This interview, with Senator Bernie Sanders, has several strategies that will work providing there is transparency and are all implemented together.
[Note: I see this as a economic stabilizing/transitional strategy - Ron Paul opposes all income taxes on principal, however his strategy, like the one below, will only work if it is implemented as a full strategy. Doing one thing at a time(as opposed to, 'all at once'), while filling each bill with inefficiencies because of corporate influence... with the only public exposure of these problems through comedy news shows, won't work. ]
The following are extracts from "Q&A: U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders welcomes Occupy Wall Street message":
Public outrage is well justified, he said; and cited two sobering statistics:
-- The nation’s six largest financial institutions now have assets worth more than $9.4 trillion — about 65 percent of our Gross Domestic Product.
-- Three of the four largest of those corporations have actually grown in size since they were bailed out two years ago with taxpayers’ money.
“If they are too big to fail, then they’re too big to exist,” Sanders said.
During an extended interview, the senator described parallels between the impulses driving Occupy Wall Street — and his own work to spur Congress and the White House to make systemic changes in how Americans create wealth.
Burlington Free Press: This has been a perennial concern of yours for years, hasn’t it?
Senator Bernie Sanders: Sure: I’ve been talking about it for many years, but it hasn’t been out there.
BFP: Explain how your aims — if not your methods — are similar.
SBS: I am very supportive of the protests because they are focusing attention on an issue that needs a lot of discussion: not only the greed of Wall Street and the reckless behavior that has caused this recession, but also the growing inequality in the United States.
It’s important for more people for understand that, both in terms of economics and in politics, there’s something very wrong when so few own so much and have so much political power — and when so many have so little political power and money. That’s what these protester are focusing on, and I think that’s a good thing to do.
BFP: How does Wall Street consolidate money and power?
SBS: One example from a political a perspective: when Wall Street wanted more deregulation, over a 10-year period, they spent $5 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to do away with Glass–Steagall (Act), to do away with the regulations that had prevented them from getting into this hyper-speculative mode. Five billion dollars to get what they wanted! That’s extraordinary power.
BFP: You mentioned the six largest financial firms in the U.S. controlling more than half of the country’s worth.
SBS: They also issue about two-thirds of the credit cards in this country, and about half of the mortgages. So, what we’re looking at is folks with tremendous economic power, and obviously with that economic power goes tremendous political power in terms of their ability to spend huge amounts of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. It was spent to make sure that the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill (passed in 2010, ostensibly to regulate financial markets) was as weak as possible.
BFP: What can we, as a country, do about the financial giants?
SBS: The answer has got to be that you’ve got to break them up. If they are too big to fail, then they’re too big to exist. They should be broken up so that we don’t have to bail them again when they collapse again.
And number two: because they have so much economic power, I think they’ve got to be broken up because that’s not what a competitive economy is about.
BFP: Are there lessons in history we need to re-learn?
SBS: Monopolies (in the early 20th century) were broken up by good Republicans like William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt. Standard Oil was broken up, the railroad trusts were broken up. So I think we can learn a lesson from Teddy Roosevelt who broke up the trusts: that should be one of our goals.
BFP: Then what?
SBS: When you have 25 million Americans today who are either unemployed or underemployed, and if you understand that real unemployment includes those people who have given up looking for work and are working part-time when they want to work full-time — that’s 16 percent of our population.
It goes without saying that we need a major, major jobs program. We need to put millions of people back to work. I agree with some of what the president is proposing; disagree with certain other aspects. But he is certainly talking about the need for a jobs program. I would go further.
BFP: What kind of jobs?
SBS: Rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, I think, is the fastest and best way to create jobs. Look at our roads, bridges, water systems — go down to Rutland and talk to the mayor there about his water system — wastewater plants, rail: We are falling behind much of the rest of the world in terms of high-speed rail.
A good jobs bill will address all of those things; it will make this country more productive, more internationally competitive and create, over a period of years, millions of decent paying jobs.
BFP: These are tough times. How can we afford to pay for a massive jobs program?
SBS: We need to ask the wealthiest people in this country to pay more taxes. I say use that money to invest in infrastructure and in the process, create jobs for working families.
BFP: Is this what you were talking about as a “tax surcharge” earlier this year?
SBS: In fact, I introduced that legislation in March — and it’s now being used, with some changes, by the Democrats. This is a a time when the people on top are doing phenomenally well — and their effective — i.e. their real — tax rates are the lowest in decades. It’s what Warren Buffet, a billionaire, is talking about when he says he ends up having an effective tax rate lower than a nurse or a police officer.
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