Looking for Major Changes to Save the World – Ed O’Rourke
“Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars”.
Casey Kasem
Where there is no vision, the people perish. Proverbs 29:18
My parents endured the Great Depression and participated in bringing about military victory over the Axis Powers. Now it is our turn to step up the plate. What has to be done?
I offer a few ideas that are easy to understand:
1) Revise the Income Tax Code to collect only from families making more than $250,000 a year.
2) The US has 5,300 nuclear weapons. Since a nuclear war between Pakistan and India will induce global warming, reduce this number to 1,000.
3) The US has 750 military bases overseas. Close 650 bases.
4) Start a Second Marshall Plan to end poverty everywhere and reverse global warming.
See this commentary from Thom Hartmann:
The danger with this is that oligarchy, as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy: Reclaiming Our Democracy from the Ruling Class, is a transitional form of government that rarely lasts more than a generation or two. It’s so unstable because when the people realize the oligarchs are ripping them off and essentially stealing the nation’s wealth for themselves, they tend to rise up and loudly object.
That’s what we’re seeing with the No Kings and other protests here in America.
· Average Americans know that when modern GOP-driven Reaganomics started in 1981 fully two-thirds of us had a good, middle-class life with a single paycheck but today it takes two paychecks to barely reach that level, which is why the middle class has collapsed down to fewer than half of us.
· They know that the top 1% has extracted more than $50 trillion from working class people over the past 44 years via Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts and the destruction of the union movement.
· They know that when Reagan came into office a home cost three times the average salary and today it’s ten times a single salary (or five times a two-income household’s income).
· They know their parents went to college for free or cheap and they’re now indebted for half or more of their lives.
· They know that healthcare and health insurance used to be affordable when hospitals and health insurance companies were required to be nonprofits, and are now a massive trillion-dollar annual wealth-extraction scheme that’s making people like Rick Scott and Dollar Bill McGuire richer than the pharaohs.
We have the greatest wealth inequality in human history. In the US, three men have as much wealth as 160 million. The top 1% have a 30% wealth share. The bottom 50% have 2.5% of everything.