Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, October 15, 2011

All You Have To Do Is Listen To Know What the Occupiers Want



Okay, I'll bite. Most of these demands seem more or less representative or directly entailed by the Occupiers.

1. Too Big to Fail Is Too Big to Exist! Use antitrust laws to break up the big financial institutions rather than bailing them out when they misbehave.

2. Tax the Fraudsters! Tax income from capital gains at the same rates as income from work. Tax all financial transactions that take place over networks to limit high frequency, algorithm-driven share trading and other forms of online speculation that facilitate fraud and exacerbate market volatility. Raise the taxable income cap to keep Social Security solvent for well over another century.

3. Mainstreet Bailout! Refinance all underwater home mortgages at their post-crash values with affordable fixed rates for individual home-owners (but not for home flippers). Forgive all student loan debt.

4. Perp Walks! Prosecute banking and ratings agency executives who peddled unsound speculation as sound investment.

5. Jobs! Pass Obama's goddamn Jobs Bill for a start. And then pass a Green energy and agriculture Second Stimulus to put a million solar roofs and a hundred thousand wind or tidal turbines in every state in the union, encourage small-scale sustainable organic and local farming practices, put an organic farmer's market with affordable nourishing produce in every urban neighborhood, and connect every major city to every other with high speed rail. (I don't think this Green priority is just me -- there are lots of environmentalist signs out there, but this is an attempt on my part to connect them more concretely to the rest of the job-centric anti-corporatist OWS agenda.) Provide an easy path to full citizenship to all law-abiding tax-paying people born or raised or working here whatever their family's country of origin.

6. Democratic Elections! Switch to exclusively public financing for elections, mandate same-day registration and a full month of early voting in every state, make Election Day a National Holiday, institute Instant Runoff Voting federally and abolish the Electoral College for the Popular Vote. Allow the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to become full US States if their populations want to be.

7. Corporate Reform! Introduce clauses in all corporate charters limiting corporate lifespans, insisting that corporations must never operate against the public interest, requiring that corporations keep to their initial purpose or lose their licenses, and mandating that the difference in total compensation between the lowest and highest paid permanent and contract employees of the corporation never exceed five to one.

8. Healthcare for All! Lower healthcare costs and solve long-term deficit problems by allowing Medicare buy-in for all as a Public Option. Decriminalize and tax marijuana and other recreational drugs like Ecstasy (if you don't think that's one of the demands, you just aren't paying attention -- or possibly you're high), and use the occasion to close fifty jails and open a hundred community health centers across the country providing drug-abuse counseling among other things.

Well, that sure was fun, I could do that sort of thing all day long (that's why one should avoid it). I've confined these recommendations to the sorts of things that seem directly relevant to the Occupiers, stuff you hear if only you listen -- but there's plenty of stuff I care about personally as much or more, of course, or which as a theory-head I think get to deeper more structural problems of the white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarist capitalist evil octopus, but simply haven't gone on about in this context, from ending US occupations, renewing civil rights protections, protecting women's right to choose, celebrating queer lifeways, controlling private gun use and trafficking, ending capital punishment, supporting lifelong public education, advocating for a democratically-elected UN Parliament, ending war and disaster profiteering, protecting freshwater commons, providing basic income guarantees, instituting a Keynesian Clearing Union, demolishing car culture, severely curtailing ubiquitous marketing and advertizing, and so on. Also, these recommendations are very US-centric even though the Occupy movement is of a piece with a planetary movement, the priorities of which are related but different from the ones registered in this little wish-list.

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