"15 Things Every American Can Do Right Now"

I'm going to try to check off as much of these as I can.

From Michael Moore:

Friends,

It's the #1 question I'm constantly asked after people see my movie: "OK -- so NOW what can I DO?!"

You want something to do? Well, you've come to the right place! 'Cause I got 15 things you and I can do right now to fight back and try to fix this very broken system.

Here they are:

FIVE THINGS WE DEMAND THE PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS DO IMMEDIATELY:

1. Declare a moratorium on all home evictions. Not one more family should be thrown out of their home. The banks must adjust their monthly mortgage payments to be in line with what people's homes are now truly worth -- and what they can afford. Also, it must be stated by law: If you lose your job, you cannot be tossed out of your home.

2. Congress must join the civilized world and expand Medicare For All Americans. A single, nonprofit source must run a universal health care system that covers everyone. Medical bills are now the #1 cause of bankruptcies and evictions in this country. Medicare For All will end this misery. The bill to make this happen is H.R. 3200 (but only with Rep. Anthony Weiner's amendment). You must call AND write your members of Congress and demand its passage, no compromises allowed.

3. Demand publicly-funded elections and a prohibition on elected officials leaving office and becoming lobbyists. Yes, those very members of Congress who solicit and receive millions of dollars from wealthy interests must vote to remove ALL money from our electoral and legislative process. Tell your members of Congress they must support campaign finance bill H.R.1826.

4. Each of the 50 states must create a state-owned public bank like they have in North Dakota. Then congress MUST reinstate all the strict pre-Reagan regulations on all commercial banks, investment firms, insurance companies -- and all the other industries that have been savaged by deregulation: Airlines, the food industry, pharmaceutical companies -- you name it. If a company's primary motive to exist is to make a profit, then it needs a set of stringent rules to live by -- and the first rule is "Do no harm." The second rule: The question must always be asked -- "Is this for the common good?" (Click here for some info about the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.)

5. Save this fragile planet and declare that all the energy resources above and beneath the ground are owned collectively by all of us. Just like they do it in Sarah Palin's socialist Alaska. We only have a few decades of oil left. The public must be the owners and landlords of the natural resources and energy that exists within our borders or we will descend further into corporate anarchy. And when it comes to burning fossil fuels to transport ourselves, we must cease using the internal combustion engine and instruct our auto/transportation companies to rehire our skilled workforce and build mass transit (clean buses, light rail, subways, bullet trains, etc.) and new cars that don't contribute to climate change. (For more on this, here's a proposal I wrote in December.) Demand that General Motors' de facto chairman, Barack Obama, issue a JFK man-on-the-moon-style challenge to turn our country into a nation of trains and buses and subways. For Pete's sake, people, we were the ones who invented (or perfected) these damn things in the first place!!

FIVE THINGS WE CAN DO TO MAKE CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT LISTEN TO US:

1. Each of us must get into the daily habit of taking 5 minutes to make four brief calls: One to the President (202-456-1414), one to your Congressperson (202-224-3121) and one to each of your two Senators (202-224-3121). To find out who represents you, click here. Take just one minute on each of these calls to let them know how you expect them to vote on a particular issue. Let them know you will have no hesitation voting for a primary opponent -- or even a candidate from another party -- if they don't do our bidding. Trust me, they will listen. If you have another five minutes, click here to send them each an email. And if you really want to drop an anvil on them, send them a snail mail letter!

2. Take over your local Democratic Party. Remember how much fun you had with all those friends and neighbors working together to get Barack Obama elected? YOU DID THE IMPOSSIBLE. It's time to re-up! Get everyone back together and go to the monthly meeting of your town or county Democratic Party -- and become the majority that runs it! There will not be many in attendance and they will either be happy or in shock that you and the Obama Revolution have entered the room looking like you mean business. President Obama's agenda will never happen without mass grass roots action -- and he won't feel encouraged to do the right thing if no one has his back, whether it's to stand with him, or push him in the right direction. When you all become the local Democratic Party, send me a photo of the group and I'll post it on my website.

3. Recruit someone to run for office who can win in your local elections next year -- or, better yet, consider running for office yourself! You don't have to settle for the incumbent who always expects to win. You can be our next representative! Don't believe it can happen? Check out these examples of regular citizens who got elected: State Senator Deb Simpson, California State Assemblyman Isadore Hall, Tempe, Arizona City Councilman Corey Woods, Wisconsin State Assemblyman Chris Danou, and Washington State Representative Larry Seaquist. The list goes on and on -- and you should be on it!

4. Show up. Picket the local branch of a big bank that took the bailout money. Hold vigils and marches. Consider civil disobedience. Those town hall meetings are open to you, too (and there's more of us than there are of them!). Make some noise, have some fun, get on the local news. Place "Capitalism Did This" signs on empty foreclosed homes, closed down businesses, crumbling schools and infrastructure. (You can download them from my website.)

5. Start your own media. You. Just you (or you and a couple friends). The mainstream media is owned by corporate America and, with few exceptions, it will never tell the whole truth -- so you have to do it! Start a blog! Start a website of real local news (here's an example: The Michigan Messenger). Tweet your friends and use Facebook to let them know what they need to do politically. The daily papers are dying. If you don't fill that void, who will?

FIVE THINGS WE SHOULD DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES AND OUR LOVED ONES UNTIL WE GET THROUGH THIS MESS:

1. Take your money out of your bank if it took bailout money and place it in a locally-owned bank or, preferably, a credit union.

2. Get rid of all your credit cards but one -- the kind where you have to pay up at the end of the month or you lose your card.

3. Do not invest in the stock market. If you have any extra cash, put it away in a savings account or, if you can, pay down on your mortgage so you can own your home as soon as possible. You can also buy very safe government savings bonds or T-bills. Or just buy your mother some flowers.

4. Unionize your workplace so that you and your coworkers have a say in how your business is run. Here's how to do it (more info here). Nothing is more American than democracy, and democracy shouldn't be checked at the door when you enter your workplace. Another way to Americanize your workplace is to turn your business into a worker-owned cooperative. You are not a wage slave. You are a free person, and you giving up eight hours of your life every day to someone else is to be properly compensated and respected.

5. Take care of yourself and your family. Sorry to go all Oprah on you, but she's right: Find a place of peace in your life and make the choice to be around people who are not full of negativity and cynicism. Look for those who nurture and love. Turn off the TV and the Blackberry and go for a 30-minute walk every day. Eat fruits and vegetables and cut down on anything that has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour or too much sodium (salt) in it (and, as Michael Pollan says, "Eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants"). Get seven hours of sleep each night and take the time to read a book a month. I know this sounds like I've turned into your grandma, but, dammit, take a good hard look at Granny -- she's fit, she's rested and she knows the names of both of her U.S. Senators without having to Google them. We might do well to listen to her. If we don't put our own "oxygen mask" on first (as they say on the airplane), we will be of no use to the rest of the nation in enacting any of this action plan!

I'm sure there are many other ideas you can come up with on how we can build this movement. Get creative. Think outside the politics-as-usual box. BE SUBVERSIVE! Think of that local action no one else has tried. Behave as if your life depended on it. Be bold! Try doing something with reckless abandon. It may just liberate you and your community and your nation.

And when you act, send me your stories, your photos and your video -- and be sure to post your ideas in the comments beneath this letter on my site so they can be shared with millions.

C'mon people -- we can do this! I expect nothing less of all of you, my true and trusted fellow travelers!

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

I imagine he's not saying that everybody shouldn't invest in the stock market; he's saying the 'little guy' should not subject what little savings he or she does have to the vagaries of Wall Street insiders who generally find ways to profit even as non-insider small investors take a bath.

Don'tEatNachos, 60% of all subprime loans were the result of bank fraud. Also, the leading reason for foreclosure (more than 50% of foreclosures, I don't recall the exact percentage) are the result of health care cost-related bankrupties.

There's a very convenient right wing talking point that the foreclosure crisis has to do with people spending more than they could afford. While there is an element of that, the main story--one the MSM is loathe to report--is that rampant predatory lenders steered people towards dangerous loans, preying on the elderly who owned their homes outright and minorities.

I know it's tempting to blame the victim, but the fact of the matter is that our entire economy--the entirety of the middle and working classes--are the victims. The banks that created all these fraudulent loans to feed their insatiable greed for credit-based derivatives are now making out like bandits by foreclosing on the houses and then flipping them for enormous profits. But what it's doing to neighborhoods, and the amount of people it's putting on the streets, is endangering all of us.

I hope I made a sound case. I probably didn't, but Capitalism: A Love Story illustrates the entire story from the beginning to end in very easy to understand terms, so I highly recommend you see it.

You sound like my accountant. But here's the thing: do the people who are told how "smart" it is to put one's retirement in mutual funds or whatever understand the risks? A lot of people lost 30% (or thereabouts) of their savings during the "crash"--do you think they understood how that could happen? Do you think they would have done better with that money had it been in other forms of savings accounts all that time? And what if--as people are predicting since zero laws have been passed to rein in risk-taking "masters of the universe" in the year since the "crash"--there's another, more catastrophic crash coming? There is still $500 trillion wrapped up in inscrutable derivatives and what goes up must ultimately come down.

The market expanded precipitously during this push to make every working and middle class American join the "investor" class, and at the top enormous rewards were reaped from that, but I have come to believe that blindly handing over your money to investors without having the wiggle room for risk is a bad idea (at least for me).

Beautifully stated, eatatjoes. It's also worth noting that Eliot Spitzer and attorneys general from all 50 states tried to put a stop to all the predatory lending going on way back in 2002 but the states were shut down by the Bush Administration, using an obscure law, because Wall Street needed these loans to keep coming, the more fraudulent the better.

There is a reason: the banks are very powerful and therefore control our representatives by dangling carrots of campaign contributions and lobbying.

The mainstream media did not report this aspect of the crisis for the same reason as the above. The boards of the mainstream media are filled with people who are on the boards of the banks, and where profit is concerned, they don't $#!& where they eat.

And if you watch Fox News, you have to take it as a given that you're going to be either kept in the dark or mis-informed.

Here are some links:

Eliot Spitzer's Washington Post article about predatory lending and the Bush administration

"Fraud seen as a driver in wave of foreclosures" (this is one of many many many local news articles about mortgage fraud, though the subject can't get arrested on mainstream national news)

Among the overwhelming glut of white collar criminality, here's one case of charges filed.

"Health care costs main cause of personal bankruptcy, study finds"

All of this is documented in true first-person narratives in Capitalism: A Love Story, which you should see on the big screen while it's in theaters.

The Closer, you're far more knowledgeable than I on the ins and outs of all this, so I defer to you on specifics. I'm talking broadly about risk and people snapping out of it and thinking realistically about what's best for them--it may not be investing. Yet we were all sold this bill of goods from the early '90s onwards and maybe it's great and maybe it's a sham, but in light of the derivatives debacle and lack of laws/regulations in the wake of same, I believe that for me personally--and maybe for a lot of others--putting their money into mechanisms they have no comfort level or true understanding of is a bad idea. I don't think we're that at odds, just that our takes come from polar opposite sides of the equation.

Also, I don't hate my accountant--I just wish he'd listen to me ... just like you!

eatatjoes, your anecdotal information is invaluable. I don't really think the big picture has coalesced just yet but I think there should be Pecora-style hearings with testimony from everybody on every level, including stories like yours, to really define for the record how this happened.