There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.And how are they doing that?
Load economies (governments, companies and families) with debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack the means to pay. Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain... The aim of financial warfare is not merely to acquire land, natural resources and key infrastructure rents as in military warfare; it is to centralize creditor control over society.
Proverbs 22:16
by Elizabeth Conall
what do they care
if we can’t pay
the bills run up
to keep us alive?
to save our kids?
why bother with
expensive care
we don’t deserve?
plenty more
where we came from
Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that manmade climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine, whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it.
Neoliberalism, also known as market fundamentalism or laissez-faire economics, purports to liberate the market from political interference. The state, it asserts, should do little but defend the realm, protect private property and remove barriers to business. In practice it looks nothing like this. What neoliberal theorists call shrinking the state looks more like shrinking democracy: reducing the means by which citizens can restrain the power of the elite. What they call “the market” looks more like the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich. Neoliberalism appears to be little more than a justification for plutocracy.
Any attempts to target the oil and gas industry for punitive treatment should be avoided as higher taxes could put the economic growth we’ve created at risk.
What’s the issue? If they are so great, why not advertise them? Why does the industry that profits from them fight labeling so vehemently and put so many of their resources into keeping their presence in our foods a secret? Why are corporate rights continually given precedence over consumer rights?Opponents of California's Proposition 37, which would have required labeling of GMO content on foods, used a flood of mostly out-of-state corporate money to overwhelm the relatively meager resources of advocates 5-to-1. Which companies would fight so hard to keep consumers ignorant? They include Monsanto, DuPont, PepsiCo, Dow Agro, Bayer, BASF, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Nestle, ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg, Smithfield Foods, Del Monte, Campbells, and Heinz, each of which contributed at least $500,000 and as much as $8M to defeat the measure. Other well-known brands fighting for the consumer's right not to know include Hershey's, J.M. Smucker, Ocean Spray, Mars, Hormel, Bumblebee, Sara Lee, Unilever, Wrigley, Cargill and Dole. Their political involvement suggests the likelihood that all of these companies have GMO in their products or expect to do so in future.
The Fix the Debt campaign has raised $60 million and recruited more than 80 CEOs of America’s most powerful corporations to lobby for a debt deal that would reduce corporate taxes and shift costs onto the poor and elderly.The corporate tax burden is lower than it has been in 40 years. They don't want to fix the debt, they want to fix the system.
[snip]
The 63 Fix the Debt companies that are publicly held stand to gain as much as $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves one of their main proposals — a “territorial tax system.” Under this system, companies would not have to pay U.S. federal income taxes on foreign earnings when they bring the profits back to the United States.
Gore Vidal, the recently demised American writer, once famously quipped that the US economic system is "free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich".Vidal had it right, but it is more pernicious, since the rich don't just get to socialize their losses, they are actively protected from the corrective market forces that make capitalism theoretically efficient. As one wag put it:
Since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008, not only has the US lived up to Vidal's caricature but the whole of the rich capitalist world has become more "American". The poor are increasingly exposed to market forces, with tougher conditions on the diminishing state protection they get, while the rich have unprecedented levels of protection from the state, with virtually no strings attached.
Free-market capitalism is for the poor. Job creators prefer market-free capitalism.
So Iceland decided not to follow the rest of the world by bailing out the bankers. Instead, they chose to arrest them. Now their economy is recovering faster than the EU and the United States...
At the start of the world wide 2008 economic collapse, Iceland was in worse shape than almost any other country in the world. Now they are one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
Imagine what America would be like today if we bailed out the victims of poor banking practices, while punishing the bankers who were responsible?
Have ... declining tax cuts for the rich--the "job creators" who are being given a bigger incentive to invest by the reduced tax rates--led to faster economic growth?These tax cuts, however, are strongly correlated with surging deficits, mounting debt, and burgeoning economic inequality.
Nope.
... The slope of the solid line in each chart is the key.
The lefthand chart shows that there is no correlation between GDP growth and the top marginal tax rates. The righthand chart shows that there might be a very modest tendency toward faster economic growth with higher capital gains rates. (But those who love today's record-low capital gains rates will be relieved to know that the [non-partisan Congressional Research Service] does not find this correlation to be statistically significant.)
