News & Analysis
Fascism Now: Occupy Wall Street's Call for Transaction Tax Taken Up by Congress
Two U.S. lawmakers will introduce measures to impose a transaction tax on financial firms that resembles a proposal released by the European Union. Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, and Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, will introduce the bills tomorrow in their respective chambers. The bills will give the United States an increased role in the international debate over a transaction tax, which is likely to be discussed at the Group of 20 summit this week in Cannes, France. – Yahoo
Dominant Social Theme: There is a limit! These greedy thugs on Wall Street need to be taxed to an inch of their lives. And if we get taxed the same way, well, darn it, it'll be worth it. If OUR transactions are taxed, OK, we'll take it. If we have to keep records of everything we purchase, OK, we'll do it. If we get thrown in jail because we're not keeping records right, well that's OK, too, as long as some of these Wall Street types go to jail. We'll gladly live in a totalitarian society so long as we can punish these Wall Street evildoers!
Free-Market Analysis: If there is any single thing that shows Occupy Wall Street is a controlled opposition, the idea that its ideas resonate within weeks with the US Congress and the larger global power structure should at least give one pause.
OWS has called for a moratorium on student college loans. Now President Barack Obama is moving a bill through Congress to give students relief. OWS has called for mortgage relief and that's on its way, too. OWS has called for a transaction tax on Wall Street trades, and now THAT bill is being moved in Congress.
Watching OWS-types, the mainstream media and the political classes (under the control of Money Power) perform their elaborate dance is sort of amusing, or it would be if the consequences weren't so dire. Let's examine for a moment what a transaction will entail.
Basically, every firm of significance on Wall Street and presumably through the West will have to start keeping a log of trades. This means government and the Anglosphere power elites (who dominate trading anyway) will know everybody else's Book.
It's not enough that the elites control money. They have to have access to everybody's trade information as well. That way they can control markets even more than they do and reap even more money by front-running the market than they already do.
Not that they need money. That's not the real reason for a transaction tax. The real reason is CONTROL. If people think a transaction will stop with Wall Street, they're wrong. When the income tax came to America, the credulous middle classes were assured it would only target the wealthy. As it turned out, the wealthy pay few taxes and the middle classes increasingly are being thrown in jail for tax avoidance.
The arc of the transaction in our view will be predictable. First it will apply to Wall Street and then to all private traders. Soon the wealthy may have to begin to itemize their PURCHASES in order to pay a special tax on them, not just their trades. And so it will go.
At the very least, a transaction tax for America is the beginning of a back-door VAT – a value added tax of the sort that the elites have been aching to saddle the US middle class with. There can never be too many taxes, after all. The middle class is to be ground into dust with these taxes. Here's some more from the article:
"It's a significant way to raise some needed revenue," Harkin said in an interview today in Washington. "Quite frankly, I bet nobody would even feel it." The European Union in September proposed a financial- transaction tax that would take effect in 2014 and raise about $57 billion euros ($78 billion) a year. Germany and France have led a push for global implementation.
The bills are unlikely to become law: Republicans, who have opposed transaction taxes in the past, control a majority in the House. President Barack Obama's administration has also voiced concerns over the proposal and declined to give a direct endorsement in advance of the G-20 summit that opens Nov. 3. The chances a transaction tax could pass in the U.S. "are less than 50/50" primarily because of Republican opposition, Brian Gardner, senior vice president of research for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc. in Washington, said in a Sept. 28 note to clients.
U.S. exchange operators fell the most since August on the news that the lawmakers would propose the tax. The exchanges would be negatively affected by the tax because "volume will drop off," Sam Ginzburg, a partner and head of capital markets at First New York Securities LLC, a New York-based proprietary trading firm, said today. "I shudder to think of the landscape of the market if this happens," Ginzburg said.
It is no coincidence that everything OWS's non-leader/leaders suggest, lawmakers in America, anyway, begin to act on. OWS is in this sense a kind of elaborate charade, a shadow play organized by the elites to implement their world-spanning agenda.
Conclusion: Fortunately, there is the Internet, which allows us to propose alternative viewpoints and point out elite agendas via "coincidences" that would not otherwise be made available. Cumulatively, these sorts of insights constitute a kind of Internet Reformation that is changing the complexion of the human hive mind. The Internet Reformation is a process not an episode.
l 
|
You must be a site member to submit suggested edits or post feedback. In addition to submitting edit suggestions and posting feedback, your Free Membership to The Daily Bell gives you access to our Member Zone where you will discover a plethora of other member benefits. Want to learn more? click here |
|||||
|
|
||||
 |
Posted by howardtlewisiii on 11/05/11 08:58 PM
Rubbish. Tax the criminals and let it go? Screw you!!! Give me half a chance and I will help put you in prison as an independent contractor for codoning felonious theft. Congress is a pack of miscreant mewling prancers who cannot help themselves in their actions. Like livestock. If they can develop appropriate morality for society to accept and approve of, then and only then should they be released frrom labor intensive prison life.
|
Posted by marat on 11/05/11 10:15 AM
Um, excuse me, but fascism is one law for the elites and another law for the serfs. Sales taxes are 8.875% in New York city. Now that is wrong, but it is even more wrong that poor people pay those taxes to buy necessities, while Wall Street pays zero taxes when they sell financial products. Many Wall Street firms make billions off of "flash trading" where computer programs buy and sell securities, often holding them for only seconds. That is not investing, it's gambling, it adds nothing to the economy except making the markets rigged against anyone without a supercomputer in their basement.
That is the free market at work - the big get bigger until they gobble up most of the market, eventually becoming so powerful that they can subvert any system of law, norms or oversight, in other words fascism.
The free market is an unstable period preceding fascism - sorry but your whole philosophy is even less workable than Marxist-Leninism. The Soviet Union lasted for nearly a century, but Wall Street managed to destroy itself merely a few years after they were deregulated by Congress. Explain that one.
|
Posted by tom jefferson on 11/03/11 11:37 PM
These "occupy" mobs/thugs are the modern emergence of the National Socialist Party in support of Obama and Democrats in Congress. Paid for by G. Soros.
 |
Posted by rossbcan on 11/03/11 07:30 AM
"we get thrown in jail because we're not keeping records right"
... hmm, what happened to the legal concept that we cannot be forced to incriminate ourselves and the burden of proof lies with the accuser?
This is because we live in an action precedes consequence reality and, a negative (lack of evidence) cannot be proven except by process of elimination, searching all of infinity for "lack of evidence".
It is "guilty before proven innocent". Ran into this with false allegations of abuse during my divorce. You would think it is possible to prove the simple fact that you are "not abusive", but, it is not, there is always a doubt that can be inflamed to demonize you. Lawyers love to pretend to try the impossible, with you at mortal risk paying some outrageous multiple of your after tax hourly rate for the "best lawyer". The reason they can do this is that they claim the right to extort you, to threaten your life, children, property and freedoms unless you pay and use their dubious "services". Doesn't take long before all resources are gone and, then, the legal "profession" loses interest (profit opportunities), the judiciary assumes what it considers to be in their "best interests" which is: keeping the conflict going as long as possible (maximum legal "profession" tribute) and then, appeasing the irresponsible to maintain "appeasement of the governed".
Conflict does not end until "all resources gone", then, predators move on to other fools, low hanging fruit who believe the faux "law is honest" meme.
In fact, this is how conflict (such as entitled versus productive) must and, therefore will end: Universal impoverishment, destruction of everything that criminals and the entitled covet.
I consider myself extremely lucky that I was confronted with these facts and adapted decades before the "bottom feeders", sniping upwards at their betters consolidated enough criminal power to take on all of civilization, as opposed to picking off individuals.
|
Posted by provolone on 11/03/11 12:59 AM
All they need to do is make Google roll over a little bit farther and we will see how centralized the Internet has become. From patents to anti-trust there are plenty of options for stopping or severely delaying online progress.
Most of the major ISPs are already wholly owned by the main media corporations. If not your ISP then your ISP's upstream provider is probably a subsidiary of a lying mouthpiece. Those concepts only cover the net-neutrality part of the equation. Laws intending to extend the already draconian DMCA, such as the PROTECT-IP or E-PARASITE act will mandate censorship at the DNS level.
Internet reformation is a nice idea, but consider Libya or OWS; Look how easily it has equally become a tool for astroturfing and misinformation.
 |
Posted by Saintpaulia on 11/02/11 07:39 PM
So sorry, I meant "ways" not says, but you knew that, right?
|
Posted by Saintpaulia on 11/02/11 07:38 PM
You've got to grudingly admire these oligarchs! They are extemely creative in thinking up says to destroy the American middle class, which has always stood between them and their ultimate goal of One World Despotism.
|
Posted by Pete 8 on 11/02/11 07:01 PM
The Truth shall set THEE free of that camel.
|
Posted by Pete 8 on 11/02/11 06:18 PM
People are listening intently Laceja.
They are seeing the inconsistencies in the matrix.
Thinking caps are becoming fashionable, especially when wearers are presented with fresh confirming informations, which due to the shorter synaptic pathing required to retain/resolve such gems, simultaneously allow for much greater loading and processing capacities, whilst at an increasing rate, removing the burden of the prior inefficient and damaged ectoplasmic remnants in memory.
The Truth shall set The free of that camel.
|
Posted by laceja on 11/02/11 03:54 PM
If the internet reformation is a process, I sure hope it gets into gear soon. The elite have so successfully coopted it with the main stream media websites, it worries me, no one is listening.
Reply from The Daily Bell
Time will tell ...
 |
Posted by budwood on 11/02/11 02:16 PM
Seems that a transaction tax just may move many transactions overseas. That probably won't be all bad.
|
Posted by rossbcan on 11/02/11 12:12 PM
Try again. Langley and I are playing the attack / defend game...
 |
Posted by philitarian on 11/02/11 11:40 AM
rossbcan,
I've been trying to visit your site today (timing out) to no avail.
|
Posted by rossbcan on 11/02/11 10:48 AM
@DB: Stop being so interesting and prolific. I have to earn some broken "promises to pay" fiat and need to focus elsewhere.
|
Posted by rossbcan on 11/02/11 10:45 AM
Taxation EQUALS servitude of the productive to the unproductive by "necessity" (Machiavelli) of (insert faux warm and fuzzy utopian goal rationalization or faux survival threat de jour HERE).
And, when the productive shrug, by the unbearable burdens placed upon them? And, when the conflict destroys the peace required for "division of labor"?
... stayed tuned, or, for the impatient, who wish to skip to the end of this self-inflicted tale of woe:
Click to view link
 |
Posted by Hoss on 11/02/11 09:46 AM
They're trying to suffocate us.
