1. Impose prohibitive tariffs on companies which minimize costs by outsourcing safety and environmental issues abroad with impunity, and by paying substandard wages.

2. Abrogate free trade agreements which permit the above and destroy local agriculture and industry both abroad and at home to facilitate monopolization by a handful of corporations.

3. Reimpose the 90% tax bracket on the upper 1% taken down by the Democrats in 1963 to appease the rich with their planned escalation of the Vietnam War in the works. Anyone who believes that giving corporations more tax breaks will entice them to invest in the U.S. is not paying attention. The nation’s most profitable corporations, whether GE or Bank of America, did not pay taxes last year but actually made a profit (tax credits) on their income taxes. These corporations maintain batteries of attorneys whose sole function is providing excuses for not paying taxes on profits.

4. On a local level, developers run the city council. As an example, it took residents decades and the death of a child to get a streetlight at Lincoln School, but the developer at the same intersection hasn’t even finished his speculative building project yet and already they’ve installed a turn signal for his project. It was local developers who were the instruments of the stockholders who organized the banking industry’s siphoning off the money and ruining the country. End the rule of the City Council and manager by developers. And it has been local developers who have prevented laws protecting tenants from predators like the Shonings (“red door landlords”, Bula Enterprises).

5. It is only recently that the owners of a corporation were given amnesty for what their instrument did. We need to return to the laws original to this country, when the owners of corporations were accountable.

6. We need a law requiring managers to take into account not only the well- being of the stockholders but also the employees and the public. These people have done more harm to the country – for money – than Osama Bin Laden dreamed of doing and are walking around, not only free but with wads of cash, much of it from the public.
7. The rule of moneyed is everywhere. Even the National Championship for college football, the BCS, needs overhauled, maybe junked altogether in favor of a playoff based upon merit only, not on greed.
8. Local fees and taxes need to be progressive, with the property tax rate on people with fixed incomes much less than those who buy mansions and expect the public to service them on such a large scale at the same rates.

Tax subsidies and tax breaks should be reserved only for firms creating value in our local economies. That is a NET value – it does not mean creating 25 longshore jobs at some port to ship timber to mills abroad which rely upon substandard wages, safety practices, and environmental laws to generate inflated profits, when those same resources could employ 2,500 mill workers in the interior, if retained here. It does not mean spending millions to accommodate a Target warehouse so that Target Inc. can distribute goods from sweatshops abroad, goods that could just as easily be produced locally by workers earning a living- wage. . It does not mean hiring some predatory to buy companies and sell them for scrap, throwing thousands out of work at a fat profit. The end to subsidies means, for example, an end to dredging ports for the sake of exporting those critical resources or importing the finished products. If Walmart wants a port dredged so they can import cheap machines for sale locally, rather than purchasing them from local suppliers like Freightliner, Walmart needs to pay for it. Not Freightliner workers from their taxes. Not the public. No more subsidies of any kind for off-shoring.

The tax kickbacks going to corporations and the rich need instead to go toward investments in our infrastructure where these benefit the public and create living-wage jobs in the process, rather than being another corporate subsidy.  A good part of that investment will be in the education of our youths. That alone would be a worthwhile process but, additionally, children will one day be the nation’s workforce. Higher education needs to be affordable. The banks, with their love of fees and interest, need to be removed from educational loans. The universities themselves may need to be decentralized. It may prove cheaper to move professors to the students than to move the students to professors. K12 education needs to be returned to local control, with families involved and with standardized testing becoming merely one option for measuring success. Assembly line models for education have not worked. Vouchers need to be considered, but only with the proviso that no public funds will continue to go to any school which turns away disabled children. Trades and horticulture, and revitalized home economics need to be re- incorporated in K12.

The absurdity of federal patent laws is a direct result of international corporations trying to claim ownership of things they had absolutely nothing to do with developing, for the sake of generating profits. Even the language and the musical scale, let alone the fundamental building blocks of Life itself, were developed over eons without the assistance of, thank you very much, Warner Brothers or Monsanto. And we don’t even allow governments to enter our home and seize information without a warrant. Yet, corporations do it daily, gleaning – without permission – from our computers whatever information they want, in order to increase their profits. Strict privacy laws need invoked and enforced” (49 yo Software Writer)