The fact of the matter is that the Supreme Court has never found eternal truths in the Constitution—they just reflect current popular view, and they usually do that with about a twenty-year lag time.
The power of “We the People” should be with us and the officials we elect, not nine lawyers who have claimed the illegitimate right to rule over every other branch of our government.
After the crash, we must address the Supreme Court’s power grab and strengthen our system of checks and balances in our government to empower organized people over organized money.
Chapter 13
Repair the Fundamentals
The most perfect political community must be among those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate.
—Aristotle, A Treatise on Government, 322 BC
A mending the Constitution and putting an end to corporate personhood could take years. In the meantime, post-crash, we need to get to work repairing the fundamentals that sustained a middle class after the last Great Crash.
That means making our social safety net stronger, reclaiming our commons, taking on Wall Street, investing in working people again, and rolling back Ronald Reagan’s disastrous tax cuts.
Medicare Part E
A 2009 study by Harvard University found that 45,000 Americans die every single year because they lack health insurance.178 After the last Great Crash, while Europe began rebuilding, several nations adopted single-payer health care systems. After the Crash of 2016, the United States should do the same.
The way we do that is by building off the single-payer system we already have in place that’s worked perfectly for generation after generation of senior citizens and never missed a payment—Medicare. I’ve long advocated what former Congressman Dennis Kucinich calls “Medicare Part E”—“E” as in “for Everybody”—and I still think it’s the right way to go.
Just like in the Occupy Wall Street encampments that sprang up across America at the end of 2011, where doctors volunteered to man tents where people received basic health care for free, our nation should make a commitment to healing the sick without consideration of who or what will make a profit off of it.
This won’t be done overnight, but we can look north toward Canada for a strategy on exactly how to do it.
The Canadian government didn’t just one day say, “It’s time for a single-payer system,” and then poof everyone was covered. Instead, it was a process. It was a process that started locally.
It began in 1946, when Saskatchewan became the first province in Canada to say that everyone should be able to get medical care when they are sick by passing the Saskatchewan Hospitalization Act.
While that was a big step forward, the province wanted to do more. It wanted universal health care for all its citizens, but it just didn’t have the money yet. Then, a few years later, in 1950, Alberta saw what was happening in Saskatchewan and thought it was a good idea. They passed their own plan, which gave health coverage to 90 percent of the population.
In 1957, the federal government saw what was happening around the nation and passed the Hospital Insurance and Diagnostic Services Act, which paid for half of all the costs of any single-payer system passed by the provinces.
After that, by 1961, fifteen years after Saskatchewan started the process, all ten provinces had similar single-payer programs.
Today, Canada has one of the highest life expectancies in the world and spends almost a third less a year on health care than we do in the United States.
That process is already starting in the United States. Vermont and Montana are looking into setting up their own single-payer health care systems based on the Canadian model.
And the largest state in the nation, California, has twice passed a single-payer health care law, only to see it vetoed by Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then, with a Democrat in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, the state legislature came just two votes shy of passing a single-payer law. We’re getting very close to that “Saskatchewan moment” in America.
After the Crash of 2016, we’ll get there, and our nation will be fundamentally changed for the better.
We’ll be a nation where people can start a new business or pursue a new career field without having to worry about losing their insurance. A nation where a mother or father can get sick without it affecting whether their child can afford to go to college. And a nation that’s not drowning in debt because for-profit health insurance CEOs need another mansion.
Look anywhere you want and you’ll never see a successful nation with a sick population or a nation where the sick have to go to prison just to get the care they need. Most of the developed nations in the world that have universal health care, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, created their systems following crises like World War II and the Great Depression. Now we’ll have our chance to do the same.
As Occupy has demonstrated, health care is sacred. We are our brothers’ keepers.
Reclaim the Commons
When the Royal Dutch Shell rig Kulluk got stuck on the rocky shores of Alaska on New Year’s Eve in 2013, the people of that state paid close attention—not just because they worried about the potential for another environmental disaster in their backyard but because they pay close attention to their state’s oil industry in general since they each make a lot of money off of it.
Alaska is unique in that it has something called the Alaska Permanent Fund.179
Believing that all residents of the state should profit off the resources that are naturally below their feet, Alaska takes the money that big oil corporations pay them in oil leases and royalties, invests that money, and then distributes the returns on those investments to each and every resident of the state.
It works out to between $1,000 and $2,000 for every man, woman, and child in Alaska every single year.180 So if you’re a husband and wife with two kids, you could earn as much as $8,000 at the end of the year—and that’s not pocket change for a working family trying to make it by.
Thanks to this supplemental income to each resident of Alaska, the state enjoys the third highest median income in the nation, and is also the second most equal state in the nation.
It’s a system that works, and it’s been embraced by both Democrats and Republicans—even Sarah Palin.
Before the Crash of 2016, this system was applied to the rest of the country, but only the Economic Royalists enjoyed it.
Under their reign, our entire economic model, largely controlled by this billionaire class, depends on enriching the lives of shareholders and business owners—but not average working-class Americans.
From Wall Street, to Big Oil, to the for-profit health insurance industry, business decisions are geared to increasing the wealth of shareholders. Take a gander at the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list and you’ll see a slew of billionaires who collect most of their money in the form of nonlabor dividend income from things they “own,” such as businesses, land, and infrastructure.
Paris Hilton collects a steady stream of dividend checks from her family’s businesses. The Koch brothers get their regular checks in the mail courtesy of the massive energy conglomerate their dad built up known as Koch Industries. Mitt Romney continues to cash his checks from Bain Capital.
It’s good to be a shareholder or corporate owner in capitalist America. And that’s all well and good.
But aren’t we all shareholders in our commons, just like Alaskans? And being such, shouldn’t we all share the dividends every time our commons turns a profit for others, just like Alaskans?
In Alaska, the money oil corporations pay to lease and extract oil on public lands is distributed to all Alaskans equally. So, nationwide, all the money oil corporations pay to lease and extract oil on public lands could be distributed to all Americans equally, too.
In 2007, the US government collected $
9 billion in royalty payments from Big Oil on just the drilling done in the Gulf of Mexico.181 In reality, we taxpayers should have earned a lot more, but the United States ranks ninety-third in the world in how much revenue it extracts from oil and gas extraction compared with the profits these industries enjoy.182
That has something to do with Ronald Reagan. Between 1954 and 1983, the average lease for federal land was $2,224 per acre. But after Reagan, between 1983 and 2008, the average lease was just $263 an acre.
But still, $9 billion in royalties from just the Gulf of Mexico is a considerable chunk of change. And if we were to distribute that money equally to all Americans, as they do in Alaska, then it works out to about $30 a person. Not too much money, but when you throw in the leases and royalties paid everywhere else around the nation for oil, gas, and coal—from the East Coast drilling platforms, to the fracking wells and coal mines in Appalachia, to the oil derricks in the Midwest and Texas, we’re talking serious money.
Not only that, think of how much money is put into our common military to defend the interests of Big Oil abroad to make sure the shipping lanes stay open and the oil spigot keeps flowing. Big Oil should contribute a small fee for this service, which can also be added to this common “permanent fund” to be shared by all Americans.
And what about making Big Oil pay for their pollution of the commons? A cap-and-trade system, which forces polluters to pay for how much carbon they dump into the atmosphere, is a good start and could raise even more money for our commons permanent fund to be shared by all of us.
The point is, our commons belong to all of us and should be enriching all of us, and not just the billionaires who’ve put a flag in the ground.
And it shouldn’t stop at just oil.
Wall Street relies heavily on the commons, too. Our markets are regulated by common government, enforced through common courts, and fueled by workers who were educated in our commons.
As entrepreneur and cofounder of On the Commons, Peter Barnes proposes that we should all get a cut every time a company goes public. Barnes argues, “When a company like Facebook or Google goes public, its value rises dramatically… Experts call this a ‘liquidity premium,’ and it’s generated not by the company but by society. This socially created wealth now flows mostly to a small number of Americans… Let’s say we required public companies to deposit 1 percent of their shares in the [common fund] for ten years, up to a total of 10 percent. In due time, the [common fund] would have a diversified portfolio worth trillions of dollars.”183
Now consider the enormous profits that radio, television, and entertainment companies receive by using our common air and infrastructure and our common copyright laws for basically no charge. They, too, should be paying into the common fund.
Add together all of these “rents” for using our commons, and “We the People” have a raised quite a bit of money for our common permanent fund, money that could go a long way to supplementing the annual incomes of millions of Americans who desperately need a bit more cash.
Somehow, as Royalists were left to run amok in America over the last few decades, we forgot the important role our commons can play in enriching all of our lives. Rather than billionaire CEOs paying us to use our commons, pollute our air and water, dictate our military missions, exploit our markets, and hijack our radio and TV airwaves, it’s all been flipped on its head and we end up paying them. We give them subsidies, generous tax breaks, free usage, and no requirement that they have to share with the rest of us, who actually own those commons, any of the wealth our commons have produced for them.
So in the end, they make billions off what should belong to all of us while we make squat. This makes no sense. And with pressing concerns about wealth inequality, economic insecurity, and environmental disasters, we need to move away from this corporate-exploitation model, and embrace a new universal-shareholder model.
Cure Wall Street’s Madness
One of the ways to put a check on Wall Street’s madness that’s caused the last Great Crashes is through something called a Robin Hood tax—or a financial transaction tax, as it’s technically called.
It’s pretty simple; every single security that’s bought and sold comes with a tiny tax—usually less than 1 percent. In 2012, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced a new financial-transaction tax on banking institutions in France—charging a tiny one-tenth-of-one-percent tax on all stock trades.
It’s called a Robin Hood tax, because it’s a tax that only affects banks and wealthy traders, and it generates a lot of much-needed revenue to tackle issues such as poverty, health care, and infrastructure rebuilding.
That tiny, little just one-tenth-of-one-percent tax on only the banks and other stock traders will generate massive revenue for the rest of the nation—upward of 12 billion euros a year.
And if the whole debt-ridden European continent were to go the way of France and put in place a Robin Hood tax on stock trades, that’d be an additional 50 billion euros flowing in.
Not only would a Robin Hood tax raise much-needed revenue, it would also discourage bad behavior, such as excessive financial speculation and high-frequency trading—triggers of economic crises.
As one of the main proponents of the Robin Hood tax in France, an organization called Friends of the Earth Europe argued, “European banks, pension funds and insurance companies are increasing global hunger and poverty by speculating on food prices and financing land grabs in poorer countries… Food speculation, with billions of euros flooding in and out of financial products… causes price volatility. These rapid and unpredictable price swings hit the most vulnerable hardest, threatening their right to food, and making it more difficult for farmers to maintain an income—creating instability, hunger and poverty.”
And they were just talking about European banks, not even American banks. It’s been proven that Goldman Sachs—which opened up the market for speculation on everything from oil to food to gold—played an integral role in the 2008 food shortages around the planet as well as the housing crash.
This is what the banks are doing with all that untaxed money: speculating and creating instability around the planet. But a Robin Hood tax would change all that. And it would put an end to the high-speed machines that account for most of the trades made on Wall Street—machines that make tens of thousands of trades a second based solely on some computer formula.
After the Crash of 2016, it’ll be time to put an end to fraud and theft on Wall Street and make banksters pay their fair share again.
Reinvest
There’s something that every single American family understands—something that Royalists don’t want us to talk about—and that’s the difference between spending and investing.
Let’s assume that the typical American family collects its paycheck at the end of the month and decides to go out to eat for a fancy dinner. A couple of glasses of wine, an appetizer, four entrees, and a few desserts later, the waiter brings the check and that family is now out about $150. Do that once a month as a special treat, and you’re pushing $2,000 a year. That money is not coming back. It was spent and is now gone.
Now let’s assume that same family decides to skip the fancy dinners all year. Instead they take their $2,000 and put it into home repairs, such as a new air conditioner, improved insulation, or a new rooftop deck. Unlike spending it on a fancy dinner, that money doesn’t just disappear. It will actually create more wealth in the long run through lower energy bills and an increase in the value of their home. That’s an investment.
Or let’s assume that same family uses a chunk of their paycheck to start a prepaid college fund for their kids. Again, that money doesn’t disappear. Instead, it was invested in the future for their kids to earn a college degree.
Or maybe, they just buy $150 worth of stocks every month like many other people. Again, the money doesn’t disappear. In fact, in a year it might be worth $2,500.
That’s another investment.
American
families know the difference between spending and investing. And they know that when times are tough, they need to cut back on their spending but not on their investments. That means fewer fancy dinners out, but no cuts to their kids’ college fund or mortgage payments on their home.
However, since the Royalists took over, this same logic isn’t applied to our government.
Like a family, our government is capable of spending and investing.
Money put into our wars is the perfect example of spending. As a nation, we can spend a trillion dollars deploying troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, manufacturing and detonating bunker-busting bombs, and refueling aircraft carriers in the Gulf. Guess what happens to all of that money? It’s obliterated.
War spending is just that—spending. It doesn’t create more wealth in the future. The shards of a Predator drone’s Tomahawk missile in northern Pakistan will not create one dime of lasting wealth for our nation. Our military might as well have gone out for a few million big fancy steak dinners.
No question about it, our government spends a lot of money. And when it comes to reducing our deficits, there’s certainly a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse within that spending that can be cut—particularly in the Defense Department, which seems to have lost $2 trillion they can’t account for.
But let’s not confuse spending with investing, which our government also does a lot of.
For example, money put into Pell Grants so more kids can go to college is an investment that will create lasting wealth for our entire nation when those kids graduate and become a productive part of the economy. Our experience with the GI Bill indicates that every $1 spent will return at least $7—and maybe as much as $50—back to government coffers in the form of income taxes from more productive and higher-paid workers.
The Crash of 2016 Page 23