How the Ultra-Rich Betray America

Monday, May 21, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Paul Buchheit

 

The betrayals come in many forms. Here are a few of the more outrageous, and destructive, examples:

Evasion: Corporations suddenly stopped meeting their tax responsibilities

While corporate profits have doubled to $1.9 trillion in less than ten years, the corporate income tax rate, which for thirty years hovered around the 20-25% level, suddenly dropped to 10% after the recession. It has remained there for three years.

We are seeing a manifestation of the Shock Doctrine. Corporations are using the national emergency of the financial collapse to make a statement about taxes, and a traumatized nation is too preoccupied to do anything about it.

Delusion: Technology companies won't admit that much of their 'innovation' is due to public assistance

According to the report Funding a Revolution, government provided almost half of basic research funds into the 1980s. Federal funding still accounted for half of research in the communications industry as late as 1990. Even today, the federal government supports about 60 percent of the research performed at universities.

Apple's first computer was introduced in the late 1970s. Apple still does most of its product and research development in the United States, with US-educated engineers and computer scientists.

Google's business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model.

Apple got its tax bill down to 9.8% last year. About 2/3 of its profits remain overseas for tax avoidance purposes. Google, like Apple, avoids taxes by moving most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda. Both Apple and Google, along with Microsoft and Cisco, are lobbying for a repatriation tax holiday to allow billions of overseas dollars to come home at a greatly reduced tax rate.

An Apple executive said: "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems." That may be true, but they do have an obligation to pay the taxes that help America solve its problems. (Apple is nothing but a bunch of greedy cunts! Fuck Apple!--jef)
Desertion: The people who benefit most from government are renouncing their citizenships to avoid taxes

Perhaps the ultimate insult to America is to just quit on your country after making a fortune off of it. In 2011 almost 1,800 Americans gave up their citizenship to avoid taxes. (Good riddance, bastards.--jef) The wealthy benefit disproportionately from property and inheritance laws, contracts, stock exchanges, favorable SEC regulations, the Small Business Administration, patent and copyright and intellectual property laws, estate planning, trust funds, Internet marketing, communications infrastructure, highway maintenance, air traffic control, local and national security, and 60 years of research in technology and other industries.

A recent outrageous example is Facebook part-owner Eduardo Saverin, whose family came to America from Brazil partly for safety reasons, and who happened to land Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard. Now after falling into billions, he's decided to renounce his U.S. citizenship to avoid taxes. (Well, stick his ass in Gitmo, then!--jef)

Denial: Traders feel it's inappropriate to pay even a tiny tax on a quadrillion dollars in sales

A quadrillion dollars sounds like a fake amount. But it's all too real. That's a thousand trillion dollars of derivatives transactions which, along with the high-frequency computer-generated transactions (5,000 per second) that make up over half of U.S. stock trades, contributed to a financial meltdown and a $3 trillion bailout for reckless trading.

But there's no tax on these transactions.

While average Americans pay a 10% sales tax on necessities, millionaire investors pay just a .00002% SEC fee (2 cents for every thousand dollars) for a financial instrument. And their supporters claim, inexplicably after the disastrous trading frenzy in 2008, that a tax would increase volatility.

Illusion: The media leads us to believe we should all be cheering when the stock market is booming

Conservatives insultingly assure us that the "democratization of stock ownership" is gradually making America more equal, as evidenced by the flattening of wealth ownership among the richest 1% in recent years. So we should all be excited about a rising stock market.

Here are the facts. Data from Edward Wolff confirms that from 1983 to 2007 the percentages of net worth and financial wealth for the top 1% remained steady. But the percentages for the rest of the richest 5% increased by almost 20%, while the percentages for the lowest 80% of the population DECREASED by almost 20%.

In other words, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% leveled off because the "democratization of stock ownership" spread the wealth among just 5% of the population, those earning an average of $500,000 per year. A few people -- 5 out of 100 -- got very rich, but everyone else lost ground.
Conclusion

The issues are difficult to address with Congress largely on the side of the wealthy. At the very least:

(1) Eliminate the tax break on unearned income (capital gains). The richest Americans, who own most of the stocks, should not pay a smaller tax than everyone else.

(2) Implement a small financial transactions tax. It would be easy to administer on computer trades, it would generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, and it would help guard against the reckless speculation that devastated the financial markets and our country.

Lesser Evilism, 2012

A Vote for Obama Now Might Be More Evil Than It Was in 2008

by MICHAEL KAUFMAN

 

At this time of year it is not uncommon to become wistful and look back at the time that has passed, but oddly enough, I find myself becoming nostalgic for the time of the last Bush administration. I remember it as a time when people still expressed opposition to a regime that had contempt for them. It was scarcely possible to be in any social setting without people grumbling about Bush and expressing their disgust, even people of an apolitical nature.  How freely the “F”-word, fascist, was bandied about!  Anti-Bush sentiment permeated the culture to such an extent that there were even books written discussing the merits of assassinating the president……and that was just the pacifists!*

Now, even mild expressions of disapproval are largely absent. These days who is saying she is ashamed to be from Hawaii, Chicago, Kansas, Indonesia? Or that Obama doesn’t care about black people? Who is singing “Let’s Impeach the President”?  Occupy Wall Street is putting up a struggle and there are other pockets of resistance, but within the electoral system:

the citizens
don’t want to put up a defense
they enroll in accelerated courses
in falling to their knees**

Almost weekly, progressives and liberals are faced with some new “betrayal”, but they appear unable to rebel, bound by the self-imposed limits of the concept of the lesser of two evils.  Obama may be bad, they say, but the Republican will be much worse.  Many people appear to be absolutely committed to this pessimistic short term approach to a bleak situation and so will always vote for whomever they consider to be less damaging: Pinochet versus Duvalier, Suharto versus Saddam, Idi Amin Dada versus Mobutu Sese Seko. No matter how bad the choices, the doctrine of lesser evilism compels them to choose, they cannot opt out.  It seems appropriate to refer to this group as “purists”.

I suspect that many who claim to make such a clearheaded appraisal actually possess a predetermined bias, and so believe the Democrats’ evil, as if an equation from a calculus text, can approach ever closer, but can never cross the Republicans’ axis. In order to effectively engage these people, however, one must take them seriously and try to answer the question of who is actually the lesser evil. I would begin by suggesting that although it used to be taken for granted that Bush was the worst president ever, in those areas in which the president is able to operate without the need for 60 senators, Obama has actually been worse.  To test this notion, a simple question for the purists: Can you name one country on the planet where the policies of Obama have been less militaristic than those of Bush?

(Expect either Iraq[hah!] to be offered in response, or a very long pause.) In the area of civil liberties we can echo Obama’s hero and ask: Is the Bill of Rights better off today than it was 3 years ago? This should “frame” the discussion for introducing as much detail as you desire, or, given the level of ire so many of this group possess, is allowed.

In these two areas most at the mercy of the unitary executive those at the outer edges of dissent among the Democrats seem to have it precisely backwards—Bush was Obama lite.  But we must remember that George W. Bush is not running in 2012, that unless Dick Cheney makes a last minute entrance into the race, Obama will be competing with someone who has not prosecuted illegal wars, rained down missiles on the heads of civilians, had people incarcerated and killed without trial. So many of the Obama loyalists rely on the subjunctive mood to carry their argument about who is the lesser of two evils. It would be prudent to follow the lead of another president, who also received rather too much credit for being slicker than the Bush who preceded him, and pay strict attention to what the meaning of “is” is. By doing this, who is the lesser of two evils becomes quite clear.

But I should try not to be so rigid; let’s play along and try to divine what the Republican candidate would do. Let’s imagine that the favorite, Mitt Romney, wins the election. Will he be a greater or lesser evil that our current president?  Their similarities have been often mentioned, most notably their health care plans. Similarities exist also in outward characteristics: Romney is seen as a slickly packaged empty suit with little of substance to offer; Obama has been frank that this applies to him as well, confessing in his writings to being a “blank slate”. There really aren’t so many ways we can be sure about Romney’s eventual policies– after all, it isn’t very wise to believe what any politician says.

This fact of life actually would be slightly to Romney’s advantage—Obama lied to get the support of those to his left, whereas Romney is seeking support from those on his right, so it is probable that he would be not quite as evil in reality as he is promising on the campaign trail to be.  Liberals could also feel proud for supporting him and striking a blow against religious bigotry, regaining the good feelings they had in 2008.  In those matters where the president needs the support of congress, Romney would have to move to the left in order to get anything passed. In the seemingly unrestrained role as commander-in-chief we have no way of knowing what the real essence of Romney is that ultimately would be revealed if he were to reach the position of near absolute power.  It is feasible, I suppose, that he will turn out to match or even surpass the icy viciousness, the elegant brutality of Obama, but it is far from certain. What is certain is that, given what we know at this time, a vote for Obama in 2012 is a much greater evil than it was in 2008.