Forum Post: Declaration of Independence 2.0 (feel free to add)
Posted 12 years ago on Sept. 27, 2011, 4:07 p.m. EST by gawdoftruth
(3698)
from Santa Barbara, CA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
i wish they would grow up and am having the same love hate relationship
with them as say tzm. it would be nice to have allies that didn't all go waste
their time in infantile demonstrations and instead bothered to you know...
show up with me and have an information revolution. Their way never works
since the USA figured out controlled media. Check.
the media aren't reporting this.
Their silence is a mind crime in and of itself. The government cyclically proves it is the criminal in all of these demonstrations....the police have no business jumping all of those people just for wearing masks... etc... why aren't the police doing the will of the people and arresting the criminals on wall street? why? because we haven't made the legal case as intellectuals that is so; just lobbed assorted attacks and seen the truth but not argued to the public using formal logic and nvc
. You see the problem? My way wins this game forever in under 6 months. their way just gives their negative energy to what they don't like.
John Bassist if Everyone does what they call for... if even 30 percent of the population does... that could be epic and could make change happen. but in what direction? anarchy? Its hard to agree so much and yet have so many clue by fours to hand a mob.
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i think its time for us to write a more eloquent document gentlemen i was thinking something along the lines of "Declaration of Independence 2.0"
1. We the people, of these United States of America, Hereby invoke our
right and our powers and hereby do proclaim that our government, of by and for the people, shall again and immediately be of by and for the people,
instead of of by and for the elites and their assorted bubbles and economic
voodoo schemes. We hereby place under arrest any and all persons who
are merely systemic parasites utilizing fictional economic bubbles in order
to "rule over" the rest of us.
2. It is hereby a criminal offence equal to treason to knowingly lie to the
public and this shall from this moment in time forward be extended to any
and all possible pasts in which government interacted with corporations or
their representatives. Any and all persons who shall be found guilty of
knowingly using mass media to knowingly lie to the public shall be
incarcerated for life in a federal penitentiary or put to death.
3. It is hereby a criminal offence to wage class warfare of any kind, and
specific to this it is thus criminal to do any of the following.
A. Collect taxes. period. Taxes are merely part of the caste system and one
of the bubbles that they ride. Our government was founded on the sound
principle of havin gthe government itself both print and distribute its own
money. The old banking system infiltrated and took over the USA and so the
USA is still more or less owned lock stock and barel and controlled by the
British Crown.
B. Incarcerate persons for non violent non victim offenses.
If you are going to put a person in Jail you must make the case that you are
doing them less harm than they would do to society otherwise.
Currently, they just put people in jail really to fill the jail with random victims
they find instead of look for and deal with real criminals who for the most part
evade the police and get off while random homeless people and drug addicts fill the jails.
C. Create any federal boundaries or laws regarding the creation of unions,
which rightly should take precendence over corporations in government
because they represent PEOPLE not Corporations. Thus Government shall
not restrict the right of people to form unions and to seek just compensation for employment.
D. Own property for rent. Either you sell the property or you keep it vacant.
Renting is in essence a form of masked slavery to prevent people from
owning their own home. Every person in America should own their own
home and probably to start, own it by virtue of inhabiting it.
E. Lie in any kind of contract or make or create any kind of contract that is
knowingly misleading. Contracts should be up front and there should be no
"fine print" phenomenon because everything important should be said up
front. business and corporations need to make an honest living advertising
what they actually are and do at the actual costs and prices, not conspire to
somehow scam their clients with unsecret complexities.
F. Restrict the Right of the people to convene esp upon a political problem
or to solve an issue with any meta entity that the population deems to have
crossed the line. If 10001 people show up at some meta entities door step
thats a citizens arrest and the police darn well had best enforce the will the
people and arrest those folks to make sure that it all goes to proper and fair trials.
(CALL THAT THE CITIZENS ARREST CLAUSE...)
4. The legal notion that a corporation is a legal person or may be is hereby
rescinded. Corporations are not legal persons, and their actions are the
actions in fact of assorted persons who make those decisions. Legal
Representation is also now hereby restored, and ancillary to this (part B) It
shall be the job of the legal representative to run an open source forum and
wiki on which the public can work through problems and make its views
known. This direct communication via the internet shall replace all of the
back door secret secret lies and spies against the public games that have
been going on. From now on we the people demand direct access to our
representatives, the right to tell them what to do, and the right to keep
corporations and meta entities out of it. If a CEO of company X wants to talk
about his company he can do so on the forum with everyone else and in full
view of the public. All gifts and all donations to any public representative
(congress, senate, mayor, city council, etc...) are hereby illegal. You get
payed a flat rate by the government to do the job, and its a nice high wage
because otherwise your not legally allowed to accept gifts while in office or
because of favors after or any of that . Government by secret favors is now over.
You are taking issue with the symptoms, and trying to band-aid them. Please try to work a little deeper into these issues.
And remember, this all happened in a democracy. While the "big boys" certainly encouraged and corralled "the masses" into this situation, ultimately, "the masses" really have chosen this. Blaming it all on the "big boys", especially for things "the masses" have allowed to happen in the past, is very much "class warfare".
The greatest this OccupyWallSt, or any movement, revolution, or whatever you want to call it can achieve is to get people to think about the choices they make every day in their own lives. How often do we choose to support the corporations every day, in everything we do? What did you eat today? Where did it come from?
True I think there was complacency on the part of the 99%, people are starting to do what they haven't been doing, which is demonstrating. We have been in a prosperity coma for the last generation and a half and the standard of living isn't on the rise like it was so were getting a little stressed. This is what a healthy democracy should get every 65 years or so. Think through the history of this country and we have had a number of upheavals, and those shaped by the people(and not strictly industry and business or finance) have yielded a better world. The key thing is that the 99% have been asleep, and some month long camp out near Wall St. isnt gonna finish the job, this has to be the spark. If your not in New York find some people, have them find some people, and cascade a group of people to the local branch of a large bank. Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America in your hometown deserves a non-violent reminders in the form of a constant vigil that in solidarity with the OWS.
In Solidarity
? no, in fact i have gone very deep into assorted issues, its a bit strange for somebody to imagine that theres more depth for me to cover... i have been doing this for 20 years. I speed read, thats essentially a multiple of 10, like 10 people doing this for 20 years. All of this did not happen in a democracy, we never had a genuine democracy. It was always a lie, always a patent oligarchy. I'm not blaming anything on anyone. i'm telling it like it is an I very differently from most am pointing out meaningful and real solutions to those problems. Its a bit late to call "class warfare" when thats exactly the problem; the elites have been conducting a class war. its time to wake up and end it. Your ideas about the best that can come out of this are clearly limited. the best that can come out of this is radical change. Step up to that and don't make believe that you know what you are talking about.
A radical change would be people realizing that the entire system is broken and actually doing something about it every day, by exercising their right of choice.
A radical change would be the people realizing their part in the system.
True, the big boys, or at least their minions, are painting the masses as the cause of the problem, and it's only natural in this age of divisiveness to want to reflect the blame back to those who are unjustly blaming the fools.
It's time to stop being fools.
Quit giving the corporations your money.
No Fast Food Fridays, No Soda Saturdays
The American "food" industry is as much an embodiment of corporate greed as Wall Street. Do something about it.
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150409084095833
If you want to quit playing the Devil's Game, you have to take away the Devil's Toy - money. Then people will be free to learn whatever it is they feel is to be learned, and will not bicker about what is "fair". But I'm not sure the world is quite ready for that, yet.
an interesting and redundant point, you seem to have missed the larger and more complicated issues i have tried to raise.
Even if contracts contained no "fine print" that doesn't mean people will actually read them, and "taxes are a caste system" but we should still collect them? Aren't those two things contradictory? And yeah, I don't want to be put to death for lying either. Pretty much every part of this is totally idiotic.
My over all position is that we should end taxes. period. the USA consitution was generated specifically to create a state with no taxes. The congress was given the responsibility to print and coin and regulate money, and to run society by paying it out as made sense. That may not be a realistic short term plan, so heres a realistic short term plan. one single flat tax rate, everyone gets taxed equally, the same flat rate . People who want to do away with income taxes fail to understand thats another way to sell out everything to the rich who thus then won't pay hardly anything on all of their fortunes.
Flat taxes are regressive, they hurt the poor more than the rich. Getting a flat tax and saying "We won!" is not winning at all, not even close. At best, it's a concession to the powerful.
For example, say I make $1000 a month, at 10% tax, I pay $100, and have $900 left. Someone else makes $100, 000 a month. they pay 10%, or $10,000 a month, leaving them with $90,000 ... the other buy is still making 100 times what I do, and we all pay the same for basic food, gas, power, shelter. Assume these basic necessities cost around $1000 a month. I'm going in debt and the other guy is getting rich.
You can't fight greed, separatism, deception, etc unless you let people know that is what you are fighting. These are ideas of man and they manifest in many ways, and as long as the motivation for these ideas exist, they will always find ways to beat "law".
thats not true, flat taxes are progressive, its unfair "fair" taxes that are regressive. It also depends on the actual percent. most people would pay a lot less and the rich would pay a lot more.
If by "unfair 'fair' taxes" you are talking about tax loopholes or any other method that allows someone to avoid taxation, you have a point indeed. But how exactly does a flat tax enforce tax payment, more than a tax structure where those that profit more pay a higher percentage? In both cases, it's the enforcement of a certain percent, whatever that is in any specific case. There is no difference. A flat tax does not fix tax loopholes, removing the loopholes removes the loopholes.
"unfair" tax = the "fair" tax which is a con scam by the elites to sucker proles into an anti income tax effort.I agree, remove all the loop holes, thats why its also called a flat tax. there are ZERO loop holes,. everyone pays a single given fixed percent of income which is the same for everyone. this has been mathematically proven to be the most progressive way to do things aside from zero taxes and having congress print the money which is what the constitution says.
"most people would pay a lot less and the rich would pay a lot more"
This is by definition not a flat tax then!! A flat tax means everyone pays the same. Thank you jcm for a little bit of rationality.
sorry, but the "flat" does not refer to what you seem to think. It refers to the simple fact that its a single fixed number for everyone, so there is no curve or funny math or income brackets just one tax which is equal and fair to everyone. Its mathematically flat because its the same rate no matter how much or little you make and its loop hole flat because you just end all loop holes. Its always strange to see people making fatal processing errors and accusing me of doing that over semantics issues they don't seem to have bothered to study.
"It refers to the simple fact that it is a single fixed number for everyone"
Exactly, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with loopholes. Nada, zip, zero.
The poor are HURT by flat taxes. Flat taxes serve to increase economic inequality. The simple example I gave makes that very, very clear.
no, the simple example you gave makes it very clear you don't understand.
the poor are NOT hurt by flat taxes, they pay LESS because everyone else is paying their fair share.
The simple example you gave demonstrated you hadn't the foggiest notion what you are talking about or that you are operating as a propaganda shill. which is it?
Please keep the discussion civil.
I know very well what a flat tax means. It means that those who benefit more from the economic system pay the same percent as those who benefit less from the economic system. And I know fully well that the economic system is not fair (that's what the protest is about, isn't it?), and so to tax everyone at the same rate is not fair.
why is it not fair? what are you saying we should do? its the fairest possible taxation scheme, aside from no taxes.
it has everything to do with tax loop holes, because its not genuinely flat
unless there are no loop holes, the very definition of flat in a statistical sense absolutely means zero loop holes. If there are loop holes its not flat,
you can graph the inequalities. A flat tax has no inequalities to graph-
its a flat line straight across no matter how you play with the data unless you try comparing
a rich mans millions to the poor guys pennies and make the rich guy out to be unfairly paying a whole lot more than the poor guy.
IN FACT, all of the other standard alternatives ARE against the poor, a genuine flat tax is the only one that isn't. Which of those repugnicon capitalist tax schemes are you promoting?
I'm promoting a simple graduated tax scheme. Those that benefit more from the system pay a higher percent.
I survive on ~$1000 a month. Pretty sure I could qualify for "public assistance" but do not take it, for various reasons. Why do people need to be making 100x that? They surely cannot be spending that much just to live. And they don't. They use that money to influence politics.
I would agree with a flat tax if income disparity was not so large. Until income is more even, a flat tax is just another way to propagate economic inequality.
I also survive on pennies a month. I sympathize with what you are saying and going through, but to say that its just another way to propagate economic inequality is i think detached from reality. A flat tax would be extremely progressive and people in yours or my situation would still be doing a lot better. I do think those in poverty should not be paying taxes. I'd be interested in hearing more details of your simple graduated tax scheme. I'm not per sey opposed to that in theory, but i'd need to see the details. If millionaires payed another 5 percent MORE than the 99 percent that wouldn't be a bad thing... it makes sense for them to pay more since they are the ones profiting so much from society. However over all i don't think taxes are the place to address the problem of income disparity. I think your problem here is your trying to address the problem of income disparity inside of taxation, there are assorted systemic problems with that including that then we don't address on its own grounds and terms the problem of economic disparity. The theoretical resources and energy and even infrastructures exist for everyone on earth to live as a millionaire. Without boot lickers or gardeners, i Guess. there is no reason to maintain a poverty class.
again. you have driven my thread off topic. Why can't we discuss taxes on a taxes thread?
everyone pays the same PERCENT of what they earn. so if the rate is 5 percent, or 30, everyone pays the same percent. Instead of the middle class getting milked for 60 percent and the rich not paying really any taxes at all or only 3 or 5 or 10 percent.
I get your point about the tax system being too complicated. A simple graduated tax system, however, is still simple.
Ok fine, then what jcm said above would hold true. The big guy still has $90,000 and you still have $900 and the power and the money stays exactly where it is.
nope. Right now, if you make ten thousand dollars you keep what? half of it? a rich man makes ten thousand dollars and he keeps 90 percent of it.
It completely changes the game in utterly dynamic ways, esp when you understand that our current tax codes are all rigged in a very large number of ways to give unflat advantages to the rich.
if you GRAPH the assorted tax rates, you can see this very clearly, where your
assorted bars are all very tall and the riches are all very low where it comes to taxes but this is inverted when it comes to income.
its called a flat tax because when its graphed the graph is a FLAT LINE. get it?
"Your assorted bars are all very tall and the riches are all very low" because of loopholes and tax incentives, not because of the percent they are supposed to be paying.
i posted an evolutionary document. we have decayed into arguing about taxes.
why is it that humanz always decay to the lowest energy zone possible in the conversation?
your derailing my thread. Stop pretending you know anything and read the original post over again. or probably for the first time.
"because of loopholes and tax incentives, not because of the percent they are supposed to be paying." again, a genuine flat tax by definition MUST close all loop holes and end all incentives and subsidies or its not a flat tax.
You realize though, that the primary method of tax evasion is to make it appear as though the amount to be taxed is much smaller than it really is. That's the point of off-shore holding companies, for example. How does a flat tax address this?
a genuinely flat tax is a mathematical and statistical construct. in order to be genuinely flat there has to be nothing to graph.
If people shrink their money one way or some other that makes something graphable and so thats no longer flat.
So a genuine flat tax ends all of those loop holes and tax evasion schemes.So a genuine flat tax ends off shore holding schemes, and etc.
But HOW does it end off-shore holdings? It's not about a % of an amount, it's about the amount itself. Ending off-shore holding is ending off-shore holdings, not a "flat tax".
dude your just talking in circles. it ends it how? thats up in the air the how. I'd say by making it illegal to play such games.
you still seem to be unable to grasp WHAT a flat tax is or why its called that. Its a flat tax because nobody gets away with anything, there are no loop holes, there are no games, etc.
What I learned in high school many years ago, and what Wikipedia says today, is that "flat tax" is short for "flat tax rate". So "flat" refers to the fact that the rate does not change. Perhaps that implies that "nobody gets away with anything", but not by definition.
Now, an argument here is that higher earners would be less likely to try to "cheat" the system in the first place, if they felt they were treated like everyone else, and not being "cheated" by the system themselves simply because they make more money. Whether or not that's true, well, we wouldn't really know unless we tried. But, I think it's obvious that at least some would still try to work around the system for their benefit, as they do now. Maybe fewer would, but ultimately, the people avoiding tax, know they are avoiding tax. What exactly their motivation is, and why they think that is OK, and what it would take to change that, I cannot say.
obviously true, but again i will state, that a flat tax as defined mathematically does by definition mean no loop holes, no hiding money, and no tax evasion schemes.
We need to concentrate on EXACTLY what it is we want changed.
For example:
Legislation that would end "corporate welfare". If the demise or the possibility thereof of a company comes at it's own hands then they should fully and personally experience any adverse effects their actions produced. And if their demise would harm the overall economy then the Government should be able to assume full control of the company until the wrinkles get smoothed out, then give them the opportunity to buy the company back by paying back all of the taxpayer money (with interest) used to hire analysts, accountants, or anyone else that would be involved with righting their wrong as a result of their irresponsibility or financial malpractice rooted from negligence or dishonesty.
Legislation that would require 100% transparency for effective auditing before, during and after the fact. (maintaining trade secrets is of high importance, however their importance should not allow the hiding of greedy practices. These types of audits where sensitive information is being handled can be done confidentially, kind of like certain things are discussed in Judge's chambers in criminal and civil cases when needed.) After all the whole reason they got as far as they did was because they were not being monitored. We need babysitters for them. I don't know of anyone that finds the fact that Casino employees and bank tellers are subject to being video taped and having their records scrutinized absurd. How should they be any different. They have too much power to be left home alone.
Now let's say that everyone agreed with me (which is rare) We would vote on it and make any changes that needed to be made. The next step would be to test our proposed legislation against the constitution to make sure that we are being fair (this would require someone with someone advanced legal expertise who is fluent in legalese) then get some signatures and or endorsements from anyone in the government that agrees to back it up. This will show that THIS is SPECIFICALLY what we want. Only then will we be taken seriously.
I think the passion that those who hold signs, or dance, or make music or art that are on wall street now participating are great, and I love the fact that there are heroic and brave people out there that know they might be subject to being attacked by police, rained on, and not be near the comforts of home because they want change, this is our most valuable characteristic , but we need more cowbell. The song and dance routine will only get so far . We need to collectively draft proposed legislation, vote on the terms and make changes if needed, get people to sign then bring that to our protests.
We are the 99%! THIS is exactly what we want! we have xxx,xxx,xxx people who agree! we demand you make these changes now!
agreed, freedomfries...good points..
You want politicians to sign a document saying, "I will be put to death if I lie." ??
yes. Its actually less absurd than occupying wall street.