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

TO OBAMA: Tell the wealthy to stop being selfish crybabies

I was visiting Obama's Change.gov website the other day, and one of the sections was on "service," and it occurred to me that themes of public service are always directed at the poor and middle class.

Someone is always coming up with a bill for kids to pay for college by doing community service or joining the military, and conservatives especially like to lecture us about doing volunteer work and giving to charities (so they have an excuse to cut the government programs that perform the same function on a broader scale).

I remember in 2004, John Kerry was going to make an appearance at a college, and I hoped he would address how Democrats would help students avoid the crushing debt of student loans or having to work full time and go to school part time, so they can't finish their bachelor's degree until they're thirty or pay off their student loans until they're dead. Instead, he talked about what THEY should do for their country, as if providing cheap labor at a fast food restaurant wasn't doing a big enough favor for the wealthy in this country.

How often is a similar speech given to the financial elite of this country?

I know what the immediate retort to this will be.

The wealthy have their charitable foundations, scholarships, and advocacy for this or that cause.

But most of their "charity" work would not be necessary if they acted responsibly in all the things they did with their money to further enrich themselves. The things they should be asked to do for their country:

• Every employee of yours or companies you invest in is paid enough that they never have to apply for food stamps or other public assistance.

• Those employees should never have to wonder how they will pay for medical treatment for themselves or their children or be bankrupted by seeking it out.

• Only close a factory because you can't make a profit there anymore, not because you could shave some labor costs by moving it to Bangladesh, or your accountant told you that firing people makes the company look more profitable in the short term and tweaks your stock price.

• If you own or invest in an industry that does have unavoidable fluctuations in labor needs, make sure the community can take care of those workers.

• If you invest in a factory or mine, ask yourself if you would like to breathe the air or drink the water nearby, and if not, do what needs to be done to correct it.

• When it comes time to pay taxes, ask yourself if paying what you actually owe will cramp your lifestyle one iota. Will you have to sell your primary residence, your only car, or pull your kids out of private school? Or do those taxes only cut into your bragging rights at the club and how many generations of your kids can survive without doing the honest day's work it took you or your ancestors to accumulate that wealth in the first place.

If they did these things, their charitable contributions and advocacy would be far less necessary because there would be fewer problems and fewer that the government couldn't afford to address.

But the wealthy have rarely been faced with the call to service the middle class and poor routinely hear.

Instead, politicians get in line with the orphans and blind and talented kids who can't afford college and beg the wealthy for a handout. And if the politician grovels extra well, and does EXACTLY what the rich tell him to do in Congress, the politician will be rewarded when he leaves office with a job as a CEO, do nothing board member, consultant, or lobbyist.

For at least the last thirty years, we have not treated the wealthy in this country as citizens but as Greek gods who we must not offend lest they withhold their bounty of jobs and prosperity. We have allowed them to tell our supposed representatives in Washington how to run our economy and foreign policy and they have obeyed to the least jot and tittle.

Our elected officials have become so servile that when Wall Street demand $700 billion dollars with no strings attached, an amount greater than we have spent on the Iraq War so far, and greater than the entire federal budget just a few years ago, Congress scrambled to give it to them as quickly as possible and they saw no irony when some talked a few weeks later about cutting the budget for programs that help the rest of us.

The results of this worship of the already rich is that the wealthy have become exponentially wealthy, the middle class is become poorer and the working class, apart from a few skilled workers, is being left without a way to make enough money to keep a roof over their heads and food on their table. Our tax money goes to the pockets of the wealthy, and then they lecture us about how irresponsible we and our government are for running up so much debt.

And when the profits from our labor and subsidies from our tax dollars aren't filling their pockets fast enough, they demand our children go to war and die to seize more oil or keep banana pickers in Central America from demanding a decent wage.

So it is time to stop saying to the rest of us, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," and time to not ask but REQUIRE this of the wealthy.

We must say to the wealthy:

The middle and working class don't want to steal your wealth--we even like to imagine we are one invention, novel, business or lottery ticket away from becoming one of you. We simply want you to stop being crybabies, pay your fair share of taxes, treat every employee as if they were your own child, and every community where you build a factory as if it was your own neighborhood.

If that doesn't register with you, imagine that all your investments were with Bernie Madoff and his ilk, and you were kicked out of the country club, the board room, and your house. Have you created an America where you could build that wealth again through hard work or could you even survive?

How little profit for a capitalist to not be greedy?" & a progressive answer

Someone asked this question at Yahoo Answers:

What rate of return for a capitalist is not considered greedy?

Here is my response:

I would not begrudge someone any rate of return so long as they didn't screw their workers, the environment, people in other countries, or bribe politicians to rig the system to give them monopoly power to do so as oil companies and media companies have done.

In the case of media companies, we give them public airwaves essentially for free instead of charging market value, and allow them to combine to the point that they can choke out opinions they don't like.

We give an even bigger gift to oil companies: we use our diplomatic, intelligence, and military to give them control of Middle Eastern and other oil reserves, and overthrow any governments that threaten that control. In exchange, they don't try to increase production or cut us a break on the price, or even offer to repay the trillion dollar plus cost of the war even though they will reap tens of trillions in profit from it.

In some cases, like pharmaceuticals, we give the companies taxpayer money for research, and they thank us by charging us MORE than anyone else in the world, and fighting to keep those drugs whose development we funded from going generic.

Very often these same companies that we do so many favors for with our taxpayer dollars bend over backwards to get out of paying taxes themselves, so that they end up paying a lower percentage of their income in taxes than you and I.

Even if they got no direct support from the government, they used our roads, our police and fire departments, workers educated in our public schools, and other infrastructure to accumulate their wealth, so they should be grateful to only have to pay a percentage of their PROFITS instead of their INCOME like the rest of us do.

If somebody has a new product or idea that people want, I wish them all the profit in the world.

A better question to ask is what return should Americans be getting on our tax dollars? Should we get public schools with classes small enough for students to actually learn? Should we get meat inspectors who are more concerned about our safety than incurring the wrath of his boss who came from and plans to go back to the meat industry? Should we get a foreign policy designed to make us safer instead of more enemies for America and more profits for a handful of corporations?

If America was a business, and you were a stockholder or customer, what would you expect to get out of it?