Wall Street is replacing "private enterprise"...
as we have known it.
Unlike any time at least since the 1920's, corporations and wealthy individuals are making their money on Wall Street, not Main Street.
Their profits are not invested in more labor or new equipment, it is invested in funds of all sorts and shapes. They can make more money on Wall Street at this time than they can by producing more jobs.
Corporations, unlike small businesses, are able to buy up other competition and charge higher and higher prices for their products. Coupled with their manipulation of Wall Street, they are able to return a continuously high dividend to their investors, year after year.
Their strategy of "buying" our politicians in exchange for lower and lower tax rates is not only a threat to "free enterprise" as we have known it but also, a threat to the social fabric that we have built up over the last 75 years.
Wall Street is a problem and politicians continue to turn the other direction. They pretend not to see. "Everybody is in the stock market now", they advise us. "We have no enemies - we are all in this together..."
The refusal of our politicians to address this problem is a great failure of our times. The logical step would be to stop them from taking all our wealth and accumulating it at the top. How could we do that??
First of all, the aforementioned "politicians" could put a 1/2 of 1% surcharge on every stock transaction and that money could go into our Treasury to secure our social fabric that they are destroying. Penalties could be secured on investments that are not kept for a certain length of time. But this would take some backbone and will power by our elected officials.
There is nothing on the horizon to indicate we have such leaders.
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After all, Elizabeth Warren was just elected to the Senate, and I know she knows all of this. As a matter of fact, I remember someone actually mentioning this idea... of taxing transactions on Wall Street. Might have been Elliot Spitzer? Or Thom Hartmann? Norman Goldman? Sorry I can't remember. Don't give up, kentuck. If we give up, there's no WAY good can win out in the end.
"If you never stop fighting for what you believe in, then you will always be victorious."--Ramona Africa
