program that "puts people and the planet - not Big Oil - first."

-- Take back the Democrat party - the party is in crisis having bought on to the agenda of the far-right Republicans. Hartmann says the solution is for progressives to join together to take back the Democrat party just like the cons took control of the Republican party with the election of Ronald Reagan.

-- A third party is not the answer because of our corrupted "winner take all" system under which whoever gets the most votes "gets all of the pie." We're structured this way because it's written into our Constitution which was a huge mistake by the Founders.

-- Republicans also need to re-capture their party from the cons who stole it from the moderates. Today the party is run by the "Ayn Rand utopians, Pat Robertson fundamentalists, and the largest and dirtiest of America's corporate elite." They rejected the values of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Eisenhower, exploited working people and looted the nation's treasury for their own self-interest leaving it for those who follow them to clean up the mess it could take a whole generation to recover from or longer.

-- Change happens, sometimes slowly, and people need to band together to work actively for it which means more than "just showing up for a peace (or other kind of) rally."

-- Other activist tools include the most fundamental one of all - communication. Hartmann explains without two simple forms of it, the American Revolution wouldn't have been possible. There were the two commonly used ones then - letters to editors of newspapers who published them and pamphlets like the kind Tom Paine wrote. Today the dominant media are corrupted by their corporate control that suppresses real information in favor of only what's friendly to the state and the corporate giants. Fortunately though, alternatives exist and must be used effectively.

-- Don't ignore the obvious influence we can have by communicating with our elected leaders. They pay attention, and it guides their policy-making.

-- Joining a union or getting active in the union movement is crucially important to rebuilding the nation's middle class. It's essential unions be re-empowered through favorable legislation, and voters need to petition their legislators to work for this.