Jack, you went to Coon Rapids High School so you know the area, so please, move to the Sixth Congressional District and run against the schreeching Harpy.
I would love a campaign that could coin the slogan, "Vote for Jack because Bachmann hasn't done jack."
Everyone with a progressive heart has to like Nelson Pallmeyer's enduring honesty and ability to tell truths simply but effectively:
Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer is an American academic who teaches justice and peace studies at the University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities. He sought the endorsement of the state’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2008 and did not succeed. Nelson-Pallmeyer spoke at Peacestock 2011 near Hager City, Wis., and told people gathered that this is a decade of opportunity.
He cited four actions that would solve the current budget crisis:
1. Single payer health care
2. Fair tax system on all incomes
3. Transaction tax on speculative investments
4. Remove cap on Social Security contributions (currently $106,000 annual income), which he said would make Social Security healthy forever
Nelson-Pallmeyer also argued for reducing American imperialism and a 70% reduction in war expenditures.
And what better thing has he going for himself, than being able to point to who it is that hates him but would use his appeal against one the hater fears more.
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Well prior to the so-called "Patriot Act" and other things [see following post] that are sobering about how the nation continues to be moving in troublesome directions, Nelson Pallmeyer had written at length about the peril of our nation becoming "a national security state," e.g., here.
_____________UPDATE_____________
If you dislike long excerpts, tough. Nelson Pallmeyer wrote, and remember it was in 1992 -
p18
Kevin Phillips, The Politics of Rich and Poor
The forces of the late twentieth century have required double entry bookkeeping: new wealth in profusion for the bright, the bold, the educated and the politically favored; economic carnage among the less fortunate. In short, the United States of the 1980s.
Poor people living in third-world countries are not the only victims of the so-called new world order. At the heart of this "new" order is a troubling paradox: Poor people within the United States, and the country as a whole, are getting poorer at the same time as the rich within the United States are getting richer. The massive wealth drain from third-world countries to first-world elites has not prevented the economic decline of the United States. Its pressing national problems mirror those of many third-world countries. The infant mortality rate in inner cities like Detroit and Washington, D.C., exceeds that of impoverished Honduras. The United States, in less than two decades, went from being the world's largest creditor nation to being the world's largest debtor. It is also a country of stark contrasts including billionaires and homeless people, measles epidemics and military bands, crack babies and Wall Street speculators.
The most disturbing parallel between the United States and the Third World is that massive wealth transfers from the third world poor to the first-world rich have a domestic counterpart.
During the 1980s there was a dramatic shift in wealth from poor and working-class Americans to U.S. elites. This upward redistribution of wealth was accompanied by a radical shift in relative wealth and economic power from the United States to Japan and Western Europe. There is one other paradox that is central to understanding U.S. goals within the new world order: The nation's declining economic power is accompanied by and linked to United States ascendancy as the world's undisputed leader in military power.
Domestic Hunger and Poverty
... The Reagan and Bush years produced, according to Kevin Phillips, a Republican party strategist, "one of U.S. history's l most striking concentrations of wealth." This wealth concentration occurred "as the American dream was beginning to crumble not just in inner-city ghettos and farm townships but in blue collar centers and even middle-class suburbs.'' The gap between the richest and poorest U.S. citizens is now greater than at any time since the Census Bureau began collecting such data in 1947. The poorest twenty percent of the U.S. population receive 3.8 percent of national income; the richest twenty percent get 46.1 percent.
If talk of victory in the Cold War sounded bitterly ironic to poor people living in third-world countries allied with the United States, it is doubly so for people living in third-world conditions within the United States. The following litany of ills provides ample evidence of a nation in crisis:
* One in four children in the United States is born into poverty.
* More than thirty-five million U.S. citizens lack any type of health insurance. Millions more have only limited coverage.
* The United States ranks twenty-second in infant mortality, behind most of our industrial allies.
* Most of the poor in the United States are full-time workers or their dependents. This reflects a serious deterioration in the wages and benefits of significant sectors of the U.S. work force.
* In 1985, 20.4 percent of all infants below age 1 were not fully vaccinated against polio, 41.5 percent of infants of color.
* One-fourth of the poorest low-income households spend more than seventy-five percent of their incomes for rent.
* The United States has the world's largest per capita prison population; 426 of every 100,000 people are in jail. By way of comparison, the incarceration rates per 100,000 people are 333 in South Africa, 268 in the Soviet Union, 97 in Great Britain, l 76 in Spain, and 40 in the Netherlands.
* The United States, according to a United Nation's Development Program report, also has the highest murder rate and l highest incidence of reported rape among industrialized countries.
These acute social problems are a consequence of national policies and priorities that enrich certain sectors at the expense of others. These policies include enormous tax cuts for the richest Americans, major cuts in social services, huge trade and budget deficits, and massive infusions of foreign capital. They reward speculative rather than productive investment and emphasize military production and power over socially useful production. By describing in general terms the economic changes that occurred over the past decade, and the winners and losers from these changes, we can discover the forces and constituencies giving shape to the new world order.
"America's richest 5 percent (and richest 1 percent in particular)," writes Kevin Phillips, "were the ... beneficiaries" of major changes in the U.S. tax code. Tax reforms benefited the rich in several ways. The top personal tax bracket rate dropped from seventy percent to twenty-eight percent over seven years. At the same time the rate of federal tax receipts from corporate income tax revenues continued to plummet from 32.1 percent in 1952, to 12.5 percent in 1980, to an all-time low of 6.2 percent in 1983.7 The burden of taxation shifted further onto low-income households as social security tax rate hikes accompanied lower income tax rates. According to Senator George Mitchell this resulted in "a shift of about $80 billion in annual revenue collections from the progressive income tax to the regressive payroll tax." In the first five years following the passage of the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act the superrich "shared a half-trillion dollar victory." These tax changes translated into deepening disparities between the incomes of the rich and poor. Between 1977 and 1988, according to a Congressional Budget Office report, the incomes of the wealthiest fifth of U.S. households increased thirty-four percent, the incomes of the middle fifth grew four percent and the incomes of the poorest fifth dropped by ten percent. The top one percent benefited most. Their incomes rose by 122 percent, rising from an average of $203,000 in 1977 to $451,000 in 1988.l° According to the 1991 Green Book from the House Ways and Means Committee, the after-tax income of the richest one percent of all U.S. citizens in 1988 was as great as the combined after-tax income of the bottom forty percent. By way of contrast, the after-tax income of the bottom forty percent in 1977 was more than double the total after-tax income of the richest one percent.
In addition to tax breaks for the rich the Reagan administration increased military spending by thirty-eight percent from 1982 through 1986. Burgeoning military expenditures further traumatized the federal budget, which had already lost hundreds of billions of dollars of potential tax revenues. The results were huge deficits that drained the federal budget because of rising interest payments. Annual federal expenditures on interest for the federal debt rose from $96 billion in 1981 to $216 billion in 1988.
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| Talk is cheap. Action is precious. It is time to turn that talk into something, Mark. photo credit |
