American investor Nick Hanauer has started a petition on Change.org which helps you tell your Congressfolk to give rich folk and corporations "not one penny in tax cuts." I find it fascinating that this document finally exists -- in a nation where more than half of Americans have thought the rich should pay more for many years now, it really should have come into being a lot sooner! -- but it is still a defensive maneuver. If you want to play offense, call your Reps and Senators and demand a 91% tax bracket on millionaire income (which will not raise taxes on any income under $1 million, no matter what some right-winger tells you) and an end to corporate welfare tax breaks without reducing the corporate tax rate, so that small businesses and ordinary Americans like us don't have to shoulder a bigger share of our taxes than we can pay or deserve. You don't just move the line by holding the line; you move the line by seeing where the line could be -- and, in this case, where the line has been, since the 91% tax bracket was a feature of our tax code through the middle of the last century.
Meanwhile, a Change.org petition also helps you demand that our Department of Justice bring terrorism charges against James Alex Fields, who drove a car into a group of counter-protestors in Charlottesville, VA on Saturday. In apparently deciding to use his automobile as a weapon, Mr. Fields killed one person (Heather Heyer, of Charlottesville) and injured 19 others, and though I have no interest in reading any manifesto he may have written or may yet write, I find it hard to imagine that he did not intend to terrorize other folks into being silent. And I'd feel the same even if we didn't already know that driving cars into large groups of people has become one of ISIS's favorite ways of spreading terror. (If we pointed that out to him, we would not be surprised, I'd hope, if he reacted with some admiration toward terrorists he might otherwise call "mud people.") Perhaps a terrorist charge for Mr. Fields is, ah, a big ask of this particular Administration, one that loves swinging its balls when discussing a foreign threat but gets all limp when the perp is a home-grown Nazi wannabe. But duty is duty.
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