The Hightower Report: Why Can't Our Economy Promote Equality and Shared Prosperity?

You don't have to be in "Who's Who" to know what's what. For example, if a tiny group of Wall Street bankers, billionaires, and their political puppets are allowed to write the rules that govern our economy and elections, guess what? Only bankers, billionaires, and puppets will profit from those rules.

That's exactly why our Land of Opportunity has become today's Land of Inequality. Corpor­ate elites have bought their way into the policy-making back rooms of Washington, where they've rigged the rules to let them feast freely on our jobs, devour our country's wealth, and impoverish the middle class.

There's good news, however! A growing grassroots coalition of churches, unions, civil rights groups, citizen activists, and many others is organizing and mobilizing us to crash through those closed doors, write our own rules, and reverse America's plunge into plutocracy. Called "Take On Wall Street," the coalition's structural reforms include:

• Getting the corrupting cash of corporations and the super-rich out of our politics by repealing Citizens United and providing a public system for financing America's elections.

• Stopping "too big to fail" banks from subsidizing their high-risk speculative gambling with the deposits of us ordinary customers, making them choose to be a consumer bank or a casino, but not both.

• Instituting a tiny "Robin Hood Tax" on Wall Street speculators to discourage their computerized gaming of the system, while also generating hundreds of billions of tax dollars to invest in America's real economy.

• Restoring low-cost, convenient "postal banking" in our post offices to serve millions of Americans who're now at the mercy of predatory payday lenders and check-cashing chains.

Learn more about this campaign, and its reform agenda to democratize America's financial system, at www.takeonwallstreet.org.