Why Can’t Our Economy Promote Equality and Shared Prosperity?

Jim Hightower Author, Commentator, America’s Number One Populist

You don’t have to be in “Who’s Who” to know what’s what. For example, if a tiny group of Wall Street bankers, billionaires, and their political puppets are allowed to write the rules that govern our economy and elections, guess what? Only bankers, billionaires, and puppets will profit from those rules.

That’s exactly why our Land of Opportunity has become today’s Land of Inequality. Corporate elites have bought their way into the policy-making backrooms of Washington, where they’ve rigged the rules to let them feast freely on our jobs, devour our country’s wealth, and impoverish the middle class.

There’s good news, however! A growing grassroots coalition of churches, unions, civil rights groups, citizen activists, and many others is organizing and mobilizing us to crash through those closed doors, write our own rules and reverse America’s plunge into plutocracy. Called “Take On Wall Street,” the coalition’s structural reforms include:

  • Getting the corrupting cash of corporations and the superrich out of our politics by repealing Citizens United and providing a public system for financing America’s elections.
  • Stopping “too big to fail” banks from subsidizing their high-risk speculative gambling with the deposits of us ordinary customers, making them choose to be a consumer bank or a casino, but not both.
  • Instituting a tiny “Robin Hood Tax” on Wall Street speculators to discourage their computerized gaming of the system, while also generating hundreds of billions of tax dollars to invest in America’s real economy.
  • Restoring low-cost, convenient “postal banking” in our Post Offices to serve millions of Americans who’re now at the mercy of predatory payday lenders and check-cashing chains.

To learn more about this campaign and its reform agenda to democratize America’s financial system, go to www.TakeOnWallStreet.org.

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Reposted from The Hightower Lowdown.

National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be – consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plain-folks. Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80 percent of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top. He publishes a populist political newsletter, “The Hightower Lowdown.” He is a New York Times best-selling author, and has written seven books including, Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There’s Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

Posted In: Allied Approaches, From Jim Hightower

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