If the 1% owns 99% of everything and that's bad then why don't we, the 99% just buy it back?

[ThomWV]

The most sensible thing on the face of this economic universe is the employee-owned business.

Consider production. Let's say you work doing your part making paper towels, your'e an accountant or something. The company has 1,000 different jobs around the country, from the sawyers out in the woods dropping trees for pulp to the truck driver delivering the final product to Wal Marts everywhere - there are chemists and economists and engineers and even a promotions department that combine to put the companies' paper towels on every store's shelves.

Every roll of paper towels sells eventually and every roll carries within its cost a small percentage that goes back to the owners. Every roll.

So the guy who owns the paper towel company, who very well may have got it when his dear old dad died, has that "profit" rolling in day after day, week after week, year after year. The system has been set up and its running just fine.

Meanwhile back on the factory floor there are the men and women making the paper towels. They work and they slave and they compete with each other for stature and pay grade and corner offices - with windows if you please - and they contrive schemes and plans to sell more and more paper towels.

And what do we call this? It's "The American Dream" if we are to believe what we are told. Newt said it just the other night, so did Barrac, so did Mitt, so did our own lovable VP, Uncle Joe. The American Dream, we are told, is held in the ability to work hard and get ahead. But what on earth are you getting ahead of? You work your ass off, you cut your neighbor's throat for success, and the paper towels continue to roll and who comes out the winner? Its not you, its the guy who's dear old dad set up the system where the owner gets that little it of a cut out, roll after roll after roll.

You know what the real American Dream is? It doesn't have a god dam thing to do with hard work and getting ahead of this or that; its not apple pie and baseball, its not NASCAR or the god damned bird-watching club. The American Dream is to have a society in which you can find your own productive place. It is to perpetuate that giant sphere of unification in which your special blend of talents and abilities can be most fully realized. And that my dear friends, that dream of fitting into a working society, is what has been stolen from us, one god damned roll of paper towels at a time, day after day, week after week.

Nothing frightens entrenched wealth so much as a fair inheritance tax - nothing. They might actually have to work.

[elleng]

1. Good idea, and HAPPY THANKSGIVING, ThomWV!!!

:thumbsup:
:hi:
:grouphug:

[NYC_SKP]

2. I agree with you, elleng! Let's do what ThomWV said...

...but let's wait til tomorrow!

:hi:

[freshwest]

8. +1,000. So glad to see your thoughtful posts here again.

[TheKentuckian]

3. That resource discrepancy makes such a thing mathematically daunting.

Especially, if the rest of the top 20% largely throw in with the 1% economically, you are talking a process of several hundred years, if things steadily go according to plan.

[freshwest]

7. Agreed. That 21% have historically connived to maintain their position above the lower 79%.

When the plutocrats glorify 'freedom' and 'liberty,' they don't mean anything protected by the Constitution. Their freedom and liberty to do as they please in any arena of life derive from their wealth.

It allows them to hire those of the lower strata to do what they could not numerically accomplish. In varying percentages, they reward their supporters for keeping things the way they've designed them to be. Thus those who live within the lower percentages are effectively policed by their income which gives them no firm platform to effect changes as they are one step away from homelessness.

It is about ownership, as the OP states, and it is one of the things that Michael Moore promoted as one of the goals that the Occupy Movement should focus upon. The lower groups in this system can only help each other in the face of opposition by a large percentage of society who will resist changes.

Those with the least power will have to find a unifying cause or relationship to get the 21% to hold back from having those they reward the most from slaughtering the underlings. At one time it was with liberal religious beliefs, but that's been removed.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. The body of your text makes sense, but the 'buy it back' in the title is puzzling

'Buy' implies we 99% hand over money for the ownership; but what you seem to be advocating is a good, large inheritance tax. 'Buying' implies the 1% will get the money, with which they'll then buy ownership of other things.

[ThomWV]

11. Just goes to show how scatter-brained I am, I started off with a different point in mind.

[socialist_n_TN]

5. Fuck it. Tax the 1% at 99%........

I read somewhere that the Koch brothers (not even the richest of the rich) have $40 BILLION. Each. $40 billion is 4000 million dollars. Ergo if they were taxed at 99%, they would still have $40 million. Could anybody here live on that for the rest of their lives? I know I could.

[saras]

6. Exactly. A 90+ percent tax rate didn't harm America at all

[ThomWV]

12. We don't tax wealth, we tax income

I read just yesterday that each of the brothers was worth $22 Billion, essentially in agreement with what you said. Tax what they have coming in and and sooner or later they will start spending faster than they are "earning" and from that day forward we are on the winning side.

[bvar22]

9. "They might actually have to work." ... K&R

...and allow me to repeat:

"Nothing frightens entrenched wealth so much as a fair inheritance tax
- nothing.
They might actually have to work."

Thanks!



You will know them by their WORKS,
not by their excuses.
Solidarity99!
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[kestrel91316]

10. Bravo!!!