SOLUTIONS: What the 99% can do now

RS Janes (BartBlog); Daily Kos; Wisdom Quarterly; Occupy Wall Street

This is a simplified version of Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second Economic Bill of Rights, proposed in 1944, which would solve a great many problems.

How we became the "99 percent"
RS Janes (Bartblog.bartcop.com)
This is not a history of how banks and the military-industrial complex grabbed power and corrupted our democracy. This is something we can do to change it.

What is the problem? The majority of Americans are steadily sinking economically as the nation’s wealth flows to the top. What led to it? Deregulation enacted by rank and file Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Is that all? No, it was also caused by an unprecedented Supreme Court decision that treats corporations like people (giving them personhood) and their money like speech. Corporations are not people, and their money is not free speech. These are rights the founders of this country intended only for individual human beings.

• As tent cities fade, Occupy turns to specifics

The Daily Kos early on suggested four simple demands:

1. Reinstate Glass-Steagall [regulating banks after the Depression to prevent stock market crashes]
   
2. Audit the FED [the non-governmental 'Federal' Reserve]
   
3. Reverse Citizens United (via constitutional amendment)
4. Overhaul the tax code for the mega-rich (1%) and corporations
   

Here are some suggestions on what to do about it now:

• End the charters corporations keep harming customers or the environment.
• Enforce SEC regulations.
• Redo the rules that appoint boards of directors.
• Making shareholder meetings more accessible or put them online to streamline voting.
• End the buying of stocks "on margin" so buyers pay up front.
• Tax corporations to remove their motive to outsource jobs.
• Tax offshore assets at the same rate as domestic profits.
• If corporations are people and money is speech, hold executives responsible for a corporation’s criminal acts.
• Make sure corporations selling products to the government do not retain the rights to secret proprietary codes.
• Ban corporations from lobbying government officials.
• Limit the money corporation use to corrupt elections.

Banks and corporations have become Too Big to Fail and Too Big to Bail. They threaten Americans' right to the pursuit of happiness, to liberty, and even to life. Let's rethink the whole concept of corporations as a way of doing business.

What is a "corporation" anyway? Ambrose Bierce defined it more than a century ago:

• CORPORATION: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.