99americans.org

Yesterday came the alarming news that there would be no big 4th of July fireworks show in Seattle this year, because the non-profit that organizes it

has been unable to find any local companies willing to pay the $500,000-plus annual cost to become title sponsor.

Talk about a failure of imagination! What, we can’t celebrate the 4th with fireworks because no corporation was willing to pay for naming rights on the festivities? Why should that matter?

My immediate reaction: Why not just ask regular folks to contribute in small dollar amounts – and leave off the corporate name? I’m sure in a city as large and prosperous as Seattle, we could easily raise the required cash. And after all – shouldn’t the 4th be an American holiday – not a corporate one?

Local restauranteur Tom Douglas beat me to the punch, and chipped in $5,000 of his own to get things going. By this morning when my wife and I contributed $25 through the small (under $1,000) donor page, they’d already raised over $450,000. If only 20,000 households in Seattle gave as much as we did on average – we could buy a 4th of July fireworks celebration for ourselves.

Yet still the large corporate and individual donors managed to cut us out of the action – the small donor page was put up last, and taken down immediately when $500,000 was reached – so we only contributed $7,454 to the total. Meanwhile the large donors got their names posted online – with special thanks to Microsoft and Starbucks – but not the small ones.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m happy we saved the 4th of July in Seattle. And all kudos to Tom, who’s a stand up guy and tackled this problem immediately. (Though it is a little odd that he’s on the Board of the non-profit that puts on the show…shouldn’t he have seen this coming earlier?)

But why do non-profits collude with wealthy corporations and individuals to keep 99% of Americans out of the action – even in funding their own 4th of July celebrations?

I guess they figure if they keep taking care of us in paternalistic fashion and giving us bread and circuses – we won’t ask why 4th of July fireworks started to be thought of as, in the main, a corporate naming opportunity, and how corporations and wealthy individuals have so much money to throw around in the first place – or suddenly decide to stop throwing around, as the mood strikes them. We’ll just be grateful for their liberal largess.

We all pay a little bit more for our lattes and Windows so Microsoft and Starbucks can put their name on the celebration of a revolution fought to abolish taxation without representation – and make the decision to do so, or not, without asking any of us.

Kind of ironic, don’t you think?

I was amazed and heartened to catch the end of The Blind Side author Michael Lewis’s segment on 60 Minutes last night, in which he demolished the delusions behind Wall Street’s scandalous bonus system.

But I was even more astonished to see an online-only clip when I went to the 60 Minutes website today to learn more. Apparently Lewis would be right at home in our movement:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Did they really edit this out of the broadcast? I wonder why…

As I said in a comment on the 60 Minutes site:

Lewis’ argument in this clip could apply equally well to Andy Rooney (assuming he makes a lot of money) or stars in any kind of star system – entertainment, sports, whatever.

What they all have in common is that they’re not paid directly by people – like your hairdresser is – but by corporations.

And what these corporations do is basically add a little private “tax” of their own to everything they sell – or looked at another way, they charge a little private income tax on all their employees and stockholders – to create a massive slush fund to pay truly monstrous salaries and bonuses to the few executives who are at the top of the heap, and the stars with whom they fraternize.

They don’t earn this money – like the Wall Streeters, they just siphon it off from a large revenue stream.

True, they don’t bring the economy crashing down…but neither do they “deserve” what they’re paid.

This is a democracy – I wonder why we don’t just pass a law against income exceeding a certain level – what a history teacher would consider reasonable, as Lewis says – or at least pass taxes of our own to claw those megasalaries that make everything we buy more expensive, and make all own own incomes a little bit lower, back for our benefit.

Those private corporate “taxes” are the kind of taxes the tea-partiers should be worried about – taxation without representation, or with the reduced representation of a stockholder – not taxation with representation, like our government imposes for us.

At least if our government doesn’t impose taxes that benefit us, but instead benefit the rich – we have only ourselves to blame, for not starting, joining, and pursuing political movements like this one to assert our power.

Robert Reich’s trenchant column about the Mad-as-Hellers on Salon.com today seemed to require some response for 99% of Americans – since we are, I suppose, populists of that stripe more or less.

So I exercised my right to freedom of speech to join Salon.com in the movement’s name (I hope no one will begrude the movement’s founder this liberty) and post the following letter to the editor announcing our existence. I invite other members to do the same.

Won’t you join us Robert?

I guess I must be a mad-as-heller – because I’m mad enough to try starting a new political movement, the 99% of Americans movement, at http://99americans.org/

The movement’s fundamental principle: No American’s income should exceed that of 99% of other Americans.

First on our agenda: Tax the rich – households in the top 1% of income, making over $400,000 a year, who currently siphon off over 20% of all income earned in America. Use that money to improve the lot of the 99% of don’t make so much, and don’t even really want to make that much – agreeing to take such a salary would just be unfair to everyone else who has to make do with so much less.

I think that can be a constructive movement, Robert – more so if thoughtful people like you and fellow readers of Salon.com join it. We need to develop an agenda based on this principle, and do so through the most democratic process we can muster – ideally, though hard-won consensus.

But I think you’re wrong about one thing, Robert. It’s only naive populists misled by hypocritical right-wing tools into positions at odds with their own self-interest who think “big government” is bad.

Big government is bad only when it taxes the 99% of us at the bottom to give handouts to big business, Wall Street, and the overpaid heads of large nonprofit organizations – and colludes with them to keep the rest of us down.

Big government is good when it claws back the top 1%’s windfall profits and ill-gotten gains to make life better for the rest of us – instead of letting them squander it on lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Perhaps by focusing on this single fundamental principle – restoring some moderate measure of equity to the income scale – a truly progressive populism can emerge from the anger 99% of us feel at big government, big business, and big finance today.

—99% of Americans

It’s hard to believe that only a year ago most of us were celebrating Barack Obama’s inauguration, hopeful that against all odds he would overcome the petty factionalism that divides Republicans from Democrats, and unite this country behind fundamental changes we’ve long known we need, by appealing to deeper truths the vast majority of us could agree on.

Alas, what a difference a year makes. Factionalism has actually intensified, as Republicans just vote No on every proposal, hoping the public blames the Democrats when nothing gets done. And Obama himself has turned from inspirational leader into bungling pragmatist, ready to give away the store to the usual special interests in the name of political expediency.

Last night, even liberal Massachusetts elected their first Republican Senator since the Great Depression, to block health care legislation that reforms little, and gives away way too much to the insurance industry, not to mention the State of Nebraska. Why should Massachusetts – which already funds its own universal healthcare system at the State level – help pay Nebraska’s entire Medicaid tab to get a bill passed? Some compromises are not worth making.

And so I’ve decided to restart here a project I put on hold almost two years ago, when Obama’s emergence made me think it was more important to help get him elected first, than to distract myself and others with something much less assured of success. This project had been percolating on my back burner since early 2006, when I proposed it on the website/contest SinceSlicedBread.com – another promising initiative in beneficial social transformation that came to nought in the end.

In the words of that original proposal, here’s the kind of thing I’m launching today on this website, however unlikely the outcome may be:

Found a “99% of Americans” Movement

Graft and corruption are rampant at the highest echlons of American society – witness Enron, congressman Randy Cunningham, the “millionaires club” coddled by lobbyists that our government has become.

Found a “99% of Americans” movement to strike at the root cause of this corruption – emulative materialism run amok. Its fundamental tenet would be that in a democracy like ours, no one deserves to make more income, or accumulate more wealth, than 99% of their fellow Americans.

Membership would be open only to people whose household income and net worth puts them among the “moral supermajority” of all but the top 1% of Americans – or who are willing to donate the excess either to the movement itself, or to other non-profit causes.

This movement would elaborate a platform focused on achieving economic fairness in America, and support candidates for office that pledge to support this platform.

In default of such candidates, it would field its own.

I’d rephrase that today to moderate the populist anger I felt when Bush was in charge – or maybe not, since such anger has now become general, even if I personally don’t indulge it anymore. And I’d defer the conclusion that no American should enjoy more wealth or income than 99% of us do until we can all agree that it really does represent our best interest (too many of us have been bamboozled by widespread denunciations of “communism” and “socialism,” I think, to realize that it might be, at least for now). But I think the fundamental principle remains sound:

Life has not improved economically for the vast majority of Americans – 99% of us – over the last decade (or two, or three). In fact, we’re doing worse.

Meanwhile the rich – the top 1%, households with incomes over about $400,000 a year, who now take in over 20% of all income – are making out like bandits. Probably because they’re increasingly acting like bandits, seizing all the spoils they can.

It’s long past time for the vast majority of us to unite in a political movement that keeps its focus on something we can all agree on: It’s time to take political power back from the 1% at the top, and use it in the service of the 99% of us who don’t have, and for the most part don’t even want to have so much – and refuse to let the many other contentious issues we don’t agree on distract us from making substantial progress on this one now.

This website, unveiled today, represents the first small step toward the creation of what may one day become a powerful political movement that helps guide the nation out of the morass we currently find ourselves mired in.

I invite 99% of Americans to join it and help determine its agenda – and even those in the top 1% who agree that their needs should take a back seat to everyone else’s.