Reforming the financial and tax system, Modest Proposals

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http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/some-modest-proposals-for-reforming-the-u-s-financial-and-tax-system-2.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Naked Capitalism has a great transcript and expansion of the answers/ideas from an interview with Michael Hudson with Alan Minsky on KPFA on the issues of OWS/ie. the 99% and the PTB-- why there can be no "goal" or "demands" so to speak as there is so much wrong there really is no solution that can easily fix what is broken-- ie: our system. He talks about what the problems are and then what he believes the firsts steps are to rectify it. I don't know about you, but while the different clashes with authority and buzz around the Occupy movement are interesting and very attention getting, I feel that there is something very important missing from the discussion: The Point of ALL of This and How to Rectify what is Wrong. People who do not understand the OWS movement are puzzled as to what will actually allow people to fold up their tents and go home and I think this interview/article may help to answer that. Here is an excerpt but this is a long article and I strongly urge for you to read da whole thing:

"Suppose you were going to design a society from scratch. Would you create what we have now? Or would you start, for instance, by reforming the most egregious distortions of campaign finance? As matters stand, Goldman Sachs has been able to buy the right to name who is going to be Treasury Secretary. They selected Geithner, who gave them $29 billion from A.I.G. just before he was appointed. It’s like that all down the line – in both parties. Every Democratic congressional committee chairman has to pay to the Party a $150,000 to buy the chairmanship. This means that the campaign donors get to determine who gets committee chairmanships. This is oligarchy, not democracy. So the system is geared to favor whoever can grab the most money. Wall Street does it by financial siphoning and asset stripping. Politicians do it by getting money from the beneficiaries – the 1%.

Once people realize that they’re being screwed, that’s a pre-revolutionary situation. It’s a situation where they can get a lot of sympathy and support, precisely by not doing what The New York Times and the other papers say they should do: come up with some neat solutions. They don’t have to propose a solution because right now there isn’t one – without changing the system with many, many changes. So many that it’s like a new Constitution. Politics as well as the economy need to be restructured. What’s developing now is how to think about the economic and political problems that are bothering people. It is not radical to realize that the economy isn’t working. That is the first stage to realizing that a real alternative is needed. We’ve been under a radical right-wing attack – and need to respond in kind. The next half-year probably will be spent trying to spell out what the best structure would be.

There is no way to clean up the mess that the Democratic Party has become since politics moved into Wall Street’s pockets. The Republicans also have become a party of lobbyists. So it looks like there is no solution within the existent system. This is a revolutionary, radical situation. The longer that the OWS groups can spend on diagnosing the problem and explaining how far wrong the system has gone, the longer the demonstrators can gain support by showing that they share the feelings everybody has these days – a feeling of being victimized. This is what is creating a raw material that has to potential to flower into political activism, perhaps by spring or summer next year."

......
"Michael Hudson: There are two stages to any kind of a transformation. The first stage is simply to start re-applying the laws and the taxes that the Bush and Obama administrations have stopped applying. You don’t want Wall Street to be able to put its industry lobbyists in charge of making policy. So the first task is to get rid of Geithner, Holder and the similar pro-financial administrators whom Obama has appointed to his cabinet and in key regulatory positions. This kind of clean-up requires election reform – and that requires a reversal of the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United ruling that enables a financial oligarchy to lock in its control of American politics.

One of the first things that is needed – and only a President could do it – would be to demand a new Supreme Court. This is what Roosevelt threatened, and it worked. You make them an offer they can’t refuse. If this can be done only by expanding the number of court justices, then you nominate ones who are not radicals on the right – judges who will reverse the 19th-century ruling that corporations are the same as people and indeed have even more rights (and certainly more campaign money) than people have. You then move to clean up the corruption of the legal system that has protected financial crooks instead of sending them to jail. Financial fraud has effectively been decriminalized, at least by Wall Street’s largest campaign contributors."

There is a whole bunch before my quotes and a whole bunch after -- a very good analytic review and discussion of what solutions can be garnered through the economic and financial aspects of the problems we are currently mired in. Have a good read and feel really smart today.