1930s WRA murals in Coit Tower, San Francisco. Photos by Tara Bradford.
An excerpt from US Senator Bernie Sanders's (Dem-VT) January 9th column in The Huffington Post:
"...In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and
income of any major country on earth and more inequality than at any
time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the
financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom 60 percent
own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns
more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income
distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1
percent earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent
shared the remaining 7 percent.
"Despite the reality that the rich are becoming
much richer while the middle class collapses and the number of Americans
living in poverty is at an all-time high, the Republicans and their
billionaire backers want more, more and more. The class warfare
continues.
Out-of-control spending on wars and unfair tax breaks
"My Republican colleagues say that the deficits
are a spending problem, not a revenue problem. What these deficit-hawk
hypocrites won't talk about is their spending. They won't discuss what
they did to dig the country into this $1 trillion deep deficit hole.
They waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. They
gave away huge tax breaks for the rich. They squandered taxpayer dollars
on the pharmaceutical industry by making it illegal to let Medicare
bargain for lower drug prices. They also rescinded financial regulations
that enabled Wall Street to operate like a gambling casino, leading to a
severe recession that eroded tax revenue and left more than 14 percent
of American workers unemployed or underemployed.
"Now, despite the deficits their policies helped
to create and despite the enormous suffering which exists in our
society, the Republicans want to cut Social Security, veterans'
programs, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition programs and
virtually every program which benefits low-and-moderate-income
Americans. They choose to turn their backs on the economic reality
facing a significant part of our population: high unemployment, reduced
wages, 50 million without health insurance, college graduates saddled
with enormous student debt and elderly people living in desperation. And
they have tried to slam the door on any further discussion about how to
raise revenue by ending tax loopholes and unfair tax breaks."
Time for both parties to work for all their constituents
"...We know where the Republicans are coming from. What about the Democrats?
Will President Obama fulfill his campaign pledge to "protect the middle
class" or will he surrender to right-wing blackmail? Will Democrats in
the House and Senate stand with the vast majority of our citizens and
such organizations as AARP, the National Committee to Preserve Social
Security and Medicare, the AFL-CIO, the American Legion, the Veterans of
Foreign Wars and every other veterans' organization in the fight
against cuts to Social Security and veterans' programs, or will they
agree to a disastrous corporate-backed "chained CPI" concept which makes
major benefit cuts to those programs and raises taxes on low-income
workers?
"The simple truth is there are relatively easy
ways to deal with the deficit crisis -- without attacking the elderly,
the children the sick or the poor.
"For example, we have got to eliminate loopholes
in the tax code that allow large corporations and the wealthy to avoid
more than $100 billion in taxes every year by setting up offshore tax
shelters in places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and the Bahamas.
This situation has become so absurd that one five-story office building
in the Cayman Islands is now the "home" to more than 18,000
corporations.
"Further, we must also end tax breaks for
companies shipping American jobs overseas. Today, the United State
government continues to reward companies that move American
manufacturing jobs abroad, despite the fact that millions of American
jobs have been outsourced to China, Mexico, and other low wage countries
over the past decade. The Joint Committee on Taxation (the official
revenue scorekeeper in Congress) has estimated that we could raise more
than $582 billion in revenue over the next decade by eliminating these
offshore tax loopholes.
Wall Street's responsibility
"We must also recognize that Wall Street
recklessness caused the economic crisis, and it has a responsibility to
reduce the deficit. Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation
fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous
level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the
financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the
deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.
"We are entering a pivotal moment in the modern
history of our country. Do the elected officials in Washington stand
with ordinary Americans -- working families, children, the elderly, the
poor -- or will the extraordinary power of billionaire campaign
contributors and Big Money prevail? The American people, by the
millions, must send Congress the answer to that question."
