Supercommittee of the One Percent Won’t Even Think of Taxing Wall Street
from Dean Baker
If anyone still questioned who owns Washington, the congressional supercommittee charged with reducing projected deficits by $1.2 trillion seems determined to end any doubts. According to press accounts, both the Republicans and Democrats on the committee support a plan to reduce average Social Security benefits by 3 percent.
While whacking our parents and grandparents with a big cut in Social Security benefits apparently draws bipartisan support, the supercommittee will not even score a plan to tax Wall Street financial speculation. No committee member from either party is prepared to make a simple request to the Joint Tax Committee of Congress that would allow a speculation tax to be one of the items considered in the mix.
It’s hard to know which part of this picture is worse. The plan to cut Social Security benefits at a time when seniors are more dependent than ever on them is incredibly pernicious. The people who would see their benefits cuts under this proposal paid for their benefits contributing to Social Security over their entire working career.
Most retirees have little other than Social Security to support them in their retirement. In large part, this is due to the economic mismanagement of the supercommittee types. If they or their friends, like former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, actually had been doing their jobs, we would not have had the huge housing bubble that wrecked the economy. The collapse of this bubble caused most of the wealth that retirees and near-retirees had accumulated in their home to disappear, leaving them with nothing other than Social Security to sustain them in retirement. Now, they want to cut Social Security as well.
This particular cut is especially pernicious since it will hit the oldest and poorest beneficiaries hardest. A person who is in their 90s and has been getting benefits for 30 years would see a reduction in benefits of close to 9 percent under the new cost-of-living adjustment formula apparently supported by members of the committee.
The benefit cut is being justified by claiming that the current cost-of-living adjustment exceeds the true rate of inflation. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics index that measures the cost of living of the elderly indicates that the current adjustment understates the rate of inflation experienced by retirees. There should be no doubt, this is a proposal for cutting Social Security benefits; it has nothing to do with making the cost-of-living adjustments accurate.
While the supercommittee has plenty of time to think of ways to make life more miserable for seniors, it won’t even countenance the idea of taxing Wall Street speculation. In spite of the repeated pledges that everything is on the table, taxing Wall Street speculation is absolutely off the table.
In order for a tax bill to be considered by Congress, it must be scored by the Joint Tax Committee (JTC). While many members, including some very senior members from both houses, have requested a score from the JTC of a bill taxing financial speculation, the supercommittee has the JTC completely tied up meeting its requests. By refusing to include a financial speculation tax in its scoring request, the supercommittee is preventing this idea from even being included in the discussion.
Given the role of Wall Street in both creating the conditions for the crash and prospering at the expense of the other 99 percent, it might seem reasonable to include a tax on speculation in the mix of items to consider. This is not a radical proposal. The European Commission is currently on the edge of approving a financial speculation tax. Its leading proponents are the conservative leaders of Germany and France.
It is easy to see that this could be a very substantial source of revenue. The United Kingdom already has a FST. It raises the equivalent of 0.2 to 0.3 percent of GDP ($30-$40 billion a year in the United States), by just taxing stock. If options, futures, credit default swaps and other derivative instruments were also taxed, it is easy to believe that we could raise three to four times as much money in the United States.
But the supercommittee doesn’t want to think about a proposal that would impose serious costs on Wall Street. It is more interested in taking away Social Security and Medicare benefits from the old and disabled.
This contempt for the 99 percent coupled with protection for the 1 percent is the reason Congress has an approval rating of 9 percent. When both parties in Congress work against the interest of the overwhelming majority in order to protect a tiny elite, it is not surprising that most of the country would return the contempt.
A Message to the “Super Committee”:
http://ecologicalheadstand.blogspot.com/2011/10/message-to-super-committee.html
(picture = 1000 words)
Obama did this and people need to wake up. There is no one running on a liberal ticket and four more years of Obama covert actions for pseudo-public health care and the fundamental security of our social benefits will be completely destroyed. The false fronts and deceptions are abundantly demonstrated if people will get out of their dreaming. WE desperately need people like Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson to create an action platform for the democratic foundation of American political economy. Forget the hope and promises, the horizons and shared sacrifice spiel of the formula 1 agent for the intelligence community. The guy is a fraud and front man and has sold out the people he fooled the first time around, and is now making the rounds and doing it again. The super committee is nothing more than a carnival show for the masses along the same lines of Obama’s false medical show. The fallacy of distinction is the politics of distraction, deception and division.
“Foreclosure of American Dream By Wall Street”
- Nalliah Thayabharan
Wall Street is a confidence trick, a dazzling edifice built on paper promises, gambling, bets and rampant speculation. Wall Street doesn’t manufacture or produce anything. The Wall Street however attractive it may appear is built on paper.
Modern day bank robbers are at Wall Street but they wear grey suits and not masks. Rampant speculators, propagandists and financiers of Wall Street are given some unfair advantage over the average consumers and taxpayers and the cumulative effect of the people watching selfishness prevail over the public interest has been an undermining of the public’s trust in the present US government. There’s no question the Wall Street is rigged against the average consumers and taxpayers. The Wall Street has a lot more information. Wall Street jerry-rig the system so that Wall Street always win. If the Wall Street loses trillions, the US Treasury will bail the Wall Street out so it can go back and do it again.
50 trillion dollars in global wealth was erased between September 2007 and March 2009, including 7 trillion dollars in the US stock market, 6 trillion dollars in the US housing market, 8 trillion dollars in the US retirement and household wealth, 2 trillion dollars in the US individual retirement accounts, 2 trillion dollars in the US traditional defined benefit plans and 3 trillion dollars in the US nonpension assets. Greed, arrogance and incompetence created a massive meltdown, cost trillions, and still Wall Street comes out richer and more powerful.
There are trillions dollars of new money taken again from Americans to make deals and hand out outrageous bonuses. And when these trillions run out Wall Street will come back for more until the dollar becomes junk. The value of the US dollar declined very significantly during the last 70 years. The value of the US dollar in 1940 was worth 2,000% more than the value of the US dollar now.
Many big US manufacturers are outsourcing to Mexico and China to increase their profits, adding more unemployment in the USA. Manufacturing jobs in the USA declined 37% between 1998 and 2010. Since manufacturing industries declined in the USA, the US competitiveness in the global marketplace is also declined.
The demise of Glass Steagall act helped spawn the credit crisis by allowing the US Banks to reinvest money that was not theirs; they gambled; they failed; they passed down the burden to the people.
The top 6 US banks had assets of less than one fifth of US GDP in 1995. Now they have two third of US GDP. The financial crisis was created by the biggest US banks to consolidate power. The big banks became stronger as a result of the bailout by the US Treasury. The big banks are turning that increased economic clout into more political power.
Oligarchy is the political power based on economic power. And it’s the rise of the Wall Street in economic terms, that it’d turn into political power. And Wall Street then feed that back into more deregulation, more opportunities to go out and take reckless risks and capture trillions of dollars.
Wall Street only has the lobbyists. Today more than 42,000 Wall Street lobbyists manipulate USA’s 537 elected officials with huge campaign contributions that fund candidates who support their agenda. It no longer matters who’s the President of USA.
Since the heads of Wall Street and their representatives are afraid because they don’t have the substance or the arguments, they will not come out and debate with the people who occupy the Wall Street.
The political and economical leadership of the US has chosed to cartel profits and transformed the US economy to serve the colluding and unlawful oligarchy. The political and economical leadership of the US is bailing out failed paradigms with trillions of dollars while committing social injustice to its people. The political and economical leadership of the US including the US Congress have now become Wall Street’s “Trojan Horses”. The US banks are borrowing money at near zero interest from the US government, then lending it back to the US government at even mere fractions higher interest than they are paying. The net interest margin made by the US banks by lending the money back to the US federal government in the first 6 months of 2011 is 210 billion dollars.
Due to the oligarchs’ rapacious looting and their purchase of a politically protected luxurious lifestyle, the people of the US are on the road to permanent serfdom under a police state. The democracy was not given to the people of the US on a platter. It is not theirs for all time, irrespective of their efforts. Either people of the US organize and they find political leadership to take this on or they are going to be in deep trouble.
The failure of governance to address the current critical issues have already produced catastrophic consequences. Now we are experiencing a major global paradigm shift and it is still unfolding.
Banking and finance as a political tool for social domination is not new in America and the same groups of people opportunistically revamp the process in periodic assaults against American constitutional protections…all done in the name of freedom and democracy. Take a search trip through the history of monetary history and political economic crisis in detail, and you can start here:
Some Historic background:
search page: the Second Bank of the United States, the quasi-governmental national bank
http://search.aol.com/aol/search?s_it=webmail-hawaii1-standardaol&q=%20the%20Second%20Bank%20of%20the%20United%20States%2C%20the%20quasi-governmental%20national%20bank
Meanwhile, the time schedule has been modified by technology and the stakes are much higher now that money can domminate and buy that technology to serve its purposes: capturing the executive leadership of this country is not as new as you might think. What has changed is the ability to mount a grand scale national operation and capture the scope of the political spectrum to also drive the “capture” forward. All in the name of protecting America (an America that apparently does not include the 99% of its people that constitute its “plebeian” levels of freedom; and an American 1% that seems to believe that the “free market” is not to be shared, and that liberty and justice goes to the king of the mountain.
From Dependency theory for the Domestic Economy, to Crisis and legitimation theory for dominating the political economy, the investment finance, and the apparatus of paramilitary enforcement. Are they conquering the world or colonizing the United States?
This is not theory:
Government Provision to Implement a Police State
http://ocoathkeepers.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/government-provision-to-implement-a-police-state/
and:
CNBC recently took note of the economics-related war-games planned by the Pentagon, including the recent Unified Quest 2011, which will actually be looking at what happens domestically when the financial systems breakdown and how to handle the subsequent civil unrest.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232/?video=1653093678&play=1
Political suppression is initiated outside the country in foreign contexts where constitutional factors don’t intercede; and then they are brought insidiously into the domestic dynamics under pretexts of national security. The Corporate elite are acting like war lords and have established the modern version of a thousand fiefdoms with networking chiefs and headmen. Apparently we are not as “civilized” as we once believed !
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/pentagon-has-been-war-gaming-for-economic-disaster-since-early-09/ ;
Count the infractions! Do the math!
Full Report: ‘Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America’
http://ampedstatus.org/download-free-pdf-kindle-word-doc-of-full-report-analysis-of-financial-terrorism-in-america/
PDF version:
http://ampedstatus.org/Analysis-of-Financial-Terrorism-in-America.pdf
Full Report: ‘Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America’
Dean et al, I really do hate to tell you “I told you so.”
It means more cultural & financial limitation for me, my daughter, her peers, and the rest of us 99%ers.
Naturally, a tax on the gamblers was a naively unworkable notion from the start. All partial “solutions” that ignore the root causes in favor of piecemeal shots at symptoms are really nonsolutions, always were & always will be. The ones that make it to the dim light of day are worse than useless, because they always disappoint & discourage and feed despair & apathy & complacency & The Big Collusion.
The rabid little dogs and Top Dogs alike do what they do because they like it and they are clueless about the unbreakable universal Law of Interdependent Interaction (karma). They think rarely seeing instant ripening means there is no karma (simultaneous initiation of reaction with every action). They’re programmed to believe that the supreme values are catering to one’s own desires (at all costs), winning (no matter what if costs all others), getting lots of attention (of equally damaged spiritual retards), getting & squandering lots of score , status & objects (i.e., quantity is better than quality), cheating & lying, harming & mocking their victims. It’s like heroin & gambling addiction + petty megalomania complicating ecocidal NPD (narcissistic personality disorder).
Now we all know who did the deed and how. What we need now is expert triage and emergency economic medical intervention. A simple community credit system will stop the bleeding AND kill the pain. It can be implemented locally, regionally, per state, nationally and, eventually, globally. We can fine tune the detials as we progress.
It seems almost too late, but better late remedial action than never, eh?
There are more than enough posts with very informative bad news about the symptoms of pervasive corruption, and some great posts on causes, but the time is over ripe for proactive collaboration. How? With so many opinions and competing theories and subtheories and promising theorems…?
Our first duty is to stop the bleeding and stabilize the patient. We’ve got great diagnoses out the wazoo. Now it’s time to operate. The patient is on the table — dying.
Are we going to come out of shock and get to work or let the patient die?
Constitutional Amendment to overturn Citizens United introduced in US Senate
Submitted by oskebuckley on Tue, 11/01/2011 – 13:42
U.S. Senators Tom Udall and Michael Bennet introduced a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision. The amendment calls on Congress to correct the Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance allowing virtually unlimited corporate and special interest spending in elections. Joining Udall and Bennet as original cosponsors of the legislation are Sens. Tom Harkin, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jeff Merkley.
The constitutional amendment would authorize Congress to regulate the raising and spending of money for federal political campaigns, including independent expenditures, and allow states to regulate such spending at their level. It would also provide for implementation and enforcement of the amendment through legislation.
For the text of the proposed amendment visit, http://scr.bi/s1z0I2.