Interview With Mike Gravel, Former Senator From Alaska

By Nathan Diebenow

ARLINGTON, Va. – Maurice "Mike" Gravel is running for president.

What? You haven’t heard of him?

Gravel represented Alaska in the United States Senate for two terms from 1969-1981.

The bells still aren’t ringing, huh?

He launched a global campaign to halt the Pentagon’s plans – the Cannikin test – to detonate nuclear bombs under the seabed of the North Pacific at Amchitka Island, Alaska.

The U.S. military wanted all five tests performed, even though the warheads it was testing was obsolete and would have destroyed the food chain of the North Pacific for generations to come. One test, however, went ahead.

Sen. Gravel was also the first in Congress to oppose the use of nuclear fission as a commercial source of electricity.

Today, nuclear fission is no longer considered an environmentally clean energy alternative to fossil fuels as it once was in the 1950s and 1960s.

Remember him now? No?

Sen. Gravel successfully orchestrated the passing of legislation on a policy to construct the Alaska Pipeline.

The bill passed the Senate by one vote, and now, 20 percent of the oil that powers the continental United States runs through this pipeline.

Did that jog your memory? Still, no?

Well, it could be said that Sen. Gravel is the reason why President George W. Bush has no more boots on the ground in Iraq than he already has.

In 1973, Gravel mounted a one-man filibuster lasting five months that forced a deal to stop the military draft.

President Richard Nixon – in order to regain political clout – sealed the deal to let the draft expire, thereby ending the defense policy that had been on the books since 1947.

Is he coming back to you now?

Perhaps Gravel’s most famous accomplishment is his reading of the "Pentagon Papers" into the congressional record in 1971.

These papers — the collection of a secret government study describing the U.S. military’s involvement in the Vietnam War — were originally leaked to the news media by former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg.

Using his office as senator, Gravel released roughly 4,000 of the 7,000 documents during a committee hearing in an effort to inform his constituency about the war’s progress.

The senator orchestrated the documents’ release the day the Supreme Court was to have handed down its decision to prevent the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing more excerpts of the study.

The publishing of the Johnson-era study caused a rift of distrust between the U.S. government and the American people, which inevitably led to the ending of Vietnam War and the resignation of President Nixon.

The next year, Sen. Gravel was unable to solidify enough votes to gain the Democratic nomination for Vice President of the United States during the Democratic National Convention.

He came in third behind Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri and Frances "Sissy" Farenthold, a delegate from Texas.

But that was in 1972.

Thirty-five years later, Sen. Gravel announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 2008.

Since then, the 70-year-old former lawmaker has caused a ruckus during the Democratic debates by speaking truth to power.

"There was a debate at the DNC," explained Gravel in a recent telephone interview with the Iconoclast, "and I said very clearly that this war would have not have happened had it not been for the Democrats. Sure it was a Republican war, but we made it possible.

"If you look at the vote in the Senate, it was our Democrats that made the margin for passage of the resolution, and then I had the temerity to tell the Democrats that anybody that voted for the resolution is not qualified to be president. Well, that endeared me to all the Hillary supporters and the Edwards supporters for sure."

And he doesn’t stop there.

"I may not have any money, but I have a voice, and I’m not afraid," Gravel added.

The Iconoclast’s Nathan Diebenow continued his conversation hitting such topics as the "Iraq War version" of the Pentagon Papers, various reforms to such governmental institutions as the tax and healthcare systems, and his proposed National Initiative for Democracy – the original plank of his presidential campaign.

Here is that interview:

.........

ICONOCLAST: So why hasn’t the Iraq version of the Pentagon Papers (showing the Bush administration’s intent to manufacture the cause of war in Iraq) been leaked to the public yet?

SEN. MIKE GRAVEL: Because the members of Congress are wimps.

ICONOCLAST: So do you think there’s someone actually trying to give information to senators and representatives?

SEN. GRAVEL: I don’t know. We know, first off, you don’t have to have that. The Congress in its oversight hearings and all of that can take any kind of classified information and release it to the American public without any danger of any prosecution.

That’s the court case of Gravel v. the U.S. government. We’ve got a Supreme Court decision on that back in 1972, and nothing has changed since that decision was rendered. It’s a tragedy that members of Congress feel they have to honor the secrecy that exists in the Bush administration and in the entire government which is horrendous in the excesses in that regard.

ICONOCLAST: Are senators like Russ Feingold just not aware of this power?

SEN. GRAVEL: They may not be aware of it, but they can do it. I’ve tried to publicize it, but by the same token, the media has somewhat marginalized me in this regard because the media don’t buy into it. I mean, the level of ignorance on this particular subject is appalling.

The media abets the secrecy involved, and of course, the government leaks like a sieve for purposeful things, but not generally for the benefit of the people. You have whistleblowers, and we have a whistleblower law which is supposed to protect whistleblowers, but its impact is exactly the opposite.

ICONOCLAST: They get victimized, right?

SEN. GRAVEL: Let me draw a scenario for you. When I was in office, I was able to stop the Cannikin test, not by my protest but by the fact that somebody in government leaked to me a memo showing that the testing for the Cannikin testing for a nuclear safeguard system was obsolete. It was just going forward on the basis of the profits of the contractors involved. The minute I published that information they had to kill the program.

Now, I don’t recall – don’t remember who gave me that information and I don’t really care. It was classified. I dropped it like a bomb, and that was the end of that story. Now, Congress can do that any time it wants. The whole release of the Pentagon Papers was that issue.

And in this incident I released, nobody was ever prosecuted. I had a national security memorandum that dealt with (Secretary of State Henry) Kissinger and the bombing of Cambodia. That was released. I gave some to Ron Delum when I couldn’t get it in the Senate record. He slipped them into the House record.

Feingold in my mind is the best senator you’ve got, but it’s not enough. He’s not prepared to begin a filibuster on the war, and I could give you in detail how we should get to George Bush. I know you interviewed Elizabeth (De La Vega) sometime back when she talks of impeachment. Well, there are two avenues to impeachment. Do you want me to pursue these two areas? Or do you want to ask me other questions?

ICONOCLAST: No, go right on ahead.

SEN. GRAVEL: First off, this area, this 5-4 Supreme Court decision said that I as a senator can release classified information within the confines of the Senate. That was the five. The other four said that I could release information anywhere I chose to by the fact that I was a senator. A congressman has the same power.

This is under the speech and debate clause of the Constitution which members of Congress are sworn to uphold, and they don’t. They don’t. They just buy into this ridiculous secrecy which is appalling and costing an untold amount of human life.

Now let’s go back on how we’re going to get George Bush with this wimpy Congress. I say wimpy, but I don’t mean to be insulting, but it’s a fact. They just don’t think properly. They’re not providing the leadership, whether it’s Hillary Clinton who says she’s going to end the war or Barack Obama who thinks we ought to pull the troops out a year from now. Well, what about all the people who are going to die between now and then?

There’s no excuse for this. Just no excuse. This war is self-evidently a fraud. It should not continue one more day. We should pull out the troops immediately, and here’s the only scenario that is possible to do this task with the greatest amount of speed, and after we’ll cover the other modes of impeachment.

The first thing that Congress has to do is to pass a law that says the war is over and that the troops must be withdrawn with post haste. A law. Now that can pass the House if the Democrats have any sense of leadership – any guts at all. It should pass the House. Now it will be filibustered in the Senate. That means that there’ll be six Republican Senators that will oppose this. I do not think they will last very long, and they’ll wither – they’ll wither on the vine with what the media will do to them with this clear line now.

This means that the law will pass the Senate. Maybe a month later. Now you have the law going to the President of the United States. He has two choices: to obey the law or to veto it. He vetoes it, which would be my prediction, and now this is where the rubber hits the road. You’re going to have to override the veto. You need two thirds in the House and two thirds in the Senate.

Here again, we have precipitated with this course of action a Constitutional crisis between the Congress, the people, and the presidency, so if the people put enough pressure, and the media will hold the members of Congress accountable to this override, then they can override the president’s veto. If the press and the people do not, then it’ll be just stalemated right then and there.

But if they do override it, then the president has only two choices: obey the law or not obey the law. If he chooses not to obey the law, the Congress can immediately proceed with a bill of impeachment for violating that law they just passed.

Now that’s one course of action for impeachment. The other course of action for impeachment would be to hold hearings in the judiciary committee of the House and the Senate on how the fraud was committed on the American people.

We’re getting enough stuff coming out of the Libby Trial and a whole host of other areas – some hearings that Levin held with the armed services committee – that now they can now build on that body of knowledge and probe more, issue subpoenas all over to hell and get these people to testify or purger themselves. One of the two.

And that will give you obviously enough information to file a bill of impeachment in the House, send it to the Senate, and here, too, you’ll have a filibuster problem, but what’s more important? What’s more important is after it’s been sent to the Senate, then the House puts forth a resolution. It could be a joint resolution or single resolution, saying that anybody involved in the elements of the bill of impeachment cannot be pardoned by George Bush as he leaves his presidency.

Now that leaves a situation that Elizabeth (de la Vega) clearly understands as a prosecutor that now you’re going to get people to purger themselves and go to jail or they’re going to start telling the truth about how the fraud was committed on the American people – the consequence of which was this terrible loss of life. That is not only necessary for the process of impeachment, it is necessary to proceed with criminal prosecution of the president, the vice president, and all of the members of government inside and out who have been party to this criminal fraud on the American people.

ICONOCLAST: I guess the missing component to this scenario is just political will.

SEN. GRAVEL: That’s why I was using the word wimpy. Here all these people want to run for President of the United States, and they don’t have the guts to stand up and offer some leadership to prove they’re qualified. What’s it all about? This is politics as usual. It is pathetic! It is pathetic! Hillary says she’s going to end the war when she becomes president. Well, hell, we heard that same thing from Richard Nixon.

The reason for the war is oil. When you hear the leaders in Congress or the leaders in the administration talk about our "vital interests," that’s a code word for oil. So what we’re doing is spending our treasury and our blood to get control of the Titanic! We should not be fighting for oil. We should be fighting and spending our treasury to have alternate sources of energy and to bring the whole world into that effort – not just the United States with our arrogance. This is a global problem.

As a presidential candidate, I advocate that we should put on a carbon tax and invite any other country to join us in a global effort – and the only quid pro quo is that they put up the carbon tax also in their country. We take all of that money from the tax and use it to integrate a global engineering and scientific effort to get us off carbon within a decade. We can do it.

ICONOCLAST: How would that affect countries that produce oil?

SEN. GRAVEL: They’re going to sell the oil. They’ll continue in the marketplace. They’ll continue to push oil and so will all the oil companies, but we’ll have unbelievable resources to go for an alternative. There’ll be some chemical uses for oil for centuries to come, but what we have to do is get off the affect of oil polluting the environment. That’s the only way you’re going to do it.

I think Al Gore’s movie is great. The problem is that at the end of the movie, what does it say? "Go to Wal-mart and buy a new lightbulb." So informing the people of a problem is not an answer because all you do is frustrate the people because they don’t have the power to act upon it. That’s the reason why I’m running for office – to empower the people to make laws. Once the people can make laws, you won’t be so dependent on the lack of leadership that exists in the two political parties.

You see, there are only two venues with which to deal with the governance problem. One is the government, but the problem is that it’s a representative government. It’s a structural problem. The other area is the people. So if you can’t solve the problem within the government, then you might as well go to the people.

Now what happens is that elected officials and the elites of our society have no confidence in the people. Well, the people are smarter than they are. They just don’t know how to admit it. They don’t understand it. There’s not a member of Congress that I would know of that would really stand up and fight to empower the people as lawmakers. They just don’t understand that.

You can go to the website and read the law that I’ve codified – that permits the people to become lawmakers not like the 24 states and the 200 communities that have it. That’s not good law. What I’ve done is taken the procedures of Congress and tweaked them so that they can now be used by the people in every governmental jurisdiction of the United States and the national government. Why can’t the people make 100 percent of the policy issues that affect their lives and free up the government to do a better job in a day-to-day operations of the government? That’s entirely possible.

That legislation is there. It’s been neglected by the media. The media won’t even talk about it because they don’t even understand it. What happens is that once this legislation is enacted into law – and it won’t be by the Congress but by the people – it dilutes the power of the media and dilutes the power of Congress. They don’t want to see that happen.

ICONOCLAST: You’re saying that your National Initiative for Democracy dilutes the power of the media? How?

SEN. GRAVEL: If you look at the law, we set up communications procedures that even if the media is on one side of the issue or if Bill Gates spends a billion dollars and Warren Buffet spends another billion dollars, it won’t make any difference. When the people learn their enlightened self-interest, it doesn’t make any difference what anybody says. They go for their enlightened self-interest.

I can prove that with several instances of initiatives in California. One particularly I call the Philip-Morris law. I could talk to you for hours and days on this subject. I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life trying to bring this to the attention of the nation without success because the elites do not want to see this happen. Who would you trust? Do you trust a decision of the majority of 535 human beings or nine people in black robes or the decision of the majority of 125 million people? You’ll get a better decision every time by numbers.

It’s not you as an individual or me as an individual. When the people legislate, they are legislating as an individual within the context of the constituency. It’s a majority decision by the constituency, so fear of the Religious Right, fear of this or fear of that goes by the boards.

This isn’t to say that the people won’t make mistakes. The difference between people making mistakes in law and representative government making mistakes in law is that the people can change it because they feel the pain. The people in power do not feel the pain, and that’s why it took 10 years to end the Vietnam War. We’re on a similar path to end George Bush’s oil war.

ICONOCLAST: Should the National Initiative prevail, what do you think would be among the first laws that the People’s Legislature would put forth?

SEN. GRAVEL: End the war is the first one, and I would help initiate that, and if I were president I would have only one vote. The second thing is that you could do away with the electoral college. You could turn around and have term limits on the members of Congress – 12 years for a senator, three- or four-year terms for the House, and 12 years for every federal judge including the Supreme Court of the United States. And that’s just for openers.

ICONOCLAST: (laughs)

SEN. GRAVEL: The reason for term limits is important because power corrupts and power corrupts absolutely. You can add the Gravel codicil – power corrupts everybody from St. Francis of Assisi on down. So if that’s the case, the only thing you can do – it’s a product of human nature – is turn around and limit the amount of time of any human being with that kind of elected power.

They go back to the private sector, and they take the wisdom and the experience that they have, or they get promoted up, but 12 years is all you need. Boy, I’ll tell you, people say that this empowers the lobbyists. God damn, it’s just the opposite. (laughs)

ICONOCLAST: How’s that?

SEN. GRAVEL: Well, first off, you have to know how the lobbyists work. I was on a finance committee. I was very young, so obviously, the lobbyists paid a great deal of attention to me because they thought that someday I would have become chairman, if I stayed there in Congress. It’s not hard to stay in Congress, by the way. It’s the chairman that controls the agenda of the committee.

See, what people focus on is what the lobbyists overtly do, but if by having a committee chairman who thinks like a group of lobbyists, hell, they don’t have to do anything overt. They just have to keep taking you to dinner. (laughs) He knows what to do.

People in elected office are generally wonderful people. They come there with ideals. They’re going to change the world. They get there, and all of a sudden in the first term or even less, it becomes politics as usual.

Look at Obama. Here he stands up and makes statements saying that this war is terrible and that he’s against the war. And what is his solution? It’s to take the troops out in March 2008. What’s that communication all about? It’s politics as usual, and yet everybody is going bonkers over his celebrity and vision. Well, the vision has to have details, and it’s a little weak on details. Hillary the same way.

But you see, these are the creations of media, and so now, when the people can make decisions directly informed outside the media, stop and think. Here’s how an initiative would be informed: by law, the Electoral Trust, which is the agency created to administer the procedures on behalf of the people, has to turn around after a whole process of hearings and publish a booklet on each initiative. If it’s a national initiative, it’s sent to every single registered voter in the United States.

The booklet that is sent out about the initiative contains the pros and the cons, an objective analysis, an economic analysis, an environmental impact statement, and all of the relative factors so the citizen can read it if he chooses to.

This booklet has to be received by the people via snail mail. We could do it with advanced technology to their various email addresses. But it has to be received no later than 15 days before the election, and no earlier than 30 days before the election because as any politician knows, people focus on an issue on election 10 or 15 days out.

What the Electoral Trust then has to do is produce a television program a la "Frontline" about the initiative. I say this with humor that there’ll be a category for Oscars as to who produces the best program to inform the people. These television programs are an hour to half an hour depending on the context. It will be mandatory by law put in front of the people primetime by each one of the networks and cable networks one time during that 15-day period. You’ll do the same thing for radio and the same thing for print.

Now, a person would really have to go out of his way to not be informed about what is going on with that specific piece of legislation. They could then have one week, seven 24 hours to vote whether they’re on vacation or in town. Then you’d have a pipeline – 52 national issues, 52 state issues, 52 local issues.

Incidentally, the Electoral Trust has to begin right at the beginning when it’s formed to register everybody for life, so you don’t have this crappy situation that we have now. All the elections for initiatives are conducted by the Electoral Trust, not at the state level.

This is all laid out in a law that has taken me 10 years to write called the National Initiative. It’s not so out of the box. I’m sure that at one point in your life, you voted for a bond issue. Well, a bond issue is very serious lawmaking. If you’re intelligent enough to vote on a bond issue, you’re sure as hell intelligent enough to vote on the factors that effect your life. You’re the only authority on your life. I’m not. I’m an authority on my life.

See, the reason why the people cannot make laws is because of slavery. That’s the reason why. If you take the quotes from Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Wilson, James Madison, and others, they all said repeatedly that the people could alter the Constitution at any future time if it suited them. Now, that means lawmaking.

But why did they not put that in the Constitution? Because of slavery. They made a very undemocratic document, and rather than turn it over to the people for ratification, they sent it to conventions. They wanted to keep one step away because they knew eight years before the ratification of the Massachusetts constitution was defeated because it contained slavery. They knew that that could not get the constitution ratified in the Deep South if slavery were a part of it. They made a pact with the devil to satisfy the southern planters, and we have been living with that price ever since.

In the five areas of the constitution that deal with slavery, there’s only one that has been repealed. The other four are still there. Let me tick them off for you. The one that has been repealed is the 3/5ths vote. The others there to lock in – that’s why it took a Civil War – to lock in slavery: one, the Electoral College; two, the Article 5 way of amending the Constitution; three, the U.S. Senate; four, locally-controlled elections rather than federally-controlled elections. All those four areas totally destabilize any efforts at real democracy in this country.

ICONOCLAST: What you just described was how white elites have perpetuated themselves over the last 200 years.

SEN. GRAVEL: Exactly. That’s the elite system that still exists and won’t permit any breakthroughs. In fact, it’s gotten worse. The media has shrunk down to five corporations. Has it ever occurred to you why the media touts Hillary and Obama so extensively? I mean, it’s a given unless we do some stupid things that the next President of the United States could be or should be a Democrat.

I’ve got to tell you, the way that things are going, we’re going to see a revisiting of 2004. Donald Duck could have beaten George Bush in ‘04.

ICONOCLAST: (laughs)

SEN. GRAVEL: What happened? Well, I gotta tell you – Donald Duck could beat any Republican in ’08, but we’re going to see what happens. It’s politics as usual. It has destroyed both parties.

You know, politicians love to beat their chests and say what a great country we are. There’s no question that we’ve been a blessed country. We’ve got a great geographic area. We have great resources with an immigrant population. I want to underscore immigrant population.

Then, of course, we weren’t shy about committing a couple of genocides like what we did with the Indians, but other than that, we’re a great country. We love to go to war. But now, Dwight Eisenhower as he left office – that should be underscored "as he left office" – announced that the biggest threat we have to democracy is the military-industrial complex. Has anybody done anything about that since? Of course not. In fact it’s gotten worse. It’s gotten worse.

The military-industrial complex controls our government today. Controls it. Lock, stock, and barrel. With the Republican Party, it’s obscene. But with the Democratic Party, it’s still there. I was at a conference with Marshall, the head of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, and the first thing he said was we needed more money for the military.

We spend more on defense than all the rest of the world put together. We have more operable nukes than everybody else put together, and we’re building more. Who the hell are we going to nuke? Then we look at North Korea and we look at Iran, and they were the signators to the non-proliferation agreement and so are we, but we’re in violation of that agreement. They at least exercise the right to withdraw from it which you can do under international law, but we haven’t withdrawn from it, and we’re in violation.

All five members of the U.N. Security Council which is the basic nuclear club are signators of the non-proliferation agreement and are in violation of Article 7 which says that we should be in all haste doing away with nukes. None of them are doing it.

It’s easier to point to the spec in the other person’s eye rather than the piece of straw in front of our own eye.

ICONOCLAST: Well, we’re four years into the U.S. occupation of Iraq. What do you consider we do to remove U.S. troops from there and re-stabilize the Middle East?

SEN. GRAVEL: You just plain take them out. We’re in the middle of a civil war, and so what you do is have Congress pass the law saying bring them back post haste, and you take them out. This is a civil war. We started it. This is a fraud. This is a criminality. There’s nothing you can change. Everybody is focusing on the present. The present is dictated by the past, and the past is that we committed a criminal act and destabilized Iraq and the Middle East.

The only way we can handle this is to turn around, withdraw our troops, which from our point of view is the main part of the problem in getting to a solution. Once you withdraw our troops, you just withdraw them. I mean, you just start taking them out and you leave the Iraqis to their own devices which sadly is the only way.

The history of civil wars is that they end with victors. They don’t end by negotiation unless there’s an outside force that is prepared to assert itself. We are the outside force, and all we did was screwed it up. We initiated it. The only way we can have any influence at all is to pull our troops out and to proceed with aggressive diplomacy by involving the European Union, Iran, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Japan, China, and anybody else.

That’s the first thing you do. The world has a stake in the stability in the Middle East. But they’ll continue fighting. It can’t getting any worse than it already is right now. Of course, what they’re doing is taking American treasure, sequestering it to get weapons, so they can fight a civil war. They’re fighting a civil war now. They know we’re going to leave, and so therefore, they’re hording their stuff to be able to fight it more aggressively.

Somebody is going to come out on top. I don’t know who it is. It could be a religious nut.

ICONOCLAST: (laughs)

SEN. GRAVEL: Of course, that’s what we would have brought about. Or it could be a secular person. I don’t know. Nobody can predict it.

Now we went into Iraq for oil, and the reason why Democrast and Republicans are hanging around is to hope against hope to control oil. Well, you don’t have to control the oil. If oil is in the hands of an enemy – let’s look at Venezuela. Classic example. We created the enemy in Hugo Chavez like we created Fidel Castro. So he’s a socialist. It’s a dumb approach to in economics. I disagree with him, but he’s going to do what he’s going to do.

You ought to look at the history of Argentina and see what Peron did, but what he’s got to do is sell that oil, and we get most of that oil for our needs, so now we have a situation that even an enemy of ours is selling us the oil. So who cares who has the oil of Iraq?

What we need to worry about is to find an alternative to oil and carbon, and we’re not. So the juggernat of global warming is coming at us, and everybody is worrying about the Titanic. I mean, does the leadership get any sicker than that? Making a speech is one thing; its exercising your power (that makes the difference). And I say this about my candidacy. I’ve got a track record where I don’t just make speeches. I do.

But that scares the hell out of the media, and that scares the hell out of the establishment. You think the insurance industry is going to donate to my campaign like they are donating to Hillary’s and Obama’s and the others? No, because they’re all politics as usual. But I gotta tell you, I get elected president, and that is going to change.

We’re going to have single-payer healthcare, and people are going to have choices, but we’re not going to have a subsidy to the pharmaceutical and the insurance industry which is what we presently have.

ICONOCLAST: What about the education system? Are you for scrapping No Child Left Behind?

SEN. GRAVEL: This No Child Left Behind is a sham, and all these other educational proposals aren’t going to go anywhere. Education has to be the nation’s number one priority. The treasure of the nation lies in its people and that treasure is education.

What we need to do is exactly what Denmark, Finland, and Sweden are doing, which is to have education from childhood to any professional or journeymen status paid for by the government.

When you say where will the money come from for this education I’m talking about, where does it come from in Finland? Sweden? It comes from taxes. But what kind of tax are you going to have? We need a national sales tax.

Now, if a nation with its system of taxation taxes unfairly, then it is instilling the subconscious idea that their government is unfair. I think you’ll find that this is the way the American people feel about their government. It’s unfair.

Let’s look at the system of taxation. You’ve got two major possibilities. One is the income tax which is a tax on what you earn. The other is the sales tax which is a tax on what you spend.

The difference between the income tax and the sales tax is that the income tax has been corrupted for eons with the unbelievable exceptions that exist in a code that is now four feet high. Nobody understands all those exceptions.

It costs the American private sector about $270 billion a year to comport to the tax code. Now that’s half the money we’ve spent thus far in Iraq. This is annually. You begin to feel how much damage is being done by our tax code, so we’ve got an income tax that is totally regressive because of a simple human nature aspect: wealth can game the system.

When the liberals talk about taxing the wealthy, it’s a canard because they’re getting campaign contributions from them. The other thing which is really extreme is taxing corporations. But what does a corporation do? The corporation only collects the taxes for governments. That’s all it does. It doesn’t pay any taxes in a literal sense because it has to take the cost of taxation and add it to their product, so the consumer pays the corporate tax – the same people who are paying the income tax which is already regressive.

Now, let’s look at a sales tax. It has total transparency. If you want to go buy a $2,000 suit of clothes, you’re going to pay whatever that rate will be, and it will be somewhere between 20 and 30 percent. Now I go buy a $200 suit, I’m only going to pay 20 percent on that, so you see the natural progressivity of the sales tax. We can make it even more progressive.

There’s a group out of Texas that came up with the Fair Tax. It’s better than what I came up with 30 years. I had a guaranteed income separate from my single tax. They came up with a pre-bate to eliminate the exceptions to the cost of taxing the essentials (food, shelter, medicine).

What they do is they multiply the cost of essentials at the level of poverty by the tax rate, then divide that sum of money by 12 and mail that to every single registered taxpayer as a check, so they get the money before the first of the month. Those checks are mailed out by the Social Security office because you don’t need the IRS when you wipe out the tax code.

So the way you can make the sales tax even more progressive is take the cost of essentials not at the poverty level but at the level of the average American. Now you’re talking about somewhere between $500 and $1,000 a month. That is not inconsequential.

John Edwards says he wants to do something about poverty, but our present tax code causes more poverty than anything else. It’s obscene. How do you take care of the poor? You give them a tax credit? What that means is that they have to have income to get credit, so if you’re poor and you don’t have a job, you’ve got nothing. You’ve got a choice: welfare or go sleep under a bridge.

If you really want to help the poor, look at the Fair Tax which recommends that we get a check to the poor for $1,000 a month, and it’s not dependent on income. It’s dependent on that we know they have to buy the essentials of life.

If you have a system of fair taxation, your products can also compete in the global marketplace 10 or 20 percent better than they can right now because the cost of our health system and tax code are not incorporated in the cost of your products. You don’t think that this will add jobs to this country? You don’t think that will add manufacturing to this country?

With a sales tax and a pre-bate – no corporate taxes – the United States will become the largest tax haven in the world. Academics predict a growth factor of 10 percent. That will provide the wealth, if it’s not gobbled up by the present stupid leadership and the military industrial complex, to fund the kind of education that is done in the Scandinavian countries, pay for a healthcare program worthy of its name, and take the entire transportation system of the United States off oil and electrify it all.

These are the things that are possible if we can straighten out some of the generic flaws in our system of government.

INFO

http://www.ni4d.us/

http://www.gravel2008.us/