Conservatism in Action, How Big Corporations Are Unpatriotic

Conservatism in Action, How Big Corporations Are Unpatriotic

Many giant profitable U.S. corporations are increasingly abandoning America while draining it at the same time.

General Electric, for example, has paid no federal income taxes for a decade while becoming a net job exporter and fighting its hard-pressed workers who want collective bargaining through unions like the United Electrical Workers Union (UE). GE’s boss, Jeffrey Immelt, makes about $12,400 an hour on an 8-hour day, plus benefits and perks, presiding over this global corporate empire.

Telling by their behavior, these big companies think patriotism toward the country where they were created and prospered is for chumps. Their antennae point to places where taxes are very low, labor is wage slavery, independent unions are non-existent, governments have their hands out, and equal justice under the rule of law does not exist. China, for example, has fit that description for over 25 years.

Other than profiteering from selling Washington very expensive weapons of mass destruction, many multinational firms have little sense of true national security.

Did you know that about 80 percent of the ingredients in medicines Americans take now come from China and India where visits by FDA inspectors are infrequent and inadequate?

The lucrative U.S. drug industry – coddled with tax credits, free transfer of almost-ready-to-market drugs developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars via the National Institutes of Health – charges Americans the highest prices for drugs in the world and still wants more profits. Drug companies no longer produce many necessary medicines like penicillin in the U.S., preferring to pay slave wages abroad to import drugs back into the U.S.

Absence of patriotism has exposed our country to dependency on foreign suppliers for crucial medicines, and these foreign suppliers may not be so friendly in the future.

Giant U.S. companies are strip-mining America in numerous ways, starting with the corporate tax base. By shifting more of their profits abroad to “tax-haven” countries (like the Cayman Islands) through transfer pricing and other gimmicks, and by lobbying many other tax escapes through Congress, they can report record profits in the U.S. with diminishing tax payments. Yet they are benefitting from the public services, special privileges, and protection by our armed forces because they are U.S. corporations.

On March 27, 2013, the Washington Post reported that compared to forty years ago, big companies that “routinely cited U.S. federal tax expenses that were 25 to 50 percent of their worldwide profits,” are now reporting less than half that share. For instance, Proctor and Gamble was paying 40 percent of its total profits in taxes in 1969; today it pays 15 percent in federal taxes. Other corporations pay less or no federal income taxes.

Welcome to globalization. It induces dependency on instabilities in tiny Greece and Cyprus that shock stock investments by large domestic pension and mutual funds here in the U.S. Plus huge annual U.S. trade deficits, which signals the exporting of millions of jobs.

The corporate law firms for these big corporations were the architects of global trade agreements that make it easy and profitable to ship jobs and industries to fascist and communist regimes abroad while hollowing out U.S. communities and throwing their loyal American workers overboard. It’s not enough that large corporations are paying millions of American workers less than workers were paid in 1968, adjusted for inflation.

Corporate bosses can’t say they’re just keeping up with the competition; they muscled through the trade system that pulls down on our country’s relatively higher labor, consumer and environmental standards.

Corporate executives, when confronted with charges that show little respect for the country, its workers and its taxpayers who made possible their profits and subsidized their mismanagement, claim they must maximize their profits for their shareholders and their worker pension obligations.

Their shareholders? Is that why they’re stashing $1.7 trillion overseas in tax havens instead of paying dividends to their rightful shareholder-owners, which would stimulate our economy? Shareholders? Are those the people who have been stripped of their rights as owners and prohibited from even keeping a lid on staggeringly sky-high executive salaries ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 an hour or more, plus perks?

Why these corporate bosses can’t even abide one democratically-run shareholders’ meeting a year without gaveling down their owners and cutting time short. To get away from as many of their shareholder-owners as possible, AT&T is holding its annual meeting on April 26 in remote Cheyenne, Wyoming!

Pension obligations for their workers? The award-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal Ellen E. Shultz demonstrates otherwise. In her gripping book Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit from the Nest Eggs of American Workers, she shows how by “exploiting loopholes, ambiguous regulations and new accounting rules,” companies deceptively tricked employees and turned their pension plans into piggy banks, tax shelters and profit centers.

Recently, I wrote to the CEOs of the 20 largest U.S. corporations, asking if they would stand up at their annual shareholders’ meetings and on behalf of their U.S. chartered corporation (not on behalf of their boards of directors), and pledge allegiance to the flag ending with those glorious words “with liberty and justice for all.” Nineteen of the CEOs have not yet replied. One, Chevron, declined the pledge request but said their patriotism was demonstrated creating jobs and sparking economic activity in the U.S.

But when corporate lobbyists try to destroy our right of trial by jury for wrongful injuries – misnamed tort reform – when they destroy our freedom of contract – through all that brazenly one-sided fine print – when they corrupt our constitutional elections with money and unaccountable power, when they commercialize our education and patent our genes, and outsource jobs to other countries, the question of arrogantly rejected patriotism better be front-and-center for discussion by the American people.

Sleazebag Republican Zealots John Boehner Paul Ryan Admit They're Using Debt Fear Mongering To Cut Middle-Class Safety Net

Sleazebag Republican Zealots John Boehner Paul Ryan Admit They're Using Debt Fear Mongering To Cut Middle-Class Safety Net

I never thought I’d write these words, but here goes: thank you, John Boehner. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for finally admitting on national television that all the fiscal cliffs, sequestrations and budget battles you’ve created are, indeed, artificially fabricated by ideologues and self-interested politicians and not the result of some imminent crisis that’s out of our control.

America owes this debt of gratitude to Boehner after he finally came clean on yesterday’s edition of ABC’s “This Week” and admitted that “we do not have an immediate debt crisis.” (His admission was followed up by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, who quickly echoed much the same sentiment on CBS’ Face the Nation).

In offering up such a stunningly honest admission, the GOP leader has put himself on record as agreeing with President Obama, who has previously acknowledged that demonstrable reality. But the big news here isn’t just about the politics of a Republican House Speaker tacitly admitting they agree with a Democratic president. It is also about a bigger admission revealing the fact that the GOP’s fiscal alarmism is not merely some natural reaction to reality, but a calculated means to other ideological ends.

Before considering those ends, first remember that Boehner (like Obama) is correct on the facts.

As Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has pointed out, “Even if we do run deficits, federal debt as a share of GDP will be substantially less than it was at the end of World War II” and “it will also be substantially less than, say, debt in several European countries in the mid to late 1990s.” It is also lower than the 80 percent of GDP level that many economists say starts to put countries in a precarious position. Additionally, citing Congressional Budget Office data, the Center for American Progress notes that the long-term debt outlook is only dire because the projections simply assume without question that “future Congresses will enact huge new deficit-increasing tax cuts and spending hikes.”

“The debt outlook is bad (but) we’re not looking at something inconceivable, impossible to deal with,” writes Krugman. “We’re looking at debt levels that a number of advanced countries, the US included, have had in the past, and dealt with.”

So yes, we should start dealing with the long-term debt in a pragmatic and sober way, but we shouldn’t pretend it is some sort of imminent crisis worthy of draconian austerity measures.

If we could somehow do that, then there would be plenty of gradual steps that could be taken right now – steps that deal with the debt in measured ways that do the least harm to the overall economy.

Conservatives have taken to saying the debt is a way to spend your children's future. Well, they could have paid for their spending as they passed spending bill after spending bill from 2000 to 2008. They didn't because they knew that even the appearance of debt would give them an opportunity to attack programs like Medicare, Social Security and Veterans benefits, which they consider communist programs.

How Long Will Voters Let Conservative Republicans Put the Rich Before Everyone Else

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How Long Will Voters Let Conservative Republicans Put the Rich Before Everyone Else

We are nearly a week into the dreaded sequester and already there is reason to believe that the spending cuts that were designed to be so draconian and unpalatable that even the Republican party could not stomach them are here to stay.

Despite there being widespread consensus that these cuts will be extremely damaging to the economy and that they may ultimately even increase our debt load rather than lower it, the party that pushed us over this particular fiscal cliff is refusing to budge an inch. The only question that now remains is why, and for how long more, ordinary Americans will let them get away with it.

Balancing the budget and reducing the deficit are noble goals, but when a party who claims to be all about balanced budgets, shifts the entire burden of achieving one onto the poorest and neediest in our society, while doing everything in their power to protect the pocket books of the wealthy, I would be inclined to distrust their motives. All the evidence points to the fact that our most vulnerable citizens are the ones who will be hit the hardest by the sequester cuts (more on that in a moment). Yet the GOP are already making moves to reduce the impact of the cuts on the military, while they look for even more ways to cut welfare spending that will hurt the poor.

On Monday, congressional Republicans put forth a bill ostensibly designed to prevent a government shut down at the end of the month. This is welcome news in so far as I don't think any of us could stomach another round of the kind of school yard bullying that now passes for governance in the house of representatives.

But the Republican bill, which was authored by House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, has come under criticism for incorporating several measures that would ease the pain of the sequester cuts on military spending, while doing nothing whatsoever to counteract the damage the cuts will inflict on domestic programs that our poorest citizens rely on. Meanwhile, both senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and house majority leader John Boehner have made it clear that any talk of revenue increases, even closing tax loopholes that only benefit the super rich, are out of the question.

So it seems that the poor are on track to take the hit for the Republican party's apparent zeal to reign in government spending, at least on programs they don't care for. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities outlined what this will mean for low income families and children. They estimated that up to 775,000 mothers and children will be turned away from the WIC Nutrition program by the end of the fiscal year; over 100,000 low income families will lose their housing assistance; 3.8 million long term unemployed people will see an 11% reduction in their weekly benefits and over 70,000 poor children will no longer benefit from the vital preschool program known as Head Start. War veterans, children with disabilities and elderly people living alone will also be made to feel the pain.

In addition to the various cuts in services, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 750,000 jobs will be lost by the end of the year and the GDP will slow down by 0.6%. But, hey, Wall Street had a bumper day on Tuesday, so who really cares about a few hundred thousand job losses or if the poor get poorer?

Actually, we should all be deeply concerned about the long-term implications of the trickle down poverty policies that the Republican party has grown so fond of. It's no secret that inequality has been steadily rising in America for the past few decades, but I don't think most Americans are aware of the full extent of it. Mother Jones has put together a very illuminating video, based on income inequality charts that is worth a look to understand just how big the wealth gap has grown. The top 1% in this country now own 40% of the wealth while the bottom 80% only own 7% between us.

In the past 30 years the wealth of the top 1% has more than tripled, meanwhile 15% of the country are now living in abject poverty, up from 13.8% in 2008 and real median household incomes declined 1.5% in 2011, the second consecutive annual drop.

So the old cliche about the rich getting richer while the poor (and middle class) get poorer is alive and kicking. If anyone fails to see the link between this reality and the policies promoted by the Republican party that protect the rich and punish the poor, then I guess you should just keep voting republican and you will keep getting more of the same.

 Time to start thinking about the 2014 med-term elections. Do voters want an America for and by the people or for wealthy plutocrats who are leaching off the labor of the average American worker.

Conservative James O’Keefe To Pay $100,000 for journalistic malpractice.

Tell Radical Republicans No Deal - 8 Deficit Reducers That Are More Ethical—And More Effective—Than the 'Chained CPI'

8 Deficit Reducers That Are More Ethical—And More Effective—Than the 'Chained CPI'

News reports say the President’s proposed deal includes the “chained CPI,” which would impose drastic Social Security cuts and tax hikes for everybody but the wealthy. And HHouse Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says that “Democrats will stick with the President," even as he capitulates to GOP tax proposals.

They should both think again.

The “chained CPI” is being offered as part of a “deficit reduction” deal, even though Social Security is forbidden from contributing to the deficit. Even if you accepted this unreasoned act, it remains morally unacceptable to reduce spending on the backs of the elderly, women, the poor, veterans, disabled Americans, and the poor.

It’s even more unethical to do it when other options available could save much more money, And it’s even worse when we see who isn’t “sharing in the sacrifice” – a list that includes hedge fund managers, Wall Street gamblers, billionaires, drug companies, defense contractors, and tax-dodging corporations.

Independent estimates say that the “chained CPI” will slash Social Security benefits by $122 billion over the next ten years. Here are eight solutions that will save more money—and really will reduce the deficit—without compromising either our ethics or our sense of fairness:

1. Close multiple loopholes in the capital gains law: $174.2 billion. (1.42x)

Lawmakers could save nearly one and a half times as much money as they’ll get from stripping seniors, the disabled, veterans, and children of their benefits—1.42 times as much, to be precise—by closing capital gains loopholes.

They include the “carried interest” loophole, which taxes hedge fund managers’ service fees at the low “investors’” rate; the ‘blended rate,’ which taxes some quick derivatives trades as if they were long-term investments; the ability to ‘gift’ capital gains to avoid taxation; a dodge for bartering capital gains; and the ability to ‘defer’ gains to future years.

A more aggressive approach—eliminating the capital gains altogether—ould yield more than $900 billion in savings, but that might affect middle-class families and seniors. By using the “chained CPI,” America’s seniors, vets, and disabled are taking a hit so that hedge fund managers can keep their loopholes.

(Source: Calculations based on figures cited by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.)

2. Refuse to compromise on the President’s $250,000 figure for increased taxation: $183 billion (1.5x)

The President’s initial tax plan—the one he and his party ran on, the one that voters endorsed—called for letting the Bush tax cuts expire for income above $250,000. That would bring in an estimated $366 billion in added revenue over the next ten years. Now, say reports, he and the Republicans will agree on a figure that’s “somewhere in the middle.”

If true, the deal’s deficit reduction impact will be reduced by $183 billion. That’s one and a half times as much as the “chained CPI” will take from seniors, the disabled, veterans, and their dependents. They’ll pay—so that people earning $250,000 and up don’t have to.

(Source: CBPP estimate, divided in half.)

3. Reduce the budget for US overseas military bases by 20 percent: $200 billion. (1.6x)

The United States maintains 702 military ‘installations’ in 63 foreign countries (it has 4,471 bases altogether), according to the Defense Department’s annual budget statement.

These figures don’t include bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re talking about our military presence in nations like Germany, South Korea, and Japan. While the total cost of these bases is kept secret, the best analysis I’ve seen estimates their ten-year cost at approximately $1 trillion.

A twenty percent cut in that budget is extremely modest under the circumstances, and would save 1.6 times as much as the “chained CPI” cut.

(Sources: US Defense Department; David Vine via Juan Cole and Tom Engelhardt.)

4. Allow the government to negotiate with drug companies: $220 billion. (1.8x)

Current law specifically forbids the government from using its negotiating power to obtain lower rates for Medicare prescriptions—even though much of the research behind the drugs involved was performed at government expense.

If we allow the government to negotiate with drug companies, that will save an estimated $220 billion. That’s 1.8 times as much money as the “chained CPI”—and it comes from the drug companies, not vulnerable Americans.

(Source: Outterson and Kesselheim, Health Affairs.)

5. Enact DoD-friendly cuts to military budget: $519 billion. (4.25x)

A defense think tank conducted an exercise to help the military prepare for the possibility of forced spending cuts under sequestration (the so-called “fiscal cliff”). It convened what it called “a series of strategic choices exercises,” using “experts from across the defense community,” in order to decide how best to cut $519 billion from defense spending cuts over ten years.

The participants were not peaceniks—most were in the defense community, while some were Congressional staffers—and the think tank’s staffed by ex-military and military-friendly consultants. Nevertheless, they were able to come up with options that seemed acceptable by balancing short-term readiness with long-term preparation.

It was a surprisingly smart exercise—and it sounds like a very good way to build consensus around defense cuts (even though that was not its intent). A project leader described the exercise as “listening to the future,” while the report itself said that “Failing to recognize and make strategic choices is effectively a form of self-sequestration.”

We can listen to our future selves, since we’ll all need Social Security some day, and say: Make these cuts. That’s better than “self-sequestering” by letting politicians cut Social Security.

(Source: “Strategic Choices: Navigating Austerity,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments)

6. Enact Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s ‘Fairness in Taxation Act’ for very high earners: $872.5 billion. (7.15x)

In 2011 Rep. Jan Schakowsky introduced the “Fairness in Taxation Act,” which would have created additional tax brackets for very high earners. As Rep. Schakowsky noted at the time, today’s tax structure “fails to distinguish the merely ‘well-off’ from the ‘super-duper rich.’”

The bill adds the following tax brackets:

• $1-10 million: 45%

• $10-20 million: 46%

• $20-100 million: 47%

• $100 million to $1 billion: 48%

• $1 billion and over: 49%

It also taxes capital gains and dividend income as ordinary income for those taxpayers with income over $1 million.

The very wealthy would still be paying much less than they paid under Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, when the top rate was 91 percent. For that matter, these rates are lower than those we had under most American Presidents of the last century.

This bill brings in more than seven times the “chained CPI” savings by asking the ultra-rich to pay their fair share, instead of targeting seniors and other Americans in need.

(Sources: Rep. Jan Schakowsky; Economic Policy Institute.)

7. Eliminate corporate tax loopholes: $1.24 trillion (10x)

A 2007 Treasury Department report (prepared under President Bush) concluded that “corporate tax preferences”—that is, loopholes—resulted in lost revenue of $1,241,000,000,000 over a ten-year period.

That number looks pretty good—especially when it’s stacked up against the “chained CPI” figure of $122 billion.

If we can’t afford to honor our commitment to America’s veterans and their families, or to our seniors, or to the disabled, we sure can’t afford these corporate tax loopholes – excuse me, I meant “preferences."

(Source: United States Department of the Treasury background paper.)

8. Create a financial transactions tax for high-volume Wall Street trading: $1.8 trillion (14.75x)

And here’s our grand prize winner: A financial transaction tax like the one they’ve imposed in the United Kingdom. The UK tax rate is tiny—0.25 percent of each transaction, levied on both parties—but the overall impact is substantial.

Not only would this tax bring in substantial revenue, it would also discourage the massive volume of ultra-high-speed computer-driven transactions that have turned the stock market into both an imperceptible ‘black box’ and a real-time mega-casino operating in nanoseconds.

‘Algorithmic trading’ and other forms of Wall Street speculation don’t build economic value or encourage wise investment. Instead they’re used to drive the kinds of speculation that’s driving out smarter investments – and brought our economy to its knees in 2008.

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates that a UK-style tax would bring in $1.8 trillion over ten years. It could also lead to healthier investment—and potentially might even help prevent another crash. More than 200 economists signed a letter supporting the concept of a financial transaction tax.

So the choice is clear: Tax the folks who ruined the economy, and protect the rest of us in the process, or ask seniors, etc. to sacrifice needed benefits. Guess which one they’re leaning toward right now?

(Source: Dean Baker, “The Deficit-Reducing Potential of a Financial Speculation Tax“)

Conclusion These figures don’t even include the tax hike that the “chained CPI” will impose on all but the highest levels of income. But even without those numbers, the public already hates the idea. Confirming our interpretation of polling data yesterday, a new Washington Post poll shows that 60 percent of the people polled found the idea “unacceptable” and only 34 percent found it acceptable.

Imagine how they’ll feel when they learn that’s it coming anyway – and that it’s being used to protect hedge fund managers, Wall Street tycoons, Big Pharma, military contractors, and tax-evading corporations?

Democrats should not “stick with the President” on this one—and the President should not stick with this proposal.

President Obama is being nice. He is offering up things that Republicans should like if they were serious and genuinely concerned about the debt. Conservatives are not concerned. They are happy to let middle-class families eat dust. The president should let the wacky cult of conservatism hang by it's own petard, the debt they created with no plan to pay it back except giving seniors, vets, and children the shaft.

Why is America Hating Wacko John Lott all over the media being asked for serious input on gun laws?