Challenge To Deldem (And Hillary Camp)

Martin Luther King said:  you cannot have social justice when you perpetuate economic injustice.

Giving a person rights on paper doesn’t better their life, as long as they are prevented from finding a job, establishing a nest egg, and buying a house to get their part of the American dream.

For example, inner city blacks living with 50% unemployment, still can’t live with dignity given to them by their freedom, even though they DO have a right to vote, even though they can’t be discriminated by race to get a job, and even though they maintain a “right” not to be discriminated against were they to buy a house they will never have money enough to afford….

In other words, opening the door to political power, does not put food on a table. For the true freedom envisioned by Dr. King, you need economic opportunity open to all.

The challenge for Deldem and by default, the Hillary campaign, is how does Hillary accomplish this.. What is her plan for “taking from the rich and giving to the poor”, to quote Jesus himself?

I have found nothing in my search, which is why I’m asking Deldem to step up.

Let me tell you how Bernie plans to do this.

Rebuilding Our Crumbling Infrastructure Reversing Climate Change Creating Worker Co-ops Growing the Trade Union Movement Raising the Minimum Wage Pay Equity for Women Workers Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers Making College Affordable for All Taking on Wall Street Health Care as a Right for All Protecting the Most Vulnerable Americans Real Tax Reform

 

Rebuilding the infrastructure uses unskilled labor.  Like the military,  people learn on the job how to do it.  It requires manual labor, it is prioritized in our urban environments (since those were the first edifices built and the most in danger of failing). To pay for this, someone has to take on the top one percent and with the backing of the entire nation, make them begin to pay for the rebuilding of this nation. Making the top one percent reinvest in the nation that gave them their money in the first place, is the core of Bernie’s campaign.

Reversing Climate Change requires  change to the existing structure.  Change requires manual labor. We need new power sources built, and old power sources demolished and sold for scrap.  All which require manual labor at good pay, and are centered around our urban areas, since that is where energy is mostly used. This change unfreezes huge amounts of money now locked down in old energy schemes. Whereas good policy now is to sit on oil to raise it’s price (sitting which does not create jobs) the new corporate success stories will be those who could outbuild their competitors to tap new markets first.

Creating Worker Co-ops, giving workers an ownership stake in the businesses they work for, causes productivity goes up, absenteeism goes down and employees who are much more satisfied with their jobs.  For too long, ownership in companies has been toward the financial side. Often an handful of men, own a handful of investment companies, who the have ownership rights of most of America’s corporations.  ALL board decisions are made ONLY to appease the financial side.  Germany requires all corporations to have labor vote on all their corporate boards. This single idea has prevented Germany from many of America’s corporate financial meltdowns. For too long, American workers have been treated like paid slaves. It is time they own both the risks and rewards of financial ownership in those companies for which they work. The advantage for the workers as that as their effort makes money for their boss, it increases their wealth as well.

Growing the Trade Union Movement gives employees stronger rights to negotiate higher wages, pure and simple… Essentially it removes the labor market from out of the slave economy it is in today, (where the bottom line is free labor and only the minimum wage law hold the wages above zero),… and puts it back into a market economy …. a place where the price of labor is negotiated based on the business needs of two parties.  People do have to eat; if you force them where they have to work very low wages in order to accomplish that, you can keep profits to yourself in perpetuity.  Flipping that, so they negotiate higher wages backed by their ability to go on strike without permanently losing their right to eat, changes the dynamic. Just a threat of such provides pressure on those financial interests who also have an economic interest to prevent a strike, so they willingly up-front pay pricier amounts for their labor.

Raising the Minimum Wage raises the floor. It is a simple concept into which a lot of effort has gone to confuse the issue.  All raising the minimum wage means, is that if you are making $7.25  for every hour you work, then are making $15.25 for the same time spent, you have $8.00 more dollars in your pocket to spend for having worked that one hour.. All other talk about this putting black teens out of work is to distract you from that simple truth… You have a lot more to spend if you get paid more for the time you put in.

Pay Equity for Women Workers is so easy to fix.  You simply say from this time forward, it is illegal to pay women less than men for the same amount of work.  Then let lawsuits and courts determine what that wage should be.  If someone can prove a male hired prior to them was paid more, take the employer to court and let the courts sort it out.. It’s done. But it takes someone willing to say:  as of now, it is illegal to pay men more than woman and ironically it is a man, not a women, who is offering this solution.

Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers instead of foreign investors, go a long way to making any company see it is more lucrative to stay at home to invest here than go overseas to China or Mexico. Currently that is not the case.  Our very lenient corporate tax laws enacted by the Cheney-Bush Presidency, encourage businesses to expand to cheaper labor markets.  With proper taxation on those profits earned overseas, that becomes less lucrative.  By raising taxes on the higher profits earned by those companies who shift jobs overseas and lowering taxes on those who invest here, a powerful dynamic of economic investment is shifted back to our shores.  Raising corporate tax rates and then, only giving tax credits for capital investment here in America, solves a lot of woes.

Making College Affordable for All simply opens the door of opportunity.  It allows those who can’t afford to better their lives, a new opportunity to do so.  The rest is up to them of course. But it opens the door of opportunity to 80% of our population who now cannot afford to go through it…. It breaks the monopoly our for-profit entities today have in saying: it is impossible to get a good job unless one mortgages ones life to us first. In Colonial America, people who had to do that, were called indentured servants. This gives audacity of hope to inner-city children right now, who now see all dreams end upon leaving high school.

Taking on Wall Street…  Just how effective would YOU be in taking on Wall Street if they had funded 80% of YOUR campaign?  Just think on that for a minute.  Think of you going against your children; your spouse; your aged parents and how much of an emotional toll that would weigh on you?  How strong would be your will to put someone else’s financial interests over theirs?  This alone is the greatest argument for giving Sanders a shot. For if someone at some round-table in the future were to ever encapsulate these first 15 years of this American century, it could be easily done with this sentence:  America chose to put the interests of investors over the interests of its people… .  Entrusting the reverse of that to someone who has gotten 80% of their support from investors, is simply not wise.

Health Care as a Right for All is simply about choice.  Do we want health care as a right by all, or do we want to allow it to be dictated by ones wealth…  We can choose either way. Each have their benefits; both have their detriments. The simple question is what do we want to do? The Affordable Health Care Act did make up immense ground by giving some rights back to the American people. There are still areas where it needs tweaked.  The newest best addition is to insert a basic government-subsidized plan, like an income-based graduated Medicaid plan, to compete against the corporate plans already in the market place. Unfortunately, Health-care is a  recipient of huge financial investment. Only someone with the backing of the American people and no allegiance to Wall Street, can make it happen.

Protecting the Most Vulnerable Americans was an American philosophy once had by all, then lost. It has been replaced by a corporate-driven philosophy of every person for themselves.  Although freedom does enable one to do ones best to succeed on their own, freedom without responsibility creates a greater cost to society than freedom with responsibility.  For example: we are responsible to our veterans who when we asked to give up their lives for our well-being, they said sure, send us. On a moral scale we can never pay them enough, yet a certain political party every year, cuts back their benefits because of an ideology that says government is too big… Another case: our children were thrown into the claws of corporate America with the advent of Common Core.  Again, someone beholden to Wall Street for 80% of their funding, is not going to fight too hard against the biggest problem hurting America.  It will take someone beholden to the American people only, to make America great again.

Real Tax Reform:  it all comes down to this really. America got totally screwed up beginning in 2000.  We stopped taxing the top earners of their fair share and went from a yearly plan of a $200 billion dollar budget surplus scheduled to end the national debt by 2008, to a $1.7 trillion dollar deficit today which our children and grandchildren are now on the hook for.  If we had chosen not to do that… tax cuts, and instead worked to continue the “Dave Ramsey Way” to pay off our debts as do every American citizen, our taxes could now be lower because of no debt-interest payments. The simple explanation as to why we have a super-big problem, is that as the rich got richer (and they have), as the poorer got poorer (and they have), the taxes on those on top getting all the money, also were reduced.  Real tax reform can only come with a lot of “back payments” tacked onto the regular payments at the same time. Real tax reform will hit those with money hard. Just as if you, who had not paid your mortgage at all for a couple of years, would one day get hit with a demand note from your mortgage company.

How can you ask for that demand note, when 80% of your funding comes from those to whom you will need to ask?

To summarize: there are only two candidates who can take on the number one problem this nation faces which is: it is being run by Wall Street.  Today we are a nation which top-down is always favoring investors over the interests of its own citizens. This really is not new for history; it has always been that way.  It is new for America though. One of those candidates with wild red hair… has not a clue what he is doing today , much less tomorrow.  The other, with your backing, can actually make the difference.

So my challenge to Deldem (and the Hillary camp), is for them to engage and explain to us all, how someone beholden at 80% to those who created 80% of the problems America faces today, can force the policies that should have happen 15 years ago, which Wall Street is against, back into effect ?

Without their brilliant or compelling argument to persuade me, I just can’t see it happening.  Which is why today, with as clear and eye as I can see, Bernie is the only option Americans have today if they want to reach a destination of financial stability at levels we were well on a course to achieving back in 2000, when ironically Hillary was still in the White House…

Of course… if American voters DON’T want any improvement in the way things are being run, entirely happy with the status quo, there are still 4 other candidates (3 Republican,1 Democrat) out there who are still trying to earn their allegiance.