Step 1. Get the low-down on what your elected representatives are up to at local, state and federal levels
Although the links are not always readily apparent, what goes on in our government and economy is closely related. There is a direct link between your livelihood and economic security and what your elected representatives do in office that influences your job, income, cost of living and tax burden. They play a major role in determining how much it costs to live in America and how much money can be made and retained by different groups of people living in American society.
For example, our representatives have the power to increase or decrease your cost of living by deciding whether the prices corporations charge for their products and services are fair or excessive. Unfortunately, in recent years, they rarely enforce laws prohibiting windfall and excess profits like those being reaped by the oil and gas industry. However, if their constituents insisted, they certainly could use their legislative authority to put a stop to the price-gouging that is driving up the cost of living.
Our representatives decide what people have to pay in taxes on their income, which in turn determines how much of their income different income groups get to keep.
If we look at the past thirty years, the actions of our elected representatives have allowed wealthy people in America to accumulate far more wealth than typical American working families, who are increasingly falling into debt because they cannot make ends meet. (According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, an astounding 44% of Americans report that they do not have enough money to make ends meet.)
According to Inequality.org, back in 1979, the average income of the top 5 percent of American families was eleven times as large as that of the bottom 20 percent. In 2005, the average income of the top 5 percent had grown to twenty-one times that of the bottom 20 percent.
Even more significantly, in 2005, all of the income gains went to the top 10% of American households. All the rest - 90% of American households - saw their income decline.
A large part of the reason for this growing inequality is that our elected representatives in Congress have been holding down the wages that can be earned by working Americans while the compensation paid to corporate executives has been soaring.
American CEOs make almost twice as much as CEOs in France, Germany and the United Kingdom. This amount was 411 times as much as average U.S. workers in 2005. (In 1990. it was only 107 times as much.) The result is that the slice of the total national income pie that is going to corporate executives is getting larger while that of workers is shrinking.
So we have to keep our eye on what our representatives are up to and work to get control of the legislation they pass to make sure that it protects our livelihoods and economic security.
You can keep abreast of what they are doing and how their actions affect you by surfing into nonpartisan websites such as:
Project Vote Smart and its links provide you the names of your elected local, state and federal representatives; information about your representatives' campaign contributors, legislative track records, and contact information you can use to get in touch with them by email.
To get started, click on "Current Officials" at the top of the website's home page. Then click on "U.S. Congress" and after that select your state. You will get a list of all your Congressional representatives. If you click on the name of one of your senators, for example, you will be linked to a page with comprehensive information about him or her. If you click on "Campaign Finances", and then on "Campaign Finance data for Senator X at OpenSecrets", it will link you to the website of OpenSecrets.org.
OpenSecrets.org is a nonpartisan organization that covers the waterfront when it comes to all the facts, issues and trends surrounding the ways in which corporate special interests inject money into American politics. It helps identify the cause-and-effect relationships through which corproate contributions to the campaign war chests of our elected representatives help them obtain public policies that maximize their profits and block policies they oppose.
Specifically, the menu on the left side of the Open Secrets home page will provide you the names of special interests from whom your Congressional representatives have accepted campaign contributions. It will also give you break-downs of these contributions by geographic area, e.g., what proportion comes from outside the state as opposed to inside the state; which industries provide the largest contributions, e.g. defense, energy, finance, health, labor, etc.
MAPLight.org: Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection. Another vital source of information showing the connection between your Congressional representatives' campaign contributors and their votes on legislation is the website of MAPLight.org. Just click on the icon with the U.S. flag and the words "U.S. Congress".
Once you have this information about your Congressional representatives' campaign contributors, you can check their legislative votes to see whether the legislation favors the interests of the contributors, and, if it does, how this legislation impacts your livelihood and vital interests. You may wish to monitor your representatives' legislative actions in policy areas that particularly affect you.
OpenCongress.org and MAPLight.org enable you to track your Congressional representatives voting records and follow bills as they work their way through Congress. You can sign up to have regular updates on legislative actions delivered right to your own computer.
Unfortunately, Congress itself provides confusing information about the votes of specific representatives on specific legislation that is hard to find, if it is available at all. They frequently take "voice votes" on controversial pieces of legislation that do not leave a written record of which way a particular representative voted. Presumably this is because they do not want us, their constituents, to know that their votes favor corporate special interests at the expense of our livelihoods.
So we have to use other means to find out, such as by asking our representatives outright how they have voted and expect to vote on specific issues. Steps outlined below show how representatives who use such tactics to betray the public interest can be defeated at the polls and replaced by those who respect and defend it.
Stateline.org: Politics and Policy Issues State by State covers the major legislative issues pending in all 50 states. You can click on the name of your state and read news alerts about what is happening on the legislative scene. You can also click on links to your state legislature's website where you can monitor your representatives' legislative initiatives and votes.
Return to Step 1 Overview
Step 2
Step 2. Exercise your political rights! Select the issues and policies that most concern you from the 100+ basic policy options provided on this website. Create your own policy agenda across the board advocating the policies you want enacted into law.
Email your agenda to your elected representatives and candidates for office with detailed instructions for protecting your vital interests, such as your livelihood, economic security and all the vital resources and assets on which your economic security depends.
If you are interested in particular pieces of legislation, tell them whether you support or oppose the proposed legislation. Give them instructions regarding the action you want them to take, if any, to revise the legislation to meet your requirements.
Weigh your alternatives across the board using a comprehensive set of basic public policy options currently facing American voters. They are profiled on this website with links to online information about their pros and cons.
These options are displayed using a visual metaphor that makes the location of the options easy to remember -- two decks of playing cards.
The options are grouped under eight umbrella themes, each linked to a suit of cards. The options are grouped under eight umbrella themes, each corresponding to a different suit of cards in each of the two decks:
Deck 1
Livelihoods
Health & Welfare
Security
Civil & Political Rights
Deck 2
Economy
Local/State Government
Federal Government
International Relations
You can access these options as often as you like, 24 hours a day, free of charge. You can even add your own options to the Joker pool.
As you will see by comparing the options offered, they cover a wide range of options that advocate divergent and even diametrically opposed policy choices. You can evaluate these options by clicking the Card Links located at the bottom of each card. They connect you to online information sources that you can access via the Internet to analyze their pros and cons from different points of view and ideological perspectives.
Most links connect you to recent articles from newspapers, magazines, blogs and research reports. New links with new information are added to cards as they become available. You can view all the links in alphabetical order by clicking on the "References" item on this website's home page.
Here is how the 100+ policy options are displayed on the two decks of cards:
- Each deck contains 52 cards and four suits: Spades Hearts Clubs Diamonds.
- Each suit represents one of the eight umbrella themes listed above.
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Each suit contains 13 cards -- just as you would find in a regular deck of cards.
- Each card contains a public policy choice related to the umbrella theme of its suit.
- In addition to the decks, there is also a pool of Jokers, which serve as wild cards that you can use to compose your own policy options, as explained below.
Click here to see a complete list of the titles of the 100+ policy options displayed on the two card decks. Each suit displays one of the eight themes and has 13 cards displaying the titles of 13 policy options.
Click here to see all the cards and the textual descriptions of each policy option contained on each card.
What is unique about this tool is that it enables you to email any or all of your representatives your policy agenda with the public policy options you wish them to enact into law at any time. You can add specific information, comments and recommendations of your own. In addition, you can update your agenda whenever your feel the need to do so and email your new agenda to your representatives as often as you wish.
We live in a fast changing world, and this flexible agenda-setting tool enables us to keep our representatives abreast of our evolving policy priorities. We can use it anytime to send them detailed instructions explaining how we want them to translate our agendas into effective legislation that protects our well-being. At the present time, many if not most of our representatives have limited and even erroneous views of what their constituents really want and need. Worse still, they overlook what they do know when their corporate campaign contributors and their lobbyists pressure them to translate their agendas into law.
Our representatives' partial views are often defined by their pollsters who design surveys to get a "quick fix" on where we stand on controversial issues, often through automated telephone interviews that last only a few minutes. These fly-by-night polls do not give us a chance to share our broader perspectives on how we want our representatives to "connect the dots" among all the various issues and pieces of pending legislation that affect our livelihoods and economic security.
The policy options provided on this website give you the opportunity to tell your representatives exactly what you want across the board and, most importantly, how you want the various segments of the population to share the tax burden. Statistics show that in recent years, the middle class and working families are getting more and more squeezed between rising costs of living and stagnant real income. A major cause of this squeeze is the fact that our tax burdens are growing at the same time that our cost of living is dramatically increasing.
The rising cost of living is largely due to unbridled corporate profit-taking and the lack of legislative action by our elected representatives to enforce laws prohibiting corporations from reaping windfall and excess profits, especially those due to price-gouging. Much of the increase in the cost of living is due to soaring gas, oil and electricity prices, rising interest rates on credit cards and loans, skyrocketing insurance premiums and co-payments that have vastly increased the profits of the energy industry, financial services sector, insurers and health care providers. These corporations charge far more for their products and services than it costs to produce and distribute them or to fund the research and development that is needed to produce new products and services.
Yet our Congressional representatives stand idly by allowing highly profitable giant corporations to reap excess profits by siphoning off an ever large portion of the earnings of working Americans. To aggravate this shift in wealth to those who are already wealthy, our representatives have significantly cut the taxes of the corporate executives and their families who have profited from this price gouging -- to such an extreme that the federal government is unable to balance its own budget and fund its obligations to pay for such vital programs as Social Security and Medicare!
Jokers are Wild: How to Compose Your Own Options.
If you wish to create a card with your own policy option, you can email us a special request to create a Joker containing that option. If your option is unique, we will add it to the Joker Pool that is situated below the card decks. Just click here or select the Requests & Recommendations item from the menu on the home page.
The Joker pool contains consecutively numbered Jokers. Each Joker will have an original public policy title and text, which will be situated to the right of the card. Interested users will be able to conduct keyword searches of these unique cards to find those that address issues they care about.
Helpful Tips
Needless to say, evaluating all the policy options provided on this website is a daunting challenge. One way to simplify it is to first access just the key table to the card decks, and select one or two of the eight public policy umbrella themes that you are most concerned about. Then you can concentrate on the policy options offered within each theme by clicking on the title of the policy option. That will take you to the card that addresses the policy options related to that title and theme. You will be able to navigate through the deck with increasing speed as you become familiar with the location of your preferred themes and cards.
As you progress, you will find other tools on this website to help you. In addition to the Card Links to online information sources found at the bottom of each card, you can access the Public Policy and Election Links web page by clicking here. It contains an alphabetized list of links to key policy and election-related websites and the resources they offer. You can also access this web page via the menu found on this website's home page.
You can propose additions to the Card Links and to the Public Policy and Election Links by clicking here or selecting Requests & Recommendations from the menu found on this website's home page.
Instructions
You can create and transmit your policy agenda in several ways.
Once the website is fully automated, you will be able to check the box beneath each card that represents a policy option that you advocate to protect your vital interests. You can then proceed to the bottom of the page and select the elected representatives or candidates to whom you want your agenda sent, or people who are in your online address book. Your agenda will be automatically sent by email from this website.
You will be able to add your own comments to your agenda and policy options regarding specific pieces of legislation you support or oppose. You will also be able to save your agenda in your personal archive on this website.
In the meantime, to select your options, right click on the cards with the issues and options that are most important to you. Copy and paste your cards into emails addressed to your elected representatives and candidates for office at local, state and federal levels with detailed instructions for protecting your vital interests. You can also email them to advocacy groups to which you belong, a political party, labor union, friends, family and co-workers.
For detailed instructions on emailing your cards using your own email software, click here.
Return to Step 2 Overview
Step 3
Step 3. Start a dialogue with your elected representatives
To get a dialogue started, it is important to recognize at the outset that this may be an uphill battle in cases where elected representatives have reasons to avoid their constituents. You can figure out in advance whether this is the case by the "user-friendliness" of their contact interface. If it is hard to use, you know that you have work to do to goad these representatives into using state-of-the-art technologies to facilitate communications with you and the rest of their constituents. While this may be annoying -- and a sign that it is time to defeat these representatives at the polls -- it is a noble cause that will eventually serve your interests.
If you go to your elected representatives' official government websites to send them an email (Project Vote Smart provides quick access), you will be provided a standard form in which you can write your message. You will be asked to select a topic, which will channel your message into a mailbox dedicated to messages on that topic.
It is a common practice for our elected representatives' staff members to tally up these messages from their constituents to determine whether they support or oppose a particular piece of legislation or controversial issue. In other words, they condense our messages into a "yes" or "no" on single issues.
What this method suggests is that our elected representatives want to limit their constituent communications to short emails restricted to just one topic at a time, despite the fact that we live in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. It also suggests they need to be pressured into availing themselves of state-of-the-art internet technologies that enable us to engage in across-the-board dialogues with them on how our policy agendas and legislative options can be combined into legislation that we favor. If our agendas cannot be accommodated, we need to vote them out of office and replace them with representatives who will enact our agendas.
We need to track how our current legislators' past and future legislative decisions affect our real income, assets, debt and taxes. These are the real "meat-and-potato" issues of our time and we need to be in the driver's seat when it comes to the decisions that our representatives make on these issues. We need to be able to track how the tax burden is distributed among the various groups in society with different abilities to pay these taxes. Right now, the working poor pay a higher percent of their income on state taxes than the wealthy. Do we want this unfair distribution of the tax burden to continue?
We also need to track how income is distributed in this country among the various income groups. We have to look at the big picture and ask the big questions. Are the rich really getting richer and the poor poorer, as many people claim? What is going to happen if corporations keep outsourcing jobs and the U.S. no longer has the jobs that are needed to provide livelihoods to American workers?
What will happen if more and more people end up in low-paying service jobs that are inadequate to purchase basic necessities? What will happen if not enough people have the disposable income that is needed to buy the products and services that are needed to keep our economy going?
We need to scrutinize the distribution of income, wealth and profits among middle class citizens, wealthy citizens and the large corporations that dominate our economy so we know what is really happening. This will protect us from getting hit with tidal waves of changes that are out of our control and adversely affect our livelihoods and economic security.
We need to provide explicit instructions to our elected representatives when we elect them which tell them how we want them to vote on pivotal legislative decisions that are needed to ensure that the middle class survives and whether those who are counted as the "working poor" and thos presently at the bottom of the economic ladder can realize the American dream of climbing its rungs to the top.
With the agenda-setting tool found on this website, you can start a candid, broad-gauged dialogue with your representatives in which you can compare and contrast your respective policy agendas and give them concrete instructions. You can help them break out of the single issue mode of communications by directly them to provide you a concrete, issue-by-issue basis for comparing how their legislative choices for connecting the public policy dots stack up against yours. By taking this initiative, you will serve notice on them that you and millions of citizens and voters like yourself intend to play a greater role in guiding and overseeing their actions on a broader spectrum of legislative fronts than their constituents have ever played before.
Return to Step 3 Overview
Step 4
Step 4. Hold your elected representatives accountable for upholding the U.S. Constitution: Make sure they discharge their constitutional obligation to promote the general welfare by protecting your livelihood and economic security
According to the U.S. Constitution, we, the people, are the source of all government power in America, the sovereign rulers of this country. We create the government by electing representatives to represent us in legislative, judicial and executive branches of government. Once they are in office, the Constitution imposes on our representatives as their primary obligation the defense and protection of our general welfare.
Nowhere does the Constitution say that elected representatives should serve the interest of corporations, which do not have the right to vote in any election. In fact, the founders of the American republic specifically warned against the encroaching influence of corporations. Thomas Jefferson warned about their influence in 1816 when he wrote: "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Like Jefferson, we must constantly monitor their influence and constrain it whenever we see that it is adversely affecting our livelihoods and general welfare. In particular, we must constantly monitor the relationship between corporations and the elected representatives whose campaigns they finance to prevent these corporations from buying the votes of our representatives and interfering with public policy-making to our detriment. When we find that they are do so, we must vote them out of office.
Unfortunately, over the past 40 years, at the same time that corporations have gained the upper hand in government, our elected representatives have seriously jeopardized our welfare when it comes to our livelihoods. This term "livelihood" refers to a lot more than jobs or even "living wages" that enable us to pay for basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing and health.
It refers to all the resources and assets that make it possible for communities to create sustainable businesses and livelihoods that they can protect from disappearing overnight just because multinational corporations that do business there decide to outsource jobs. Protecting not only our livelihoods but the resources and assets that make it possible to create livelihoods is at the heart of what our elected representatives should be doing to defend and protect our general welfare and economic security.
Here's what two knowledgeable sources, Livelihoods Connect and Ecosystems.org define as the core ingredients of livelihoods. It is vital that we make sure our representatives protect these core ingredients from predatory corporations and market forces that destroy them. While the free market system is the most efficient and effective at creating businesses, jobs and wealth around the world, it is the primary duty of every nation-state and its governmental representatives to make sure that there are enough livelihoods in the country for the people who need them and that the conditions for creating livelihoods are maintained.
"A livelihood comprises the capabilities, assets (both material and social resources) and activities required for a means of living. A livelihood is sustainable when it can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks, maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets, while not undermining the natural resource base.
"The definition adopts an economics metaphor (capital assets) to describe the basic material and social, intangible and tangible assets that people have in their possession. These resources are the 'capital' bases from which livelihoods can be constructed and are defined as follows:
"Natural capital - natural resource stocks (soil, water, air, genetic resources etc) and environmental services (hydrological cycle, pollution sinks etc) from which resource flows and services useful for livelihoods are derived
"Economic or financial capital, including infrastructure - the capital base (cash, credit/debit, savings etc), infrastructure, and other economic assets that are essential for the pursuit of any livelihood strategy
"Human capital - skills, knowledge, ability to work and good health important for the successful pursuit of livelihood strategies
Social capital - the social resources (networks, social relations, associations etc) upon which people draw when pursuing different strategies.
"Whilst more 'capital' sources could be identified, the main point was that in order to construct livelihoods, people should successfully combine all or some of these 'capital' endowments. Understanding, in the context of people's lives, how different livelihood resources are combined in the pursuit of different livelihood strategies is therefore, critical."
Keeping in mind this inventory of the ingredients on which livelihoods depend, here's a list of ten livelihood-related questions we have every right to ask our representatives to answer so that we can hold them accountable for how their legislative acts and omissions affect our economic security:
- Since they took office, has the number of jobs in our state increased or decreased? Have they voted on legislation affecting job retention or loss, and if so, what was the legislation and what impact did the legislation have on job availability?
- If jobs have been lost, have they taken effective action to help existing state and local businesses expand and new businesses get started? Too often politicians tell us that job training is all that is needed to replace lost jobs, and yet even after the job training is completed, the jobs are not available to those who need them. Or the jobs that are available do not pay living wages
or fail to pay wages and benefits commensurate to those paid by the jobs that were lost. Are the new jobs that become available vulnerable to being outsourced?
- Do our representatives stand by silently while jobs in our states are outsourced overseas? Do they do nothing when profitable corporations threaten to outsource jobs unless they can pare down their labor costs even to the point that they do not provide living wages? Or eliminate their companies' health plans and pension programs, putting the burden on individuals, their families or the government?
Are they making an effort to prevent regional and local economies from being dominated by giant multinational corporations with uncompetitive practices that wipe out regional and local businesses?
- Is the cost of living in the state rising, staying the same or decreasing? If it is rising, what is causing it to rise? Are the wages, salaries and real incomes of state residents increasing, remaining flat or actually declining? If they are stagnating or declining while those of corporate executives are greatly increasing, what are our elected representatives doing to address these trends?
- Do our elected representatives consider the soaring profits of industries that provide energy, electricity, health care and financial services, especially those that are constantly raising consumers' prices, to be fair, unfair, excessive or windfall profits? Are our representatives enforcing existing excess profits laws against companies raking in unfair profits? What is their stand on usury laws prohibiting exorbitant interest rates?
Most importantly, are they monitoring the combined impact on our ability to make ends meet of rising costs of energy, electricity, health care, housing, college tuition and interest rates on credit cards and loans? Are they watching the "squeeze" in which the middle class is being caught, the declining number of middle class families and the increase of impoverished families?
Do they think it fair that health insurers' profits have been soaring in recent years at a rate far greater than the rest of corporate America? According to a report by
CBS Marketwatch, in 2000 they raised their insurance premiums by 60% and increased their revenues so much that they doubled their profit margins. The profits of the top 17 U.S. health insurers rose 114 percent to $414 million from $193 million on average in the year 2000 alone. They increased their revenues 21 percent to $9.3 billion on average.
Is it any wonder that this unregulated, privatized healthcare system has become one of the most expensive in the world? That it ensures only the healthiest and wealthiest so that the premiums it collects from the healthy policy holders it selects exceed the claims it has to pay? That this system threatens millions of insured Americans with the nightmare of losing their insurance because they cannot pay the continuous increases in insurance premiums, deductibles and co-payments that are forced upon them? That it has left nearly 50 million Americans uninsured so that they cannot get routine medical care and are vulnerable to bankruptcy from medical bills they cannot pay out of their stagnant incomes?
Why should individuals hold public office if they are going to allow the providers of health care and other indispensable goods and services to keep raising consumer prices to maximize their profits to the point that our living costs and the debts we incur to cover basic necessities outstrip our incomes?
- In the face of this demonstrable failure of the privatized U.S. health care system to cover all Americans Congressional research and surveys showing that a majority of Americans favor a universal government guaranteed single payer health care system, where do our elected representatives stand on providing their constituents this system, which that they have been requesting for years?
Are our representatives taking effective action to create such a system? Why are so many of them talking about further privatizing health care through private health care savings accounts when the public overwhelmingly favors a government-backed system?
Have they refused to take action creating universal health care for their constituents but voted for legislation establishing taxpayer-funded private health care systems reserved exclusively for themselves?
- During his tenure, Republican president Ronald Reagan set in motion the privatization revolution that is still going on. It has resulted in the sale by government officials to private companies of trillions of dollars of publicly-owned assets belonging to the American people, including oil reserves, public land, water rights, roads and railroads, port and airport facilities and even the electromagnetic spectrum known as the "air waves".
Are our local, state and federal representatives and the agencies they oversee giving away control of publicly-owned natural resources and assets without public benefit or fair compensation to the public? Are any of these sales or giveaways to foreign nations, enterprises and conglomerates threatening our security or making us vulnerable to terrorist attacks?
Are any of these privatization schemes resulted in the confiscation of citizens' private property -- like their homes! -- to turn them over to commercial developers, as has occurred in a number of municipalities recently?
Has the time come to reconsider and possibly roll back the "privatization revolution" so that the American people can retain control of "the commons" -- the natural resources and assets that have historically belonged to all the citizens of every country in the world? Research shows that privatization of government services can have negative consequences, especially higher costs to consumers, while non-privatized publicly-managed state and municipal services can be highly efficient and cost-effective in serving the public.
Do any of the companies that are permitted to "privatize" publicly-owned resources and utilities charge us higher prices than we would have to pay if publicly-owned resources were competently and cost-effectively managed by public entities or joint public/private entities with appropriate government oversight and regulation?
A related question is why do our elected representatives allow the executive branches of our local, state and federal governments to award no-bid contracts to private enterprises to carry out governmental functions less cost-effectively than government agencies can do? Why do they fail to require these private corporations to provide proof of being more qualified to perform the work than other companies or existing government agencies? Why do our representatives fail to hold these corporations accountable for the performance of the work while they bypass government agencies that are qualified to do the work, charge less for the work and can be held accountable for their performance?
The Bush administration paid an astounding $377.5 billion to private contractors in 2005 alone, an 86% increase over the year 2000 when it first took office, according to the report of U.S. Congressman Henry A. Waxman, a member of the Committee on Government Reform of the U.S. House of Representatives. $145 billion of this amount went to no-bid contracts in 2005.
Is there not something fishy in the dramatic increase in federal contracts received by Halliburton, the company whose former head is the current U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney. In 2000, Halliburton received only $763 million in contracts as the 20th largest federal contractor. By 2005, Halliburton received nearly $6 billion and had become the 6th largest federal contractor.
According to the Waxman report, which is based on investigations conducted by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), agency inspectors general and other government procurement analysts, a significant portion of the companies winning federal contracts have been inadequately audited or not audited at all. It identified 118 contracts collectively worth $745.5 billion that have experienced "significant overcharges, wasteful spending, or mismanagement over the last five years."
With this track record of unaccountability and waste at the level of hundreds of billions of dollars, is it any wonder our representatives claim that there is not enough money left in the federal budget to pay for affordable health care and fully fund the Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits that American workers have already paid for and have a right to expect?
Is it not a betrayal of the public trust that while our representatives are allowing nearly a trillion dollars to be wasted by private contractors they voted in fiscal year 2006 to make long-terms cuts of $40 billion from Medicaid and entitlement programs for the elderly, disabled and poor -- cuts that were opposed by 74% of the American public?
Is it not a further betrayal of the public trust that at the same time our Congressional representatives made
$40 billion in long-term cuts to these programs they spent $29 billion of taxpayers money in one year (FY 2006) on "pork barrel" projects for special interests in their districts? Year in and year out, our representatives increase their annual giveaways outside of legislatively-established budgetary procedures even as the federal budget deficit soared to $8 trillion in 2007.
Unfortunately, our cowardly representatives passed this $40 billion long-term cut without taking a roll call vote as they often do, presumably to prevent us from knowing the names of the legislators who betray our interests. So while we may not be able to know the names of those who voted for this legislation, the roll call vote itself is a clear sign that we have lost control of our elected representatives and need to take concerted action along the lines described below to build winning voting blocs that can regain control and restore popular sovereignty in America.
- How do our representatives vote on issues affecting the tax burden? Is it true, as some people argue, that cutting taxes paid by wealthy individuals leads to investments that create more jobs?
Or is it true, as other experts argue, that there are productive ways to create profitable businesses and sustainable livelihoods that do not rely on investments by wealthy people who must be induced to do so by having their taxes cut tax cuts? These experts argue that jobs are automatically created without cutting the taxes of the affluent by a flourishing, non-monopolistic free enterprise economy in which profitable businesses naturally expand and capital is made available to new businesses formed to provide needed goods and services to meet unmet needs of emerging markets.
This is one of the thorniest unresolved controversies plaguing our country. We citizens and voters can resolve it by using each of our states as a laboratory to see whether cutting taxes paid by the affluent is the only avenue to creating jobs or whether we can and must take action on other fronts. We should put our elected officials under our state microscopes and insist that they explain and justify the actions they take and identify their impact on our livelihoods and economic security. If we are not satisfied, we can and should vote them out of office.
Among the legislative alternatives open to us are policies and programs that prevent our economy from being dominated by a few giant industries by enforcing legislation prohibiting excessive industry consolidation.
- Where do our state and federal representatives stand on raising the minimum wage? Have they voted against raising the minimum wage of working Americans while voting for their own legislative pay raises funded by the taxpayers?
Why is it that Congress recently voted in 2006 against raising the minimum wage even though 82% of the population favored raising it by $2, and a full-time worker earning minimum wages only earned $10,712 a year, far from a living wage and close to the poverty line? That corrected for inflation, this sum represents less buying power in 2006 than 1955?
How can legislators who vote against raising the minimum wage claim that they are defending the general welfare and economic security of their working constituents earning minimum wages? Why should they remain in office?
- Do our representatives vote to balance the federal budget or do they vote to raise the debt ceiling every time the federal government is about to run out of money?
If they vote to raise the debt ceiling, how do they explain the logic of voting to decrease federal revenues through tax cuts for the wealthy and then voting to raise the debt ceiling? How do they explain voting to borrow $2 billion a day from traditional adversaries like China after they have created a budget deficit by voting to cut taxes and decrease the tax receipts needed to balance the budget?
Are they serving the public interest by saddling the American people and future generations with an $8 trillion debt after they and the Bush administration have approved a whopping 35% increase in discretionary spending, pushing the U.S. to the brink of insolvency?
Ideologically speaking, are they died-in-the-wool conservatives who vote to cut taxes and lower federal tax revenues in order to justify cuts in traditional entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? Are they adherents to the conservative ideology of de-funding the government espoused by icons like Grover Norquist who call for such severe reductions in government tax revenues and the size of government that "we can drown it in the bathtub"?
These are just a few of the livelihood-related legislative issues for which we must hold our elected representatives accountable. If we really want to get down to get control of our representatives, we can require them to seek our agreement in writing before they vote on legislative proposals that might jeopardize our livelihoods. At the same time, we can undertake the steps described below to build winning voting blocs that enable us to elect representatives who will defend and protect our economic security while they are in office.
Return to Step 4 Overview
Step 5
Step 5. Join citizens and voters throughout the country to reset public policy priorities at the national level to protect your livelihood and economic security.
At the present time, it is unlikely that the views and priorities of American citizens and voters on public policies and livelihood issues are being accurately portrayed by the media or public opinion polls. It's also unlikely that the concerns we share about our livelihoods and other vital interests are heard about the din of partisan mudslinging and influence peddling. That's because the media tends to assume that our opinions are the same as the ones put in our mouth by professional politicians and our elected officials who are trying to butter their bread instead of ours. When public opinion polls are designed, pollsters ask us questions that address issues that politicians and elected officeholders are debating rather than our livelihood concerns.
Since our elected representatives and professional politicians spend much of their time in hot pursuit of campaign contributions from wealthy individuals and corporate special interests who want to buy their votes, they tend to discuss their contributors' issues rather than ours, or keep quiet on issues their contributors want to keep out of the public eye. They also try to divert public attention to phony issues and controversies they "gin up" to inflame their electoral bases and drive them to the polls to vote against candidates of other parties. The bottom line is that all too often they are either putting words in our mouths, inciting divisions among us, or remaining silent on the issues that we care most about.
The time has come to turn the tables on this system. We can put our priorities on the table and out in front of the media by using the agenda-setting tools and services found on this website to publicize our policy preferences nationwide on a regular basis. We can use the opinion polls to share our personal policy agendas in the first nationwide, citizen-initiated, nonpartisan survey of issues across the board. It does not ask or display political party affiliations or the names of those who contribute their agendas. What the polls do is to tally up how many times specific public policy options profiled on this website (including the user-created Joker pool of cards) are chosen by concerned Americans within a given period, and to what extent these choices cluster together in discernible patterns in particular geographic areas.
The only demographic indicator provided about the individuals who contribute their choices and priorities is their ZIP code. It is likely that the opinion polls will show that American citizens and voters throughout the country have much in common when it comes to their concerns and anxieties about their livelihoods and economic security, irrespective of political party affiliations and the so-called "culture wars" concocted by partisan politicians to divide Americans into warring political camps.
Poll results like these will send the crucial message to our elected representatives that we are united in our requirement that they protect our livelihoods and economic security -- and that our numbers are sufficient to defeat them at the pools if they do not. Of equal importance, these results will also prove to us that we have the numbers we need to build winning voting blocs across party lines that decide who gets elected and what our elected representatives do while they are in office.
Click here or on the home page menu under Opinion Polls & Queries to contribute your policy agenda to the polls whenever you wish.
Return to Step 5 Overview
Step 6
Step 6. Find common ground: Build your own political action networks and shared policy agendas around a nucleus of your friends, family, co-workers, neighbors and community groups..
The failure of federal, state and local agencies charged with disaster relief to protect the lives of the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 points up the need for all of us to rely on our own resources and self-help networks at the local level. That our elected representatives, government officials and emergency responders are unprepared to prevent man-made and natural disasters is tragically illustrated by the unnecessary loss of life and property in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast.
Even four years after the attacks of 9/11, the federal government and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security are still unprepared to provide adequate emergency assistance to American citizens in the event of disasters. One of the primary reasons is that billions of dollars in no-bid contracts have been awarded by the department to unaudited private contractors, resulting in mismanagement, wasteful spending and significant overcharges, according to recent reports.
The number of these no-bid contracts awarded by the department increased 739% to $5.5 billion between 2003 and 2005, which is more than half of the total contracts awarded. A significant portion of these contracts were awarded after intensive lobbying by corporate special interests that are major contributors to the Republican Party and Congressional and presidential campaigns.
The end result of this influence peddling is that the cities and towns in which we live are unprepared to provide emergency relief in the event of terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
But even if there were plans in place, the nation's hospitals are in such poor shape that most of them would be unable to treat large numbers of disaster victims. Recent reports document the lack of preparedness of the emergency rooms of the nation's hospitals to treat the normal flow of sick people as the result of decades of continuous cut-backs in funding caused by the privatization of health care. Preparations to treat a possible epidemic of bird flu focus more on quarantining those afflicted than on preventing the spread of such an epidemic or treating those who become sick.
And last but not least of the threats to our welfare is the notable failure of our elected representatives to protect the air and environment in America and countries around the world from the global warming effects and pollution caused by American cars and power plants. The special interests involved in the automobile and energy industries have blinded our representatives to the health risks and environmental dangers inherent in our continued dependence on fossil fuels like oil and coal and weakened their political will to pass legislation mandating a speedy transition to renewable energies.
These shortcomings and the lack of viable plans to remedy them in the near term make it imperative that we American citizens and voters at the grassroots rebuild our democracy from the bottom up so we can elect responsible government officials who will give top priority to discharging their constitutional obligation to protect the general welfare. Unaccustomed as most of us are to playing an active role in government at local, state or federal levels, we now have undeniable proof that we can no longer entrust our welfare to the majority of representatives who have been elected to office. Nor do we have to.
Instead of waiting for primaries and elections to take place in the hope that there will be candidates we wish to vote for, we can change the status quo virtually overnight by gathering together our friends, family, neighbors and community groups in online and face-too-face groups to form the nucleus of our own political action networks.
We can create online meeting places for the members of our networks by using free internet tools, such as those provided by Google and Yahoo. We can also create wikis free of charge. Wikis provide us private meeting places on the Web. They contain user-friendly Web pages that the members of our networks can use to collaborate online and create and edit documents (with text, hyperlinks, graphics, pictures, etc.) and keep them private for our eyes only or post them publicly for other people to read.
We can use our onlinegroups and wikis to debate the 100+ policy options profiled on this website and develop consensus about our priorities. We can use our online groups and wikis to plan and schedule events and publicize those we want others to attend. The people we invite to join us in these efforts can pave the way to building the political common fronts and winning voting blocs discussed below that we need to get control of electoral and legislative processes and pass the legislation we need to protect our livelihoods and economic security.
Return to Step 6 Overview
Step 7
Step 7. Locate people with similar policy agendas in your community and build winning voting blocs inside, outside and across party lines.
Needless to say, Steps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 described above and the tools they provide are fundamental building blocks to getting control of our elected representatives and overcoming the threats to our livelihoods and vital interests that we experience everyday at the grassroots.
The key tool, the 100+ policy options profiled on this website, enables us to weigh legislative alternatives and articulate our public policy preferences and priorities across the board outside the confines of current political ideologies, alignments and political parties. We can use our choices to instruct, monitor and evaluate the performance of our elected representatives so that we can decide whether they should remain in office.
Steps 7, 8, 9 and 10, however, may be even more indispensable than the other steps to restoring popular control of government. For they enable us to build coalitions and winning voting blocs across party lines that can determine who runs for office, who is elected and what they do while they are in office. Most importantly, they show us how to use our coalitions and voting blocs to remove from office elected officials who have betrayed our trust.
In particular, Step 7 may well be the decisive step in restoring our sovereign rights to elect representatives who protect our livelihoods and vital interests. As things stand, the decks are stacked against us in our own electoral districts unless we devise unique strategies and tactics to overturn the status quo and the power of special interests. While many representatives will undoubtedly respond positively to the individual initiatives we undertake pursuant to Steps 1-6 to exercise a greater influence over their legislative actions, the large majority will probably continue doing business as usual with the corporate special interests that fund their campaigns. In these cases, we must be able to build autonomous voting blocs across party lines that can remove them from office and replace them with representatives who will follow our lead.
Step 7 provides pivotal tools that we can use at the grassroots to build such voting blocs. To succeed, these blocs must be comprised of enough voters to get candidates on the ballot and win primaries and general elections. They must be able to get control of electoral processes even in districts that are gerrymandered, dominated by a single party, or controlled by wealthy individual campaign contributors and corporate special interest donors. In addition, these blocs must be able to prevent dishonest election officials from rigging election results by removing the names of eligible voters from official lists, failing to provide enough voting machines or using voting machines that can be tampered to falsify their results.
While these are daunting challenges, they are dwarfed by the damage that government dominated by corporate special interests is doing to our livelihoods and vital interests. Fortunately, it is within our power to surmount these challenges and put special interests in their place. Step 7 shows how we can accomplish these tasks using 21st century Internet-based mobilization strategies and search tools provided free of charge on this website.
Any voter or group of voters can use these search tools to find people living near them who share their public policy goals and their desire to build winning coalitions and voting blocs. Once we identify and contact these citizens and voters, we can create autonomous organizations that develop locally-based political strategies and tactics capable of uprooting the entrenched interest at all levels of government that threaten our livelihoods and economic security.
The past 40 years have shown that when the driving economic interests behind the free enterprise system take over the apparatus of government decision-making by financing the campaigns of our elected representatives, they can make record profits at the expense of working Americans. By inducing our representatives to refrain from enforcing laws prohibiting price-gouging, windfall and excess profits, and anti-competitive practices, corporate profit-taking can soar and a huge amount of wealth can be transferred to a small percentage of the population. These driving interests selfishly reduce the real income of tens of millions of American working families by cutting labor costs to the bone (wages, benefits and pensions) while dramatically increasing their costs of living. Caught in an economic and financial bind from which they cannot escape, the middle class is shrinking, American workers are finding it impossible to make ends meet and nearly 1 million working Americans are driven into poverty every year.
Consolidated industries like the energy conglomerates hike consumer prices on oil, gas and electricity after buying out their competitors. Giant U.S.-based multinational companies like Wal-Mart ruin their competitors by keeping their prices down through low wages. Wal-Mart pays only $18,000 a year on average to full-time U.S. workers and requires Wal-Mart's suppliers to outsource their manufacturing operations to low-wage countries abroad so they can cut their costs. These anti-competitive practices have enabled Wal-Mart to drive out of business tens of thousands of retailers and manufacturers in the U.S. and abroad.
At home, the driving interests behind the free enterprise system use their campaign contributions to induce our elected representatives to turn a blind eye to the human costs of their business practices. Under their influence, our representatives have so drastically cut corporate taxes and personal income taxes paid by the affluent that our government institutions lack the tax receipts they need to adequately fund basic public services and entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These harmful policies are based on the incorrect assertion that the only option we have for creating jobs is to cut the taxes of the wealthy so they will invest their untaxed incomes in expanding enterprises and start-up businesses.
While many of us recognize that the free enterprise system is the most productive in the world from an economic and financial point of view, and that too much government intervention and taxation inhibits its growth, we have also recognized that the driving interests behind the system have a marked tendency to become financial gluttons and social predators only too willing to leave the working class in dire straits.
Lacking moral scruples and external restraints, there is nothing to prevent them from becoming predators once they gain so much influence over government that they can prevent our elected representatives from discharging their fundamental constitutional responsibility to provide for the general welfare by ensuring all Americans have access to the natural, human, social, economic and financial capital they need in order obtain sustainable livelihoods.
With this track record in mind, it is clear that the time has come for us citizens and voters at the grassroots to wrest control of government from corporate special interests so that we can compel the driving forces behind the free enterprise system to function as constructive members of society rather than as predators. It is time for American citizens and voters to develop a new political/economic consensus that enables a popularly-controlled democracy to curb the excesses of these interests in the areas where they have have proved harmful to our livelihoods -- without compromising the productivity and growth potential of the free enterprise system.
This citizen-based, grassroots consensus-building process must also address the dramatic transformations of work and economic life that are already taking place and will continue throughout the 21st century. These include the permanent loss of 20 million manufacturing jobs that have been lost not just in the U.S. but throughout the world, even in emerging economic giants like China.
Not only do these manufacturing jobs appear to be irretrievable, but an equally serious transformation appears to be looming on the horizon. It will grow out of increasing productivity gains per capita which certain economists believe have the potential to transform work in the global economy so significantly that by the end of the 21st century only 20% of the population will be needed to produce 100% of the goods and services that are needed on the planet.
We must address the issue of how we provide a sufficient number of livelihoods in the short and long term for all those who need them when businesses outsource jobs to low-wage areas, the free enterprise system constantly reduces its manpower needs and the global economy is compromising its own potential by depleting irreplaceable natural resources and degrading the environment. Clearly, it is not acceptable social policy to allow those who become unemployed or underemployed for any of these reasons to fall into poverty.
Socially beneficial and economically productive answers to these thorny issues must come from our own collective soul-searching at the grassroots. It is unlikely that they will come from the corporate special interests who are unwilling to set limits to corporate profit maximization and have a track record of willfully corrupting our democracy with their campaign contributions and lobbyists. We can only protect our livelihoods and those of working people everywhere if we wrest control of the electoral process from these entrenched interests. We must be able to elect government representatives who are capable of addressing these complex human challenges and work with us instead of against us as we collectively grapple with the livelihood risks we now face and the long-term threats we can see on the horizon.
In sum, we must retake control of our government from the grassroots and simultaneously build a new 21st century consensus to guide us in constructing a flourishing, non-predatory free enterprise system that can provide sustainable livelihoods for all within a democratic political system capable of curbing any system excesses that threaten our vital interests.
Since the major political parties, like our governmental institutions and elected representatives, have been corrupted by money and special interests, we must be prepared to develop this new consensus outside their confines if and when we find that we cannot work within them to protect our interests. We must work autonomously in our homes and communities across the country so that we can build common fronts that cross party lines, if necessary, in order to get candidates elected who will defend our needs as we define them. The task is a formidable one. But it can be achieved by virtue of the grassroots mobilization potential of the internet and tools and services you can take advantage of through this website without cost to you. Here's how you can make them work for you in your community:
At the present time, we citizens and voters have no way of identifying and contacting other voters in our electoral districts whom we do not already know who share our public policy preferences and priorities and our determination to overthrew the entrenched interests that now control our political system. If we belong to a political party and the party puts us on the ballot, the party will use its lists to send our campaign literature to party members.
But most parties would not allow us to use these lists to canvass voters to see whether their priorities match ours and whether they would be interested in forming autonomous coalitions and voting blocs with us. As a result, it may prove difficult if not impossible for us to use existing party organizations in our electoral districts to identify people who share our preferences and priorities and then work with them to form autonomous coalitions and voting blocs that we can use to place our candidates on the ballot and elect them to office.
We can accomplish these objectives independently of existing political parties and organizations, however, by following the instructions provided above and below.
Return to Step 7 Overview
Step 8
Step 8. Use the voting bloc you build to get control of electoral and legislative processes affecting your community. Defeat the entrenched interests in gerrymandered districts where the major parties' favored sons have been re-elected time after time and receive the lion's share of their campaign financing from corporate contributors..
Needless to say, the coalitions and voting blocs we build at the local level will develop their own unique sets of public policy priorities and preferences to meet local needs and conditions. They will also develop their own mix of strategies and tactics best suited to the challenges they face. They alone will decide how they want to position themselves with respect to existing political parties, interest groups and alignments.
One of the most important decisions our voting blocs will make is whether to work inside, outside or across party lines. We can run your own candidates in your party's primaries to get them on the ticket. Or we can run our candidates on the Independent line. Or we can start our own political party, which is quite a bit more complicated but entirely feasible.
One novel mechanism for deciding whether the blocs we build wants to work with existing political parties and alignments, or across or outside them, is to construct a livelihood index mentioned earlier that assesses what is happening to the livelihoods and economic security of the people living in our electoral districts, starting with the members of our own coalitions and voting blocs.
If trends are not favorable, we can formulate political and legislative strategies for improving them. Once we have a working livelihood index complete with benchmarks showing what is happening and working strategies for improving them, we are read to start pressuring our current representatives to move in the directions we favor.
We can initiate a dialogue with incumbent representatives who have been elected on the various party lines to see whether the information they have about these vital indicators concurs with the information we have used to devise our index and benchmarks. Their staffs can research government statistics and share their findings with ours so we can get as much agreement as possible about our baseline information. Then we can proceed to compare and contrast what our members think and propose to do with what the incumbents think should be done.
If we find there is broad-based agreement with any of them, we can decide to work with them. If there is disagreement, we can pressure them to adopt our agenda using various tactics, such as letter-writing campaigns, petitions and threats to work against them in upcoming elections. If they resist implementing our agenda, we have the option of running our own candidates in primary elections against them. If we think these incumbents are so entrenched that they will win their primaries and general elections no matter what we do or who we run, we can decide to run our candidates on the Independent line or create a new party altogether.
Here are some of the questions related to livelihoods and economic security that we can use to focus your political dialogues and coalition-building decisions with representatives of existing political alignments in our electoral districts?
- Are the number of jobs in our area staying the same, increasing or decreasing?
- Are there enough jobs for the people who reside in our localities and need them?
- Is outsourcing taking place?
- What options are there for protecting existing jobs? What are the options for increasing the number of jobs?
- Are real incomes going up or down?
- How fast is the cost of living rising? What factors are affecting the cost of living?
- Is the cost of living outstripping incomes? If so, what proposals have been implemented to do something about it? What proposals have been put on the table by incumbent elected officials to do something about it?
- How are local, state and federal tax burdens being shared among the various income groups? Is the burden being shared fairly according to the ability to pay?
Conducting a dialogue about these critical issues with incumbent officials and representatives of the various political alignments that exist in our localities is a good idea because of the divergence of views in conservative and progressive quarters about how well the U.S. economy is doing, who is actually benefiting from economic growth and what should be done about growing inequality and the wealth gap.
While increases and decreases in jobs, and the trend for the cost of living to outstrip people's real income, can be caused by a myriad of factors, a growing number of people believe that governmental intervention is clearly required now that the unfettered workings of the free market system have clearly failed to keep the cost of living at a reasonable level and provide a sufficient number of jobs and living wages for American workers who need them.
Since we citizens and voters have scant influence over the conduct of the large corporations that dominate the U.S. economy, we must use the levers of democratic government to ensure that our elected representatives enforce laws against price-gouging, excess profits and monopolistic consolidation of industries that destroy competition, limit choices and raise prices. We must insist that our representatives raise the minimum wage, enforce laws prohibiting union-busting and pass legislation that facilitates the efforts of workers to organize in order to obtain higher wages.
The aim of the dialogues our coalitions and voting blocs initiate with our elected representatives should be to show that we mean business when we request them to redirect their attention away from the profit-maximization efforts of their corporate campaign contributors and wealthy individual donors to the promotion of the general welfare of their constituents, as measured by the availability of the livelihoods we need now and in the future to assure us the lifelong economic security we deserve.
We should target representatives who refuse to embrace our livelihoods and economic security as their top priorities for defeat in the next election or remove them from office beforehand in those states that permit a formal recall of elected representatives from office. We can should use the coalitions and winning voting blocs we build to put our own pro-livelihood candidates on the ballot and get them elected. The procedures are quite simple despite local variations from state to state.
(For a brief overview of the process, visit the user-friendly website of the state of Pennsylvania. Go to Project Vote Smart for quick access to your state's Board of Elections and to the local Board of Election of the county in which you live. Your state board will tell you how to get candidates on the ballot.)
The internet greatly facilitates the efforts of our voting blocs to run candidates for election against entrenched interests, especially on the fund raising front. Howard Dean was the first to show the potential of internet-based fundraising by raising $50,000,000 from his online contributors in little more than a year via his own website. Our coalitions and voting blocs can set up our own websites to raise money over the internet, just like Dean did.
But we can also benefit from the services of internet-based political action groups in the progressive camp to strengthen our voting blocs' political muscles. These include ActBlue, which features candidates it refers to as Netroots candidates, as well as groups like Democracy for America, MoveOn.org, the Progressive States Network and the Center for Policy Alternatives.
Return to Step 8 Overview
Step 9
Step 9. Use your voting blocs to create livelihoods and protect your economic security by reinventing the free enterprise system on a level playing field..
Just as people-centered and people-powered political processes are poised to wrest control of government from the corporations and elected representatives who do their bidding, people-centered and people-powered economic processes are poised to reinvent the free enterprise system on a level playing field so that working people can use it to create the businesses, jobs and wealth they need and can protect from outsourcing. The community-based asset building movement has been gathering force for many years as a remedy for the excesses of unbridled free enterprise systems and unfettered free markets.
Over the past 40 years, conservative economists, politicians and corporate executives have tried but failed to prove that the free enterprise system coupled with free markets throughout the world that are totally free from government regulation can create the jobs, business and wealth that all working people deserve.
But statistics show that although great wealth is being created by this system, most of it is going into the pockets of large corporations and the families of corporate executives. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Not only is the gap between rich and poor growing, but unregulated corporations and oligopolies are driving prices up and working people's incomes down so fast in the U.S. and abroad that millions of people are being driven out of the middle and working classes and pushed down the economic ladder into the ranks of those who can barely make ends meet. Worse still, many of them are being driven down into the ranks of those who are impoverished.
Their plight is only part of the much larger problem of economic globalization as it has proceeded under the aegis of unregulated corporations. The larger problem is that the unregulated free enterprise system and unfettered free markets, which conservatives have unsuccessfully tried to propagate as the most productive economic structure. They appear to be on the way to self-destruction by eroding domestic manufacturing bases and consumers' purchasing power. Free markets can only survive if consumers have money to purchase goods and services.
As indigenous industrial and manufacturing bases are eroded by unregulated multinational corporations incessantly outsourcing jobs in search of low wages, the devastated indigenous economies they leave behind are increasingly populated by an atrophied middle class and displaced workers relegated to low-paying service jobs who lack the purchasing power needed to keep their economies growing. They will also lack the taxable income that is required to generate the tax revenues that governments need to fund basic government services. An unregulated free enterprise system coupled with unregulated free markets will enfeeble the governments and the societies in which they are allowed to reign supreme.
Fortunately, the writing on the wall has been widely read by entrepreneurial segments of post-industrial societies with the know-how needed to replace conservative economic nostrums with viable strategies for revitalizing the free enterprise system so that its benefits and opportunities are more equitably distributed throughout society. We can apply these strategies in our communities once we have our winning voting blocs behind us and our blocs have elected representatives who can be counted on to implement our policy agendas.
We can then proceed collectively to take action on both legislative and economic fronts to develop locally-appropriate strategies and tactics for applying this know-how to our communities so that the free enterprise system brings businesses, jobs and wealth to all working people in our communities. As described by the Progressive States Network, the states and counties in which we live are the most promising places to focus our efforts
The livelihood index discussed in Step 8 above provides a framework for getting started in this effort by assessing local needs. The index can help to justify the creation of public/private partnerships among state, county and local government agencies, on the one hand, and private sector entities, on the other hand. It can help us to focus their attention on collaborative action to support our local efforts to build sustainable livelihoods and provide economic security to the members of our voting blocs and all the residents of our communities. We can use our livelihood index to track not only job loss and creation and their causes, but, more significantly, changes in the availability of the natural, human, social, economic and financial capital that we need in order to create sustainable livelihoods and long-term economic security.
Building favorable conditions that spawn a sufficient number of livelihoods in the counties where we live should be the primary focus of our elected representatives' legislative work. Creating these conditions requires formal and informal collaboration on many levels between the public and private sectors that may or may not require the passage of specific laws.
The key is to create pro-active pro-livelihood partnerships between the public and private sectors that create small and medium-sized businesses and jobs that remain in the state. While it may appear that the global economy has been irreversibly taken over by giant multinational corporations, this appearance is deceiving. Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) throughout the world are thriving and, in the aggregate, are the source of a large and growing portion of the world's most stable and sustainable jobs.
With adequate support from the public and private sectors to protect them from the anti-competitive practices of large corporations, their potential for growth is virtually unlimited. Recognition of the vital and indispensable roles that SMEs play at the local level is increasing, as is awareness of the need for concerted government action to foster their growth and protect them from predators.
With the coming exhaustion of fossil fuels, the cost of transporting products and services around the world is going to make local industries that do not have to pay for these costs to get their products and services to local and regional domestic markets more profitable and competitive. Locally grown agricultural products are likely to be the primary beneficiaries of this sea change in the financial economics of global trade and the importing of agricultural products. Global warming will also stimulate the growth of state and locally-based SMEs as the shift to green businesses and green economies accelerates.
From a national security standpoint, all nations must ensure that they have the internal capacity to produce indispensable products and services at home, at a cost that is not prohibitive, during short and long term emergencies when they cannot obtain these products and services from foreign suppliers. The U.S. is no exception. Corporate dominance of the U.S. economy has led to the foreign transfer of critical industrial and manufacturing capabilities and operations. Without these internal capabilities to produce critical goods and services at home, the U.S. can be held hostage to exorbitant price hikes and hostile actions by foreign governments that prevent these products and services from reaching U.S. shores.
(Equally damaging to the viability of our society is the trend for U.S. corporations, to move their headquarters "offshore" to foreign countries. By moving out of the country, they get out of paying U.S. taxes. This loss further erodes the U.S. tax base and the capacity of the federal government to balance its budget and meet its obligations to fund entitlement programs owed to the American people, such as Social Security and Medicare.)
Last but not least, there is another key reason why we must work to build SMEs and community-based assets that will help us create sustainable businesses, jobs and wealth. It is that all nations, the U.S. included, must take steps now on behalf of future generations to see to it that enough livelihoods are available to their working populations even after technological advances, automation and productivity increases dramatically diminish the amount of manpower required to produce all the products and services that are needed and wanted.
Experts predict that by the end of the 21st century only 20% of the world's population will be needed to product 100% of the products and services that are needed and wanted. In anticipation of this new economic world, it is time to starting inventing new societal paradigms for engaging the socially productive and creative energies of everyone in rewarding and satisfying activities that provide also them livelihoods in exchange for their efforts. Relegating a growing portion and eventually the majority of the world's working people to the ranks of the impoverished is a socially unacceptable solution.
Fortunately, SMEs can provide the answer. Their entrepreneurial owners, managers and workers have proven themselves to nimble innovators who have an untapped potential to bring new technologies, products and services into the marketplace. They can compete with the giant corporations when the latter are not permitted to engage in unfair business practices. It is vital that we make sure that our voting blocs work with our local, state and federal representatives to protect small and medium size businesses and make sure they have the capital, resources and legislative protection they need to withstand the predatory business practices in which giant corporations tend to engage.
Increasingly, the best place to focus our efforts to develop these new pro-livelihood public/private partnerships appears to be the state level in progressive states that are opting to curb corporate influence and
experiment with a different mix of tax policies, minimum wage and labor standards, health insurance systems, job creation and state and locally-based enterprises..
In such states, it will be easier for us citizens and voters to get dialogues going with local and state representatives, who are closer at hand than federal representatives, about how to support wealth creation from the bottom up within the framework of the free enterprise system that provides sustainable livelihoods for all.
Similarly, from a strategic point of view, it will be easier for us to change the American political system by building consensus within our own states first rather than to try to swim upstream in the U.S. Congress where tens of thousands of lobbyists are spending $200 million a month ($2.36 billion a year!) to override our interests. It will also be easier for us to keep track of what corporate special interests are up to in our own states and take action locally to level the playing field when they exercise too much influence.
However, even in our own states, we must be eternally vigilant. As mentioned above, a growing number of critics argue that large corporations are already taking unfair advantage of state level job creation programs. For example, Matt Singer, communications director of the Progressive States Network, reports that Georgia's governor offered $400 million in incentives to Kia, the profitable Korean automaker, to provide 2,500 jobs to Georgians. This outrageous program cost the taxpayers of George $160,000 for each job! Worse still, the state of Mississippi reportedly offered the automaker $1 billion in incentives, which cost Mississippi taxpayers approximately $400,000 per new job!
Similarly, Wal-Mart, one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world, is reported to have received over $1 billion in government financial assistance for U.S. operations despite the fact that the full-time wages it pays its employees on the average put their families below the poverty threshold.
We taxpayers simply cannot afford to pay for these useless corporate giveaways. Elected officials and legislative representatives who create and endorse such programs either lack the know-how for using state-based resources to create sustainable SMEs and livelihoods in the 21st century or they are corrupt.
The coalitions and voting blocs we create must seriously consider whether using taxpayers money to induce profitable corporations to create jobs makes any sense from an economic, tax revenue or cost-benefit standpoint when compared to the long-term sustainable livelihoods that could be created by SMEs in community-based asset building efforts.
We must explore and invent alternatives in a painstaking, state-by-state, trial-and-error process that includes not only job creation programs but a host of related areas that engender the conditions needed to create sustainable livelihoods. While we may not know in advance all the answers to these complex challenges, the demonstrated failures of an unregulated free enterprise system and unfettered free markets makes it incumbent on our local, state and federal governments to pursue other avenues to ensure that sustainable businesses, jobs and wealth are created and retained at the local level.
With our own coalitions and voting blocs behind us, we, the people, can intercede to correct these abuses and excesses. Once we elect representatives dedicated to protecting our livelihoods, we can follow in the footsteps of those who have already succeeded in creating vibrant, wealth-generating enterprises and
living economies at the grassroots that provide the livelihoods that are needed. Such economies, as illustrated by the global BALLE movement that is getting under way, have a unique potential to create regional and local SMES with the businesses, jobs and wealth we need.
In the process, our voting blocs can take action to put large corporations in their place, primarily by identifying and defeating elected representatives who peddle their legislative influence to corporate special interests that fund their campaigns and use their office to enrich themselves, their families, friends and business associates.
Thanks to the work of public service organizations like Project Vote Smart, it is very easy for our coalitions and voting blocs to find out what corporate special interests our elected representatives accept money from and track their legislative votes to see whether they favor these contributors at the expense of our livelihoods. Whenever we find convincing evidence that they are peddling their influence in legislative decision-making, and that their legislative acts or omissions harm our livelihoods, we must hound them out of office.
The recent Abramoff legislative influence peddling ring that involves dozens of Congressional representatives and special interest lobbyists, which the New York Times labeled the "biggest scandal in Congress in over a century", was in operation for six years, from 1999 to 2005. Its longevity demonstrates that Congress itself and agencies that should be scrutinizing and stopping these activities are lax in enforcing and tightening up existing laws that prohibit influence trading. Six months after Abramoff was convicted, key members of Congress, including the
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, are alleged to have used their offices and business relationships to pass legislation from which they personally reaped huge financial gains.
In light of this track record, it is clear that we citizens and voters must assume the burdens of oversight our government is failing to discharge. We must systematically scrutinize what our representatives are doing, expose legislative influence peddling to the public whenever we uncover it, and hound the perpetrators out of office. Once our elected representatives realize that our coalitions and voting blocs are watching their every move and that we will remove them from office if they betray our trust, they will be less inclined to do so.
There are several decisive steps we can take right in our own back yards to get the ball rolling to free our democratic processes from the damaging influence of corrupt politicians and corporate special interests that exercise an undue influence over legislative decision-making.
First, we can make sure our voting blocs elect representatives who do not take campaign contributions from corporate special interests and defeat incumbents who have already done so.
Second, we can remove the corrupting influence of money from politics and clean up corrupt local election practices. We can support nonprofit organizations like
Common Cause that are working across the nation to remove money from politics by passing "clean election" laws, including those that provide for public financing of electoral campaigns.
We can also support redistricting reforms that prevent politicians and special interests from redrawing election districts around voters who are likely to vote for them. Of equal importance, we can support local and national groups like the
Electronic Frontier Foundation that are working to replace electronic voting machines whose results can be rigged.
And third, we can take direct action at home by passing laws in our own counties barring corporations from participating in electoral campaigns on the same footing as voters, since they are not citizens and do not have voting rights.
California's Humboldt County recently passed such a law. Local citizens became fed-up with corporate interference after Wal-Mart spent $250,000 to change local zoning laws to permit the retail giant company's big-box stores to open there. They were also outraged when another corporation tried to recall from office a local district attorney who was enforcing local regulations against its operations in the county. During the same year saw, other outside corporations meddled in local election campaigns in order to gain political support for their plans to exploit the county's natural resources.
If the citizens of Humboldt County can pass a referendum like this one, so can the rest of us. Corporate special interests will go as far as we let them go. We citizens and voters are the sovereigns in this country and we will always have the last word whenever we decide to flex our political muscles.
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Step 10
Step 10. Acquire the economic power your need to protect your livelihood. Join a Citizens’ Wealth Creation CooperativeSM in the county where you live. Learn how to use state and community resources and assets to collaboratively create your own wealth, job and business.
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