Goodbye Middle Class Life

A milestone was passed this month: America’s middle class is now a minority of the population.

The story on NPR.

How much income have American workers lost? The details from MarketWatch.

Reaganomics has divided the population into haves and have-nots, and has done so with a vengeance. Initeconomics has that story here.

Joseph Stiglitz on the politics of inequality.

The revolving door between our lawmaking branch and the corporate lobbying industry is part of a vast engine of inequality.

Robert Reich discusses the problem of income and wealth inequality.

From that bastion of communist orthodoxy, MONEY magazine: an examination of the cockeyed economics of the Republican candidates.

Power once lost is hard to regain. Workers’ rights and the prosperity that came after were won after a century of sacrifice and outright battle with corporations’ strong-arm tactics. This is the kind of history they don’t like our kids to learn in school. If we turn the dial back they won’t have to worry; we are on the way back toward child labor instead of universal free education. Get a quick review of labor history here.

Young workers are going to experience their work lives as one long slump. This is exactly how the 1% want it and Republicans have made it happen. This important story in the Atlantic.

Of course not all rich people are against working Americans. (Some Republicans actually like Bernie Sanders.) Working Americans are the consumers who make the economy hum. Can it still hum?

One of the things forcing incomes down is what’s called The Gig Economy. In place of full employment (with benefits) workers learn to come when an employer whistles. The Gig Economy explained by MarketWatch.

And those safeguards and benefits? A relic of past times. ProPublica describes how Tyson Foods has carved up its employees' workers' compensation. And their workers suffer a lot of injuries.

The safety net? The 1% succeeded in persuading the other 99% that Welfare protections made people lazy. Actually it doesn’t. The story about the welfare laziness myth from VOX.

How does the 1% get the rest of us all worked up? They own the media for one thing. And a worried, fearful public is easier for them to hustle. Panic is good for the 1%. Krugman explains why the rich love generalized panic.


Workers used to have certain rights. An expectation they weren’t being spied on being one of them. No longer. Who's behind this? Walmart, of course.

Income inequality tends to show up in key areas: how inequality is perpetuated by housing.

And while the 1% is scooping up money that used to trickle down to working people, they are sharing one thing. They are letting working people have all the tax obligations. Another in a very thick file of similar stories, from the Guardian.

The Unfair Economy

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been in the news recently for enforcing inhumane work conditions not seen since the days of the Spanish galley slave.

The LATimes has an excellent write up about it.

The 1% tell us how to live and how hard to work. They create the economy the rest of us endure. They evade taxes like billy-o and we get to pay for them, or learn to live without good roads and decent schools.

Gyrations in the stock markets terrify the rest of us, but the 1% go shopping (as the NYTimes reported recently). Market instability that worries us they see as opportunity to buy up bargain shares. They profit from volatility. It is their environment of choice, they create it, it profits them enormously (as Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine has explained) but they don’t have to experience it. Their lives are serene and insulated.

Desirable places to live like London, Paris and New York are the setting for a vast new wave of social cleansing, quietly deporting the poor and inviting the rich in.

Reported in the Guardian.

And in a Guardian opinion piece.

Curbed reports how social cleansing is being carried out in New York.

The New York Daily News reports how, in many cases, the new multimillion dollar pieds a terre are seldom inhabited, so the poor and the working classes are being pushed out just in case some rich people would like to spend a weekend in the city.

Pulitzer Prize winning economics reporter David Cay Johnston has this explanation of how the 1% play the American economy and tax system like a violin.

The rich are not like you and me. Why do we cater to them? Why do we walk in the street so they can enjoy the sidewalk? Why do we vacate our cities for their convenience? Why do we pay their taxes for them? Why do we do what they tell us at work and in the voting booth? Are we their slaves? Possibly. By choice, apparently.

How Is A National Economy Not Like A Household Budget?

Krugman is especially good today. He makes some crucial points, one in particular, that most Americans don't understand, and that the conservative power structure, the banks, the 1%, are determined Americans never understand:

"Let’s start with what may be the most crucial thing to understand: the economy is not like an individual family. Families earn what they can, and spend as much as they think prudent; spending and earning opportunities are two different things. In the economy as a whole, however, income and spending are interdependent: my spending is your income, and your spending is my income. If both of us slash spending at the same time, both of our incomes will fall too."

The Austerity mantra tells us that nobody should spend more than they have in their pocket right now. No homeowners, no car owners, no college for you.

Unless you are a member of the 1% who have accumulated all of America's earning power over the past 30 years.

What income and savings ordinary working and formerly middle class consumers used to spend now belongs to the very rich and adds to the leverage that the 1% has to manipulate the economy.

The 1% also uses this leverage to manipulate Congress to ease their taxes and increase ours, to get our tax dollars to bail out the big banks but not help the homeowners who were wrongfully foreclosed, to get government to protect corporate earnings and CEO pay from taxes but cover any losses they might suffer through their own risky behavior.

The concentration of wealth also buys a lot of media, a lot of punditry, a lot of "expert opinion", a lot of public relations that can be used to persuade the mass of Americans that they don't deserve what they used to deserve, that austerity is good for them, that Americans should settle for less and quit grumbling.

Austerity policies take trillions out of the middle class consumer economy and put them into the well-stuffed mattresses of the 1%.

To what purpose? The rich can afford to play a long game. (Call it a long con if you like.) Their goal is to suppress working incomes to their lowest possible degree. They own for a living; they see working incomes as an evil. They have been suppressing working incomes for the past 30 years. What will eventually happen is the U.S. economy will begin to resemble a third world country, with large slums full of workers desperate enough to work for pennies and small gated enclaves of very wealthy people and their bodyguards.

Interestingly, the Austerity preachers give us Greece as an example of what happens if a country doesn't act according to the wishes of the very rich. But Greece is an example of the opposite. The Greek economy fell apart because its extremely wealthy stopped paying taxes and the consequences (unwise austerity policies) were forced upon the working population. But economies are made up of people who work and spend money, not just people who own for a living, who are rich for a living and do nothing productive. Why are the latter group made immune to taxes? What happens when trillions are taken out of a nation's economy and put tax-free in offshore banks? What happens is a Greek style collapse.

Republicans and The Greater Fool

I didn't realize that pretending to be charitable could save a person millions of dollars in taxes every year. But it's worked for Romney. He can promise to give to charity and take the deduction and then not give as much or at all, as this article in Bloomberg News explains.

Fuzzy Math? Voodoo Economics? Flim-Flam? Senate Republicans prove that math that you refuse to look at doesn't actually exist. At what point can you prosecute a political party for covering up the truth? Or for lying? There's a non-partisan report that shows clearly that cutting tax on the very rich doesn't help the economy at all. No wonder they're hiding it.

Information is power. Hiding it gives power to the powerful, who tend to be Republicans and their clients. Republicans prefer the public didn't listen to Nobel Prize economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Listen anyway. Make them mad. And vote accordingly.

There is a weird consistency to Republican thought (if I can call it that.) They prefer Americans believe bad science and non-science rather than the best science. They want Americans to ignore what NASA and our top atmospheric scientists have been saying about climate change. They want us to ignore the evidence of Hurricane Sandy. Republicans persist in trusting numbers that don't add up, plans that their candidate won't show, voodoo economic policies that failed disastrously during the Bush years.

There is, in economics, something called the "Greater Fool Theory", which says that you can always sell a product, no matter how bogus, no matter how foul and dangerous, simply by finding someone more foolish than you are, or more ill-informed or gullible, to buy it. To increase the number of greater fools you can also lie.

(As Romney is doing in Ohio and Michigan right now with his ads falsely claiming Obama somehow forced Jeep to send American jobs to China. Obama saved Jeep and Jeep is increasing its hiring in Ohio and Michigan.)

Reagan Economic Advisor Debunks the Biggest Tax Myth

Former Reagan economic adviser Bruce Bartlett only needs a minute to debunk the prevailing notion that keeping taxes lower on rich people creates growth and jobs.

Low taxes on the rich do NOT result in growth and jobs. That's a myth.

Well, actually it's a lie. An expensive lie paid for by the rich who had their taxes lowered by G W Bush, which contributed to the economic crisis. A lie perpetuated by the Romney campaign, possibly because Romney and Ryan are extremely rich and prefer to have their tax rate lower than ordinary working people.

Higher taxes on the rich do NOT result in economic decline or recession or loss of jobs or growth. Quite the opposite. Reagan raised taxes in 1982 and the economy did better. Clinton raised taxes in 1993 and the economy boomed. It was the longest peacetime boom in American history.

So saying low taxes on rich people is a good idea is a myth. A lie. A big lie. A dangerous lie.

Think about it. This isn't the opinion of some socialist elitist European professor. It's the evidence based argument of Ronald Reagan's economic adviser, Bruce Bartlett.

Why aren't the pundits and the newspeople on TV listening to him or considering the mass of evidence? Maybe because they are rich and prefer to have their taxes lowered.

Share this information with your Republican or independent brother-in-law. It may persuade him. Or it may cause his head to explode, which would make him ineligible to vote in this election.

Romney's Party Boat Flew A Cayman Islands Flag

In Tampa there are a lot of exclusive parties where the super rich meet to lay plans for a post-Obama tax climate. It was interesting to learn that the Romney party yacht at the GOP Convention flies a Cayman Islands flag. What's the message here? ABC broke this story.

"I think it's ironic they do this aboard a yacht that doesn't even pay its taxes," said a woman who lives aboard a much smaller boat moored at the St. Petersburg Municipal Marina.

Romney defends his secret bank accounts in tax havens, saying: “There was no reduction -- not one dollar reduction in taxes -- by virtue of having an account in Switzerland or a Cayman Islands investment.” Why not keep his millions in American banks then? And why are these places––the Caymans, Switzerland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Luxembourg––called "tax havens"? Romney's words don't square with common sense or Americans' sense of fairness. This story appeared in the LATimes.

If you want to look more closely at Romney's complex tax evasions, Gawker has posted the most complete information about Romney's tax schemes online.

Gawker's John Cook: "Almost all of them are affiliated with Bain Capital, the secretive private equity firm Romney co-founded in 1984 and ran until his departure in 1999 (or 2002, depending on whom you ask). Many of them are offshore funds based in the Cayman Islands. Together, they reveal the mind-numbing, maze-like, and deeply opaque complexity with which Romney has handled his wealth, the exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy that benefit him, the unlikely (for a right-wing religious Mormon) places that his money has ended up, and the deeply hypocritical distance between his own criticisms of Obama's fiscal approach and his money managers' embrace of those same policies. They also show that some of the investments that Romney has always described as part of his retirement package at Bain weren't made until years after he left the company."

All of this may explain Romney's nervous chuckle on the stump.

But as much as we focus on Romney's tax secrecy, it's his plans for our taxes which ought to concern us most. His plan would lower his own already very low tax rate and put the burden onto the rest of us who work for a living. The story appeared in the Washington Post.

Romney responded to the criticism, but his response didn't add up either. A good analysis appeared in the Post.

There's also a very well researched analysis in the August Vanity Fair magazine.

There's a lot here about his various offshore schemes, but the most mystifying may be his IRA account.

"Mysteries also arise when one looks at Romney’s individual retirement account at Bain Capital. When Romney was there, from 1984 to 1999, taxpayers were allowed to put just $2,000 per year into an I.R.A., and $30,000 annually into a different kind of plan he may have used. Given these annual contribution ceilings, how can his I.R.A. possibly contain up to $102 million, as his financial disclosures now suggest?"

How indeed.

Andrew Sullivan, a died-in-the-wool conservative finds the tax evasions of rich people like Romney to be repugnant. (Should we rename them The Repugnant Party?)

Sullivan: "Conservatives, it seems to me, should care about all of America, rather than seceding from it. Social and economic inequality are dangerous threats to social stability and democratic legitimacy. That is a conservative belief - and one utterly alien to the fanatics who now run one of our two major parties. If conservatism is to recover, this version of the GOP must be defeated. It's the only language they understand: the language of power." Amen. Remove this Republican Party and give us back the one Eisenhower presided over.

Tax evasion isn't the only theory about Romney's secret taxes. The other theory, reported in the Guardian newspaper, is that Romney is hiding evidence of voter fraud. Was he really living in his son's basement when he voted in Massachusetts? With six large houses do you really think he lived most of the year in a basement? With six houses it has to be a lot of work establishing residency.

Between $20 and $30 TRILLION are hidden offshore by the Super Rich

"The very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy," according to James Henry, former chief economist for the global business consulting firm McKinsey.

This is the financial club Mitt Romney belongs to.

This story broke on the front pages of the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer over the weekend. The articles discuss the burden wealthy tax evaders place on everyone else, not just by evading taxes but by removing their massive cash hoards from the economies where they earned them (and evaded taxes). The amount of hoarded cash is greater than the GDPs of Japan and the US combined. Need a reason for the global recession? This is it.

The summary in the Guardian

The details, in the Guardian

The world of private banks where our economy is being held hostage

Analysis of the problem

The white paper with all the numbers

Mitt Romney is the poster child for this elite group of super rich. They may have homes in this country, but their wealth is safely offshore where what they earn can't be touched to build roads or schools or hospitals. Or, for that matter, to pay the lifetime of healthcare for wounded veterans. They are above obligation to any country, especially the United States. We all try to minimize our tax bill, but for people like Romney it is a major effort of evasion that employs many banks and very complex schemes.

The article about Romney's tax havens in this month's Vanity Fair

The question then is: should Mitt Romney be running instead for the presidency of Bermuda?

Or the Cayman Islands? Or the Bahamas? Or Switzerland? It doesn't really matter what it says on his birth certificate. What matters is what it says on his tax returns. Where is he invested? Whose economy does he care about? Does he fulfill the basic duty of citizenship, the duty we all fulfill? Does he pay the taxes that pave the roads and educate our kids? Or does he evade them?

This matters.

The collusion of the big banks to rig global interest rates matters.

The involvement of major banks in money laundering for international terrorists and drug cartels matters too.

What's disturbing is they are laundering billions for ordinary American billionaires as well, helping them hide what they earn from the tax obligations that are a vital part of citizenship.

The Anti-American Business Model of Mitt Romney

Tom Hamburger, reporting in the Washington Post, tells how Mitt Romney earned his millions. He did it pushing the sharp end of the job exporting business model that's destroyed our jobs base in the last few decades. He continues to earn millions a year from his anti-working-man investments in Bain Capital. Tom Hamburger:

"Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.

"During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission."

Hamburger's carefully reported article describes Romney's harshly anti-American business model. He made his pile by impoverishing and unemploying thousands of American workers, and, perhaps more importantly, by showing other business leaders how to do it. What other business leaders hesitated to do, Romney did. If other businesses were too patriotic to ship American jobs overseas, Romney and his like would beat them by doing so. A very cynical kind of leadership. A race to the bottom, toward the ultimate business model based upon fearful, impoverished workers with no rights and no voice.

Worse still, once Romney has earned his millions where do those millions go to live? He carefully shields them from taxation that might build roads and schools here in the U.S., hiding them in secretive offshore banks in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Switzerland, as reported in the August Vanity Fair magazine. Not only has he offshored American jobs, he has offshored the wealth he earned by breaking down the American industrial base.

"To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

"That’s not the only money Romney has in tax havens. Because of his retirement deal with Bain Capital, his finances are still deeply entangled with the private-equity firm that he founded and spun off from Bain and Co. in 1984. Though he left the firm in 1999, Romney has continued to receive large payments from it—in early June he revealed more than $2 million in new Bain income. The firm today has at least 138 funds organized in the Cayman Islands, and Romney himself has personal interests in at least 12, worth as much as $30 million, hidden behind controversial confidentiality disclaimers."

We're As Bad As Greece

While the crisis persists in Greece, rich Greeks aren't worried. It's not their problem. The rich float above the crises that impoverish and destroy working people. They benefit from the conditions that ruin the broader economy.

This article in the Guardian explains the Greek problem, and it's the same as the problem here in the U.S.: rich parasites. In both countries the rich are overpaid and immune to taxation. Meanwhile they benefit the most from the government spending they refuse to fund. Our tax financed military protects their trade. Our roads move their products. Our government funded research invents their patents. Our government cleans up their messes. Our safety net takes care of the workers they throw away. These three paragraphs from the Guardian are especially telling:

"Greek shipowners, who have gained from their profits being tax-free and who control at least 15% of the world's merchant freight, have also remained low-key. With their wealth offshore and highly secretive, the estimated 900 families who run the sector have the largest fleet in the world. As Athens' biggest foreign currency earner after tourism, the industry remitted more than $175bn (£112bn) to the country in untaxed earnings over the past decade. Greece's debt currently stands at €280bn.

"As ordinary Greeks have been thrown into ever greater poverty by wage and pension cuts and a seemingly endless array of new and higher taxes, their wealthy compatriots have been busy either whisking their money out of Greece or snapping up prime real estate abroad.

"An estimated €8bn flowed out of the Greek banking system in May as speculation over the country's possible exit from the eurozone mounted. Another €4bn was reported to have been withdrawn in the last two weeks – on top of an estimated €20bn since the start of the crisis in late 2009. Stories of rich Greeks sending their wives and best friends on "shopping missions" to remove secret hoards kept in banks in Switzerland and Cyprus are legion."

These three paragraphs might as well be about the U.S. and its lucky one percenters, the carefree rich––like the Romneys, who happily deduct twice the national median annual income every year for their horse expenses. It must be nice to have an expensive tax-deductible hobby like dressage. Why are our tax dollars subsidizing Mrs. Romney's playtime?

The Romney candidacy is all about making the rich less obligated to pay their way. It's about giving themselves and their friends a free ride while working Americans work harder and longer for less. President Romney would shift even more of the tax burden off people who live off wealth and onto people who work to survive. That is the Greek model, and it doesn't work. Rich Greeks are abandoning Greece, taking their wealth with them, just as Romney has most of his wealth in Switzerland and the Caymans.

Jon Stewart arm wrestles Grover Norquist (and wins)

Here's the Jon Stewart interview. (Dontcha wish actual newspeople interviewed this well?)

I have a pledge for you. And I bet it'd work.

"Any congressional district that elects anyone who signs Grover Norquist's pledge shall have its federal funding adjusted to equal its federal taxes paid."

This would affect mostly Republican districts who get more than they pay in. And it would balance the budget almost immediately.

Take it a step further: all congressional districts that elect a Democrat shall not have to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal funding. This would affect most Democratic districts who tend to pay more in taxes than they receive in federal dollars.

Ya see, here's the Big Hypocrisy: the districts that get the most from the federal government are Republican districts. And Republican districts nationwide, on average, get more from the federal government than they pay in.

So we'd be doing them a favor. We'd be helping them be honest, helping them be true to their ideals. No more federal gravy train for Republican districts who signed Grover's pledge (which he thought up when he was twelve–––I'm not making this up, it's on tape.) And Democrat taxpayers would stop being ripped off by the lazy, tax evading Republican parts of the country.

Anyway, Jon Stewart does a pretty fair job of outdebating Norquist. He points out that Reagan raised taxes a dozen or so times. He points out Clinton raised taxes and created a budget surplus and a boom, and Bush cut them and destroyed the global economy and bankrupted the country. Norquist doesn't blink or argue because it's all true.

Stewart does miss one big fat opportunity. When Norquist says we should get rid of public pensions and replace them with 401K's because then everyone knows exactly what they are going to get, Jon should have pointed out that 401K's are the accounts that Wall Street cleaned out over the past four years. The money went away. (Well, it didn't go away as much as it went into Goldman Sachs executive bonuses.)

Retirees under the privatized system have to pray really hard that the economy is up when they retire.

The thing Norquist hates about pensions is they are promises that have to be kept even if the market is being wiped out by pirates. Norquist doesn't like promises made to working people. Only promises made to pirates and CEOs, who are sometimes the same thing.

OMG––Norquist Wrote His Tax Pledge When He Was 12

From Daily Show reporter Samantha Bee, who is a pretty great interviewer.

OMG.

I'm not kidding. He says he actually did. Right on camera.

Our entire country is heading toward Greek style default because a 12 year-old in 1968 decided to rebrand the Republican Party around one simple and stupid idea. The idea of holding his breath until he got what he wanted. This may explain the brainpower problem they have.

This also explains why the GOP side of the aisle in the House is full of 8th grade boys.

Yuck.

The Red States Get the Government Spending, Blue States Pay the Bill

Ever wondered why we need journalism? Read this piece from Eric Black. He provides a useful and intelligent analysis of a very important piece of reporting from yesterdays' New York Times.

"Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It" is an eye-opening feature article from the New York Times. It includes an intriguing interactive map showing region by region breakdown of government spending and taxes paid.

Here's Krugman's commentary on it, with a useful chart.

The point is this: the places and people in the U.S. that oppose government the most are often the places that need it the most and rely on it the most, who take the most from the federal government in subsidies and programs and contracts, in dollars, but pay in the least in taxes.

These Red areas and people oppose the taxes they aren't paying anyway, and oppose the government payments they are receiving more than other bluer, more Democratic areas and people. The areas that pay MORE in tax dollars than they receive in government payouts? Mostly Democratic areas populated by Democrats.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture. And there's something wrong that you don't hear this repeated every time a Republican stands up and hollers about gummint spendin'. All he needs to do is reject it. And if he doesn't it would be less hypocritical if he'd agree to pony up for the government millions he brings to his district. He won't though.

And it's not a new story. Simply underreported. Suppressed you could say. Don't believe the New York Times? Read on.

From Business Insider, reported in 2011.

A tax professor's commentary on the same bizarre red-state paradox, from 2004.

A 2002 paper from the ultra conservative Hoover Institution and Ohio State about The Red State Paradox.

The Washington Post's economist Ezra Klein posted a map of this bizarre but true correlation in 2010.

Data from the Tax Foundation

A 2010 article from SLATE.

You also hear Republicans shouting about the immorality of Democrats. But it's the Red States that have higher measures of the usual moral failures, divorce, teen pregnancy, murder and smut.

From Vox Nova, a Catholic blog, a chart of the correlation between Red States and high divorce, teen pregnancy and pornography rates.

From James Wolcott, a 2006 article on the higher "moral failure" rate in the "ultra-moral" Red States vs. the allegedly immoral Blue States.

It's factual and downright stunning. Especially because Americans in large numbers are angry about something that is not true. Which also shows the power of journalism...or "journalism" in the case of FoxNews, which is a player in the spreading of bad information and the shaping of ignorant opinion.

Welfare for Billionaires––Only Billionaires

If you count corporate welfare and tax subsidies of rich people and private companies, the U.S. is a welfare state but one that supports the rich and corporations rather than the poor and working classes. A prof from Washington State University explains it very well.

Moyers & Co discuss how a political system steered by billionaires benefits billionaires.

(Big surprise.)

Meanwhile... The sad and disastrous fact is the billionaires have their money and are content to allow the western economies to collapse rather than forfeit any of it to support such "socialist" schemes as roads and universities and libraries and hospitals. As if the public good is an anarchist plot. A prosperous nation is an insult to their belief system. Infrastructure made it possible for them to get rich, in fact multiplied their wealth-creation with the efficiencies cooperative systems create, but they think nobody else exists in their closed system of spas and resorts and private clubs. Money is created for THEM. People work for THEM. Their idleness is akin to the idleness of the old Roman gods, luxurious and self-justifying. Meanwhile the lives of those who work for a living are growing narrower, shorter, meaner and more unpleasant. To reward actual work––as opposed to dividends on riches–– would inconvenience the lucky 1%. Austerity is killing the European economy rather than inconvenience rich Europeans. Austerity is how the rich teach working people to be poor. It's not happening by mistake. Here's an enlightening article from the New York Review of Books.

How patriotic is it to offshore your millions? Is it worse when those millions are earned from exporting jobs to countries where people work harder and longer for a dollar a day? Is it OK if you sing God Bless America while you are doing it? That's Romney's approach.

The Looting of American Creativity

From Forbes, an important piece about how the captains of our biggest industrial corporations have been looting our creative capacity and pocketing whatever they can take.

You should call it looting. It's the sort of thing we used to read about when mobsters bought a company and hollowed it out before dumping it, but now it's the model used by big capital management companies. (It sounds a lot like how Mitt Romney got rich: by selling off parts of companies he acquired, laying off masses of employees, and pocketing the cash.)

Such single-minded (you might say narrow-minded or short-sighted) pursuit of profits is a loser's game. It's not sustainable, not responsible. (Remember when American business used to be responsible?) In the cases cited here, where capacity is sold off overseas, it's certainly not very patriotic, even if the tycoons involved do wear a flag lapel pin. What's the word I'm looking for? What's the opposite of creative? Sure: destructive. That's the preferred model of the last thirty years in American businessthink. You could write a vampire movie using this business model.

Creative assets have been invented and developed in the U.S. often with large taxpayer investment, collective genius harnessed and supported by universities and government scientific grants. But in many cases the things Americans helped create are no longer American; they've been offshored to evade societal obligations. Obligations that responsible Americans used to be proud to shoulder. And the infrastructure and educational system that nurtured the creativity is left to rot because the profiteers refuse to pay back into the creative cycle. They've looted the creative infrastructure, offshoring our American genius to evade taxes. As if the American genius was theirs to take. What happens to the inventors once their creativity has been mined and sold away? The huge dividends from this process have been pocketed by a very narrow class.

We are taught by the media to distrust migrants, but the multinational corporate model is a migrant too, a much less helpful version, a more dangerous version, without nationality, without any sense of responsibility or loyalty or conscience. Without any wish to be American unless it profits them and doesn't tax them. Here's an interesting 2007 article from investigative journalist Lucy Komisar about how Merck and other companies do their offshore shuffle.

First they came for the blue collar jobs, and I said nothing. Then they came for the white collar jobs... What mid-century cautionary tale am I reminded of here? This warning article was published six years ago by the Economic Policy Institute. Did we listen?

But (and are we surprised?) offshoring doesn't fulfill the promises it makes, as this 2007 article from CIO magazine demonstrates.

"Sixty percent of companies that send their operations offshore fail to meet their operation performance expectations, and more than a third (34 percent) fail to mee their savings expectations, according to a new study from global management consulting firm A. T. Kearney."

The Tax Evasion Industry

Everybody hates the tax man, so people tend to laugh when tax evaders get away with it. Never mind that Jesus advised people to pay their taxes, and President George Washington personally led an army to go after tax evaders in western Pennsylvania.

Taxation is both Christian and patriotic. So how do flag wavers and bible thumpers get away with their evasions? Plain and simple? They cheat. They leave honest citizens to carry their burden. They sit at the table and order food, they eat and drink, and they leave before the check arrives. They may be good at business, but mostly they're good at avoiding their responsibilities as citizens and neighbors. They are lowlifes. We shouldn't admire them. We shouldn't allow what they do. Mostly we shouldn't be paying their debts for them.

Here's a very good article by Chuck Collins in Sojourners.

Tax evasion is a big business model, and the biggest tax evaders are corporations. Companies like Amazon.com outcompete the small independent bookstores by evading sales taxes. There's an excellent article about this in Mother Jones.

The "Double Irish" maneuver corporations use to avoid paying taxes. Clever them, poor us. Here's a useful diagram.

The U.S. may have a high rate of corporate tax, but corporations don't pay it. The Daily Beast has a list. It's worth sharing with your conservative friends.

The top corporate tax dodgers include GE, Eli Lilly, Google, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal), Boeing, Pfizer, Oracle, Altria (Philip Morris), IBM, Goodrich, TimeWarner, Morgan Stanley, the Hartford, Devon Engergy, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.