Is the wealth the 1% made from destroying our jobs and moving them offshore rightfully theirs?

[reformist2]

It could hardly be classified as honest work. It seems more like a crime against humanity to me. Especially when you consider the needless pain, misery, illness and even death inflicted on millions of Americans because of what they did.

Seriously, I would be fine with the government confiscation of all their profits as ill-gotten gains.

In any case, to allow them to keep that wealth is to give tacit approval to how they "earned" it - honestly, I don't see how a thinking people could do that.

[Safetykitten]

1. No.

[kestrel91316]

2. No. It's is what we call "ill-gotten gains".

IMHO it should be seized and used to fund social services and single payer healthcare.

[Octafish]

3. No. And we CAN get it back.

On My Mind

Tax Offshore Wealth Sitting In First World Banks

James S. Henry
07.01.10, 09:00 AM EDT
Forbes Magazine dated July 19, 2010

Let's tax offshore private wealth.

How can we get the world's wealthiest scoundrels--arms dealers, dictators, drug barons, tax evaders--to help us pay for the soaring costs of deficits, disaster relief, climate change and development? Simple: Levy a modest withholding tax on untaxed private offshore loot.

Many aboveground economies around the world are struggling, but the economic underground is booming. By my estimate, there is $15 trillion to $20 trillion in private wealth sitting offshore in bank accounts, brokerage accounts and hedge fund portfolios, completely untaxed.

SNIP...

This wealth is concentrated. Nearly half of it is owned by 91,000 people--0.001% of the world's population. Ninety-five percent is owned by the planet's wealthiest 10 million people.

SNIP...

Is it feasible? Yes. The majority of offshore wealth is managed by 50 banks. As of September 2009 these banks accounted for $10.8 trillion of offshore assets--72% of the industry's total. The busiest 10 of them manage 40%.

CONTINUED....

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0719/opinions-taxation-tax-havens-banking-on-my-mind.html

[xtraxritical]

41. "Simple: Levy a modest withholding tax on untaxed private offshore loot."

Simple if you don't have to do it through a Tbag Congress.

[cantbeserious]

4. The Answer Is No - As To People, How Many Honestly Think Versus Parrot Their Masters

eom

[Starry Messenger]

5. No.

Our work made them successful in the first place.

[Bonhomme Richard]

6. Hell, we are given the carte blanche to take more.

There seems to be no end.

[Zorra]

7. Excellent. Now we're getting somewhere. It's not just Americans.

It's everyone on the planet.

Neoliberalism as a puzzle: the useless global unity which fragments and destroys nations

[Catherina]

8. No. And this is why they squeal like pigs

when there are revolutions and the people reclaim the goods the 1% acquired from the little people's toil and sweat. The Latin American bandits, who profited off slavery and outright theft, are still squealing decades later. Allowing them to keep the profits of their ill-gotten gains makes a mockery of justice.

[WovenGems]

9. Short answer - NO

How did the French solve this kind of problem way back when?

[silvershadow]

10. Wait until the TPP is foisted upon us. nt

[Lizzie Poppet]

11. No, not even close.

Is it legal? Sure...they completely control the political system, and the state of our laws reflects their preferences.

Is it ethical? Hell. Fucking. No.

Eventually, we'll snap out of our trance and realize we've been getting fucked over for decades...and the results will not be pretty.

[SunSeeker]

12. I think we should tax it at a top rate of 90%, like we did under Eisenhower. nt

[Raster]

13. NO! This is the type of question that makes the 1% itchy and nervous...

....people have been disappeared and suicided for less.

[ErikJ]

14. Exploitation of America's consumers while laying them off. 90% tax needed

Seems a crime. We need to briong back the top rate 90% tax rate again which was meant to stifle such greed and corruption.

[on point]

15. No. They raid and capture social welfare, while externalizing costs and paying no taxes.

Raise their rates back to historic levels of 70% for starters.
Then tax all income regardless of source (wages, interest, dividends, capital gains) the same
Then add transaction tax on stocks to hurt the igh frequency traders

[byeya]

16. No. It's a sociopathic crime and their gains are tainted by their culture of corruption.

[ellennelle]

17. well, legally, yes it is

but remember, they wrote those laws so that they could make off with all that loot.

we must be very careful, tho; we can't fall into the trap of saying it's ours; as someone here has pointed out, all resources and wealth belong to everyone.

we have to do more than rewrite the laws; we much recover the morality that makes those laws, um, self-evident.

[The Wizard]

18. They send money

to the right Cayman Islands accounts. The whole system is compromised and corrupt to the core.

[Cleita]

19. I don't think so and I believe we have a right to make them give it back,

higher taxes, tariffs and fines for moving jobs off shore could be a start. Also, when people give me that
"I earned it" crap, I remind them that my eight hours of labor is no less valuable than their eight hours of labor and the reason they get more is because some or many workers worked their eight hours and a large portion of it was taken from them by the rich.

[markiv]

29. great, tell that to the govenment that helped them do it in the first place

tell that to the government that they OWN

[Cleita]

32. I know. But I was answering the question. The solution to the dilemma is near impossible. n/t

[markiv]

37. espeacially when the government has a log of every phone call

you think that would never be used to nip such a movement in the bud?

'naaww, that would ONLY be used against terrorists! it is only to PROTECT us!'

a

[Crow73]

20. The argument

They say that the poverty level in other countries has dropped because of outsourcing.

This outsourcing consists of sweatshops conditions in most cases.
Free trade isn't going away, but we could demand that those countries that are being outsourced/have free trade agreements linked to the US minimum wage, have paid healthcare, and workers rights.

The idea is to make the free trade into fair trade.

[BobbyBoring]

21. WOW

That article is 3 years old. I wonder what the numbers are now?

[RainDog]

22. hell no

not only that - the jobs they have put in place consist of imprisoning or curtailing the rights of workers.

A quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor”—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line.

The corporate state is not democracy. Corporate structure is not democratic and our nation is replicating these undemocratic structures within our govt.

The Banking/S&L crimes and bail outs from the last THREE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTS have all been massive transfers of wealth, illegally or unethically (because they made the law putrid), and all deserve to have their wealth confiscated and be thrown in jail for their actions.

[woo me with science]

31. Your second paragraph

should be an OP with links.

Thank you for this post.

[RainDog]

38. It's a quote from this link

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide

...which is already an OP here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3182592

here are a few more words from that article -

The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs. This is precisely the system that has imposed free market orthodoxy, and opened the world to financial pillage, under the watchful aegis of American arms. It only made sense that the first attempt to recreate a global revolutionary movement, the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.

Future Stop
In retrospect, though, I think that later historians will conclude that the legacy of the sixties revolution was deeper than we now imagine, and that the triumph of capitalist markets and their various planetary administrators and enforcers—which seemed so epochal and permanent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991—was, in fact, far shallower.

Have you ever read Marjorie Kelly's book, The Divine Right of Capital? Really great read from a business person's perspective.

more good quotes here - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Divine_Right_of_Capital

Democracy

Major public corporations have evolved into something new in civilization, structures more massive, more dominant in the world than our democratic forefathers dreamed possible. They left us little guidance on governing these institutions - the word "corporation" appears nowhere in the Constitution - because only a handful of American corporations existed when that seminal document was written. Washington and Jefferson governed a nation of farmers, in which most nonagricultural businesses were indeed "private," run out of the parlor, or in the barn, as part of the private household.

Profits

In the current narrative of the corporation, it works like this: A corporation exists to generate profit. Profit belongs to stockholders, but they leave part of it in the corporation to fund growth. So a portion (about a third) is paid out as dividends, and the rest is kept as retained earnings. Those earnings are generated by the income statement, and retained on the balance sheet, where they are added to shareholder equity. Equity is what stockholders initially contributed when they purchased shares from the company. And by the magical closed loop of accounting, equity grows, year after year, while stockholders never contribute another cent out of their pocket.

Ergo- Stockholders "create wealth" without lifting a finger.

We call this "return on equity," or ROE. It is designed to continue into infinity.

[Jessy169]

23. No, but...

That "wealth", if dumped back into the USA and by extension into the world economy, would raise consumption and energy usage by a significant amount. More homes built, more cars purchased, more miles driven, more of the thousands of consumer items we all "think" we need but really don't manufactured, moved and sold then eventually put into a landfill somewhere to rot and pollute the environment. More oil, gas and coal burned to fuel the glutonous consumption. Is that what we really want? Just wondering...

[Coyotl]

24. Is the wealth the 1% made from destroying the Earth just?

Let's point to the actually means of generating capital and wealth today!

[markiv]

25. the government helped them do it

no way they could have done it without the trade agreements and the guest worker visas, like H-1b

and possesion is 9/10ths the law, espeacially when one of those possesions is the government

this is, for all practical purposes, economic war.

[orpupilofnature57]

26. Only if we Vote for it. n/t

[NuclearDem]

27. A nice, hearty "hell no"

Nothing would make me happier than to see any Wall Street, private equity, or Big Oil CEO's second or third summer home confiscated and turned into a shelter for the thousands they screwed over.

[Moostache]

28. No. Its just a different kind of slavery.

Wage/Debt slavery is more broad-based and diffuse than Cotton/Plantation slavery or human slavery of its other stripes throughout history. Its the last remaining slavery that is not utterly stigmatized and unacceptable. The 1% don't squeal like pigs out of greed, its out of terror that the last method of unchecked exploitation is finally being challenged and dragged into the light of day.

The fight to eradicate it completely though will linger on for a century or more with enormous bloodshed. The privileged few will kill millions before they are brought down, but much as the path to universal human equality is uni-directional and immutable, so too is the path to erasing the last bastion of slavery for humanity.

I wish I could be there to see what comes after, when the dust settles and the world must rebuild from a new perspective. I'll be long dead and gone by then...but maybe my kids or grandkids or the ideas I fight to instill in their heads every day now WILL live on to see it, and that will just have to be meaning enough for me...

[Duer 157099]

30. Goddammit

why can't I Rec this OP more than once!!!!

[Blecht]

33. The government works for them

It's impossible to confiscate profits from your boss -- try it yourself at your job and see how that goes.

[NRaleighLiberal]

34. Nope. n/t

[kenny blankenship]

35. Yes, and so is the money gifted to them by the Fed & Treasury

after they blew their original grubstake at Wall Street's roulette tables.

That is part of the -ism of capitalism: to those who have much, more shall be given.

[lpbk2713]

36. Fruits of the war on the Middle Class.

... which continues to this day.

[GoneFishin]

39. If they are selling their crap back into the U.S. then no.

Also, if they rely on the U.S. military to protect their shipping routes, then no.

Also, if they are receiving U.S. government contracts then no.

In short, if they are relying on the U.S. infrastructure or consumer markets then no.

[Tribalceltic]

40. Not only no but

HELL NO !!!

Take it back, Take it all back and throw them all in GITMO

oops did I just say that out loud?

[MoreGOPoop]

42. This is my fantasy!

They insist on blocking President Obama's attempt to close Gitmo,
so let's put them there. Not to torture them, but to make them
think they're gonna be tortured.

[Initech]

44. [phone]!!!!

[Initech]

43. Hell no! It was stolen from us!

During the Bush years the oligarchs thought everything was theirs for the taking. It sure as shit wasn't! Ask Enron. Or Lehman Brothers, or any of the other thieves. It will take decades to undo the damage they did in a few short years.

[indepat]

45. Government is totally complicit imv and simply refuses to even levy a fair

and equitable income tax on these ill-gotten gains: it rather chooses to gut the safety net as a panacea to the nation's deficit ills woes.

[reusrename]

46. And the millions of homes that were stolen from folks.

In FL the banksters were actually forging court documents and then presenting them to the courts.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how they continue to get away with that. Other than we have a criminal for governor. But still.

[bluedeathray]

47. Tragedy of the Commons

By Garret Hardin here:

http://www.dieoff.org/page95.htm

Enlightening article (though dated) on this subject.