I am just as outraged about Obama’s bailouts as I was about Bush’s wars and his stimulus packages. They are expensive. They are of questionable value. They seem designed to benefit only the richest in our society. I am for a hybrid of the GM bailouts, though, and let me tell you why.
Whether you are anti-worker or pro-worker, we are all aware that unions have set the bar for all American workers for the better part of a century. As unions have weakened and membership has declined, benefits and wages for all have followed suit. The Big Three are one of the last powerful bastions of union manufacturing in our country. If we allow them to be killed off, it will just facilitate a quicker end to the American standard of living as we know it. That standard is the result of well over 100 years of struggle by workers and those concerned with their plight.
I see the previous bailouts (and most of the ones in the planning stages) as nothing more than corporate welfare, handouts for the ruling class. They will greatly increase the national debt. They will falsely elevate stock values. They have allowed bonuses for rich people who don’t, in any way, deserve them. I know trickle-downers who are actually prone to believe that this type of activity will eventually benefit those of us in the working class but they must not ever check. We’ve never seen a dime down here.
Reaganomics has never worked regardless of which corporate party runs the printing press. If you print money to give to big corporations, they just keep it. Their officers may vacation longer or they may buy more land in Costa Rica but we don’t ever get any of the pennies we’re supposed to get down here. Never happens.
GM is not an AIG or a CitiBank, though. It is subtly different than these other obscenely corrupt mechanisms in one major regard. It is a real employer of real workers. I read once that 1/12 of the jobs in our economy are dependent on some facet of the automotive industry. Imagine what would happen to our real economy if 1/12 of our jobs just “left the building”?
If allowed to, you can be sure that GM (and our other “patriotic” auto manufacturers) would run happily to China to reap the benefits of Clinton’s terrible legacy of globalization. They will simply move themselves and their parts operations to any place in the world where labor is cheap (or even free) and where steel and energy are cheaper, as well. GM has already been doing exactly this for several decades now.
So, I am for preventing the terrible blood loss that will ensue should we allow GM to fail but I am not for the Fed running our automotive companies. Nor am I for giving GM a blank check and simply letting them do whatever they wish (although that does seem to be the deal most of the banks are getting). But, if we really wish to know what this administration’s goals are in relation to GM, we need look no further than Obama’s Wall Street whiz kid, Brian Deese, who was just put in charge of dismantling GM. The guy has never even set foot in an auto plant. Having some 31 year old rainmaker ship all of our union jobs to China is not my own personal vision of fixing a serious problem. Its likely not yours, either.
The bailouts, as currently structured, leave the government in control of about 60% of GM’s stock and that is just not acceptable. The federal government is beholden to the wrong people and we cannot allow them access to 1/12 of our job base. Enough with the corporate welfare already!
GM doesn’t need a bailout. It needs a huge low-interest loan that will allow it to become a worker-owned company with a new agenda. Perhaps, it could once again make energy-efficient electric cars like the EV1?! It could get rid of the corporate fat-cats who ran it into the ground in the first place. Then, the collective could decide what their fate will be together without Wall Street dictating any of the terms. Look what Wall Street did to our economy (real and imagined). Do we really want these idiots put in charge of anything we have such a huge stake in? Really?
Showing posts with label bailout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bailout. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Yet Again, Lets Ignore The Plan That Makes Sense
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.
So, your member of Congress, who is grappling these days with gigantic deficits on the backs of your children at the same time as that deep recession and tax cuts reduce revenues and increase torrents of red ink, should be championing such transaction taxes.
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.
There are differing estimates of how much such Wall Street transaction taxes can raise each year. A transaction tax would, however, certainly raise enough to make the Wall Street crooks and gamblers pay for their own Washington bailout. Lets scan some figures economists put forth.
The most discussed and popular one is a simple sales tax on currency trades across borders. Called the Tobin Tax after its originator, the late James Tobin, a Nobel laureate economist at Yale University, 10 to 25 cents per hundred dollars of the huge amounts of dollars traded each day across bordered would produce from $100 to $300 billion per year.
There are scores of civic, labor, environmental, development, poverty and law groups all over the world pressing for such laws in their countries. (see tobintaxcall.free.fr).
According the University of Massachusetts economist, Robert Pollin, various kinds of securities-trading taxes are on the books in about forty countries, including Japan, the UK and Brazil.
Pollin writes in the current issue of the estimable Boston Review: "A small tax on all financial-market transactions, comparable to a sales tax, would raise the costs on short-term speculative trading while having negligible effect on people who trade infrequently. It would thus discourage speculation and channel funds toward productive investment." He adds that after the 1987 stock market crash, securities-trading taxes "or similar measures" were endorsed by then Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and even the first President Bush. Professor Pollin estimates that a one-half of one percent tax would raise about $350 billion a year. That seems conservative. The Wall Street Journal once mentioned about $500 trillion in derivatives trades alone in 2008-the most speculative of transactions. A one tenth of one percent tax would raise $500 billion dollars a year, assuming that level of trading.
Economist Dean Baker says a "modest financial transactions tax would be enough to "finance a 10% across-the-board reduction in the income tax on labor.
The stock transaction tax goes back a long way. A version helped fund the Civil War and the imperial Spanish-American War. The famous British economist, John Maynard Keynes, extolled in 1936 a securities transaction tax as having the effect of "mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise." The U.S. had some kind of transaction tax from 1914 to 1966.
The corporate history scholar (read his excellent book, Unequal Protection) Thom Hartmann, turned three-hour-a-day talk-show-host on Air America (airamerica.com/thomvision), had discussed the long evolution of what he calls a "securities turnover excise tax" to "tamp down toxic speculation, while encouraging healthy investment."
So, why don't we have such a mega-revenue generator and lighten the income tax load on today and tomorrow's American worker? (It was one of the most popular ideas I campaigned on last year. People got it.) Because American workers need to learn about this proposed tax policy and ram it through Congress. Tell your Senators and Representatives-no ifs, ands or buts. Otherwise, Wall Street will keep rampaging over people's pensions and mutual fund savings, destabilize their jobs and hand them the bailout bill, as is occurring now.
A few minutes spent lobbying members of Congress by millions of Americans (call, write or e-mail, visit or picket) will produce one big Change for the better. Contact your member of Congress. The current financial mess makes this the right time for action.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions.
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.
So, your member of Congress, who is grappling these days with gigantic deficits on the backs of your children at the same time as that deep recession and tax cuts reduce revenues and increase torrents of red ink, should be championing such transaction taxes.
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.
There are differing estimates of how much such Wall Street transaction taxes can raise each year. A transaction tax would, however, certainly raise enough to make the Wall Street crooks and gamblers pay for their own Washington bailout. Lets scan some figures economists put forth.
The most discussed and popular one is a simple sales tax on currency trades across borders. Called the Tobin Tax after its originator, the late James Tobin, a Nobel laureate economist at Yale University, 10 to 25 cents per hundred dollars of the huge amounts of dollars traded each day across bordered would produce from $100 to $300 billion per year.
There are scores of civic, labor, environmental, development, poverty and law groups all over the world pressing for such laws in their countries. (see tobintaxcall.free.fr).
According the University of Massachusetts economist, Robert Pollin, various kinds of securities-trading taxes are on the books in about forty countries, including Japan, the UK and Brazil.
Pollin writes in the current issue of the estimable Boston Review: "A small tax on all financial-market transactions, comparable to a sales tax, would raise the costs on short-term speculative trading while having negligible effect on people who trade infrequently. It would thus discourage speculation and channel funds toward productive investment." He adds that after the 1987 stock market crash, securities-trading taxes "or similar measures" were endorsed by then Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and even the first President Bush. Professor Pollin estimates that a one-half of one percent tax would raise about $350 billion a year. That seems conservative. The Wall Street Journal once mentioned about $500 trillion in derivatives trades alone in 2008-the most speculative of transactions. A one tenth of one percent tax would raise $500 billion dollars a year, assuming that level of trading.
Economist Dean Baker says a "modest financial transactions tax would be enough to "finance a 10% across-the-board reduction in the income tax on labor.
The stock transaction tax goes back a long way. A version helped fund the Civil War and the imperial Spanish-American War. The famous British economist, John Maynard Keynes, extolled in 1936 a securities transaction tax as having the effect of "mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise." The U.S. had some kind of transaction tax from 1914 to 1966.
The corporate history scholar (read his excellent book, Unequal Protection) Thom Hartmann, turned three-hour-a-day talk-show-host on Air America (airamerica.com/thomvision), had discussed the long evolution of what he calls a "securities turnover excise tax" to "tamp down toxic speculation, while encouraging healthy investment."
So, why don't we have such a mega-revenue generator and lighten the income tax load on today and tomorrow's American worker? (It was one of the most popular ideas I campaigned on last year. People got it.) Because American workers need to learn about this proposed tax policy and ram it through Congress. Tell your Senators and Representatives-no ifs, ands or buts. Otherwise, Wall Street will keep rampaging over people's pensions and mutual fund savings, destabilize their jobs and hand them the bailout bill, as is occurring now.
A few minutes spent lobbying members of Congress by millions of Americans (call, write or e-mail, visit or picket) will produce one big Change for the better. Contact your member of Congress. The current financial mess makes this the right time for action.
Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Urgent Business Relationship
>>Date: Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 1:18 PM
>>Subject: URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
>>
>>DEAR AMERICAN:
>>
>>I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP
>>WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.
>>
>>I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY
>>COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER
>>OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS
>>TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.
>>
>>I AM WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY
>>REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR,
>>YOU MAY KNOW HIM AS THE LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION
>>MOVEMENT IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTIN IS 100% SAFE.
>>
>>THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED
>>THE FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE
>>FUNDS IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY
>>UNDER SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK
>>FOR A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN
>>SO THE FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED.
>>
>>PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND
>>ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO
>>WALLSTREETBAILOUT@TREASURY.GOV SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR
>>COMMISSION FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION,
>>I WILL RESPOND WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL
>>BE USED TO PROTECT THE FUNDS.
>>
>>YOURS FAITHFULLY MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON
>>
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