“The Corporate Predator State”: This Isn’t The Free Market, It’s A Rigged Market
Bipartisan agreement in Washington usually means citizens should hold on to their wallets or get ready for another threat to peace. In today’s politics, the bipartisan center usually applauds when entrenched interests and big money speak. Beneath all the partisan bickering, bipartisan majorities are solid for a trade policy run by and for multinationals, a health-care system serving insurance and drug companies, an energy policy for Big Oil and King Coal, and finance favoring banks that are too big to fail.
Economist James Galbraith calls this the “predator state,” one in which large corporate interests rig the rules to protect their subsidies, tax dodges and monopolies. This isn’t the free market; it’s a rigged market.
Wall Street is a classic example. The attorney general announces that some banks are too big to prosecute. Despite what the FBI called an “epidemic of fraud,” not one head of a big bank has gone to jail or paid a major personal fine. Bloomberg News estimated that the subsidy they are provided by being too big to fail adds up to an estimated $83 billion a year.
Corporate welfare is, of course, offensive to progressives. The Nation and other media expose the endless outrages — drug companies getting Congress to ban Medicare negotiating bulk discounts on prices, Big Oil protecting billions in subsidies, multinationals hoarding a couple of trillion dollars abroad to avoid paying taxes, and much more.
But true conservatives are — or should be — offended by corporate welfare as well. Conservative economists Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that it is time to “save capitalism from the capitalists,” urging conservatives to support strong measures to break up monopolies, cartels and the predatory use of political power to distort competition.
Here is where left and right meet, not in a bipartisan big-money fix, but in an odd bedfellows campaign to clean out Washington.
For that to happen, small businesses and community banks will have to develop an independent voice in our politics. Today, they are too often abused as cover for multinational corporations and banks. The Chamber of Commerce exemplifies the scam. It pretends to represent the interests of millions of small businesses, but its issue and electoral campaigns are defined and paid for by big-money interests working to keep the game rigged.
An authentic small-business lobby has finally started to emerge, as William Greider reports in the most recent issue of the Nation. The American Sustainable Business Council, along with the Main Street Alliance and the Small Business Majority, are enlisting small business owners to speak for themselves — and challenging the corporate financed propaganda groups such as the Chamber and the National Federation of Independent Business. Their positions often align with those of progressives. They loathe the big banks and multinationals that work to undermine competition.
Greider reports on the antipathy these small business owners have for the big guys. Camille Moran, president and chief executive of Caramor Industries and Four Seasons Christmas Tree Farm in Natchitoches, La., rails against the “Wall Street wheelers and dealers.” They knew, she argues, that they “ would get no sympathy saying that ending the high-income Bush tax cuts would hurt them, so instead they pretend it would hurt Main Street small business and employment. Don’t fall for it. . . . That’s a trillion dollars less we would have for education, roads, security, small business assistance and all of the other things that actually help our communities.”
ReShonda Young, operations manager of Alpha Express, a family-owned delivery service in Waterloo, Iowa: “We’re not afraid to compete with the biggest delivery companies out here, but it needs to be a fair fight, not one in which big corporations use loopholes to avoid their taxes, stick our business with the tab.”
Polls show these aren’t isolated views. The ASBC, the Main Street Alliance and the Small Business Majority sponsored a poll by Lake Research of small business owners. Ninety percent believe “big corporations use loopholes to avoid taxes that small businesses have to pay,” and three-fourths said their own businesses suffer because of it.
The ASBC and its allies have the potential to become what Jamie Raskin, a Maryland state senator, dubbed a “Chamber of Progress,” a small-business voice that is willing to take on the big guys that tilt the playing field.
The possibilities are endless. Wall Street argues for rolling back financial regulation on the grounds that it hurts community and small banks. What if community and small bankers joined the call of conservative Dallas Federal Reserve President Richard Fisher to break up the big banks?
Multinational executives have just launched the “LIFT America” Coalition to push for a territorial tax system that would exempt from U.S. taxes all profits reported abroad. ASBC and its allies could rally small businesses to demand closing down overseas tax havens and imposing a minimum tax on profits sitting abroad, so that they didn’t face a higher tax burden that their global competitors.
In today’s Washington, powerful corporate interests stymie progress on areas vital to our future. Can a right/left, small-business/worker odd bedfellows alliance emerge to counter the predatory interests? We can only hope so.
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 26, 2013
“Rage Against Paul Ryan”: Perhaps He Was Moshing When He Should Have Been Listening
No musician has been more identified than Tom Morello with the uprising against the crony capitalism of Wall Street speculators and Washington pawns like Paul Ryan.
Morello, the Grammy Award—winning guitarist with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave who has earned an international following with his musically and politically charged performances as the Nightwatchman, followed the wave of protests that swept Egypt and other Mideast countries at the start of 2011.
A Woody Guthrie-inspired advocate of mass protests, rallies, marches and in-the-streets campaigning for economic and social justice, Morello loved the reports from Cairo. And he kept up with each new report from Tahrir Square.
Then, one night, he and his wife were watching the protests, and he saw something odd. Snow.
It doesn’t snow in Cairo.
But it does in Madison, Wisconsin.
“I was watching the demonstrations in Cairo with my then-pregnant wife,” Morello says. “The report went from 100,000 people on the streets of Cairo to 100,000 people on the streets of Madison. And I remember saying, What the hell is going on? Where did this come from?”
When he heard it was a union struggle that had brought masses of Wisconsinites to the streets in winter, Morello wanted to grab his guitar and fly immediately from his home in Los Angeles to Madison.
He wasn’t at all sure his wife would approve. But, Morello recalls, she was two steps ahead of him. “She said: ‘Our sons are going to be union men. You’ve got to go.’ ”
Morello went, with a crew of fellow musicians that included The Street Dogs and legendary MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, to Madison and on to the Occupy Wall Street protests against corporate corruption and political abuses that have concentrated power in the hands of the new-generation robber barons who have occupied the top one percent of American business and political life.
So you can imagine Tom Morello’s response when the New York Times reported that newly minted Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan “lists Rage Against the Machine, which sings about the greed of oil companies and whose Web site praises the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street movement, among his favorite bands.”
Ryan’s a bit of a metalhead, with a taste for Led Zeppelin, Metallica and—as he told CNN—“a lot of grunge” bands that are not frequently identified with the extreme social conservatism and the free-market economic theories of Austrian economists. He a kid growing up in Janesville, Wisconsin, he listened to radio rockers like John “Sly” Sylvester, who has since become a Wisconsin talk-radio legend and one of Ryan’s edgiest critics.
Rage has for years ranked high on Ryan’s playlist. The congressman says he really likes the music—which he plays loud while working through his daily ninety-minute exercise regime—if not necessarily the seminal band’s “fight the power” lyrics.
Morello, for his part, does not really like Ryan.
“Paul Ryan,” Morello explained in a blistering statement he wrote for Rolling Stone, “is the embodiment of the machine our music rages against.”
Morello’s no Democratic apparatchik. He’s been more than willing to criticize the policies of President Obama.
But he’s raging against Ryan.
“Paul Ryan’s love of Rage Against the Machine is amusing, because he is the embodiment of the machine that our music has been raging against for two decades. Charles Manson loved the Beatles but didn’t understand them. Governor Chris Christie loves Bruce Springsteen but doesn’t understand him. And Paul Ryan is clueless about his favorite band, Rage Against the Machine.,” Morello writes. “Ryan claims that he likes Rage’s sound, but not the lyrics. Well, I don’t care for Paul Ryan’s sound or his lyrics. He can like whatever bands he wants, but his guiding vision of shifting revenue more radically to the one percent is antithetical to the message of Rage.”
The guitarist who has a long history of radical activism and radical songwriting asks: “I wonder what Ryan’s favorite Rage song is? Is it the one where we condemn the genocide of Native Americans? The one lambasting American imperialism? Our cover of “Fuck the Police”? Or is it the one where we call on the people to seize the means of production? So many excellent choices to jam out to at Young Republican meetings!”
“Don’t mistake me,” Morello continues, “I clearly see that Ryan has a whole lotta ‘rage’ in him: A rage against women, a rage against immigrants, a rage against workers, a rage against gays, a rage against the poor, a rage against the environment. Basically the only thing he’s not raging against is the privileged elite he’s groveling in front of for campaign contributions.
The Morello, who’s got Woody Guthrie’s eye for the teaching moment, observes:
You see, the super rich must rationalize having more than they could ever spend while millions of children in the U.S. go to bed hungry every night. So, when they look themselves in the mirror, they convince themselves that “Those people are undeserving. They’re…lesser.” Some of these guys on the extreme right are more cynical than Paul Ryan, but he seems to really believe in this stuff. This unbridled rage against those who have the least is a cornerstone of the Romney-Ryan ticket.
But Rage’s music affects people in different ways. Some tune out what the band stands for and concentrate on the moshing and throwing elbows in the pit. For others, Rage has changed their minds and their lives. Many activists around the world, including organizers of the global occupy movement, were radicalized by Rage Against the Machine and work tirelessly for a more humane and just planet. Perhaps Paul Ryan was moshing when he should have been listening.
Perhaps Paul Ryan should put that in his iPod and play it.
By” John Nichols, The Nation, August 17, 2012
“Selfishness As Virtue”: The Narcissistic Politics Of Paul Ryan And The Servicing Of The Super-Rich Generation Of Termites
Often labeled a “reformer” for his determination to privatize Medicare and Social Security, Paul Ryan on closer inspection appears to be simply another Republican politician – like his new patron Mitt Romney – whose first priority is his own self-interest.
Both the ideology and the legislation he champions prove that he is utterly sincere in his admiration of Ayn Rand, the kooky libertarian author who elaborated her philosophy in a book candidly titled The Virtue of Selfishness. (The flavor of this 1964 essay collection can be gleaned from its original title, The Fascist New Frontier. Its first draft included a Rand screed that compared President John F. Kennedy with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.)
Ryan is a millionaire – one of the most affluent members of Congress – chiefly owing to a series of inheritances from his own family and the family of his wife, an Oklahoma heiress. And like Romney, he would certainly benefit from the tax proposals in the “Ryan budget,” which provides even greater benefits for wealthy families like his own than the Bush budgets that he supported during the past decade. The Romney-Ryan ticket’s chief policy preoccupation, in fact, is cutting their own taxes yet again while gutting government functions that serve the middle class (while raising taxes on them).
But the self-serving short-sightedness epitomized by Ryan’s ideas extends well beyond cutting taxes for himself and people like him. Consider his voting record on energy and environmental issues, where he has been a faithful servant of Big Oil and “skeptic” of climate change caused by carbon emissions.
That record happens to coincide perfectly with the interests of his wife Janna and her father, a lawyer representing oil and gas interests. Ryan and his wife have already inherited millions of dollars from a trust established by her family; and they own shares in several companies leasing property in Oklahoma and Texas to energy firms that benefit from taxpayer subsidies protected in Ryan’s budget. Although Ryan occasionally complains about “corporate welfare,” he and Romney both oppose any reduction in the multi-billion-dollar tax breaks enjoyed by the oil and gas industry.
As for Ryan’s own inherited wealth, it is money that mostly came from the huge construction company established by his great-grandfather in the 19th century. Ryan Incorporated’s success grew from the construction of railroads, then highways, airports, bridges and other basic public infrastructure – in short, from government contracts. (Its website proudly outlines the company history and notes that today “the Company performs residential, commercial, industrial and power site work, landfill construction and capping and full-service golf course building/remodeling for both public and private customers.”
But while Ryan benefited personally from more than a century of construction that helped to create American society and a prosperous middle class, his budget serves only the super-rich generation of termites who would allow U.S. infrastructure to crumble, rather than provide sufficient resources to maintain and modernize it. Should the Ryan budget ever become law, very little or no federal money will remain available in future decades for such basic purposes of government. That is fine with him, evidently because Ryan’s own fortunes are no longer tied to the family construction business. (His cousins who still run the company would be wise to vote for anyone but him.)
Then there is Ryan’s longtime obsession with abolishing Social Security as a public insurance system, which first drew attention to him during the Bush administration in 2005. The Bush White House suffered political disaster by pursuing a privatization plan as he urged them to do. Strangely, while Ryan is decades away from retirement age, he has already collected Social Security in the form of survivor benefits. For two years he received a check every month, following the tragic early death of his father when the future Congressman was only 16 years old.
Thanks to Social Security, Ryan was able to save money for college – a story similar to that of Senator Al Franken’s wife Franni, who lost her father at an early age and attended college thanks to federal survivor benefits. But while Franni Franken’s experience ensured that she and her husband became staunch defenders of Social Security, Ryan is eager to deprive future orphans of the guaranteed support that he received.
If selfishness is truly a virtue, then Ryan is without peer. His ideas comprise a taxonomy of narcissistic public policy – from taxes to climate change, infrastructure, and social insurance — that would surely gratify his idol.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, August 15, 2012
“Women And Children Last”: Was The Republican Party Always This Greedy?
I have a keen interest in military strategy and tactics. Probably because I’m a political strategist and tactician. Wednesday night, I watched a documentary on the Military History Channel about the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II. The unselfish actions of U.S. sailors there prevented a military disaster and demonstrated what was great about the Greatest Generation.
General Douglas MacArthur had just landed his invasion force in the Philippines in October of 1944. A large Japanese naval fleet, including the biggest battleship in the world, the Yamato, was bearing down on Leyte Gulf to destroy our invasion forces on the beach. The only American naval force available to stop the attack was a small task force of destroyers and escort carriers called Taffy 3 (Task Force 3).
The large Japanese force dwarfed and outgunned Taffy 3 but the Americans blunted the attack by sending three destroyers up against big Japanese battleships. The small destroyer force was able to slow down the larger Japanese fleet long enough for the main American fleet to ride to the rescue and save the day. In the process, the Japanese sunk all three of the destroyers and hundreds of brave, young American sailors went down with their ships. But the selfless dedication of the men in Taffy 3 saved MacArthur’s invasion force from total destruction.
There’s a world of difference between the selfless sacrifice of Taffy 3 and the Republican Party. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center shows that only four of 10 Republicans believe that government has a responsibility to help people who can’t help themselves. In contrast, six out of every 10 independents and three out of every four Democrats believe that government should step up to help down-on-their-luck Americans. Republicans weren’t always this selfish. In 1987, six in 10 Republicans wanted government to work for the common good.
The GOP slogan for campaign 2012 should be “Every man for himself” or “Women and children last.” Republicans of course, make exceptions for their sugar daddies. If you’re a banker or a billionaire you can count on a lot of help from Republicans in power. If you’re an unwed mother in need of prenatal medical care or a poor hungry kid in need of a school lunch, you can forget about any help from the GOP Mean Machine.
The Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan budget clearly illustrates the party’s fiscal philosophy. The GOP budget cuts aid for prenatal care, school lunches, and child healthcare. The Republican proposal is careful, however, to protect tax breaks for the 1 percent. The best example of the cruelty in the GOP budget is that it cuts federal aid to help seniors pay for home heating oil while it maintains $4 billion dollars a year in federal tax freebies for the oil companies. If you have filled your tank recently you know big oil doesn’t really need the money.
My political philosophy comes from Hubert Humphrey, who said, “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those in the shadow of life, the needy and the handicapped.”
If my belief in these words makes me a bleeding heart liberal, let me bleed.
By: Brad Bannon, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, June 7, 2012
“End Of A Traditional Marriage?”: Republicans And The Military No Longer BFF’s
Republicans are adept, as we know, at taking a piece of existing conventional wisdom, finding one (usually totally irrelevant) fact that seems to reinforce it, and spreading that talking point far and wide. Take defense. The piece of c.w. is that Republicans are pro-military and Democrats anti. Then they find a technically true but meaningless fact, like the assertion often made by Romney and Gingrich on the campaign trail that our Navy is at its smallest size since 18-something and of course this is all Obama’s fault because, naturally, he hates the Navy. The part they leave out, of course, is that the reduced fleet size and slower “build rate” are part of the Navy’s own strategic plan.
Which brings us to the Law of the Sea Treaty, currently being held up in the Senate by a few Republicans. The United States is not yet party to this convention, but groundwork to join had been laid by leaders from both parties over a number of years. George W. Bush supported joining. Far richer than that, though, is the fact that the then governor of Alaska in 2007 said: “I want to put my administration on record in support of the convention as the predicate for asserting sovereign rights that will be of benefit to Alaska and the nation.” But that before she flowered, shall we say, into the creature she is today.
Now, of course, because Obama supports joining, the treaty is an assault on American sovereignty. Heather Hurlburt, a leading expert on military matters, writes that joining the convention “is supported by all the current Pentagon brass, six former Secretaries of Defense and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, five former commandants of the Coast Guard, eight former Chiefs of Naval Operations.” I guess they’re all communists or at least Trilateralists.
The Hurlburt article I link to above is well-worth reading as she lays out five areas in which today’s conservatism is actively thwarting Pentagon planning and goals, from the aforementioned treaty to the jailing of terror suspects to the question of war with Iran and other matters. One of those is alternative energy, on which the story gets even weirder.
The Pentagon is the biggest user of fossil fuels in the world. Hurlburt refers to one estimate that every gallon of gas used in Afghanistan needs seven gallons to get it there. Reasonably, the Pentagon would like to reduce its bill. It has a green initiative. Uh-oh! Green? You know that’s trouble!
Here, read David Roberts of Grist, who explains how Republicans in Congress are trying to pass laws that would prevent the Pentagon from using less-expensive fuels, but force it to use more expensive fuels (coal-to-liquid technology). He concludes:
So, let’s pause and review. The Republican position on military fuel choices is as follows: Congressional restrictions are an “unacceptable precedent” when they prohibit dirtier fuels, but necessary when they prohibit cleaner fuels. Also, it is unacceptable for the military to pay more for cleaner fuels, but necessary for it to pay more for dirtier fuel.
Part of this is their debt to Big Dirty Energy, but most of it is just ideology. It’s just a party gone mad with opposition and hatred. Which isn’t exactly news, but bears repeating and repeating in all its guises and forms.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 24, 2012
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