Can America Evolve Towards A Country With A Humanitarian Bottom Line Rather Than Just A Financial Bottom Line?

I was on the phone with Marianne Williamson this morning and she was talking to me about how we have to change our country's priorities and the need to go from an economic bottom line to a humanitarian bottom line. During her presidential campaign she said that "The first pillar of a season of moral repair has to do with economic justice-- has to do with recognizing that we have created a wealth inequality greater than anytime since 1929, we have decimated America's middle class, and we must take immediate action to fix this. We should repeal the 2017 $2 trillion tax cut, which gave 83 cents of every dollar to the very richest individuals and corporations; although, we should put back in the middle class tax cut."

She went on to advocate specific programs:

We should stop all the corporate subsidies, such as $26 billion that we gave to oil and gas alone last year. For what reason?

We also need to make the United States government able to negotiate with huge pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices. The US government cannot negotiate for lower drug prices, even though we have people in the United States even today who are dying because they cannot afford their insulin.

‍We should also say to those who have a billion dollars in assets that 3 percent tax on those assets is reasonable and 2 percent for those who have over $50 million-- that is reasonable as well.

As she said, "We have near 93 million people who live near poverty in the United States today. That means million upon millions of people, tens of millions of people who live, every single day, in chronic tension and economic anxiety, not knowing really what will happen if they get sick, not knowing what will happen if one of their children get sick, not knowing how they will send their children to college or not knowing how they themselves will get out from under the burden of their college loan. We need to change this. Bad public policy created all this and good public policy will make it right."





After Marianne ended her presidential campaign she decided to do what she could to help progressive congressional candidates who are running on platforms that she feels are about creating that good and reparative public policy. You may have noticed that this week centrist Democrat Amy Klobuchar, a top contender to be Biden's VP pick, followed Marianne's lead and announced that she is trying to help down-ballot candidates, what Politico referred to as kicking off her next act. The effort to raise funds, the snazzily dubbed "Win Big Project," began Friday by endorsing a slate of a dozen House and Senate candidates. All of them are centrists or candidates from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, like reactionary Blue Dogs Anthony Brindisi (D-NY) and Xochitl Torres Small (D-NM).

Klobuchar's are the kinds of candidates who have worked hand-in-hand with the Republicans to create the bad public policy Marianne has steadfastly derailed. And none of Klobuchar's endorsed candidates are anything like the dedicated progressives Marianne is helping raise funds for-- the list of which you can see by clicking on the thermometer on the right. I asked several of those candidates what makes their own campaigns different from the campaigns of conservative Democrats being supported by the corporate and political establishment.

The first response was from Liam O'Mara, a progressive congressional candidate in Riverside County who won his primary and is challenging right-wing crook and Trump enabler Ken Calvert. "Marianne is right to say that we need a moral renaissance in this country," he said. "All our great religious and philosophical traditions give us a sense of right and wrong which is rooted in justice and compassion for others. None of them could be used to justify the neofeudal outcome of Republican tax policy. The GOP claims the mantle of liberty while it strips that liberty from Americans by steadily lowering our living standards and reducing us to virtual paupers, dependent on the largesse of powerful special interests and the billionaire class. Americans should not have to live on their knees, begging for crumbs from the table of the super-rich. Our Founders fought a revolution motivated by the Enlightenment ideal that all human beings were born free and equal in dignity and rights. It is well past time we realised the promise of that revolution, and of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is also the law of the land."

Mark Gamba's all-mail primary is 2 weeks from Tuesday. He told us he couldn’t agree more with Marianne on this. "I have long advocated that we should measure America’s success on a Gross National Happiness Index rather then the GDP which only measures outcomes for the wealthiest and has little relevance to the rest of us and certainly doesn’t measure economic justice. Concepts like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal which look to invest in the vast majority of people and the health of the nation, rather than the wealth of the 1% are exactly what we need to enact to bring our country out of the economic tragedy millions are suffering due to the pandemic. It will require a significant change in Congress however to make that a reality. The neo-liberals will use this crisis to further their agenda of concentrating wealth and power at the top. Everyone below the top 10% have been getting poorer, relative to the cost of living, since the Reagan era. It is critical that we raise the minimum wage to a living wage and tie it to the cost of housing so that it never stagnates again. It is beyond time to tax capital gains at the same rate we tax other income; to increase the tax rate on anyone making more than $10 million a year to at least 50% and to close the loopholes that allow companies like Amazon to pay nothing in taxes while creating another instant billionaire who treats his employees poorly. According to The Guardian: 'Some of the richest people in the U.S. (Bezos in particular) have been at the front of the queue as the government has handed out trillions of dollars to prop up an economy it shuttered amid the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, the billionaire class has added $308 billion to its wealth in four weeks-- even as a record 26 million people lost their jobs.' This is why all the candidates in this post need the support of every American who hopes for progressive change, I for one do not take a penny of corporate money so that I can be free to fight for the changes Marianne and I have outlined."

Julie Oliver is the progressive Democrat running against a Trumpist crook in central Texas, Roger Williams. "Our economy was already in a slow-motion crisis that the coronavirus has hit the fast-forward button on so we must rebuild that economy to ensure that it prioritizes people first," she told me. "Rebuilding the American economy for the long term is going to take a massive WWII-style mobilization. We need to repeal the GOP tax cuts for multinational corporations, tax the rich and corporations, and invest in world-class, high quality healthcare, education, and clean energy infrastructure."

"As a country we need courageous leaders who can't be bought and who will put people first, not corporate interests. Marianne, wrote Arizona progressive Eva Putzova, "has been such a leader, which is evident from her dedication to help elect a brand-new Congress. Poverty in the United States is deep and widespread. People are living paycheck to paycheck, always one crisis away from a total financial collapse. In my congressional district, it is impossible to not focus on the tragic consequences of our government’s official policies of the past toward Native Americans: first policies of annihilation, then displacement and assimilation. To this day we treat Native lands as a national sacrifice area by enabling resource extraction that comes with environmental degradation and water contamination and neglect to invest in basic infrastructure that would be unacceptable elsewhere. We are talking about running water and paved roads. Our priorities must shift and this is why I’m challenging the incumbent whose timid leadership fails to address the greatest challenges of our times and to uplift the most vulnerable among us."

Tomas Ramos, the best of the candidates to to represent the open South Bronx seat that Jose Serrano is giving up, reminded us that "It's easy to blame Trump for the economic crisis that we're in but these series of events unfolded in the 1980s under Reagan. There was a redistribution of income from the have-nots to the haves. The Bush II administration made some enhancements, and under Tump we're continuing to see a redistribution of American capitalism, which has exhausted its ability to reproduce itself through tax cuts. The trickle down analogy is a farce, because all it did was the opposite, it manipulated the effect of wealth which rose to the top 0.1 percent. When Reagan applied this tax cut policy, the American economy was operating with the premise of global profits and surpluses. This helped fuel the demand for international exports, ultimately these surpluses helped spur on subsets such as the derivative economy. After 2008 recession it was clear that the American economy can no longer support these subsets economies. If these catastrophic economic policies continue, then it will further stagnate the incomes of the middle class and the working class. The COVID-19 crisis is a clear indication that we must reinvest in the human capital and not the on the future value of an economic indicator."

Michael Broihier is a progressive Democrat Marianne has endorsed for the Kentucky Senate seat held by Mitch McConnell. Mike told me that "Marianne is spot on; the great tragedy of this pandemic, after the loss of life, will be a rush back to the comfort of business as usual. As a farmer, I know how little a roaring stock market means to rural voters. In a state with the nation’s fifth worst economy and double the national average of people working at the minimum wage, the health of the Dow-Jones or S&P means little. And, the failure of a health care system tied to employment is self-evident when 30-million Americans become unemployed in a manner of weeks." He elaborated:

Sadly, those people who routinely had to chose between rationing their prescriptions or paying the rent were invisible to career politicians of both parties until Washington career politicians began to fear the Senate gym being looted for hand-sanitizer and toilet paper. But even with a mounting death toll their first instinct was to bail out their rich and corporate donors and that tone deafness is not lost on working America. Even the paltry, one-time payment to citizens smacks of desperation-- not leadership-- as they fail to grasp the enormity of the challenges ahead.

In my race, I face the DNC’s handpicked candidate, who has refashioned herself as a pro-Trump moderate who thinks the Senate Majority Leader is stopping the president from draining the swamp. A candidate who said she would have voted to elevate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. This is what Washington establishment Dems think is what is needed-- another a get-along Democrat absent of vision or the moral courage to lead the country towards a more just and equitable future.

Queens progressive Shan Chowdhury is exactly the kind of young, working class leader who would make Congress a vehicle for the aspirations of American families rather than for sleazy corporate interests. This morning he said that "My race is critical in having to choose what is economically feasible vs. what moral is morally feasible. My opponent, Gregory Meeks is a corrupt corporate Democrat from the Republican wing of the party. He is the chair of subcommittee for House Financial Services of Consumer Protection and Financial Institutions. Time and time again since he’s even in office, he’s bailed out the big banks when working people needed help the most. I on the other hand, am fighting for progressive policies built on moral imperatives to protect working people from corporate harm. Homes and jobs should not be lost because of how irresponsible my opponent’s donors are with handling money."

Robin Wilt, a former Bernie DNC delegate, is fighting for a better Rochester and Monroe County. She and Marianne see eye to eye on shifting societal priorities and this morning shared that "Our campaign is all about elevating the voices of and empowering the 99%. For far too long, the establishment has cynically ignored anyone who wasn’t a corporate donor or political elite, and developed policies that cater to the interests of the monied few, as opposed to the interests of all of the people that they serve. As a result, our society was left vulnerable to collapse amid the current crisis. My opponent, as part of the neoliberal power structure in Albany for over thirty years, has not only been complicit, he has been an architect of these failed policies."

By contrast, the policy centerpieces and priorities of our campaign are those issues that have been far too long subverted by lickspittle corporate appeasers-- like my opponent-- who do not have the backbone to fight on behalf of the communities they represent: We proudly support healthcare and housing as human rights and champion Expanded and Improved Medicare for All, regardless of immigration status, and a Federal Homes Guarantee. We recognize that our existence on this planet is at grave risk and will fight for a Green New Deal that centers the communities that have been at the mercy of polluters and promises a future free from carbon dependence while bolstering our economy. We understand that everyone deserves a quality education, regardless of their zip code, and we support tripling Title I funding, tuition-free pre K- 16 public education, and eliminating student debt. We support a path toward citizenship for the millions of undocumented residents of our country, restoration of DACA, and economic justice for migrant and farm workers. We recognize that endless war, mass incarceration, and mass detention are all sustainable symptoms of our prison and military industrial complex, and will dismantle the systems that engender this injustice. We understand that there is an electoral industrial complex that disenfranchises our most vulnerable communities and will champion a new Voting Rights Act that ensures equal access to the ballot box, and we will remove money from politics by overturning Citizens United.

In short, we are running a people-centered campaign that recognizes that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable communities and that there is no moving forward when we continue to leave people behind.