President Barack Obama in Tucson, Arizona, 01/12/11 (Photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)

 

This year, the New Deal turned 80. And those same New Deal programs championed by FDR, a Democrat, defined the bedrock of the American left political achievements for all others who would seek the presidency. Now, the corporate takeover of our government has proven that those New Deal programs can be slowly dismantled by a Democrat president, as the Obama administration fully digs its heels in on an austerity agenda. 

He’s not the one running the show, but rather, his strings are being pulled by Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers like  Pete Peterson , who is most of the wallet behind the corporate-funded “Fix the Debt” sham campaign. Even one of Fix the Debt’s key spokesmen admitted that their goal was to create an ” artificial crisis ” that would justify gutting Social Security. 

Jack Lew, Obama’s Treasury secretary, is leading the administration’s doublespeak on austerity. In Europe, he’s told political leaders to lighten up on austerity measures. But in America, Lew is telling Congress to endorse President Obama’s proposals to cut earned benefits for vulnerable Americans who need them to survive, even though Social Security doesn’t contribute to the deficit. Lew is also a pawn of the corporate and financial string-pullers, coming from Citigroup before his years in the Clinton administration’s division of budget. He was even guaranteed a bonus by Citigroup if he was able to secure a “high-level” federal job.

The corporations running our government want our public resources, too. The White House is currently mulling a proposal to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority, which FDR’s New Deal established as the nation’s largest publicly-owned power company. Privatization of public resources is one of the key austerity measures being forced by the European Union right now, particularly in scorched-earth economies like Greece and Spain. Privatization of public resources, the selling-off of a public good for corporate profit, means that the people who depended on that service are usually subject to frequent price gouging, while under the thumb of an unaccountable private corporation.

Privatization is especially high on the agenda, considering the 10 oil spills that happened in America over just two weeks’ time and the Senate’s recent endorsement of the Keystone XL pipeline. A large public drinking water supply was tainted with 5,000 barrels of tar sands oil in Mayflower, Arkansas. Yet Bill Clinton, the only former US president from Arkansas, has been noticeably silent on Exxon’s catastrophe even though Little Rock is just 25 miles North of Mayflower.

The silence from both Clinton and Obama on Mayflower is deafening, especially as Exxon has declared the area over the spill a no-fly zone, which has been enforced by Obama’s FAA. Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel, a Democrat, has even privatized oil spill cleanup, allowing a company that investigative journalist Steve Horn recently revealed is notorious for oil spill coverups. And since a loophole in federal law says that Exxon’s spilled tar sands oil is bitumen and not oil, they won’t have to pay for the cleanup. The cleanup and coverup job for Mayflower will be paid for by the taxpayers, while the corporations that created the entire mess draw more record profits. BP did the same thing after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that ruined an entire region’s economy, Deepwater wrote it off on their taxes as a loss, shifting the cost to suckers like us. The corporations who run our state and federal governments don’t care which party is in power, as long as they can still control their agenda.

President Obama is also caving to the meat industry’s demands to privatize poultry inspection, despite mainstream chicken producers like Tyson just recently paying a multimillion-dollar settlement for ammonia accidents. Obama’s quiet signing of the Monsanto Protection Act, which exempts GMO crops from judicial review and was written by a senator who received money from Monsanto, is another indicator of the White House’s subservience to big agriculture.

None of these measures are because corporations are struggling and need help from the government to survive. On the contrary, the Dow Jones and S&P 500 have rallied to zoom past pre-recession levels, and corporate profits are at record highs, precisely because workers’ wages are so low. Yet the only bone Obama has thrown to the poor was a proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9. This would make an unremarkable difference in the lifestyles of low-wage workers. As Elizabeth Warren rightly pointed out, had the minimum wage kept up with executive pay, or even just the cost of living, it would be roughly $20 an hour today.

The left has made plenty of fuss over the president’s latest proposal to gut one of the programs near and dear to Americans of all political stripes. They’ve even promised to offer primary challengers to all Democrats running for re-election who support Obama’s plan to gut Social Security. Obama has been hearing for years from the left about how Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, and has been quoted saying that he would raise the pay-in cap to ensure the program’s solvency when he was campaigning for his first term. But the corporate owners of our government want our Social Security money to become a treasure trove of poker chips for their next gambling spree, and have finally gotten a Democratic president to begin chipping away at his own party’s key legislative victory of the 20th century.

Instead of following his own words of the past, or heeding the calls of the people, President Obama is meeting with Wall Street bankers to enlist their help in selling his austerity agenda to the American people. While most Americans voted for the lesser of two evils last November, we still voted for evil. And with the revealing of Obama’s latest plans, that evil side is showing its face even more these days. In his “American Dream” monologue, the late George Carlin warned us of our “owners” taking our retirement money, because “they don’t give a f*ck about you.” Turns out, he was right.

The people of the United States should rightly interpret this latest slew of betrayals in government as proof that we live under the thumb of a corporate tyranny, not a legitimate constitutional republic. And we should come together to decide what a functional new government would look like, and reject the assumed legitimacy of our corporate ownership’s puppet government.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Gibson, 25, of Jackson, Mississippi, is co-founder of US Uncut, a grassroots direct action movement that protests corporate tax dodgers and budget cuts. His columns are published regularly for Truthout, Bright Green Scotland, Huffington Post, The Mark News, and syndicated to 850 newspapers across America through Daryl Cagle’s Blog on MSNBC and MSN.com.

US corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion of cash, not sure what to do with it except hide more of it offshore. They can’t expand production because, after years of rising prices, & falling wages for the bottom 80%, the necessary consumer demand is just not there. Surprise, surprise. So, as technology, off-shoring and productivity continue their unstoppable advance, how many of us will eventually join the unemployed?

::::::::

In Silicon Valley, where one fourth of the population now earn an average of about $19,000 dollars a year, median rent for a decent 1-BR apartment is about $20,000 a year, and that difference adds up to homelessness for many.   So, in the shadow of Google, in the shadow of Oracle, in the shadow of Apple Computer, you have people who are homeless and hungry.

The Valley is still generating successful people on the high end of course–engineers and scientists and the programmers who write code.   But the support positions, like in manufacturing, have largely disappeared.   Most of that work is now done in very low-wage countries where environmental laws and corporate taxes are virtually non-existent.

For every 5 jobs corporations were adding in the Valley, they were building 2 units of housing.   So that jacked up the housing prices to what has become, right beside that of NY City, the most expensive in the country.   People who had blue-collar jobs were getting paid 10, 15, 20 bucks an hour, and when their jobs went away, usually to Asia or Mexico, and they lacked the skills to participate at a higher level, so they had to take jobs that paid $8 an hour, which has been the minimum wage in San Jose for the past 15 years.   But on those wages, you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t buy food, and you can’t handle the expense of driving to work and back.   So, increasingly, you find people living three or four families to an apartment, or you find people moving into homeless shelters, or into tents along the creeks or in parks — mostly where other people, and the police, aren’t going to see them.   The problem remains largely hidden.

In spite of a booming economy and record profits by stock holders and big corporations, inequality in America is now at the greatest level in modern history and shows no signs of abating.   But how to explain this disconnect?   When the market goes up, it often means that corporations are benefiting from the new efficiency and productivity that comes with new computer applications and ever more sophisticated automation.   And this means they can fire workers in order to increase investor profits, and so they do exactly that.   Not surprisingly then, the latest figures show that the number of employed has barely risen, while ever more rank-and-file Americans have simply gone missing from the job market altogether and are no longer even being counted as unemployed.   Most significantly, the Commerce Department reports that personal income fell 3.6% in January — the biggest one-month drop in twenty years — which gives rise to one burning question:   As technology, off-shoring and production efficiency continue their unstoppable advance, just how many of us will eventually be on the road to serfdom and poverty in this new “feudalist,’ corporate-dominated society?

Which brings us to our nation’s capital — rich in alabaster symbols of representative government yet shamelessly cynical in writing laws and bending rules (especially in the tax code) that massively favor corporations and the top 1%.

Corporate profits are at record highs.   But have those companies invested any of those profits in new jobs?   No, of course not.   Why not?   Two reasons:

• 1.     With wages shrinking and decently paid jobs increasingly scarce, most consumers have ever less spending money in their wallets and so they are buying ever less stuff.
• Did corporations at least give their workers a bump-up in pay?   Hardly.   Well then surely the corps shelled out a little more in taxes to help refurbish the nation’s infrastructure, which they and their workers use daily.   (I refer of course to the highways, bridges, schools, libraries, and parks.)   Guess again.   The fact is that US corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion of cash, not sure what to do with it except hide more of it offshore.   They can’t expand production because, after years of rising prices, and falling wages for the bottom 80%, the necessary consumer demand is just not there.   Surprise, surprise.
  

  Not exactly a model citizen. Money is the only thing that counts.

  Now look at this report  just published by the Public Interest Research Group, on how average citizens and small businesses have to pay for the $90 billion that giant companies “save” by hiding profits in offshore tax havens.   Among the 83 publicly traded corporations named, is Pfizer, which for the past five years reported no taxable income in the US, even as it made 40% of its sales here!

  Also Microsoft, which avoided $4.5 billion in taxes over three years by miraculously shifting its income to Puerto Rico.   Yet another:   Citigroup, which maintains 20 “subsidiaries’ in tax havens and has over $42 billion sitting off-shore.   Taxes collected here at home on that $42 billion?   Zero — thanks to Joe Sixpack and other working-stiff taxpayers . . who got stiffed with this bill and many others like it!

  But it’s not only corporations that are stashing their swag offshore.   The Center for Public Integrity in Washington and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently got their hands on two and a half million files from offshore bank accounts and shell companies set up around the world by the wealthy.   Among those documents are the names of 4,000 Americans who hid their money in secret tax havens so that the rest of us could pay the taxes on it.

  Here’s how they do it:

  Set up a secret company using one of hundreds of off-shore locations.   The British Virgin Islands, for example, is home to half a million offshore companies.   There you can buy a ready-made shell company or create your own secret company from scratch in about three days, for just over $1,000.   You may be asked to produce documents to establish your identity and they might check your name in a database, to see if you’re a terrorist.   But that’s it.

  So it shouldn’t surprise us to learn  that the United States actually collects less in taxes as a share of its economy than all but two other industrialized countries!   Only Chile and Mexico collect less.   Chile and Mexico!

  So appreciate this:   Right now a powerful group of CEO’s, multi-millionaires and billionaires, are calling on Congress to “fix the debt.”   And their puppet politicians (paid stooges) in both parties are glad to oblige.   But fix the debt by raising more taxes from those who can most afford to pay?   Of course not.   Close the loopholes?   No way!   Shut down the tax havens?   Not a chance!   Cancel the Mitt Romney Clause that Congress enacted, allowing big winners to pay a tax rate far less than that of their chauffeurs, nannies, and gardeners?   Are you nuts?!   –big corps and billionaires are their primary campaign donors!   Why bite the hand that feeds you?

  Instead, our political heroes in Washington are attempting to “fix the debt” by cutting back on services for veterans and the elderly, the sick and poor, and kids in Head Start.

  Marching in lockstep beneath a banner that now stands for “Guardians of Privilege” — GOP — Republicans refuse to raise taxes on the rich, while Democrats have a president whose new budget contains gimmicks that could lead to cuts in Social Security.   Social Security!   Our one universal safety net — and a modest one at that — and still the main source of purchasing power for millions of aging Americans.   This betrayal from a Democrat, the heir of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who pulled us to our feet when the Great Depression had America on its knees.

  As Roosevelt explained at the time,     “This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.”

  But those were the days when our political system rallied to the defense of everyday Americans.   Now a petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant bunch of political whores and Tea Party yahoos have come to dominate and paralyze our government, while ever more millions of formerly proud Americans keep falling into the ever widening chasm that has turned us into the United States of Ever-growing Inequality.

  Warren Buffett, the savviest capitalist of them all, may have written this era’s epitaph, which I’ve here bastardized just a bit: “Yes of course there is a class war, and my class is winning.   Handily”

  ============================================

  With thanks to Bill Moyers, from whose recent program this article was derived.

  Submitters Website: http://www.TechEditingServices.com

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

  Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I’ve always been more interested in political economics and what’s going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I’ve rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.

Our top executives today, by contrast, don’t smile at tax time. They laugh — at the feeble efforts of officialdom to block their massive corporate tax avoidance.

How can we squelch this arrogant avoiding? Well, we could play a video game. Like the brand-new Tax Evaders, a deliciously creative blast against the games CEOs play at tax time. Last week, Tax Evaders activists projected their game onto buildings that house some of America’s most notorious corporate tax dodgers. Charles Skouras, a big projector guy, would no doubt have approved.

Inside this week’s Too Much, more on movies and imagination.

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The wealthy don’t like to wait. Even for movies. Now they don’t have to. Prima Cinema is now offering a new service that lets movie-lovers of means view the latest Hollywood release the same day that release hits movie theaters. The cost: $500 per viewing, after installing special projection equipment that costs $35,000. This new service will initially be available only in Southern California, New York, and Florida. Says Prima CEO Jason Pang: “This is not Netflix.” The service debuted in January. Pang is expecting 1,000 subscribers by year end.

Quote of the Week

“The plutocracy has learned something important from the collapse of 2008 and its aftermath. If you cause a depression, if you loot and exploit the vulnerable to enrich yourselves while spreading the gap between rich and poor, and if you even go so far as to steal the homes and other assets of your victims in broad daylight, then mainstream parties of the contemporary West will do nothing to stop you.”
Dan Kervick, Where We Are Now, New Economic Perspectives, April 9, 2013

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Web Gem

therules.org/ Learn more about the vast global wealth divide and help change the rules that concentrate wealth at the world’s economic summit.

Looking to learn how to better engage people in dialogue about the wealth gap and how to fight it? Check out the latest United for Fair Economy “training of trainers” conference this June in Boston. Details online.

Stat of the Week

Why America’s deep-pocket tax cheats aren’t exactly shaking in their boots: The number of criminal convictions for tax offenses has fallen over a third since 1992, despite a 22 percent increase in the nation’s population. The odds of getting convicted for a tax crime, notes tax analyst David Cay Johnston, have dropped by nearly half over the last two decades.

Thomas Campbell didn’t have a good week last week. He had a great week.

Campbell directs the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Last week heannounced “something museum directors only dream about”: the donation to the Met of a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture worth over $1 billion.

The donor: cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder. His gift: 33 pieces by Pablo Picasso and dozens of other landmark works from Picasso’s fellow artists, activists all in the “cubist” movement that ushered in the modern era of abstract art.

Forbes estimates Lauder’s overall net worth at well north of $8 billion. Chunks of this fortune have been going to the art world for some time now. In 2008 alone, Lauder gave $131 million to the Whitney Museum.

Philanthropy this bold simply thrills apologists for inequality. Immense concentrations of private wealth, these cheerleaders for grand fortune love to claim, bring culture to our civilization.

Only the truly wealthy, the argument goes, have the time and resources to cultivate a real appreciation for the finer things in life.

“The rich make life more interesting,” as the prominent business editor William Davis gushed in the early 1980s. “Walk around any museum and look at the treasures they have left us, and ask yourself what there would be to see if Communism had arrived four centuries earlier.”

Editorial writers at the New York Post echoed those sentiments last week in a tribute to Lauder’s latest king-sized gift to the art world. Let’s hope this gift, the editorial opined, helps change the way our society “thinks about billionaires.”

“Being rich doesn’t make you evil,” the Post editorial continued. “And the accumulation of wealth can enrich others — in countless ways.”

Let the Lauder gift especially be a lesson, the editorial huffed, to those who may still want to subject the rich to “millionaire taxes” meant to “share the wealth.”

In reality, of course, we’ve seen precious little “sharing the wealth” over recent decades. Billionaires like Leonard Lauder have watched the tax rates on their incomes plummet. And the resulting squeeze on the public purse has had a substantial — and troubling — artistic impact, especially in America’s schools.

In New York City, as one local arts group relates, budget cuts have painted a “grim picture for arts education.” Kids in New York live “surrounded by a priceless array of arts and cultural institutions.” Yet they’re growing up “culturally isolated.” Nearly a quarter of New York’s schools have no certified arts instructor in them.

New York hardly stand alone. In Los Angeles, one arts activist noted last fall, 53 percent of elementary-age kids are getting no exposure to arts instruction. In Detroit, 60 percent of schools “lack art education as part of the curriculum.”

Nationwide, the same pattern. The U.S. Department of Education reported last spring that 4 million elementary school students are going without visual arts instruction. Adds Dan Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators: “We haven’t hit bottom yet.”

The “top” for arts education came back in America’s share-the-wealth golden age in the mid 20th century, the years when America’s wealthiest faced federal income tax rates as high as 91 percent, over double the top current rate.

In 1960, lawmakers in Albany okayed the creation of the New York State Council on the Arts. Four years later, Congress established the National Endowment of the Arts. The federal government became, for the first time ever, a major player in arts funding. In community after community, federal dollars began leveraging a vital partnership of nonprofits and public agencies. The arts flourished.

We can’t, of course, totally blame the demise of this golden age on shrinking billionaire top-bracket tax rates. Other factors have been at play, most particularly the rising pressure on school systems to narrow the curriculum to subjects that lend themselves to endless rounds of standardized testing.

But who’s bankrolling this intensely market-driven approach to education that has no patience for “frills” like art? America’s billionaires, through the vast network of think tanks and foundations they’ve so lavishly underwritten.

So let’s keep in mind what really happens — to the arts — when we let wealth concentrate. Museums get paintings from the awesomely affluent. These affluent get plaques in the museums testifying to their generosity — and lucrative deductions on their tax returns for the art they donate.

And the rest of us? We pay our $25 admission fee to enter museums like New York’s Met and watch art education fade away from our schools.

Jeff Faux, Where’s the Change? American Prospect, April 9, 2013. Top Democrats remain afraid to threaten the economic power and ideological comfort of America’s corporate rich.

Andrew Fieldhouse, How High Should Top Income Tax Rates Be? (Hint: Much Higher), Fiscal Times, April 10, 2013. Raising top income tax rates would be the least harmful policy option for deficit reduction.

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, Dr. King’s ‘Two Americas’ Truer Now than Ever, Common Dreams, April 11, 2013. Breathtakingly prescient words for a society where the chasm between super rich and poor has grown ever wider.

Ryan Lambie, Elysium and the gap between rich and poor in sci-fi cinema, Den of Geek, April 11, 2013. From H. G. Wells to today’s latest, this engaging survey looks at how movies have tried to show “how the lives of the wealthiest affect those beneath them.”

As Tax Day Approaches,The Laura Flanders Show, GRITtv, April 10, 2013, An interview with Too Mucheditor Sam Pizzigati on what we can learn, on the tax front, from our progressive forbears.

In a book about luxury, readers expect elegance. We do get elegant prose in this new history of luxury. But we get much more. We get wonderfully wise reflections on the “age-old anxiety” over excess and inequality.

The probing — and unfamiliar — history author William Howard Adams tells in these pages takes us from the ancient Greeks straight through to the dialogue and debate over luxury that agitated America’s generation of 1776.

We today, Adams argues, need to rekindle this discourse “over the line between ordinary, achievable things we need” and lust for “redundant, ephemeral” accumulation. Our dwindling natural resources, if nothing else, make that rekindling absolutely essential.

In any age, Adams writes, those wealthy elites that usurp “a disproportionate chunk” of their society’s resources and power “to support their exclusive lifestyle” do their best to “persuade everyone else that they too might some day reach such meaningless heights of limitless extravagance.”

These elites can be persuasive. We end up with charades that hold entire societies “hostage to the hubris of the benighted few.”

But we can learn from history. Especially this history. The best minds in ancient Greece, Adams reminds us, championed “moderation and resistance to excess in all of its incarnations.” Their most basic admonition still makes exquisite sense: “Nothing in excess.”

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