Ask For Little, Get Nothing

Here are our suggestions:

Raise taxes on everyone making a quarter million a year or more.

Inact Universal Health Care and tax medium to large corporations to, in part, fund it.

Create a modest excise tax on all goods made overseas, since many of our corporations have moved overseas to exploit workers in poor countries..

Stop corporate welfare, NOW! No more tax-breaks for oil companies.

Tax-payer dollars should go for alternative energy research, not more money for the freakin' Oil companies and war profiteers!

Start serious, public hearings into who is profitting outrageously from this illegal war in Iraq, both in and out of the government, or even out of the country, and freeze their assests. I'm talking about the corporate officers and the policy makers in Washington, not the company itself, which would hurt the workers.

Harry Truman once said that war-profiteering is nothing short of treason. For once, he was right.

If, in hearings or trials, they are found guity, put the money back into the National Treasury. Who cares if they have to live in a trailor park in "nowhere" Alaska?

TomPaine.com - Ask For Little, Get Nothing:

Mind-boggling. Cowardly. Tone deaf. When I read what passes for the economic agenda for “liberal” Democrats and even progressives, I can’t help but think that they have lost their minds, their imagination or their spines. And I have judiciously left out the expletives that come to mind so my editor will let this piece run.

Let me remind the quivering political leaders and think-tank, inside-the-Beltway experts about the economic insecurity most people face in their daily lives. The divide between rich and poor has never been greater; wages are barely keeping up with peoples’ bills, driven down in part by the corporate global pursuit of the lowest wage possible; personal debt is at an all-time high; 48 million Americans lack health care and millions more pay for inadequate coverage. As for the government, it’s a fiscal disaster mainly because this administration, aided and abetted by some Democrats, has blessed a wholesale raid on the public till by those for whom avarice knows no limits. Yes, Iraq was central to the election but it’s clear that people voted for Democrats because of a general unease about their economic futures.

And what is the response of the newly-elected Democratic majority? Nancy Pelosi pledges the House will raise the minimum wage, give tax credits for college education and allow the government to negotiate Medicare drug prices. My friends at the Economic Policy Institute are offering a “pay to play” health care solution (meaning, companies can cover their workers through private insurance or pay into an expanded version of Medicare). Everyone apparently agrees that rolling back the insane Bush tax cuts is off limits because such legislation won’t survive a veto.