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.

FULL TEXT

Core GOP belief

GOP strategist Grover Norquist has often spoken of "starving the beast" slashing taxes to force the slashing of government so that it is too weak to effectively regulate big business. His most infamous formulation of this is the quote in the motivational poster below, as is its natural consequence.

"Starve the Beast" in New Orleans

I posted this on Yahoo's Ann Coulter discussion board, so conservatives could see it.

______________________

For those of you unfamiliar with the phrase, "starve the beast," this explains it.

From Daily Kos:

Tragedy has a way of revealing character. The constant drumbeat of death from the war in Iraq, and now the cascading nightmare that is the Gulf Coast flood has peeled away the veneer and we can see the GOP leadership and the larger conservative movement for what it is: a sham. They have nothing. They offer nothing. They come to destroy, not to build. They have no vision for a greater public good because, for them, the very notion of a public good is anathema.

Make no mistake: as we watch our fellow citizens drown, starve, and die in the street in New Orleans, its not incompetence or lack of planning that is killing them. It is willful neglect. It is the direct result of reducing the government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." This is what "starving the beast" looks like.

For some 30 years the Republican party has packaged humanity's darkest and most craven weaknesses and pawned them off as its greatest virtues. Well, the reckoning is here and the conservatives are found wanting. When the chips are down we are a nation that cares for our citizens and we expect our government to be strong enough, capable enough, and compassionate enough to do the same.

.......

Rest in peace, Grand Old Party. America can no longer afford the drag that your self-delusions and cheap justifications put on our spirit. For those who are willing to turn back from pandering to the lowest common denominator and who choose to join us lifting up the better angels of our nature, we offer the hand of friendship. For the the rest: may the God whose name you have scandalized and used as cover for your lack of humanity have mercy on your degenerate souls.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/2/20401/46134

_________________________

The American people (and everybody else for that matter) aren't saints, which is why systems like communism don't work.

But neither are we the greedy, prejudiced, cruel, ignorant trolls the right is trying to convince us to be--and if you think that's extreme just listen to the excrement coming out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth about the hurricane survivors.

We have an obligation to our fellow citizens and it is not the same as saying we should make the rich live in cardboard boxes to say that they need to give back in taxes their fair share. At the very time we are struggling to respond to this hurricane, the Bush people are pushing to make repeal of the estate tax permanent--a tax that still let you keep most of the estate.

We have been a better country, and we can be again.

ATTACK heart of failed GOP economic faith

Deregulation, privatization, low taxes on the wealthy and corporations, anti-unions (both domestic and foreign)--which of these has been a success for average Americans?

Deregulation has led to Enron and related Wall Street scams. Unless you are in the top tier of investors, you can't know if the information you are getting on companies you are invested in or thinking of investing in is accurate.

When energy was deregulated, the prices shot through the roof and rolling blackouts resulted here in California, and the Northeast blacked out through corporate indifference to maintaining infrastructure when it wasn't required by law.

Letting corporations decide how to deal with environmental and labor concerns on their own has had equally disastrous results.

Privatization has been an even greater disaster. In principle (like communism) it should work beautifully: the profit motive should encourage efficiency and cost savings. In practice, there are two fatal flaws:

1. The buyer and consumer of the services are not the same people. If the congressional committee or agency picks a low bidder who provides a crappy product or no product at all, they don't feel the effects, and the public doesn't even necessarily connect the dots back to that decision-maker.
2. The contracting process is easily corrupted by campaign contributions and the revolving door. The first is self-evidently true. If someone makes a political donation, they will get special consideration. The second is a more insidious and deep-rooted. When you look at the history of businesses like Bechtel and Halliburton that have had their corporate officers like George Schultz, Cap Weinberger, and Dick Cheney go back and forth between Cabinet secretary positions and their corporate boardrooms, it's obvious they aren't taking a break to donate their services to our country--they are pursuing corporate profits by other means. Cheney's deferred compensation from Halliburton simply brings this out into the open.

Low taxes on the wealthy and corporations have been pursued since the Reagan era despite the vast majority of economists repudiating "trickle down" economics (a term right wing propagandists contort themselves to avoid while still defending the concept). What we have have lost in public services like education far outweighs the few low wage jobs that might be generated for extra caddies and cabana boys at country clubs.

Their anti-union policies have been the equivalent of an Iraqi IED, blowing countless Americans out of the middle class and into the Walmart class of working poor. Their trade policies not only undermine unionization here, but in the countries at the other end, freeing their governments to be even more brutal in stopping their workers from banding together to demand a living wage, and those are the people that we will call terrorists and spend hundreds of billions to kill when they get so desperate that they come here and blow themselves and a couple of Americans up too.

In the economic realm, doing what is morally right is also practical and in the security interests of the United States. We don't have many Europeans come over here and blow stuff up because they are relatively happy with their lives. Our own political system is more stable when we have a broad middle class, as is our economy when people make enough money to buy the products they make as even nazi-loving Henry Ford realized a hundred years ago.

The GOP economic platform benefits very, very few Americans, and you could almost list them by name and count them on your fingers and toes.

No one in Washington is saying this because this policy is bought and paid for with political donations and revolving door jobs for most Republicans and many Democrats.

For most of human history, there has been one economic model: those with the most money or brute force took from everyone else and reduced them to servitude and survival level poverty. For brief time in the United States and for a bit longer with more success in Europe, we tried another model, nurturing a broad middle class, giving all a chance at education, owning a home, and participating in the democratic process.

While there was a communist threat, the corporate world and the wealthy pretended to ally themselves with the middle and working class. But now that that dragon is slain, they have turned and pointed the long knives, still hot and dripping with blood, at our hearts.