Friday, April 5, 2013

What Could We Do With $32 Trillion?

Yep, that's how much the parasitic rich owe us, the workers, the 99 percent, the ones who actually created the wealth the motherfuckers stole.

What couldn't we do with $32 trillion?

Even if you just count what the criminal corporate giants have stolen, it's enough to put the lie to every repug asshole screaming for more tax cuts.

Think Progress:

America’s largest corporations have stashed nearly $1.5 trillion in offshore tax havens like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and Ireland — countries where they do little business but claim massive profits due to low tax rates. As a result, corporate tax rates fell to a 40-year low in 2011 even as profits rose to a 60-year high.

Tax avoidance from corporations and wealthy individuals has a cost for individual taxpayers and small businesses, according to a new report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. According to U.S. PIRG, tax dodging cost individual taxpayers $1,026 and each small business $3,067 in 2012.
Yet still the plutocrats whine and moan and demand your starving grandmother give up her minimal social security check so they can have even more.

Digby:
It takes some real gall to acknowledge that 92% of all financial wealth is controlled by 5% of the population, that median household incomes have been shrinking, and to even still say the problem is that the moochers and looters are voting themselves benefits instead of working for them. It's bizarre to the point that I can't even get inside this person's head.

Combined with the newly discovered fact that the plutocratic class has at least $32 trillion--that's trillion, with a "t"--stashed away in offshore accounts, it takes some very strange belief systems to assume that the market distributes rewards exactly in proportion to just deserts, that only a very few people therefore are productive at all, while the rest of humanity is a lounging mass of excrement voting themselves into a life just evading the squalor their laziness merits. It's inconceivable and childlike narcissism.

I think on some level most of these people know they don't deserve the ungodly wealth they've been lucky to accumulate at everyone else's expense. At some level they have to know that the difference between their success and others' failures had as much to do with luck, connections and often family ties as any particular effort or brilliance on their part. I think they must also know deep down that concentrating their lives on accumulation of wealth while most of the rest of the world devotes itself to survival, family, following divine dictates and bettering the lives of others, makes them worse human beings in spite of their extravagant riches.

They must know deep down that all of this is terribly wrong. They know the hand of karma either waits round the corner, or ought to. That insecurity and fear leads to a lot of self-justification, immoral universe construction and paranoia. It's no way to live. It also helps explain why so many of our elites make such bad decisions.
 No. No excuses. They bought and paid for a serfs-and-lords economic system and by dog they're going to get it. Even if the 99 percent have to kill and eat our own elderly to survive.

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