Fascism Now: Occupy Wall Street's Call for Transaction Tax Taken Up by Congress

Fascism Now: Occupy Wall Street's Call for Transaction Tax Taken Up by Congress

Wednesday, November 02, 2011 – by Staff Report



Two U.S. lawmakers will introduce measures to impose a transaction tax on financial firms that resembles a proposal released by the European Union. Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, and Representative Peter DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat, will introduce the bills tomorrow in their respective chambers. The bills will give the United States an increased role in the international debate over a transaction tax, which is likely to be discussed at the Group of 20 summit this week in Cannes, France. – Yahoo



Dominant Social Theme: There is a limit! These greedy thugs on Wall Street need to be taxed to an inch of their lives. And if we get taxed the same way, well, darn it, it'll be worth it. If OUR transactions are taxed, OK, we'll take it. If we have to keep records of everything we purchase, OK, we'll do it. If we get thrown in jail because we're not keeping records right, well that's OK, too, as long as some of these Wall Street types go to jail. We'll gladly live in a totalitarian society so long as we can punish these Wall Street evildoers!



Free-Market Analysis: If there is any single thing that shows Occupy Wall Street is a controlled opposition, the idea that its ideas resonate within weeks with the US Congress and the larger global power structure should at least give one pause.



OWS has called for a moratorium on student college loans. Now President Barack Obama is moving a bill through Congress to give students relief. OWS has called for mortgage relief and that's on its way, too. OWS has called for a transaction tax on Wall Street trades, and now THAT bill is being moved in Congress.



Watching OWS-types, the mainstream media and the political classes (under the control of Money Power) perform their elaborate dance is sort of amusing, or it would be if the consequences weren't so dire. Let's examine for a moment what a transaction will entail.



Basically, every firm of significance on Wall Street and presumably through the West will have to start keeping a log of trades. This means government and the Anglosphere power elites (who dominate trading anyway) will know everybody else's Book.



It's not enough that the elites control money. They have to have access to everybody's trade information as well. That way they can control markets even more than they do and reap even more money by front-running the market than they already do.



Not that they need money. That's not the real reason for a transaction tax. The real reason is CONTROL. If people think a transaction will stop with Wall Street, they're wrong. When the income tax came to America, the credulous middle classes were assured it would only target the wealthy. As it turned out, the wealthy pay few taxes and the middle classes increasingly are being thrown in jail for tax avoidance.



The arc of the transaction in our view will be predictable. First it will apply to Wall Street and then to all private traders. Soon the wealthy may have to begin to itemize their PURCHASES in order to pay a special tax on them, not just their trades. And so it will go.



At the very least, a transaction tax for America is the beginning of a back-door VAT – a value added tax of the sort that the elites have been aching to saddle the US middle class with. There can never be too many taxes, after all. The middle class is to be ground into dust with these taxes. Here's some more from the article:



"It's a significant way to raise some needed revenue," Harkin said in an interview today in Washington. "Quite frankly, I bet nobody would even feel it." The European Union in September proposed a financial- transaction tax that would take effect in 2014 and raise about $57 billion euros ($78 billion) a year. Germany and France have led a push for global implementation.



The bills are unlikely to become law: Republicans, who have opposed transaction taxes in the past, control a majority in the House. President Barack Obama's administration has also voiced concerns over the proposal and declined to give a direct endorsement in advance of the G-20 summit that opens Nov. 3. The chances a transaction tax could pass in the U.S. "are less than 50/50" primarily because of Republican opposition, Brian Gardner, senior vice president of research for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc. in Washington, said in a Sept. 28 note to clients.



U.S. exchange operators fell the most since August on the news that the lawmakers would propose the tax. The exchanges would be negatively affected by the tax because "volume will drop off," Sam Ginzburg, a partner and head of capital markets at First New York Securities LLC, a New York-based proprietary trading firm, said today. "I shudder to think of the landscape of the market if this happens," Ginzburg said.



It is no coincidence that everything OWS's non-leader/leaders suggest, lawmakers in America, anyway, begin to act on. OWS is in this sense a kind of elaborate charade, a shadow play organized by the elites to implement their world-spanning agenda.



Conclusion: Fortunately, there is the Internet, which allows us to propose alternative viewpoints and point out elite agendas via "coincidences" that would not otherwise be made available. Cumulatively, these sorts of insights constitute a kind of Internet Reformation that is changing the complexion of the human hive mind. The Internet Reformation is a process not an episode.