This is for Beto O’Rourke, Vince Ryan, AOC, Bernie Sanders and everybody else.
I am asking Democrats to tax rich people and major corporations to pay taxes like they did when Ike was president. I am asking Democrats to abolish war.
I was a child when Ike was president. These were prosperous times. Black people, Indians on reservations and those who lived in Appalachia received the crumbs that fell off the table. The poor suffered but not like they did during the Great Depression. However, most people lived well and the future looked even better.
What has happened starting with President Reagan, rich people and major corporations have been paying less and less. We have the biggest wealth in inequality in human history. Three men have the same wealth as half the American population.
Remembering the effort to close domestic military bases, set up a commission to make a revised Income Tax Code with an up or down vote in the Congress. There will be no amendments.
There would be funds to make all agencies responsive. For example, the Internal Revenue Service would have a budget to audit rich people and major corporations and answer the phone. When you call 1-800-829-1040, you get an automated service that gives programed answers. There is no access to reach an agent with a question or complaint.
Humans can take steps to abolish war by reducing the bloated Pentagon budget and abolish poverty everywhere in the world. It has been several decades since the Pentagon budget has received a clean audit.
The US has 5,300 nuclear warheads and 750 overseas military bases. Since a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan will bring nuclear winter, keep 1,000 and decommission the rest. One thousand warheads is more than enough to serve as a deterrent.
Since the Soviet Union closed its doors on December 26, 1991, we do not need 750 military bases overseas. Keep 100 and close the rest.
We will have a safer stable world when everyone has shelter, food, medical care and a safe neighborhood. Every family would have Internet access, water, electricity, health care and a safe neighborhood.
Establish a super world-wide FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) that would cover every human in every country. Rich countries would warehouse food, tents, clothes and medical supplies to transport to people who suffer floods, fires, earthquakes, droughts and everything else. This program would cover people in Los Angeles and everywhere else.
To maintain a sustainable world, there would soil conservation, forestation and park building. Pay children in non-rich families to go to school. This would be a Second Marshall Plan combined with a Green New Deal.
This is a neat way to deal with illegal immigration. When people have good jobs at home, who would want to cross the deserts in northern Mexico or move across the Mediterranean in unseaworthy ships to get low wage jobs?
People with religious or humanitarian feelings have been looking for this. Now it is realpolitik. Humans have to abolish poverty or poverty will abolish humans with wars, misery and environmental deterioration.
Spring 1942 was the hardest time in the war for the Allies. The Axis Powers were advancing on every front. The Allies did not lose heart. They endured and started achieving significant military victories at Midway, El Alamein, Stalingrad and Guadalcanal. In February, 1943 the Axis would go no further. It was a long way from Stalingrad to Berlin and from Guadalcanal to Tokyo but they had to start from somewhere. Working together, they achieved military victory.
There was a widespread feeling to realize a better world that went a long way from just winning the war. The United Nations, the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Marshall Plan, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs plus umpteen international agreements showed optimism to bring a better world. We know the way forward and will achieve a world without poverty.
When people hear war abolition, they only think about hippies and Quakers. In fact, establishment people have asked us to end war: Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Albert Speer, Henry L. Stimson, General Douglas MacArthur and Pope Paul VI. Woodrow Wilson with his 14 Points was the only one to offer details.
See this excerpt from General Douglas MacArthur’s address to the US Congress on April 19, 1951:
Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have been attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found in so far as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, Leagues of Nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. The utter destructiveness of war now blocks out this alternative. We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.
Why do we still have wars? Historian Richard Overy and many others have been asking this for many centuries.
My answer is that it is good business. The illegal drug trade offers more but a fellow could get murdered or spend many years in prison. Defense contractors are wiser people.
In 1945, Redemptorist Church, located at West 33rd Street and Broadway in Kansas City, Missouri, offered a prayer service. A lady walking by remarked to a priest, ‘’Listen to those fools praying for peace. We have never had it so good.’’