We've got to put limits on executive pay and have a much more progressive income tax so that people who are earning tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year are paying at a rate that they paid before 1981, which is at least 70% at the highest marginal level.
We also need to get big money out of politics.
These changes can't come about unless we have campaign finance reform that provides public financing in general elections and a constitutional amendment that reverses the grotesque decision of the Supreme Court at the start of 2010, in a case called "Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission."
None of this is possible without an upsurge in the public at large -- a movement that rescues our democracy and takes back our economy. One can't be done without the other. Our economy and democracy are intertwined. Much the same challenge exists in Europe and Japan and elsewhere around the world, where systems profess to combine capitalism and democracy.
Massive inequality is incompatible with robust democracy. Today, in the United States, the top 1% is taking home more than 20% of total income and owns at least 38% of total wealth. The richest 400 people in America have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans put together.
As we've already seen in this Republican primary election, a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people can virtually control the election result -- not entirely, but have a huge impact. That's not a democracy. As the great American jurist and Supreme Court associate justice Louis Brandeis once said: "We can have huge wealth in the hands of a relatively few people or we can have a democracy. But we can't have both."
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