Adopt a single-payer health care system and eliminate the insurance companies and other middlemen that eat up our tax dollars. The U.S. spends more for health care per capita than any nation on earth, yet outcomes produced by our healthcare system rank among the lowest in the industrialized world. We could save billions of dollars a year if we allowed the government to negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry. Eventually, we should nationalize our healthcare system.
We need to overturn Citizens United and stop corporations from buying our politicians. As long as politicians rely on multinational corporations and political action committees and big-money donors to fund their campaigns, we will never have a fair and equitable political system that works for the benefit of all Americans. As long, too, as politicians rely on corporate contributions for their political funding, the American economy will never be equitable and those with deep pockets will continue to profit off the American taxpayer.
Revise the tax code and stop the loopholes that allow large corporations to evade paying their fair share of taxes. There are many multinational corporations in this country that pay no income tax at all. There are millionaires and billionaires that pay less in taxes than people in the middle class. This is unacceptable and must be stopped.
Renegotiate trade deals. NAFTA, CAFTA, and all other trade deals that benefit corporations and not the people of the United States must either be scrapped or renegotiated. The TPP should never be allowed to pass. These trade deals favor corporations, not the American taxpayer!
Eliminate unemployment by upgrading our basic infrastructure. Water systems, highway systems, and bridges should be repaired, and rail systems and alternative energy resources should be developed. Such projects could employ many millions of currently unemployed Americans, giving them money to spend and reducing government outlays for economic and social support.
Break the monopoly on American politics currently held by our two major parties. This proposal represents another structural change that I think is imperative and again goes deeper than Bernie's proposed reforms. Both the Democratic and Republican parties are controlled by corporate interests. They will never allow control of the federal government to come into the hands of a president or a majority of senators and representatives who are committed to serve the broad common interest rather than the narrow special interests that keep the two parties in power.
Recognize that the automobile is probably the least efficient form of mass transit that can be imagined. We need to break our century-long attachment to the automobile as a fixture of American life. Doing so can lead to another critical structural change that is not only important in itself but can help conserve resources needed to meet real human needs. Besides harming the environment and keeping the fossil fuel industry in business, automobiles make it necessary to maintain an extensive highway system and the extensive infrastructure that entails, imposing a constant drain on tax dollars. High-speed rail, bus systems, and even conveyor belts that move humans represent better options for transportation than does the automobile. Already, there are cities in the United States where people don't even need to own an automobile. This should also be true in suburban and rural areas. There is no practical reason why someone who lives outside of city limits can't be served by public transportation. The only thing missing is the availability of public transportation outside of large cities, which can be readily supplied.
If mass transit were to be implemented in suburban and rural areas, it would eliminate one of the largest household expenses, saving taxpayers a significant amount of their own money and greatly reducing government outlays for repairing highway systems and infrastructure. This is not to say that we should get rid of automobiles, but only that we could greatly stimulate the economy by replacing much of their use with public transportation.
These are just seven proposals for reforming and restructuring our political economy based on the capitalist system we have, and they are by no means complete. The proposals can all be expanded with additional points to justify their implementation, and other proposals could surely be added.
In summary, I want to emphasize the point that the United States is not only the wealthiest country in the world; it probably wastes more money than any other nation in history. One striking example is the massive amounts of money wasted by the Department of Defense on no-bid contracts, through overpayment on bid contracts, and by simply losing track of the expenditures it makes. It seems odd to me that a country supposedly in immense debt, and with a Congress that worries annually over deficits, never asks questions when it comes to paying for the arms, weapons and contracts of its military. If corporations, who are responsible to shareholders, were to waste billions or trillions of dollars in similar ways, there would be hell to pay. That simply doesn't happen, however, with the United States government. Just recently, for instance, the Department of Defense was unable to account for almost $3 trillion that had somehow been lost. The loss was reported in muted tones, but where was the public outcry?!
I know I've written a lot at this point and there is much to take in. I'm therefore going to stop here and continue my critique of capitalism in the next of what I plan to be a continuing series of articles. As you read the articles, be aware that everything I write is not merely my opinion, but can be documented. My hope is that the information I provide will give OEN readers a better understanding of the real crises both our own nation and many other nations are facing. The next installment in the series will deal with ways in which I think ordinary people can help solve the problems I've raised in this first article. Later, I'll also discuss other matters, such as the national security state, the military-industrial complex, voter fraud, and what can be done about what is happening in the African-American community. Most importantly, I want to go beyond merely citing what is happening in our country and world to my own understanding of why it is happening. I hope that by the end of this series of articles I will have convinced you that what is happening is happening because there are people in power that want it to happen.
(Article changed on September 2, 2016 at 15:29)
(Article changed on September 2, 2016 at 19:24)
(Article changed on September 3, 2016 at 07:17)
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