Record fall in membership despite earlier claims of increases from right-wing figures
Labour has admitted it is only kept afloat by the money of the mega-rich, after yet another massive fall in party membership numbers – to a level lower than its peak under Ed Miliband and far below the almost 600,000 when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.
According to its latest official figures, the party suffered a net loss of 37,000 members, 9% of its total, by the end of 2023 compared to a year earlier – the biggest year-on-year loss since 2003 when Labour haemorrhaged members during Tony Blair’s illegal war in Iraq. Even the claimed latest membership of 370,000 is suspect according to party insiders, as Labour under Keir Starmer has long padded its figures by continuing to count lapsed members – and its records were long in chaos after outsourcing led to a massive hack and the freezing of its membership administration systems.
Leading right-wing Labour figures have repeatedly briefed that members were pouring in and numbers were rising, attributing this to Starmer. In fact, given Starmer’s deep personal unpopularity, it makes far more sense to attribute the collapse in membership to him, his support for Israel’s genocide, his cowardly assault on left-wing MPs and members and his dog-whistle red-Tory ‘policies’.
And the party has inadvertently admitted that it is only propped up by donations from the super-rich. Party general secretary David Evans has said that the party losing less than the expected £2.5m during the general election campaign was because of “an increase in high-value donations”. Under Corbyn, large numbers of ordinary people chipped in what they could afford – so many that Labour’s debts, grown huge under previous leaders, were wiped out.
Now, even kept afloat by billionaires – and clearly beholden to them, given Labour’s atrocious announcements penalising the poor since Starmer was ushered into Downing Street by the fascist Reform ‘party’ – Labour is still losing money, just less than it would have without the huge donors wanting payback for their investment.
Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
A man holds a sign reading, “Tax the Rich Now” at a protest in Paris on June 23, 2024. (Photo: Laure Boyer/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
“To make our economies secure and protect the earner way of life that has defined the modern era, we need wealth taxes that end the two-tier treatment of wealth,” says a new report.
With countries set to focus heavily on climate finance for the Global South at the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference in November, the Tax Justice Network on Monday offered a proposal that could raise double the amount of money needed to help developing countries transition to clean energy and adapt to extreme weather—and there’s already proof the idea is effective and politically feasible.
The “featherlight” wealth tax introduced in Spain less than two years ago raised hundreds of millions of euros last year by taxing the net worth of the 0.5% richest households, and the group’s report argued that the law should serve as a model for a global wealth tax like the one increasingly supported by finance ministers in wealthy countries.
Spain’s wealth tax, also called the “solidarity surcharge” by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, applied a tax of 1.7% to 3.5% to the richest 0.5% of the country’s households—turning away from the “two-tier treatment of collected wealth and earned wealth” that TJN said is “the root of the problem” of growing inequality.
“Collected wealth—i.e. dividends, capital gains, and rent gained from owning things—is typically taxed at far lower rates than earned wealth—i.e. salaries gained by working,” said TJN. “At the same time, collected wealth typically grows faster than earned wealth. Today, only half of the wealth created around the world each year goes to people who earn for a living—the rest is collected as rent, interest, dividends, and capital gains.”
The two-tier tax system allows billionaires to pay tax rates that are half the rates paid by the rest of society, which has allowed the wealth of the richest 0.0001% people in the world to quadruple since 1987 “to the detriment of economies, societies, and planet,” said TJN.
Because the richest 0.5% of households control, on average, more than 25% of any given society’s wealth, the report states, if countries around the world replicated Spain’s solidarity surcharge, governments could raise $2.1 trillion annually—enough to pay for climate finance as well as other pressing needs.
“By definition, a billionaire owns more wealth than an average U.S. household could spend in 10,000 years. Wealth contributes a lot less to the economy than it can when it’s pharaoh-tombed like this, making economies poorer than the sum of their parts.”
“To guarantee a good life for all citizens and preserve social cohesion despite these challenges, governments around the world need the fiscal space to transform economies in a socio-ecological manner, ensure high-quality education for all, guarantee access to modern health services, and fulfill basic needs like affordable housing, food, and transportation at the same time,” reads the report. “Such measures are only feasible with sufficiently endowed and stable public budgets. A moderate, progressive wealth tax could help countries to raise these urgently needed funds.”
The report shows, said Oxfam International, that “E.U. governments can no longer excuse their ‘lack of funds’ for failing to fight the climate crisis and end poverty. The money they need is in the pockets of the super-rich!”
In each country, half the population holds only about 3% of the wealth—a persistent inequality that is “making economies insecure and is directly linked to people having to spend more than they bring in.”
The current global tax system treats billionaires as though they “earn wealth like everybody else, they’re just better at it,” said Mark Bou Mansour, head of communications for TJN. “This is bogus.”
“It’s impossible to earn a billion dollars,” Bou Mansour said. “The average U.S. worker would have to work for a stretch of time 13 times longer than humans have existed to earn as much as wealth as the world’s richest man has today. Salaries don’t make billionaires, dividends and rent money do. But we tax dividends and rent money much less than we tax salaries, and this is destabilizing the earner model our economies are based on.”
“By definition, a billionaire owns more wealth than an average U.S. household could spend in 10,000 years,” he added. “Wealth contributes a lot less to the economy than it can when it’s pharaoh-tombed like this, making economies poorer than the sum of their parts. To make our economies secure and protect the earner way of life that has defined the modern era, we need wealth taxes that end the two-tier treatment of wealth.”
On the BBC, which featured TJN’s report in a segment on Monday, Bou Mansour debunked the common claim that taxing the richest households would harm countries’ economies by pushing rich people to move away.
“This is an area where public perception has been lagging behind the evidence,” said Bou Mansour. “Recent wealth taxes in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all resulted in a migration rate of 0.01% among the super-rich who were taxed. So what the data shows is that the super-rich do not leave en masse, and what’s more striking is that the data shows if countries do not implement wealth taxes, that is far more harmful to the economies.”
Countries can raise $2 trillion a year by following the example of Spain’s #WealthTax, our new study shows. But just as important as the amount that wealth taxes can raise, our study talks about how the extreme wealth of the superrich left untaxed makes our economies insecure. pic.twitter.com/eXgluZ24tq
— Tax Justice Network @TaxJusticeNet.bsky.social (@TaxJusticeNet) August 19, 2024
The report notes that concerns about the super-rich simply hiding their wealth in tax havens are valid, and called on countries to ensure that the U.N. tax convention currently being negotiated “delivers robust tax transparency standards.”
“Countries should collaborate to combat tax abuse by the ultra-rich, a challenge addressed in another strand of literature,” reads the report. “A straightforward starting point for combating this form of tax abuse in the context of a wealth tax is the implementation of full beneficial ownership transparency, at least within the country itself.”
While a number of G20 finance ministers have come out in support of a global wealth tax this year, leaders in some wealthy countries including U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have refused to back the proposal.
“The vast majority of countries are currently working on what can be the biggest shakeup in history to global tax rules, to end the scourge of global tax abuse by multinational corporations and the superrich. But a minority of rich countries still seem to be holding back from support for a robust framework convention on tax,” said Alison Schultz, research fellow at TJN and co-author of the report. “This needs to change now—the climate can’t wait, and nor can the people of the world.”
U.S. President Donald Trump smiles at House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) after speaking about the passage of tax cut legislation at the White House in Washington, D.C. on December 20, 2017. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
In legislatures, the courts, and our executive offices, we have a system rigged in favor of the ultra-rich, rigged by everything from acts of Congress and judicial rulings to IRS budgets and audit policies.
By all appearances, former U.S. President Donald Trump has cut a sweet deal with a dozen or two of America’s richest billionaires: Finance his campaign and he’ll keep their federal taxes super low—or even lower them—once he’s sitting back in the White House.
How much do billionaires like this deal? This much: In April, hedge fund billionaire John Paulsen held a Palm Beach fundraiser for Trump that brought in $50.5 million. Immediately after Trump’s late May conviction on 34 felony counts in Manhattan, Timothy Mellon, the grandson of the classic plutocrat Andrew Mellon, ponied up $50 million. Miriam Adelson, the billionaire widow of Las Vegas kingpin Sheldon Adelson, appears eager to kick in as much as $100 million.
This past spring, meanwhile, billionaires Elon Musk and David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party for Trump, with attendees including the illustrious deep pockets Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Milken.
The rich themselves have actually become more brazen about avoiding taxes. Just try to stop us, they seem to be saying.
America’s billionaires clearly see politics as one route to ensuring they pay as little as possible at tax time. But they don’t just make their presence felt at election time. America’s rich have their thumbs firmly on the scale of all three branches of government. In legislatures, the courts, and our executive offices, we have a system rigged in favor of the ultra-rich, rigged by everything from acts of Congress and judicial rulings to IRS budgets and audit policies.
Some of this rigging we can all easily see. The dividends and long-term capital gains of the ultra-rich have for decades faced a maximum tax rate barely half the maximum rate applicable to other forms of income. And the investment income of the rich, unlike the paychecks of working people, faces no Social Security tax.
In 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency, intense lobbying efforts helped rich business owners to a special tax rate for their business income. In 2018 alone, according to ProPublica, that special rate translated into a $67 million gift to Mike Bloomberg, whose personal wealth now reportedly exceeds $100 billion.
But these glaring privileges the rich enjoy at tax time only tell part of the billionaire tax story. Other parts get precious little attention. In 2004, for instance, lawmakers in Congress enacted a penalty for the failure to disclose potentially abusive tax avoidance transactions on tax returns. The penalty on the surface looked substantial: 75% of the tax sought to be avoided. But Congress capped the penalty at $100,000, a move that turned the penalty into a minor nuisance for billionaires seeking to avoid millions of dollars in taxes.
In our current rich people-friendly tax climate, IRS staff who want to do the right thing face tough going. Recently, for example, one former IRS staffer, Michael Welu, went public with his concerns that the IRS itself has both official and unofficial policies that end up treating audited rich taxpayers much more gently than small business owners.
Welu found the upper management of the IRS division tasked with auditing the super rich—and the corporations they run—distinctly uninterested in investigating America’s richest and their “most egregious, ridiculous schemes” for avoiding taxes.
IRS officials like Michael Welu do occasionally speak out. But only tax wonks truly have any real sense of how much obscure tax code penalties and IRS audit policies favor the rich. And most of those tax wonks work for the rich.
The rich themselves have actually become more brazen about avoiding taxes. Just try to stop us, they seem to be saying.
Take the recently decided Supreme Court case, Moore v. United States. Working through an array of right-wing organizations, the conservative mover-and-shaker Leonard Leo attempted to use a challenge to an obscure one-time tax as a vehicle to preempt Congress from ever taxing the wealth or unrealized gains of the ultra-rich. Ultimately, the court decided the case without ruling on whether the rich can be taxed on their wealth or unrealized gains. But the opinions that four of the nine justices handed down made it clear that they stand prepared to do the billionaire bidding should a direct challenge to a tax on the wealth or unrealized gains of billionaires come before them.
Billionaires now have at least three Supreme Court justices firmly in their pockets. Reporting by ProPublica has revealed the massive gifts that have been flowing from Harlan Crow and other billionaires to Justice Clarence Thomas as well as the generous gifts that billionaire Paul Singer has been sending Justice Samuel Alito’s way. Justice Neil Gorsuch has had his entire career, including his appointment to the court, funded by the billionaire Philip Anschutz.
Those three justices, along with Justice Amy Coney-Barret, have now made it patently obvious they will not allow billionaires to be taxed on their unrealized gains or their wealth. Does anyone really think the billionaires won’t have the crucial, majority-making fifth vote from Justice Brett Kavanaugh when they need it?
Republican members of Congress are showing even less shame than our Supreme Court justices. Last year, these GOP lawmakers held the country hostage in negotiations to increase the country’s debt limit. Their price for agreeing to raise the debt limit, thereby avoiding a default on the country’s debt? They demanded—and won—a reduction in a scheduled IRS budget increase that would been used to increase enforcement moves against rich taxpayers.
The purported motive for this legislative hostage taking—“concern” over the federal deficit—made for an absurd justification. The proposed increase in the IRS budget would have been recovered, several times over, through increased tax collections. The IRS budget reductions the Republican lawmakers extracted will, in fact, only increase the federal deficit. But those reductions will serve a political purpose. They’ll protect the GOP’s richest patrons from tax enforcement.
The mainstream media, to no one’s surprise, did a miserable job of exposing this Republican dishonesty in the debt limit negotiations. But at one point in our recent past a courageous soul did emerge to expose the rot in our tax system. What happened? The ultra-rich and their henchmen in Congress make sure that this soul faced a punishment far more severe than any punishment ever meted out to those few rich Americans who actually get caught evading their taxes due.
That courageous soul, Charles Littlejohn, worked as an IRS contractor. He leaked tax return information related to Trump and America’s billionaires to TheNew York Times and ProPublica. ProPublica used that leaked information to write over 50 stories about billionaire tax avoidance, embarrassing and angering many of our richest in the process. Two of them even brought lawsuits, one against the IRS and the other against Littlejohn’s employer.
Ultimately, Littlejohn pled guilty to one count of unauthorized tax return information disclosure, a crime that carries a recommended sentence of four to 10 months. But 25 Republican members of Congress, undoubtedly at the behest of their billionaire patrons, wrote the judge in the case and urged the harshest possible sentence of five years. The judge obliged, stating in her sentencing remarks that Littlejohn posed a graver threat to democracy than the January 6 rioters. As tax law professor Reuven Avi-Yonah has noted, Littlejohn is now serving a sentence far harsher than any imposed on rich Americans convicted of tax evasion.
Littlejohn’s extreme sentence did not reflect the one single count of unauthorized tax return information disclosure he pled guilty to. That sentence reflects his “crime” of exposing the tax avoidance of the billionaire class.
Try this thought experiment: Imagine if Littlejohn had released the return information of 1,000 or so taxpayers with modest incomes to ProPublica. Imagine that ProPublica had then publicly detailed all the tip income that servers and bartenders among these taxpayers had failed to report and all the social meals that small business owners in the sample had claimed as business expenses. If Littlejohn had then pled to one count of unauthorized disclosure, would 25 members of Congress have intervened? Would the judge have imposed a sentence over six times the maximum recommended in federal sentencing guidelines?
Doesn’t it become dangerous to society when the punishment for a crime depends on who the victim happens to be?
We are now living that danger. Our billionaires sit firmly in control. And they will do whatever it takes to make sure they never pay tax at an appropriate level—even if that means locking a human being up for a preposterously long time just to send a message.
There is a huge global issue that needs but is not getting immediate attention. It’s the climate crisis, that fossil fuels industries knew that they were killing our planet for profit.
We need to understand what’s happening. Let’s start:
Fossil fuel companies knew from 1960s that they were destroying the planet for their profits, to make themselves rich they knowingly destroyed the World. They must have had the attitude we don’t give a fuck for anyone else, we’re going to get rich. They fucking knew. They fucking knew because they had reports telling them that they were desroying the planet for their profits.
These fossil fuel companies knew in the 60s, 80 years ago and they decided to destroy the planet so that they would get rich. That’s Capitalism.
ed: There’s more of course.
80+ years after the oil companies were advised by their own research that they were destroying the planet, they’re still doing it.
dizzy: You’re going to have to object to it soon or it will be too late, you will have missed it. We need an immediate transition from fossil fuels.
dizzy: The world needs an immediate transition from fossil fuels to renewables. The immediacy cannot be overstated …
“The idea that rich and poor are equal before government in democratic societies is ludicrous,” writes Polychroniou. “As disparities in wealth and income grow, so do the disparities in political influence.” (Photo: flickr/Creative Commons)
Wealth taxation may sound like a good idea, but can it really address, let alone solve, the problem of inequality?
Economic inequality is the scourge of the 21st century. The rich are getting richer and faster than any other time since the onset of neoliberalism, which calls for “free-market” capitalism, regressive taxation, fiscal austerity and the rejection of the social state. They get richer not only when the economy is on an upswing but even amid crises. Billionaires more than doubled their net worth during the pandemic, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The latest analysis shows that the richest 1 percent gained $42 trillion in new wealth over the past decade, which amounts to “nearly 34 times more than the entire bottom 50 percent of the world’s population.” In the meantime, the very poor and low-income people across the globe, including the U.S., are actually getting poorer. So much for trickle-down economics which was popularized during the 1980s by the Reagan administration’s vast capital gains and income tax cuts and continues to persist to this day in spite of its major flaws. Cutting taxes on the rich not only increases economic inequality but has no effect on economic growth and unemployment.
There must be something very rotten with an economic system that allows individuals to generate obscene amounts of wealth to the point they can hijack the political system and undermine democracy.
However, inequality should not be examined purely from an economic perspective. Over the years, numerous studies have shown that economic inequality influences public attitudes toward democracy by generating political disillusion and low trust in government and other institutions, like Congress. Inequality also undermines social mobility, contributes to political polarization and fuels authoritarianism.
Finally, inequality contributes to climate change. The richest 1 percent is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66 percent, according to a 2023 report by Oxfam. Of course, while the world’s wealthiest people make a huge contribution to climate change, they are also able to insulate themselves from the worst impacts of global warming.
In sum, the super-rich can be blamed for many of the most serious ills confronting societies in the twentieth-first century. The only consequential question here is this: what can be done about it then?
One of the most frequent responses to the problem of rising inequality is a call for the implementation of a wealth tax. Wealth taxation may sound like a good idea, but can it really address, let alone solve, the problem of inequality? The answer is an unqualified “no.” At least for the world’s advanced economies. Indeed, even if it’s possible to discover all the wealth that the very rich people own (much of which is hidden in companies or put in trusts) and then proceed with an accurate asset valuation, this will have very little impact, if any, on the daily lives of people who try to survive on minimum wages. Wealth taxation alone will have no impact on workers without social protection and no bargaining power at companies. It won’t protect workers at the “gig economy” and part-time workers.
To effectively address economic inequality, we must identify the root cause of the problem, and one simple way to do this is by asking a rather simple question: How does one become superrich? Where does this immense wealth come from? Because as the renowned progressive economist James K. Boyce recently put it “nobody ‘earns’ a billion dollars.
There must be something very rotten with an economic system that allows individuals to generate obscene amounts of wealth to the point they can hijack the political system and undermine democracy. Democracy cannot exist when we have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. The idea that rich and poor are equal before government in democratic societies is ludicrous. As disparities in wealth and income grow, so do the disparities in political influence.
Take corporations, for example, which exert enormous influence, thanks primarily to campaign donations and lobbying Their actions, which range from opposing labor laws and policies that benefit workers to restricting unionization, exacerbate inequalities at all levels of society and across the globe. Moreover, the surge in billionaire wealth and the surge in “corporate power and monopoly power” form a powerful connection. The very rich are not simply beneficiaries of the existing economic order. They are in control of the working arrangements of the global economic system. Yet despite the enormous power that corporations have on people’s lives and the communities in which they operate, there are very few policies and mechanisms at national or international level to curtail that power.
Of course, we know that billionaires and big corporations pay very little in taxes, but we need much more than wealth and corporate taxation. We need ways to curb the power of big corporations and their drive to maximize shareholder value at the expense of everything else. We should also set a cap on extreme wealth. There is no social value for having billionaires. We should abolish the superrich, perhaps an easier task, politically speaking, than finding ways to tax them. Democratic societies could hold a referendum on whether we should abolish extreme wealth.
In addition, we could create economic arrangements that provide a minimum income to ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met. This can be done either through universal basic income or guaranteed income programs.
Last, but not least, we can challenge the rule of capital by advancing democratic forms of economic governance and economic planning. Participatory economics is one such alternative that would change the economy as we know it since it entails social ownership of production and self-managed workplaces. Worker cooperatives are established is various parts of Europe, particularly in Italy and Spain. The Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain is owned by its workers and represents the biggest and most successful case of worker cooperatives. Of course, for economic transformation to occur, breaking down hierarchical structures and putting workers in charge of business activities is not enough. What needs to happen is that the values of worker cooperatives spread across the economy and that power is wrested away from the capitalist class.In today’s world, we can tackle economic inequality only by shifting the conversation to its root causes and then coming up with blends of policies that work together to put an end to the driving forces behind inequality. Spending all political capital on something like a wealth tax will only help to prolong the life of an immensely cruel and dangerous economic system. An easier and far more effective way to end plutocracy is through the power of democracy via a binding referendum that calls on citizens to decide whether or not we should abolish altogether extreme wealth.
