The difficulty is that, cutlurally, people may be outraged by their greed, but they don't actually think it's wrong. To the winnner, the spoils. keep to the Fen Causeway
And Senator Obama is out spouting a "Tax cut for the poor and Middle Class."
To help solve the problem the Tax part of this needs to be revenue enhancing. Meaning some group is going to have to pay more. The obvious group are those who benefited by the Looting - in Frank Schnittger's apt wording. One way is by increasing the tax responsibility of individuals. Another is by increasing (i.e., making the bastards fork over) the tax responsibility of Corporations.
Even a flat tax on Corporations would raise a lot of money AND meet the "Fairness" qualification.
Oh, wait - we don't have any of those anyway. Carry on.
One other useful item on the list is repealing the law which gives corporations some of the same rights as individuals, with none of the democratic responsibilities.
Another useful item would be creating a completely new index of economic welfare - and I don't mean GDP, I mean the Dow, which has become the de facto measure of economic health.
Let's say Corporation A decides to reimport jobs from China. Workers in the US are much more expensive than Chinese workers, so its profits will take an instant hit.
If enough corporations do this the Dow will be hammered, because 'analysts' will 'punish' corporations which are 'uncompetitive.'
With an alternative index based on populist economics - most usefully median disposable income - you can say neener neener neener to the Dow. As long as investment is still happening - which could be a useful metric for a companion index - it can crash and no one needs to care.
But oh, the hue and cry that would go up :-P
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Or, you could simply restrict the granting of corporate personhood in meaningful ways, or that corporate persons be tasked with activities other than maximum shareholder return.
But overturning it would require a quite different court than the one we have now. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
