Wednesday, October 05, 2011

What Do We Want?

The One Percenters are complaining that they don't know what the Occupy Wall Street people want. The short answer is a complete change is the depraved, oligarchical system that American democracy and capitalism has been corrupted into. But if you want some specifics, here are a few:
  • All senior executive compensation packages must be made public and approved in an open vote by the share holders. Without such a vote, no individual may receive compensation in excess of ten times the median average compensation of all corporate employees nor receive any benefits not equally available to all corporate employees.
  • The CEO is responsible for maintaining a corporate climate free of criminal activity. The CEO is deemed complicit in corporate criminal activity such as fraud, forgery, or involuntary manslaughter unless he can prove that he took all reasonable steps to prevent such crimes.
  • Any corporation requiring a government bailout will be deemed entering into bankruptcy; all stock equity is eliminated. New stock will be issued for the purpose of paying back the government with interest.
  • No corporation receiving one or more government contracts may spend any money whatsoever to lobby that government. Any corporation which signs a contract with the government must pay ten times the total amount spent on lobbying during the previous decade into the US Treasury before that contract will be deemed valid. This rule applies to all subsidiaries, sister subsidiaries, and spun off businesses. Any effort to circumvent this rule is felony fraud. 
  • All political contributions are to be taxed by the following formula:
    • Under $10,000 - no tax
    • Between $10,000 and $100,000 - 10%
    • Between $100,000 and $1 million - 25%
    • Over $1 million - 50%
    • Over $10 million - 90%
  • All contributions to all candidates, PACs, political parties, or independent expenditures in a calendar year are totaled to calculate this tax. 
  • Citizens volunteering to political campaigns will not be taxed for their volunteer efforts.
  • Any corporation making political contributions must receive prior approval of the share holders for both the dollar amount and recipients.
  • No corporation making over $100,000 in political contributions in any single year may receive any government contracts for the following decade.
  • No Supreme Court justice or member of Congress may receive speaker fees, teaching fees, or any other compensation for appearing nor may tickets be sold or the people in any way charged for attending such an event.
  • A one percent annual Wealth Tax will be imposed on all assets (foreign and domestic) in excess of $50 million and a ten percent tax on all assets over $1 billion.
I could go on. Hell, I could spend the next two weeks writing this list and still leave stuff out. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I work for a corporation and want to see the corporation succeed. However, I do not find these proposals unreasonable and do not think they would interfere with reasonable business practices. (Of course the concept of reasonableness does not seem relevant anymore in this country.) The one I am not sure I agree with is the bankruptcy piece because the purpose of the bailout is to avoid bankruptcy, which has lots of ramifications that are not necessarily desirable for shareholders, creditors, or employees (such as being used to reject bargained-for labor agreements). Since bailouts ought to be extremely few and far between, it seems that the terms of any such arrangement could be worked out at the time.

PoliShifter said...

I agree with most of it.

But I just think there should be no money in politics. I want to see paid lobbying outlawed and public financing of elections.

The government should be serving the interest of the people and not corporations or monied interest.

Also, I don't think corporations are people.

Anonymous said...

I agree with both statements by PoliShifter. I work at a corporation and have never, ever mistaken it for a person.

Anonymous said...

If a corporation were a person it would be considered an anti-social psychopath -- as pointed out by the Canadian documentary, a few years ago. Rings true to me. The number of corporations that act as a person would in the same situation are almost zero.

A different "Anonymous"