Starve the Beast--Wall Street

We don't like smoking, so we tax the crap out of it, not just to raise money, but to discourage smoking.

Republicans apply their own perverse variation of this logic: what they love, they deregulate and throw money at, and what they hate, they starve of money and regulate to death.

They call this "starving the beast."

So Republicans love Wall Street gamblers and scammers and hate public education.

With Wall Street, we should be looking at ways to encourage people to invest in the long term profitability of companies, by buying and holding stock, and starve destructive behavior like day trading, the creation of derivatives, and short selling, which is essentially a bet that a business will fail. Britain is considering a law to ban short selling altogether.

The good side of our current economic crisis is it is forcing our politicians to talk about reality and come closer to put things in their proper perspective. These Wall Street scammers have done far more damage to our country and the world as whole than any terrorists have done, and to the extent that we HAVE a real problem with terrorists, it is from letting Wall Street dictate our foreign policy instead of our higher ideals. It is one thing to do business with a dictator, but quite something else to overthrow democratically elected leaders and replace them with dictators more compliant to business interests like oil, banana plantations, or sweatshops, or to invade a country to accomplish the same goal.

A case in point of this is Iran. Obama has talked about diplomacy with Iran, and Achmenajab said the US would first have to apologize for overthrowing their secular, democratically elected president in 1953 and replacing him with the oil company approved Shah, who ruled for 26 years until the Islamic revolution. If Eisenhower hadn't taken the oil companies' call in 1953, we would have no problem with Iran today.

If Wall Street can fuck up foreign policy that much, imagine what they are doing to us financially--oh wait, we don't have to imagine, do we?

But this isn't my idea, it's Ralph Nader's:

KEY EXCERPTS:

How to Lighten the Income Tax Load on the American Worker
Tax the Speculators!

By RALPH NADER

Let's start with a fairness point. Why should you pay a 5 to 6 percent sales tax for buying the necessities of life, when tomorrow, some speculator on Wall Street can buy $100 million worth of Exxon derivatives and not pay one penny in sales tax?

Let's further add a point of common sense. The basic premise of taxation should be to first tax what society likes the least or dislikes the most, before it taxes honest labor or human needs.

In that way, revenues can be raised at the same time as the taxes discourage those activities which are least valued, such as the most speculative stock market trades, pollution (a carbon tax), gambling, and the addictive industries that sicken or destroy health and amass large costs.

Yet apart from a small number of legislators, most notably Congressman Peter Welch (Dem. VT) and Peter DeFazio (Dem. OR), the biggest revenue producer of all--a tax on stock derivative transactions--essentially bets on bets--and other mystifying gambles by casino capitalism--is at best corridor talk on Capitol Hill.

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apply methods of War on Terror to Wall Street economic terrorists

The money lost on Wall Street didn't just disappear. Like a street scammer playing the shell game, they move the pea around and around then slip it off the table into their hand so it isn't under any of the shells. In this case, their hand is off-shore accounts, and it is the same hand any bailout money will end up in.

These Wall Street scammers have done far more damage to our economy than any Middle Eastern terrorists have, so we need to use the Bush administration's methods on his buddies:

• No assumption of innocence, especially for execs at companies seeking bailouts. If you buy or sell something that isn't a tangible product or service for a living, you are a danger to society. The less an average person can understand what it is you buy and sell, the greater danger you are to society. If you doubt that, watch the documentary THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM about Enron.
  
  
• No fourth amendment rights to restrictions on searches. If they get the cash, we get to dig through their trash--their personal trash. And bank accounts, phone records, or anything else that would tell us where the money went.
  
  
• Likewise, no fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. We should use every means at our disposal to find out what they know about money laundering, hiding assets, and which politicians and regulators are on the take. There has been some great advances made in lie detection technology in the last decade. Brains scans can determine if someone is lying with 100% accuracy, and even if they won't speak, they can detect whether or not someone recognizes a photo or some other stimulus. We should give those technologies their first real world test.
  
  
• Forfeiture of property beyond what they stole or scammed. This requires borrowing the forfeiture rules from the War on Drugs, were if they find one pot seed in your carpet, they'll take your car or house even if it was from someone who was housesitting for you. If forfeiture is supposed to be a deterrent to drug dealers, it should be equally effective on these equally greedy bastards.
  
  
• Pre-emptive military strikes on countries that harbor Wall Street types and their assets. We cannot wait for the United Nations to act against the Cayman Islands, Seychelles, and Lichstenstein. We must strike before the economic terrorists can move their assets to another safe haven. We cannot wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a Great Depression.
  
  
• Torture. If torture works on ideologically motivated prisoners as the Bushies claim, imagine how much more effective it will be to get off-shore account numbers from some pampered trust fund baby. Hell, you wouldn't even have to strip them naked. Just take away their valets and they won't know how to put their own clothes on.
  
  
• Access to attorneys. If they can contact an attorney, they could use code words or even facial expressions to give approval to shift assets to different shell corporations or off-shore accounts.
  
  
• Renditions. It is very likely that even the Americans most hurt by these assholes won't have the stomach to waterboard or sexually assault a banker, broker, or hedge fund manager. Therefore, we should consider outsourcing this work to a country that has a better track record of dealing with oligarchs run amok: Russia. It would also help stabilize relations after the Bush administration & McCain's saber-rattling in their direction.
  
  Prison sentences could also be outsourced. Imagine how much we could save on gaurds, food, health care, and accommodations if we store these assholes in CHINA.
  

These terrorists steal not merely to enrich themselves, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America's middle class grows fearful, politically weaker, and smaller in number. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause.)

Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.

We ask every nation to join us. We will ask, and we will need, the help of police forces, intelligence services, and banking systems around the world.

I also want to speak tonight directly to the capitalists throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of profit blaspheme the name of the wealthy. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack capitalism itself. The enemy of America is not our many capitalist friends; if you want to make a living providing clearly defined financial services on honest terms that don't exploit the desperate or push the middle class into poverty, we have no quarrel with you. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government and politicians of any party that supports them.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice -- assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.

Thanks to George W. Bush's speech writers and legal advisor like Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, and Jay Bybee for these policies and words