"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" blew my mind. "Billionaires and Ballot Bandits" just tells us that nothing has changed.

Yes I was very doubtful. But not a single Banker has gone to jail in the UK. Why?

We got 1. Kareem Sarageldin. Thrown to the wolves by his bosses as sacrifice.

But hey, we're putting a WHOLE BUNCH of teachers in Georgia in jail for gaming the "No Child Left Behind" system! JUSTICE, Y'ALL. Because, you know, they make less than $50k per year, instead of millions. They're not "job creators".

BTW - we put over 800 people in jail in the 1980's for the Savings & Loan crisis. Wall Street didn't like that so they got the rules changed. Now, they just look at the U.S. government and say "we dare you. You know the economy will collapse, because we gamed the system and we ARE the economy".

And now they gamble with taxpayer money. Socialism when they lose, Capitalism when they win.

I never did get that job creation thing. A company might sell a share initially for a dollar, then the stock exchanges buy and sell it many thousands (millions?) of times over taking a cut each time. The original company still only got the first dollar.
Then they option trade it, spread bet it, sell it short, sell it long.........and the guy who makes something/provides a service still only gets the one dollar. What a fucking racket.

If the price of the sold shares increases, the price of the shares you still hold yourself increases as well. You very much have a common interest with people holding some of your shares.

Also, you only sell a share for one buck if you apparently think that's a good deal for you, so even if your profit is just a buck, you got a deal you wanted. You benefit, otherwise you wouldn't sell the share for that price in the first place.

Yeah, teachers din't create jobs. They create employees...

Remember a company fabricates share from nothing. Share price goes up? Release a few shares onto the market and take the money, share price goes down? Spend some of your reserve cash buying the shares back..,

For new/small companies, employees can be given shares, the company can hand them out like candy... If the company collapses no loss. If it thrives, those emoyees can sell off their shares for a healthy profit - so you now have a small company where your employees want to see it succeed ( this is an alternative incentive to actually paying them, or offering them a pay increase, because as a small company you're often strapped for cash...)

So all in all, shares act like the ability to print your own currency. Thus giving your company power...

Iceland did a great job jailing their prime minister for mismanaging the economy, and they bounced back pretty fast from not bailing out their banks... It is only a pity more countries didn't follow their example.

We can still jail them. We ourselves have that power

Who is we?

Everyone

The only good thing about bring oppressed by a small elite is that they are outnumbered

So you think we as a collective can jail the bankers?

Of course we can. We as a collective made them bankers

Also, maybe you can look at this case: theantimedia.org/former-us-attorney-general-joins-lawsuit-against-bush-for-illegal-war-in-iraq

And what Thucy said, it worked in Iceland, though having that power is not scale-invariant.

The thing about share buy backs is as fast as the company buys them back they issue more as an incentive to the BoD and top management. Sure the ordinary worker might get a few crumbs, but he is being conned every bit as much as the run of the mill private investor. The working- and middle-classes are lambs to the coperate slaughter.

I wish you luck toppling the money structure in this country, Thucy. You will need it.

Maximum wage as a multiple of the minimum wage? Inheritance tax? Property transfer tax? Please let's not hear all that 'rate for the job shit' that argument is designed to pull the wool over our eyes. I will sit on your remuneration committee if you will sit on mine

Lol a maximum wage? Yeah right.

Lol bo sox the fact that you wish me luck instead of joining is precisely the problem

Maximum wage would force people who are worth lots of money to start for themselves to gain what they're worth, potentially splintering big companies.

If they choose not to though, it actually enriches the big companies because they have to pay less.

Maximum wage means that the wealth gap is decreased by harming one set of people without inherently benefiting any other group of people in any way.

Thucy, if you have a solution, I am all in, but you don't, nor does anyone else, that is capable of toppling the plutocracy.

I mean no offence Thucy, but I believe that in some ways you are just waiting for things to happen. Yes, you stick to your principles, but one man's principles alone don't topple such a structure.
Indeed, I think you are depending on luck quite a bit and I've been trying to convince you to actively get the wheels in motion.

What else is there to do? A hundred years worth of movements and revolutions have been crushed. The only successes are social revolutions, which are important but on their own change nothing.

"Maximum wage as a multiple of the minimum wage? Inheritance tax? Property transfer tax?"

Funny thing about taxes. The very rich always have enough money to bribe politicians to get loopholes written into tax laws, and can pay top-notch accountants and tax attorneys to structure their wealth to avoid paying. And on the rare occasions when that doesn't work (for example, with communist revolutions), the rich generally just pack all their mobile capital into a few trains or planes full of money-laden suitcases and go somewhere else, leaving the proles to try and figure out how to run the complex immobile assets (big businesses) they couldn't take with them. The people who get hit the worst by "soak the rich" tax schemes are the upper middle class, who between the oppressive "anti-rich" tax burden they must shoulder and the costs of the advanced educations or business startup loans they needed to get into the upper middle class, generally don't live all that much better than the middle-middle class.

You cannot tax the rich into not being rich. Never going to happen. But you can cut a few rungs out of the ladder towards the top and make it pretty damned difficult for everyone else to get ahead.

I'm not waiting for anything. You can erode the power of elites by disobeying them, today. We all know what it is they want for us to do. do the opposite

And once enough people do that, they will fade away. It's not so much revolution that we require, but evolution. Prove to yourself first that the consumerism and greed they claim is inevitable is in fact more than evitable, and you will find that their power over your life fades away.