The Soul Of America . . .

[Amskeptic]

The Soul of America
By Senator Bernie Sanders
January 9, 2013

Despite such terminology as "fiscal cliff" and "debt ceiling," the great debate taking place in Washington now has relatively little to do with financial issues. It is all about ideology. It is all about economic winners and losers in American society. It is all about the power of Big Money. It is all about the soul of America.

In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth, and more inequality than at any time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom 60 percent own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1 percent earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent shared the remaining 7 percent.

Despite the reality that the rich are becoming much richer while the middle class collapses and the number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high, the Republicans and their billionaire backers want more, more, and more. The class warfare continues.

My Republican colleagues say that the deficits are a spending problem, not a revenue problem. What these deficit-hawk hypocrites won't talk about is their spending. They won't discuss what they did to dig the country into this $1 trillion deep deficit hole. They waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. They gave away huge tax breaks for the rich. They squandered taxpayer dollars on the pharmaceutical industry by making it illegal to let Medicare bargain for lower drug prices. They also rescinded financial regulations that enabled Wall Street to operate like a gambling casino, leading to a severe recession that eroded tax revenue and left more than 14 percent of American workers unemployed or underemployed.

Now, despite the deficits their policies helped to create and despite the enormous suffering which exists in our society, the Republicans want to cut Social Security, veterans' programs, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition programs, and virtually every program which benefits low- and moderate-income Americans. They choose to turn their backs on the economic reality facing a significant part of our population: high unemployment, reduced wages, 50 million without health insurance, college graduates saddled with enormous student debt and elderly people living in desperation. And they have tried to slam the door on any further discussion about how to raise revenue by ending tax loopholes and unfair tax breaks.

Republicans like Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who say the revenue debate is over don't want you to consider these facts:

Federal revenue today, at 15.8 percent of GDP, is lower today than it was 60 years ago. During the last year of the Clinton administration, when we had a significant federal surplus, federal revenue was 20.6 percent of GDP.
Today corporate profits are at an all-time high, while corporate income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is near a record low.
In 2011, corporate revenue as a percentage of GDP was just 1.2 percent -- lower than any other major country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Norway, Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Ireland, Poland, and Iceland.
In 2011, corporations paid just 12 percent of their profits in taxes, the lowest since 1972.
In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all while they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period.
We know where the Republicans are coming from. What about the Democrats? Will President Obama fulfill his campaign pledge to "protect the middle class" or will he surrender to right-wing blackmail? Will Democrats in the House and Senate stand with the vast majority of our citizens and such organizations as AARP, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the AFL-CIO, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and every other veterans' organization in the fight against cuts to Social Security and veterans' programs, or will they agree to a disastrous corporate-backed "chained CPI" concept which makes major benefit cuts to those programs and raises taxes on low-income workers?

The simple truth is there are relatively easy ways to deal with the deficit crisis -- without attacking the elderly, the children the sick or the poor.

For example, we have got to eliminate loopholes in the tax code that allow large corporations and the wealthy to avoid more than $100 billion in taxes every year by setting up offshore tax shelters in places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas. This situation has become so absurd that one five-story office building in the Cayman Islands is now the "home" to more than 18,000 corporations.

Further, we must also end tax breaks for companies shipping American jobs overseas. Today, the United State government continues to reward companies that move American manufacturing jobs abroad, despite the fact that millions of American jobs have been outsourced to China, Mexico, and other low wage countries over the past decade. The Joint Committee on Taxation (the official revenue scorekeeper in Congress) has estimated that we could raise more than $582 billion in revenue over the next decade by eliminating these offshore tax loopholes.

We must also recognize that Wall Street recklessness caused the economic crisis, and it has a responsibility to reduce the deficit. Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.

We are entering a pivotal moment in the modern history of our country. Do the elected officials in Washington stand with ordinary Americans -- working families, children, the elderly, the poor -- or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the millions, must send Congress the answer to that question.

[TrollFromDownBelow]

The soul of America....

This article has the correct outcome (at least from an economic sense)...shrinking of the middle class and concentration of wealth in the top 'x' percent (I'll let the professionals argue what the percentage should be). Not sure if it is correct on the cause...at least from my myopic view point.... I see three causes...

- America is no where near the top as far as education goes....this needs to be fixed. Don't care what it takes, but for the sake of our society, EVERYONE should have access to a good education.

- America has always been on top as far as entrepreneurship, aka "Yankee Engineering". What do we need to do to stimulate that?

- As a society we have lost our drive ... we are relatively comfortable and we have settled. Need to take away cable TV and our 2500 sq ft McMansions before people will get motivated.

Personally think the 'soul' is much more than economic, which is what this article deals with....which would be a plethora of additional threads. But if we narrow it to this argument, what says you; what do you think are the causes?

[dingo]

so.... the Senator has identified that Corporate 'Merica and Wall Street use their financial clout to lubricate the legislative process heavily in their favor...ok....so which politician has the balls to step out of the cosy lifestyle to make a stand ? not gonna happen

[Amskeptic]

The soul of America....


- America is no where near the top as far as education goes....this needs to be fixed. Don't care what it takes, but for the sake of our society, EVERYONE should have access to a good education.

- America has always been on top as far as entrepreneurship, aka "Yankee Engineering". What do we need to do to stimulate that?

- As a society we have lost our drive ... we are relatively comfortable and we have settled. Need to take away cable TV and our 2500 sq ft McMansions before people will get motivated.

But if we narrow it to this argument, what says you; what do you think are the causes?

I think the issue of fairness is an important one. If we see this flow of our labors (wealth) go up the food chain, it dispirits our endeavors and efforts, **no less than when the rich claim that tax increases will damage their initiative**

Yankee Ingenuity is a great good gift of this country. and was never more apparent when the democratic basis of our founding was evident. We were an experiment in fairness, in merit-based success. We did believe in education once. The long chronic starvation of our educational resources has not gone unnoticed by our kids who have had to share textbooks and deteriorated school buildings and who are harrangued if they use too much paper. You think they can't see where we decide to apply our largesse, i.e. military adventures and corporate welfare?

Many Americans are settled and complacent. The rich apologists will even suggest that 60" flat screen TVs are proof that all is well. But we are restless for meaning. We do yearn somewhere in our collective psyche for the group purpose of this Nation. We have a vision vacuum at the top when they ask only "do you hate paying taxes as much as we do?"

To wrest the future from the fatcats who have so much complacency with the status-quo that serves them so well, we will have to continue to chat it up on boards such as this and be ready to vote our own interests against the headwinds of sophisticated and appalling disinformation.
Colin

[Amskeptic]

so which politician has the balls to step out of the cozy lifestyle to make a stand ? not gonna happen

Gonna happen in a messier way. We are on our way. Might take a big calamity, a breach of the contract between government and its people.
We did note that bankers and rich corporate types "who hate government interference" called upon Uncle Sam when their own mistakes caught up with them, didn't we?
Yes. We did.
Colin

[Velokid1]

In my opinion, this is irrefutable. We fail to see the writing on the wall when we obsess over questions about who wrote it, which type of pen they used, whether they have nice handwriting or not, etc. We are wasting time when we fail to implement solutions because we allow people to keep distracting by asking philosophical questions. The people that keep us discussing philosophy instead of actually taking action are the people who stand to benefit from us not acting.

Rather than us worrying about the wealth collecting at the top at an unprecedented rate for America, they want us to argue endlessly about whether tax breaks create jobs and trickle-down prosperity and other such questions that are ultimately of surprisingly little relevance. Using that debate as an example, how can the answer possibly matter one goddamned bit when the corporations already have huge tax breaks and myriad other advantages and yet they are failing to give Americans either jobs or prosperity? If trickle-down works, why the heck ain't it working? If wealth at the top creates prosperity in the middle, then why aren't we all enjoying unprecedented prosperity while the corporations are enjoying unprecedented profits? Screw philosophy... answer the question, right?

That article is brilliantly-written. It's very readable and hits every point that it needs to. And the logic behind it is irrefutable. It's not even worth discussing any more; it's time to act.

[glasseye]

That article is brilliantly-written. It's very readable and hits every point that it needs to. And the logic behind it is irrefutable. It's not even worth discussing any more; it's time to act.

Yup.

[Amskeptic]

In my opinion, this is irrefutable. it's time to act.

I write representatives. That new Arkansas guy Tom Cotton, he's getting an earful from me TODAY. Oooh, says his assistant office liason for email, "this one's mean!"

I converse with many people, best when they don't have to see or hear me every day (like youse guyz), and try to leave them at least with questions . . .

If you want to help, we have a 2014 election coming up that must drive the American Experience forward.
Colin

[dtrumbo]

If you want to help, we have a 2014 election coming up that must drive the American Experience forward.
Colin

Every election is touted as "time to throw the bums out!". I vote every election, I vote for the candidate I think will do the least-bad job and almost always they end up being elected. I don't even come close to having the ego to support the idea that I vote for "better" candidates than people from other districts/states. People elect who they think will do the least-bad job. Congress now has the lowest approval rating ever. Is this the individual representatives fault? No, not really. This country is so polarized, as never before, on the direction we should be going that we the people collectively elect these douche-bags that can't possibly conceive of compromise or even constructive discussion. This is not an indictment of congress so much as it is the American people as a whole. We are a country divided. Until that changes, we cannot drive forward.

[Amskeptic]

This is not an indictment of congress so much as it is the American people as a whole. We are a country divided. Until that changes, we cannot drive forward.

We have happened across some pretty vinegary political spats from the beginnings of this country.

Infamous Scribblers is a perceptive and witty exploration of the most volatile period in the history of the American Press. News correspondent and renonwned media historian Eric Burns tells of Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Sam Adams—the leading journalists among the Founding Fathers; of George Washington and John Adams, the leading disdainers of journalists; and Thomas Jefferson, the leading manipulator of journalists. These men and the writers who abused and praised them in print (there was, at the time, no job description of "journalist") included the incendiary James Franklin, Ben's brother and one of the first muckrakers; the high minded Thomas Paine; the hatchet man James Callender, and a rebellious crowd of propagandists, pamphleteers, and publishers.
It was Washington who gave this book its title. He once wrote of his dismay at being "buffited in the public prints by a set of infamous scribblers." The journalism of the era was often partisan, fabricated, overheated, scandalous, sensationalistic and sometimes stirring, brilliant, and indispensable. Despite its flaws—even because of some of them—the participants hashed out publicly the issues that would lead America to declare its independence and, after the war, to determine what sort of nation it would be.

The devisions have always been here. The smooth sophisticated "advertising brightness" of corporate manipulators is new . . . "at BP, we care about the environment!", the Civil War was a time where Americans fought furiously against growing up and living the promise of Freedom For All, we are at a new Civil War, this war is again about growing up and sharing the toys fairly.
ColinWelcomeToMessyDemocracy

[RSorak 71Westy]

Is lost as long as the poor cant get health care. It's absurd in the wealthiest country on the earth, basic health care is out of the reach of so many. What other more obvious evidence is there of our uncaring nature? That money is more important than people. Just about every other country on the planet has universal health care.

[Amskeptic]

Is lost as long as the poor cant get health care. It's absurd in the wealthiest country on the earth, basic health care is out of the reach of so many. What other more obvious evidence is there of our uncaring nature? That money is more important than people. Just about every other country on the planet has universal health care.

It is true that we were asleep at the switch when the healthcare debate began to take shape. There were many people clamoring for single-payer. It *almost* became Obama's platform. He, for numerous and possibly subtle reasons, chose to negotiate with healthcare organization and hospital INC lobbyists behind closed doors and we have this horrible quasi-private smorgasbord of profit-seeking parasites atop a critically important part of a dignified life. So WHO went wrong? We did. The whole summer of tea party discontent was a clarion call to our representatives that We The People do not want to get a grip on this problem, because we claimed almost incoherently that it was a "government take over", an error of almost comical proportion "keep your government hands off my medicare!" Hello! And the Tea Party was a front for deeply hidden corporate interests, yes it was.

Now that we have codified the corporate grip via Obamacare on on a basic right like health, what the hell are we going to do about it?
Colin

[Velokid1]

And the Tea Party was a front for deeply hidden corporate interests, yes it was.

In defense of those zealots, everydamnthing is co-opted by corporations these days. It's the new American way. There are very few exceptions... Patagonia clothing company and Neil Young come to mind.

But yes, it is remarkably fascinating, in hindsight (because the Tea Party is history IMO), to see the corporate interests that were behind the Tea Party "grassroots uprising."

[ruckman101]

The (forgive the term) elites have been battling to retain control since this country was founded, largely with the interests of the elites as the primary benefactors. They have been winning, largely through law. A long history of Supreme Court decisions have enabled the elites to remain in control. Things are beginning to fray at the edges for them, and for this I am heartened.


neal

[Amskeptic]

Things are beginning to fray at the edges for them, and for this I am heartened.
neal

Yes, and I am beginning to appreciate that which I once lamented, the passing of the newspaper for internet news. Newspapers never had the sprightly real-time conversations under their articles. Now, we get to opine on the quality of the writer and the news of the article. Of course there are many butt-heads to wade through, but there are some excellent perspectives that come through. I have been more informed by opposition blog replies than Rush Limbaugh's bombastic take, or some letter to the editor, that is for sure.