Citizens' Daily Lobby

In the wake of the ACORN scandals, it has been a difficult time for community organizers across the nation to raise funds, take action, and promote social justice.  A new organization, Arkansas Community Organizations, was founded in December, 2009, to address these issues.  This Saturday, the group is holding an open house.

For Immediate Release                                             Contact:  Neil Sealy
Thursday, June 17, 2010                                                         501-346-9617

Arkansas Community Organizations To Hold Open House This Saturday

Little Rock — Arkansas Community Organizations will hold an open house this coming Saturday, June 14 at 2101 S. Main Street in Little Rock from Noon to 3:00 PM.  A program with speakers will begin at 12:30 PM.

Arkansas Community Organizations was established in December 2009 to organize low-income and working Arkansans to win changes that improve the health, income and opportunities for people in the state’s underserved communities and to give ordinary Arkansans a voice in major policy decisions in both government and private business.  The new organization has worked on health care reform, environmental justice, financial reform and neighborhood issues over the last six months.  The organization has also been active in helping people obtain affordable home mortgages and providing financial literacy classes to community residents.

The open house gives the community an opportunity to meet members and leaders of the new organization and to meet the organization’s supporters from other constituencies.

I am tired of being the change.  Inertia is on the side of the status quo.    So, unfortunately, are wealth, power, and influence.  And age.    The revolutionaries of the sixties became the reactionaries of the first decade of the twenty-first century.  Where were the rest of us while our parents and grandparents were hijacking our change?  Most were busy squandering our chance, maybe our one chance, to move this country toward the creation of a just society.    Too busy, too jaded, too poor, too comfortable, too spoiled, too anesthetized to speak out, we let our hopes for a better future  be stamped out by the fearful, the selfish, the angry, and the ignorant.

The death of meaningful health care reform is the first sign that the movement for change has stalled.     Too few of us tried to be change for too many.

I started the evening with the intent to post Jane Hamsher’s petition to President Obama, asking him to refuse to sign any health care bill without a strong public option.  Here’s the link. Send him a letter.   Ask him to start being the change.   The rest of us are, as we say here in Arkansas, used up.

HR 1874 is a bill unlikely to see the light of day anywhere but Progressive media.   When I first read the title, I immediately bristled.  The word “Patriot” is not a favorite of mine lately thanks to the Patriot Act and TeaParty Patriots, among other things.   Use of the P word may actually help slip this bill under the radar of those very T.P Patriots and those like them.   This bill is Progressive, and is extremely relevant to yesterday’s discussion of income inequality.   The summary:

4/2/2009–Introduced. Patriot Corporations of America Act of 2009 – Grants after 2009 a preference to Patriot corporations in the evaluation of bids or proposals for federal contracts.  Defines ” Patriot corporation” as a corporation which:
(1) produces at least 90% of its goods and services in the United States;
(2) does not pay its its management-level employees at a rate more than 10,000% of the compensation of its lowest paid employee;
(3) conducts at least 50% of its research and development in the United States;
(4) contributes at least 5% of its payroll to a portable pension fund for its employees;
(5) pays at least 70% of its employees’ health insurance costs;
(6) maintains a policy of neutrality in employee organizing drives;
(7) provides full differential salary and insurance benefits for all National Guard and Reserve employees who are called to active duty; and
(8) has not violated federal regulations, including regulations relating to the environment, workplace safety, labor relations, and consumer protections. Amends the Internal Revenue Code to:
(1) reduce the income tax rate for Patriot corporations;
(2) reclassify foreign corporations created or organized to avoid federal taxation as domestic corporations for income tax purposes; and

3) increase, for the period between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2010, the income tax rate for individual taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes of $500,000 or more ($1 million or more for joint returns).

I’m for it.  Let’s give tax breaks to companies that make things in the US and take away the tax breaks for companies created offshore as tax shelters.   Along the way, let’s create an incentive for a company to be pro-labor, environmentally responsible, and distribute income more evenly.    Too bad this will never make it to the House floor, let alone the Senate.

Check out this fantastic discussion about income inequality and how we got where we are today at alternet.

Why do truly Progressive income tax rates generally fail the test of time?  Because the wealthy hate them much more than the average citizen loves them.  The average guy on the street just doesn’t connect the police force, fire squads, highways, parks, and other benefits with high tax rates on the super-rich.  I would add that some people believe the “that could be me” syndrome affects the way the American citizen approaches taxes.  Let’s not tax the multibillionaires too much, because “that could be me one day.”  The rich have more resources to throw into the fight, obviously.

Even the tax hike to the rich proposed by President Obama would only raise the tax rate for the top bracket to 39.6%.  That’s equal to what it was before the Bush tax cuts, and less than half as much as the highest income tax rate under Eisenhower.

British Progressives are proposing what my spouse and I often discuss:  a salary cap.  Let’s all get together and decide what constitutes the highest dollar amount that any individual should be “worth,” monetarily speaking.   The key to this plan is to tie the salary cap to the salary of the lowest paid employee.    Under a plan like this, there would be an incentive for those at the top to make salaries at the bottom grow, too.   Britain’s High Pay Commission is proposing to tie government subsidy to the difference in pay rates.  Ecuador already has such a plan.  In contrast, the US and Britain currently have no such policy.  In fact,” the  CEO at Lockheed Martin, a company that feeds almost exclusively off government contracts, last year took home $26.5 million. That’s over 700 times the take-home of the average American worker.”

There’s a discussion about income disparity in general.

How rich—and powerful—have today’s rich become? Some numbers can help tell the story. In 1974, the most affluent 1% of Americans averaged, in today’s dollars, $380,000 in income.

Now let’s fast-forward. In 2007, the most recent year with stats, households in America’s top 1% averaged $1.4 million, well over triple what top 1% households averaged back in 1974—and, remember, this tripling came after adjusting for inflation.Americans in the bottom 90%, meanwhile, saw their average incomes increase a meager $47 a year between 1974 and 2007, not enough to foot the bill for a month’s worth of cable TV.

The bottom line: top-1% households made 12 times more income than bottom-90% households in 1974, 42 times more in 2007.

The numbers become even more striking when we go back a bit further in time and focus not on the top 1%, but on the richest of the rich, the top 400, the living symbol of wealth and power in the United States ever since America’s original Gilded Age in the late 19th century.  In 1955, our 400 highest incomes averaged $12.3 million, in today’s dollars. But the top 400 in 1955 didn’t get to enjoy all those millions. On average, after exploiting every tax loophole they could find, they actually paid over half their incomes, 51.2%, in federal income tax.

Today’s super rich are doing better, fantastically better, both before and after taxes. In 2006, the top 400 averaged an astounding $263 million each in income. These 400 financially fortunate paid, after loopholes, just 17.2% of their incomes in federal tax.  After taxes, as a group, the top 400 of 2006 had $84 billion more in their pockets than 1955’s top 400, $84 billion more they could put to work bankrolling politicians and right-wing think tanks and Swift Boat ad blitzes against progressive candidates and causes.