Reply #22: Eliminate the stigma that goes with it, rebuild self-esteem, create WPA/NRA-class programs...

[warren pease]

.. and not just the ditch digging kind, but the ones FDR's administration created to get writers writing, artists painting and sculpting, actors acting and so forth. In other words, support creativity rather than simply create a new generation of draft animals for the corporate fuckos to exploit, ala the prison-industrial complex.

Saint Raygun was a genius at making it fashionable to hate the poor. And I know it's damn near impossible to climb out of the poverty hole if you actually internalize all that crap and degenerate into self-loathing.

Huge sums of money are required so jack the marginal tax rate on unearned income (how the rich make their money) to the moon. Penalize the shit out of them every time they even think about closing a perfectly good US manufacturing plant or factory and moving the jobs overseas.

Pass the employee free choice act and jack union membership up into the 80+ percent range by organizing office workers as well as blue-collar building trades workers.

Put union-busting law firms out of business using RICO statutes.

Go to proportional representation, make federal money available to dozens of political parties, break the stranglehold the Republicrats have on national politics and make all presidents endure a weekly grilling just like the British PM must undergo in Parliament -- all on live TV with no voice-overs or pundit interpretation for those of us too stupid to figure out what was just said.

Break up corporate media yesterday using existing monopoly-busting legislation like the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Take back the money Wall St. stole from the treasury, forcibly if necessary, and reallocate it to create more good-paying jobs. Then arrest, try and convict the thieving bastards who conspired to clean out the US treasury. And quickly, before they can flee the country to their various island homes located in tax- and extradition-free banana republics throughout the Caribbean.

Admit the minimum wage is a fucking joke. Pass "living wage" legislation locally, statewide and at the federal level. Abolish "right to work" laws. Reverse "privatization" wherever it rears its ugly head.

Get out of the war business and use the money to promote "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" among the least of us.

End the phony drug war and the even phonier war on (some) terrorists and use the money as above.

Go to single-payer, universal access health care, with complete portability so that people can leave their jobs, go back to school, learn new trades, decide to work in a field more in tune with their value systems, and so forth -- all without the goddamn corporate world using their current hammer of "no job; no medical insurance," thus creating wage slaves for life.

Fire every single member of congress and the administration who's taken more money from corporations than from unions and/or progressive issue advocacy groups over the course of their political careers.

Impeach the wingnuts on the Supreme Court -- federalist society pollutants all -- and purge their corporatist kindred spirits now befouling federal benches all across the country.

Bring Cheeeney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Yoo, Addington, Tenet, Bolton (the pair) and a couple dozen more of the worst of the worst up on charges of treason and send them to the scaffold -- after a series of fair and very public trials, of course.

The latter won't help the poor get out of poverty, but it'll make a whole lot of people -- here and around the world -- feel awfully good for a few days.

Btw, none of this can possibly happen, or work politically, unless the country abandons the current bribocratic kleptocracy model and goes with public financing of campaigns. Absent their obscene influence peddling and $100K a plate fund-raising soirees, the swine pretending to comprise a congress may actually find it within themselves to occasionally remember who they're supposed to represent.

Arrest the entire Bush International Crime Cartel and hold them indefinitely without charges, bail, access to lawyers or even a lousy phone call.

Damn... that was fun. And that's maybe 2 percent of the steps an enlightened country might take to improve the lives of its citizens. Unfortunately, the US is not that kind of place.


sf