Reply #109: OWS Demands (From OWS itself)

[mmonk]

Demand one: Restoration of the living wage. This demand can only be met by ending "Freetrade" by re-imposing trade tariffs on all imported goods entering the American market to level the playing field for domestic family farming and domestic manufacturing as most nations that are dumping cheap products onto the American market have radical wage and environmental regulation advantages. Another policy that must be instituted is raise the minimum wage to twenty dollars an hr.

Demand two: Institute a universal single payer healthcare system. To do this all private insurers must be banned from the healthcare market as their only effect on the health of patients is to take money away from doctors, nurses and hospitals preventing them from doing their jobs and hand that money to wall st. investors.

Demand three: Guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment.

Demand four: Free college education.

Demand five: Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end while at the same bringing the alternative energy economy up to energy demand.

Demand six: One trillion dollars in infrastructure (Water, Sewer, Rail, Roads and Bridges and Electrical Grid) spending now.

Demand seven: One trillion dollars in ecological restoration planting forests, reestablishing wetlands and the natural flow of river systems and decommissioning of all of America's nuclear power plants.

Demand eight: Racial and gender equal rights amendment.

Demand nine: Open borders migration. anyone can travel anywhere to work and live.

Demand ten: Bring American elections up to international standards of a paper ballot precinct counted and recounted in front of an independent and party observers system.

Demand eleven: Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all. Debt forgiveness of sovereign debt, commercial loans, home mortgages, home equity loans, credit card debt, student loans and personal loans now! All debt must be stricken from the "Books." World Bank Loans to all Nations, Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must also be stricken from the "Books." And I don't mean debt that is in default, I mean all debt on the entire planet period.

Demand twelve: Outlaw all credit reporting agencies.

Demand thirteen: Allow all workers to sign a ballot at any time during a union organizing campaign or at any time that represents their yeah or nay to having a union represent them in collective bargaining or to form a union.


Reinstate Glass-Steagall



The Depression era Glass-Steagall regulations partitioned the financial, insurance, and real estate industries into distinct businesses. This formed a kind of integrity infrastructure for the entire system. A business had to choose to be one and only one of a: commercial bank, a broker, an investment bank, an insurance company, a real estate company, etc. The goal was to insulate the various segments from problems in other segments. However, the one most important goal of this law is the separation of commercial banking, which creates the US money supply, from brokers and investment banks which often engage in speculation. This separation ensured that the public money supply was not leveraged to purely speculative, financial instruments. Instead, these brokers or investment banks would need to raise funds from private investors rather than use leverage from the US money supply. Any loss incurred by the speculative activity would be borne by the investors and not the US treasury, or taxpayer, nor impact the money supply. Today, these rules would apply to hedge funds and other investment organizations as well. This and the trade tax (see below) would serve to greatly limit the creation of derivative securities which are purely speculative in nature and threaten our financial system.