Opinions of Peter Belmont
Speaking Truth to Power
| Open Letter to the DNC Regarding Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton |
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by Peter A. Belmont / 2016-03-24
I write from what I suppose might be called a “progressive” political viewpoint. It is certainly an unabashedly pro Sanders viewpoint. America’s Most Pressing Problems The things that I see as America’s greatest and most pressing political problems, calling for great departures from present practices, practices governed by our ill-starred system of Oligarchic governance, are these:
America has failed even to begin to fight a “war against climate change” with adequate vigor and urgency. An adequately vigorous “war” against climate change would require the ending of all man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, at least in the USA, and maybe in the whole world, perhaps in so short a time as 10 or 15 years. See Planning the “War” Against Climate Change”. Far too much time has been wasted so far, and the world (and the USA) cannot afford to wait another 4 or 8 or 12 years before we begin this “war” in earnest.
Most politicians of both major parties are subservient to the desires of “The Establishment”—also known as “The Oligarchy”, “The Plutocracy”, “Big Money”, or, simply “The BIGs”: Big-Banks, Big-Oil, Big-Defense, Big-Pharma, Big-Zion, Big-Health-Insurance, just to name a few. This subservience has led to many disasters, such as the banking-induced melt-down of 2008. It has also led to the failure of the USA to fight climate change, because the pressure from the Oligarchs (Big-Oil for instance) has persuaded the subservient political class to treat climate change as if it were a hoax, or, if not a hoax, then something that need not be opposed with any seriousness or urgency. Countries whose system of governance is more democratic and less Oligarchic have done somewhat better than the USA has done on this matter. Ending the control by the Oligarchy is largely a matter of changing how money may be spent to effect political purposes (which is discussed below). These changes would return democracy to the people. The Oligarchic system of governance has for many years failed to allow voters to create a choice in candidates other than a choice between very similar Establishment (Oligarch-chosen-and-controlled) candidates. These candidates do differ as to social questions, but agree on almost everything which involves big-money—upon which questions the desires of the Oligarchy are determinative, in both parties. Thus the two-party “too big to fail” bank bail-out after the bank-created economic crash of 2008. The Trump and Sanders candidacies might seem to suggest that I am wrong that the Oligarchy controls all our candidates, but the extreme discomfort of the “regulars” of both major parties at these candidates, and the steps already taken by the Democratic Party and which are being considered by the establishment-Republican Party suggest that I am substantially right, as I would have been in the past; and in any case, the prominence of two revolutionary candidates today, Trump and Sanders, is a sign of the extreme disfavor with which much of the electorate views the Oligarchy System.
Because of the manipulations of the Oligarchy, the American system of governance allows very rich individuals and wealthy corporations to escape fair taxation. The tax-rates on income and estates (and gifts) of the very rich are reduced to less, in many cases, than the tax-rates on the poor and middle class, and the effective tax-rates on corporations are unfairly low. Corporations should not be able to avoid taxation by moving their headquarters to other countries. Corporations which too long hold great unspent reserves of cash—unproductive cash—should be required to return that cash to shareholders as dividends, which, when received (at least by American shareholders) would be immediately taxable by the IRS as income. Corporations should not be allowed to hide their unspent-for-production cash wealth from the tax-collector and thus to defer taxation perhaps forever by buying back their own shares instead of distributing the cash as immediately taxable dividends. The deviousness of the tax code in favor of the rich and various corporations is beyond belief and needs to be reformed to make it fair. The use of the tax code to provide various subsidies should be examined carefully in light of today’s needs, especially subsidies for purchases of renewable energy (too low today) and to producers of fossil-fuels (which should be eliminated as soon as possible to help fight climate change).
We need to take “democracy” from the Oligarchy and return it to the people. The American Oligarchy enjoys the power it does because our Constitution has been (mis-) interpreted to allow corporations (and other non-human entities such as labor unions) to spend money for political purposes—and to allow wealthy individuals to spend out-sized amounts for political purposes. These political expenditures include gifts to political campaigns, either directly or via PACs. These expenditures also include the purchase of so-called ”independent” political advertising (this possibility being the poisonous fruit of the Supreme Court’s off-the-wall Citizens United decision). Most of these problems can be eliminated—either by Constitutional re-interpretations by the Supreme Court or by a Constitutional Amendment—by a new rule that no non-human beings (other than PACs funded exclusively by gifts from human beings) may take or pay others to take political action; and that no human person may expend more, in any calendar year, than a maximum “cap” on cumulative political expenditures. For the moment, the protection of a “free press” would seem to allow the owners of “presses” (TV stations, elements of the internet, newspapers and magazines, book publishers)—and these often conglomerate corporate owners—to spend their own corporate money (often money obtained from enterprises other than the “press” they own) to publish politically manipulative materials, even though political expenditures by any other non-human entities should and could be forbidden. To the extent the owners of “presses” use money obtained outside their narrowly “press” enterprise to fund publication of political materials, they would violate the prohibition I wish to see enacted against corporate political action. At all events, The New York Times and the Fox Broadcasting Company could continue to decide what news to present, and how or whether to present or distort it, but could not accept payments from other corporations for political messaging but only for clearly commercial product advertising. Thus, paid political advertisements (on TV, in newspapers, etc.) could be limited to those paid for by people or by organizations (I call them PACs) funded solely by smallish contributions from human persons. Here, my re-definition of “PAC” as a political action group funded only by smallish contributions from people, would become a broad category including such things as political parties, candidate committees, and advocacy groups such as NRA and NARAL.
The cock-eyed American economy is dominated by a system which has not only created obscene imbalances in both personal wealth and personal income between the 0.1% richest Americans and the lowest 90%, but which has transmogrified big-banks, hedge-funds, and conglomerizers from productive lenders and productive investors into feudal overlords, raiders, parasites, and looters of the non-financial (that is, actually productive) parts of our economic system.
The obscene so-called “free trade treaties” such as NAFTA and TPP and TTIP are, perhaps, 10%, about trade and about 90% about foreign-investor-protection mechanisms. These mechanisms make large corporations rulers of the economic world with such potent veto powers over local legislation and regulations in regard to—for instance—environmental protection and labor laws, that they seriously threaten any attempt a well-meaning government (of any signatory country, including the USA) might make to mount a seriously transformative assault on climate change. Forget about “black helicopters: the challenge to national sovereignty is in trade treaties.
America has been at war almost constantly since 1945. This has not only been costly in American treasure and lives, but has also made life miserable for peoples all over the world as our current intrusion in the Middle East makes clear (25 years old, now, beginning with the Gulf War, 1990). The emergence of Al-Qaeda and ISIS are direct responses to American interventions in the Middle East. Some believe that the creation of terrorists was a deliberate American (that is, Oligarchic) purpose. By its use of our military and the CIA, the American Oligarchy has installed dictators in place of democratic governments, supported dictators which we did not ourselves install, and forced/guided many governments into insupportable debt resulting in unpayable loans and austerity programs of great cruelty to poor people. Austerity is now also being imposed on the USA itself, as we have become just another Banana Republic in the eyes of the multi-national corporations which make up the American Oligarchy, and in the eyes of many of our politicians—think of the Flint water supply and of the low wages being paid in America today. America Is In A Catastrophic Zone Today My own take on these problems, as well as on the problems of racism, police brutality, credit-card debt and student-loan debt and ever-lower wages for those lucky enough to find work, housing bubbles and the foreclosure tragedy, Supreme Court misfeasance and resulting gutting of campaign finance laws and of voter rights laws, to name only a few— is that America is in a catastrophic zone today—felt by almost all Americans and resented by all Americans other than party-regulars (of both parties) and all other supporters of the Oligarchic system of governance and those who profit from it. This catastrophic feeling is quite general and explains especially the (revolutionary or angry) voting of many folks for Sanders and of many others for Trump. It seems impossible to me that the independent voters who mostly couldn’t vote in the primaries are not just as angry and revolutionary. The polls which show Sanders beating Trump in a general election by a greater margin than Clinton would do strongly suggest, first, that the independent voters are also feeling their revolutionary “oats” and, second, that the DNC, by supporting Clinton (try to imagine the unelected Democratic delegates all supporting Sanders!) are seeking to defeat the electoral desires of a majority of Americans. So, DNC, to sum up: my take is that there is important revolutionary work to be done in America and that the DNC, Clinton, and the ruling Oligarchy are together determined to prevent any sort of democratic (“people’s”) upsetting of the status quo apple-cart, and are thus determined to prevent that important work from being done. Bernie Sanders together with a Congress elected on his coat-tails (or simply sympathetic to his goals) might get that work, or some of it, done. And the DNC has it within its power to allow democracy its chance, or to deny it its chance. Suggesting A Write-In Bernie will not suggest this, but I will. To all Americans who would wish to elect Bernie Sanders president—many Democrats, perhaps a few Republicans, and I deduce quite a number of Independents: Friends!, Americans! Prepare yourselves (in case Clinton is the Democratic candidate) to write-in Bernie Sanders’s name on election day! It is the only way, if we all do it, to prevent Trump’s craziness and the DNC’s self-abasing anti-democratic subservience to The Establishment (The Oligarchy, The BIGs) who have ruled us for too long and are now steering us toward many disasters, the worst of these being the environmental disaster of unopposed climate change. |
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