I received this from two of my friends, Josh Roth and Tony Danza.
They have in turn forwarded this to many of their friends.
This is the simplest idea I have heard, to effect the kind of meaningful change we are looking for.
There was a major step taken in the past week when Obama acted like a President and announced that we were going to pull out all our troops from Iraq by Christmas.
He now needs to do the same thing with the fruitless, expensive, and seemingly endless war in Afghanistan. The troops should go home by Christmas as well.
We must focus the energies of the tea party and the 99% people on those issues they can agree on. I saw very little pushback on his announcement of ending the war in Iraq. No meaningful pushback from Democrats or Republicans.
I imagine the Warren Buffett suggestions below would meet with approval of both sides.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters has been leading the charge to get the call centers brought back to American soil.
Since all politics is personal, I became frustrated in trying to deal with both my Chase card and my Capital One Card when my phone calls bounced to the Philippines, then to El Salvador and back to the Philippines. It took hours of frustration and there was no resolution since it was mutually hard to understand each other and the people on the other side have almost no power to make any kind of change.
American Express has their call centers in the US and you can have a meaningful conversation with resolution and much less stress.
American Express emails me when I am coming close to my spending limit. The other cards without exception let you go over the limit, and then charge you a fee followed by an automatic rise in interest rates up to 29.9% more than the loan sharks in my old neighborhood in the Bronx charged.
The banks sitting on billions of dollars make more billions with outrageous fees and interest rates, and then pay savers less than two percent interest.
These are the criminals the government should be going after, not the people voicing their democratic opinions in the sit ins around the country and in many other nations.
Not to be repetitious, but we need to build better schools, pay teachers better and free non violent offenders from prison and put them to work helping to rebuild our infrastructure.
I will write a further blog in a few days but really want the Buffett plan below given the attention it deserves.