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Monday, December 10, 2012

Identify Yourself (A Message To Fellow- Progressives)





Identify Yourself (A Message To Fellow- Progressives)


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OpEdNews Op Eds





Pierre, Le Cont, the deputy of the French Revolutionary Convent, 1793, France

Sometimes it is paramount to listen to your enemies.  There is a reason why progressives do not even seem to exist in the MSM_ driven environment. When they are mentioned, they are considered a nuisance at best, some pesky people who really have neither influence, nor power but are very noisy and need to be called to order.  As MSM is a sellout by default we should rightfully assume that there should be a reason good enough for them to discard us entirely. And yes it is. It is in the way we are described in the discourse. Perception is everything, so here it is.

( Sidebar. Progressives rarely sell themselves to the common public as the movement which will lead to higher chances of the individual success.)

"The so-called progressives is a bunch of degenerate people which consists primarily of two groups:

Group #1 - the losers. Those are people who, due to the weakness of character of other degenerative qualities had lost in the everyday competition within the current framework of values. and had been pushed to the fringes of the society. They are either poor or dissatisfied or their personal life is a total disaster. Thus they are full of bitterness and petty feeling of envy towards hard-working people who embrace the American dream. Many of them also live on entitlements. Thus due to the fear of losing those entitlements and also because of low-level envy they blame everyone and everything but themselves. They are at best the useless whiners and at worst - the people who hate American values and want to make everyone as miserable as they are.

Group #2 -the irresponsible bored liberals. The typical case of those kind of people is shown in the movie "The Aviatior," where Howard Hughes visits the rich relatives of Katherine Hepburn. They tell him that "we are all Socialists." Howard Hughes accurately states there that those people do not care for money because they always had it. They can afford to play with socialism. The reason is primarily boredom but also the sense of guilty conscience because the money they bask in is not earned but rather inherited, or had been a lucky grab. Such people want to feel good all the time, so they feel obligated to massage their paranoia by playing a liberal card. They do that because they are weak, lazy but lucky bastards who are not worth their luck. Within the current system of values such people are an abomination of capitalism, the ones who bite the hand that feeds them. They are cowards too. They would not like the nuclear bombardment of Japan, for instance, but they would not mind those 100000 Japanese    be killed in 100000 different places separately. They just abhor the pileup; not cool for their nerves.'

( Sidebar. The above is what happens if you do not define yourself who you are. Someone else will do it for you.)

In all fairness the scathing definition above has some truth in it. It is also a total lie. Yes, many people among progressives struggle in their everyday life. And yes, there are people among progressives who spend their fortunes on liberal endeavors; just consider the Hollywood celebs. But if we look at the ultra-right we would find much more losers, ignorant, lazy and weak individuals, the whole gallery of disgusting rich parasites, their slaves, perverts, and all kinds of unfortunate characters. Within the current framework of values those people do not call themselves losers. They call themselves the salt of the Earth. That is because they unequivocally accept that current framework of values. That simple.

If we go for a nutshell though we should admit that there is one important clue: yes, the success-oriented people, like professionals, small-business owners, career bureaucrats, civil service people, and military are rarely seen among active progressives.  Something turns them off. What is that?

( Sidebar. Yes, within the current framework of values the progressive movement is good in showing what is wrong, but it cannot provide an individual the alternative path to success, the way it is defined currently.) 

Interesting. That revelation above is very sobering. People usually resist any changes unless those changes offer them some kind of a better future. Within the current framework of values (Notice, how many times I repeat this mantra?-MS), the progressives line up the problems but the ways  they propose to solve those do not seem to have a goal of bringing an average Joe closer to the three- bedrooms' house with two cars and a monster TV. It does not seem that the path the progressives want to take   leads to an individual wealth. Not even close.

And boy, that seems to be truthful. Take energy conservation for instance.   Progressives are all for it. If we follow them, then one person who lives in a four-bedroom house, or, God forbid, has two houses is not a successful role model but a target for energy police. He or she should be punished for success, mercilessly taxed for his unfortunate "carbon footprint." If he/she     wants some fun and buys a yacht or invests in the strip clubs - the whole Hell can break lose. Of course, the Average Joe does not have any of those things. But he would love to have them. If we, progressives want to take away that dream, we should offer at least something similar to pursue. What is that, I wonder?

Within the current framework of values, what is that we can offer that will attract the person who wants to live in his house alone?

(Sidebar. It is not really true that the progressive agenda cannot offer   the path to the individual success, it is rather that progressives, for some inexplicable reason, prefer not to appeal to selfish interests of the very people whose hearts and minds they target.)

How about an interesting twist? Let's say we offer an Average Joe the same kind of the house or whatever he/she wants plus all those environmental unfortunate taxes he/she is so afraid of. But at the same time we promise the following:

-No mortgage payments ever. The prices of the houses will drop -- they will cost the real money and not the mythical "market' money because all locations will be equally attractive.



-No education expenses.

-No medical expenses because there will be a national medical coverage for every citizen.

-State pension after 65 with adjustment to the cost of living.

-Decreased utilities bills and clean air and water of higher standards in all parts of the country.

-Bonus- free gym membership for life :)

If you were an Average Joe, wouldn't you become interested? I would. Why then we do not offer that? Why don't we offer at least part of that?   Here's why - we are ourselves operating WITHIN THE CURRENT FRAMEWORK OF VALUES.

If we look at the list of perfectly reasonable goals I had listed above, we quickly realize that to achieve those or even some of those the people seemingly would need to drastically change that very current framework of values. Mortgage industry will have to go. It though is a baby of the very fabric of the US financial system whose primary driving force is the credit game. Credit is that "invisible" hand which replaces in the US the real world by the illusion of grandeur; houses cost about 4 times their real value, locations are more important than the houses, property taxes are a lucrative bonus for the loaner and mortgage -- backed securities are the backbone of the infamous derivatives market. Wow! I just touched one small point and the whole spider-web starts to vibrate. That list above can easily make me a Satan. Good I don't believe in all those things. I believe in the truth: nothing in my list contradicts the current framework of values - I just interpreted those values in a drastically different way. The proper way if you want to ask me.

The main difference here is the redefinition of the power of the citizen.

( Sidebar. It is an unfortunate truth that current progressives en masse sort of care about America but don't really like Americans. The rich and powerful do not like them either but they have much more money to buy the cohorts of slaves whose only assignment is to flatter the public and make it eat the status -- quo. Progressives do not have that luxury - thus their collective disgust, so to speak, results in the inevitable meagerness and ultimate high odds of defeat.)

Power is more important than money. Progressives, if they really want to see at least some fruit of their good intentions have to find and firmly state a powerful alternative to the mythical financial independence, the actual lie which is funded by thieves. This alternative is power. Average Joe should imagine himself without all those financial burdens he/she now endures. Consider how easy it would be to start a small business if there is no issue of medical care. Consider how good it would be to enjoy the same high standard of living anywhere you want without breaking your back. Consider the perspective to have enough time to become a powerful voice in the community. Consider the job market to become a seller's market. How?   I am pretty sure that Average Joe would be the first to offer a barrage of ideas on how to do that. But you have to love him.

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied
L. Cohen

Everybody knows but there is no hope. Progressives can invoke hope as soon as they themselves start to believe in it. They should, in fact identify themselves as a real force which WANTS SOMETHING.

( Sidebar. "There is one very important addition to the scathing picturing   of the progressives above. Using the same language we can say that one of the most unfortunate features of the progressives is that those two groups also hate each other. Progressives are notorious for an inability to cooperate, coordinate and help each other. They betray each other all the time. Moreover, they are so desperately afraid of somehow being exposed as extremists, that they spend enormous efforts to disengage themselves from all national, religious, youth and race movements, which obviously   only confirms the conclusion about them as being a bunch of weaklings.')


I am sorry to say but the message of the above sidebar is very much the truth. It is especially shameful in the light of the staunch loyalty and discipline of the right-wing-nuts and their machine. Whatever we can say about them, they care for each other. Do we?

OWS was a grass-roots youth movement in the Y2011-12. I watched the development of that fascinating movement, the real glory of our future and I was appalled by the passivity and even hostility among the various progressive-called and democratic groups to any possibility of OWS becoming a truly progressive political movement with demands, goals and ideology. On the contrary - the majority of the progressives effectively undermined any attempt to expand the OWS, to call for the racial and student groups to join, to actively involve the parents of the kids in the support net, to use the movement as a startup ignition fire for the new political party, to really fight for the goals those people came out for. The counterparts mobilized like an army, crushing the movement with the massive media barrage, slander and vicious deceit, portraying your children, our children as a bunch of lazy freaks. The Dems betrayed them the first. What a contrast to the way the Tea-Party was and is treated by the powerful elite. Just go watch the excellent documentary "The Billionaires."

(Sidebar. The OWS story had proven with painful clarity that the self-proclaimed progressive movement failed to fulfill its obligations as soon as real life stood in front of it. Progressives neither developed their own, new set of values, nor did they make any attempt to use the current framework of values to meet the OWS opportunity. It is a cruel irony that the Tea Party, an artificial to the core entity, a money- lubricated hate machine, a total lie - had successfully fulfilled its purpose and pushed the ultra- right people into Congress. At the same time, OWS, the pure truth, the real vox populi, was immediately undermined by the very people who were supposed to take a leadership. Instead of asking the best and the brightest of the OWS to start the process of future political leadership and commit to helping them, our dear liberals seemed to seek approval from the people like Rush Limbaugh. We could not handle our own truth.)

The absolutely unique endeavor of OWS died out ABSOLUTELY due to the betrayal on the part of those who were supposed to become its leaders. We, the progressives had been weighted and found too light.

This lightness of ours is most evident on OEN, which is sort of our virtual home. I was always wondering why our level of tolerance had not developed much although the site exists for already a rather long time and had become a very fruitful source of knowledge. Still, we do not value the alliance much. You can easily predict the pattern of the comment thread; if the article is somehow personal, like about women or a personal experience, or animals, or an ethnicity, or about, say, libertarians - you can expect a significant feedback. If the article makes an attempt on explanation of the phenomena (whether war or some act, or the process of election, etc) from the positions of a particular ideology, sort of establish  a parametric surface - that article rarely gets more then 2 or 3 comments; people do not like to be lectured. Some very powerful authors get no comments at all for months. This is not whining -- I am sincerely concerned; we do not cultivate allies. Our behavior on OEN still resembles the billiard balls - we collide but do not get dents. We behave like an ideal gas model. Why?

I think it is because of the lack of the goal. Imagine an engineering company with no product. People come to work every day, they discuss technical issues, make calculations, write reports - all of that for nothing; no final product, no hardware, no machine. I think we on OEN are in exactly that stage - we sit in the same room, know what we are and why we are there, but there is no sense of the common goal and our energy dissipates in hitting each other.

I am a former chess player and I remember a story about a famous genius   Jose-Raul Capablanca. He once watched a group of people analyzing a game. He approached and asked what they they were seeking. They told him that they were trying to find a way for the White to win.

"That's easy," said Capa, "You have to put these pieces (he had shown which) into these places for the final position."

"Yes," said the folks, "But how do we achieve that?"

"Oh that," said Capa, "You will figure that out yourself."

The progressive cause is just, so the goal should be easy. Turns out it is not that simple. It cannot be a goal of survival - never works. It cannot be a goal of restrain - never works either. Nothing can be turned back and a person with a cell-phone will never return to the rotary ring. The goal must be a new opportunity, something which promises a better life for EVERYONE approaching. It can be within the current framework of values but promising a new approach to it. It has to feel better for (sorry to say that) petty, selfish interests of the people. What's the goal then?

I would dare to state that the definition of that goal is the MAIN AND URGENT task standing in front of the progressives for them to stop being a crowd and becoming a movement. Here's how I see it, IMHO:

The goal of the progressive movement is the development of the power structure for the truly qualified and honest to rule.

I sincerely believe that truly qualified and honest are actually the power for the people, of the people and by the people; I believe I personally will prosper under the power of the qualified and honest and I believe that those monumental problems of Humanity could be easily solved if those qualified and honest exercise that power. And I believe that qualification and honesty transfigures the otherwise natural human qualities towards the service of good. It is just the matter of the proper standards.

"Insurmountable obstacles seem that way to us because we stay on our knees.  Let's stand up"
Karl Marx


And here is where the progressives are invaluable. Whoever starts on that road has an obligation to self-identification. The ability to see clearly the problems of the society   makes a person exceptional. It also imposes a responsibility.

Nobody has a right to squander such gift on petty bickering and cheap shots; you have to define a common goal and seek allies. You have to acknowledge the truth and make it known. You have to

"Bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;"
( IF, by R. Kipling)

IF.   If we   do not want to look like a   bunch of weaklings   worthy only the mockery by Rush Limbaugh and similar characters we should establish our goal and make it known. Then the true weaklings, the SOBs, they will get afraid. Let them. It will show their true colors. Progressives are in fact the last and only hope for the people of this country at least. If they do not define the future and make sure it happens we risk a very real confrontation with the Mankind, the one in which a defeat is imminent. We love this country and its people. We don't want that to happen. None of us wants that. The Y2013 is the YEAR OF THE SNAKE.   Let its venom be the agent of cure, not the agent of death.
Our cause is just. Let's define the goal and go for it. And let's take all the others with us.

A writer is a rogue goose. All other gees fly in a flock formation; every goose knows his place and time for honking. The rogue goose is undisciplined. He leaves the formation indiscriminately to have a look at it from aside. He roams back and (more...)

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

How the Left Can Become a True Political Force to Be Reckoned With



Election 2012  

How the Left Can Become a True Political Force to Be Reckoned With

We need to assert a new culture of organizing capable of meeting the demands it will place on us, and now is the time to begin.

 
Photo Credit: Mykhaylo Palinchak/Shutterstock.com
 
The 2012 elections may prove to have been a watershed in several different respects.  Despite the efforts by the political Right to suppress the Democratic electorate, something very strange happened:  voters, angered by the attacks on their rights, turned out in even greater force in favor of Democratic candidates.  The deeper phenomenon is that the changing demographics of the USA also became more evident—45% of Obama voters were people of color, and young voters turned out in large numbers in key counties.

Unfortunately for the political Left, these events unfolded with the Left having limited visibility and a limited impact—except indirectly through certain mass organizations—on the outcome.

The setting

On one level it is easy to understand why many Republicans found it difficult to believe that Mitt Romney did not win the election.  First, the US remains in the grip of an economic crisis with an official unemployment rate of 7.9%.  In some communities, the unemployment is closer to 20%.  While the Obama administration had taken certain steps to address the economic crisis, the steps have been insufficient in light of the global nature of the crisis.  The steps were also limited by the political orientation of the Obama administration, i.e., corporate liberal, and the general support by many in the administration for neo-liberal economics.

The second factor that made the election a ‘nail biter’ was the amount of money poured into this contest.  Approximately $6 billion was spent in the entire election.  In the Presidential race it was more than $2 billion raised and spent, but this does not include independent expenditures.  In either case, this was the first post-Citizen United Presidential campaign, meaning that money was flowing into this election like a flood after a dam bursts.  Republican so-called Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) went all out to defeat President Obama.

Third, the Republicans engaged in a process of what came to be known as “voter suppression” activity.  Particularly in the aftermath of the 2010 midterm elections, the Republicans created a false crisis of alleged voter fraud as a justification for various draconian steps aimed at allegedly cleansing the election process of illegitimate voters.  Despite the fact that the Republicans could not substantiate their claims that voter fraud was a problem on any scale, let alone a significant problem, they were able to build up a clamor for restrictive changes in the process, thereby permitting the introduction of various laws to make it more difficult for voters to cast their ballots.  This included photographic voter identification, more difficult processes for voter registration, and the shortening of early voting.  Though many of these steps were overturned through the intervention of courts, they were aimed at causing a chilling impact on the voters, specifically, the Democratic electorate.[1]

So, what happened?

Prior to the election, we argued that what was at stake in the 2012 elections was actually the changing demographics of the USA (along with a referendum on the role of government in the economy).  What transpired in the elections was very much about demographics.

The percentage of white voters dropped from 74% to 72% between 2008 and 2012.  Romney received 59% of the white vote.

Yet something else happened and it took many people by surprise.  Despite the intimidation caused by the voter suppression statutes—and the threatened actions by right-wing groups—African Americans, Latinos and Asians turned out in significant numbers, voting overwhelmingly for the Democrats.[2]  93% of African Americans went with Obama, as did 71% of Latinos (which represented an increase over 2008) and, despite the fact that Asians are only 2-3% of the electorate, they went 73% in favor of Obama (which was a jump from 62% in 2008).  The youth vote, by the way, increased to 19% of the electorate, over 18% in 2008, and went overwhelmingly for Obama.  Labor union members went for Obama at a rate of 65%, and unions themselves played a major role in many key states in terms of voter mobilization.  By the strategic mobilization of these voters in a well-organized ‘ground game,’ Obama won 332 Electoral College votes compared with Romney’s 206.  Obama’s popular vote total was also 2.6% head of Romney.

The Romney/Ryan camp was entirely unprepared for this.  While it is the case that the popular vote total was not overwhelming for Obama, there was nothing particularly unusual in US history for such a result.  The bottom line is that Obama clearly won both the Electoral College vote and the popular vote and, as such, can claim a mandate for his next steps.

It is important that one understands that the African American/Latino/Asian turnout, along with the long-lines waiting to vote (including in the days of early voting) represented an audacious defiance of the forces that sought to suppress the vote.  This audaciousness also represented a response to the increasingly racist attacks on Obama, attacks that were taken very personally by people of color generally and African Americans in particular.[3]

What was equally interesting about the November 6th elections were those in the House of Representatives and the Senate.  Contrary to many expectations, the Democrats not only held onto the Senate, but slightly increased their margin of control.  Within that expansion was the election of Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts to the seat once occupied by the late Teddy Kennedy.  Warren, who gained a strong reputation in the fight to control Wall Street, promised actions on behalf of working people.  Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist in Vermont, also decisively won reelection.

In the House of Representatives, Democrats increased their totals, but Republicans still dominate.  This is mainly the result of the gerrymandering carried out by Republican state legislators during redistricting.  The legacy of this gerrymandering may last at least a decade, part of the fallout which resulted from lower voter turnout combined with the Republican mobilization in the 2010 midterm elections.

Of particular note in the elections was the increased presence of women, especially progressive women, being elected to office, including the first openly gay Senator (from Wisconsin, Tammy Baldwin).  The state of New Hampshire now has women in all of the top governing positions.

Additionally several progressive ballot initiatives passed in various states, including on same-sex marriage and the decriminalization of marijuana.  An interesting initiative in the state of Michigan to alter the state constitution in order to protect the right of workers to collective bargaining was defeated after a major and concerted attack by pro-employer groups.

What to make of the elections?

We return to our earlier conclusion, i.e., that what was at stake in 2012 was not Obama’s record but instead 2012 was a referendum over demographics and the role of government with the far right.  Some on the Left found this assertion worthy of ridicule rather than introspection, and dismissed it, claiming that of course Obama’s record was central to the debate.

The results of the election conform much more to our conclusions.  The vote for Obama, particularly by people of color, could not possibly have been the result of the conclusion that Obama’s record made him the great leader.  Certainly his record was better than the interpretation projected by Romney/Ryan, but it was also the case that Obama’s record was complicated if not problematic.  After all, we had witnessed an economic stimulus that, while significant by historical standards, was insufficient to the task; a healthcare reform package that, while bringing healthcare to millions, was based on a corporate model first elaborated by Mitt Romney when he was Governor of Massachusetts; a failure to close Guantanamo; the continuation and escalation of the Afghanistan/Pakistan war, including the usage of drone strikes; and the failure to adopt a clear policy to address systemic racial injustice in the USA.  While there were a number of reforms that were introduced that were of significance, this was all far less than most of Obama’s supporters had hoped would be introduced.

So, what then could one say motivated the vote?  We return to demographics and the role of government.  Obama’s very existence represents the problematic future for the political Right; it’s not that he’s an individual whose birthplace is alleged by them to not be in the USA.   This insane propaganda from the Birther movement is designed to distort the point entirely.  The Birthers[4] and their off-spring hate Obama not because of where he was born but because he was born here.  His very existence illustrates the changing demographics of the USA and its move away from being a ‘white republic’ governed by a broad ‘white’ front. Instead, we are moving more towards something else, toward a more openly multi-ethnic/multi-racial society, if not politically then at least numerically.
The election thus represented a repudiation of the right-wing irrationalists seeking to turn the clock back, and not just on race, but gender and class as well.  In this sense it was not so much about what Obama had accomplished as it was about what sort of society 61 million people did not want.  That retrograde society, which was rejected, was a neo-apartheid order of domination that condemned at least 47% of the population (according to Romney’s calculations) to marginalization, and condemned at least 90% of society to continued economic distress and submission.

Romney was proposing to reduce the role of government even further, at least when it came to supporting something approaching a social safety net.  61 million people recognized the barbarism contained in his message and program, and responded accordingly.

In sum, the November 6th elections were not a referendum challenging Obama’s course from the Left, but rather rejecting a challenge from the Right, since there was no viable Left alternative.  At the same time there was an additional interesting feature of the elections as identified in various opinion polls: 
Democratic voters, while not as starry-eyed as many were in 2008, are looking for Obama to fight for them, or at least fight on their behalf.  Frustration with Obama’s premature compromising in the name of so-called bi-partisanship wins the President few accolades within his base.  The electorate is looking for something very different.

The Left in the elections:  Building mass organizations vs. the mouths that screeched

Contrary to those who suggest that no Left exists in the USA, it is better to understand that there are two and a half Lefts in the USA.  There is the organized Left, which takes the forms of very small political organizations, some of them calling themselves political parties, which are anti-capitalist and generally for some sort of socialism.  There is also what Chilean Marxist Marta Harnecker would describe as the “social movement Left,” which are forces involved in left-leaning mass organizations and non-profits, more often than not single-issue or based within a specific sector.  There is finally what we could term the ‘half’ Left, that is, the ‘Lone Rangers,’ the  rather large number of independent individuals who self-identify as leftists but are unaffiliated with any left-wing project, with the possible exception a job with social impact, such as writers or teachers or health care workers.  In each case these individuals and formations are anti-capitalist and seek a social transformation of the USA, but with varying degrees of organization, insurgency and effectiveness.

The US Left has historically had a difficult time addressing electoral politics.  There are several reasons--the complications that arise from the undemocratic nature of the US electoral system; the size of the USA; the lack of attention to strategy; and most important, ambivalence when it comes to race.  As a result the Left frequently sways back and forth between what could, perhaps, be described as apocalyptism on the one hand (i.e., waving the red flag so that the masses see us before the whole system collapses and, therefore, they know where to go), to reformist/incrementalism, on the other (i.e., believing that the best that can be done is to submerge into the Democratic Party and help move change until the system reaches a point where quantitative change morphs into qualitative change).

There is currently no significant and unified effort within the Left(s) toward building a self-conscious, broad radical Left project that has the objective of winning power.  The bulk of the US Left does not think politically.  Rather it engages in ideological or moral struggle and often thinks that ideology or morality is identical to politics.  Rather than conceptualizing a protracted struggle for power based on the need to build a majoritarian bloc, too many individuals and organizations on the Left remain trapped in a self-satisfying world of small sects and Facebook tirades rather than the hard work of building the alliances of grassroots groups necessary to win.

The limitations of the Left’s approach to the fight for power can be illustrated in any number of places, but, for the moment, let’s reflect upon the electoral realm.  Consider the following.  In 1920 Eugene V. Debs ran, for the fifth time, for the Presidency.  Though in jail at the time (as a result of political repression), he received nearly one million votes.  In the famous 1948 campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, the candidate received 1,157,328 votes and no Electoral College votes.  In the same election, Dixiecrat candidate Strom Thurmond received more popular votes and 39 electoral votes.

Now, in 2012, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 402,125 votes.  This is going the wrong way.  But it reflects, more than anything, not the character of Stein or her supporters but the approach toward electoral politics taken by the Green Party and many of their followers.

Independent presidential candidacies in the modern era reflect what can be described as a flag-waving/protest mode rather than a struggle for power/bloc-building mode.  In other words, they aim to express both outrage and reasoned critique at the system and frustration with the toxicity of democratic capitalism.  They have no hope of gaining power either because they do not believe in struggling to gain power or because they believe that power is gained when the ship sinks and we, on the Left, are positioned in the proper lifeboats prepared to save the mass of distressed passengers.

This is only on the electoral side.  The various small organizations of the organized Left which do not engage in electoral politics in their own names seem relatively content being small and of little consequence.  In the absence of an effort at building a majoritarian bloc they can remain comfortable in their particular niche(s) and not feel the cold winds that often accompany entering into unexplored demographic or geographic territories. They remind us of the old Clifford Odet’s play, ‘Waiting for Lefty.’

At the same time, over the last 5-10 years there has developed a new interest in electoral engagement in the social movement Left.  Sprouting up in different parts of the USA have been progressive—rather than explicitly Left—political formations that have either engaged in what has come to be known as “civic engagement” work, i.e., voter registration, education, voting rights, electoral law reform, and/or actual electoral engagement.  The strength of this work is that its orientation can be described as left/progressive in that these are mass-based projects attempting to reach out to a broad array within our natural base.  Organizations ranging from Progressive Democrats of America to the Virginia New Majority and Florida New Majority fall into this camp, though the list is quite a bit longer than just these organizations.

In the lead up to the 2012 elections the Left was badly divided over how to respond.  One segment, which we will describe as the “mouths that screeched” were adamant that Obama had betrayed progressives; that he was not progressive; that he represented the empire; and therefore not only should not be supported but that it was ideological treason to suggest any level of support or even just to give him a vote without any implied support.

The vitriolic attacks coming from this sector masked the fact that this segment of the Left is actually becoming irrelevant.  They had no visible impact on the elections and their protests were largely ignored.  Unfortunately, one of the key things that this segment missed was the racial element of the 2012 elections and the need for voters of color, along with a good number of white allies, to push back at the ‘demographic’ attacks that were underway from the political Right.  By focusing on all that Obama did incorrectly, this segment of the Left ignored, as well, that the Left and progressives are on the strategic defensive in the USA and that they need alliances that will provide some level of space within which we can operate.

The segment of the Left that actually made a difference was those within the organized Left and the social movement Left who engaged their mass organizations and non-profits in electoral activity.[5]  Whether it was voter registration; voter education efforts; electoral infrastructure work; or Get Out The Vote efforts, many of these organizations proved themselves to be very effective campaign organizations.  They appear to be in the process of laying the groundwork for the sorts of progressive alliance building that will be necessary to respond to the next electoral realignment that hits the USA.

What is missing entirely, however, is a coherent, self-identified Left, taking either the form of a united front, alliance, or political organization that can serve as a pole for independent, radical yet grounded Left politics.  The mass base for such an effort exists.  The opinion polls that demonstrate that roughly one third of the population are open to directions other than capitalism means that approximately 90 million people are seeking alternatives.  Consider that 90 million figure when you review the stats for the Green Party’s votes in 2012.  The Occupy Movement also evidenced a political fissure that is certain to widen as the class struggle intensifies, though admittedly Occupy did not result in the formation of one or several credible Left organizations (no criticism implied).

Moving forward

The challenge for the Left then becomes two fold.  One, there must be a self-identified, self-aware, mass radical Left formation that openly and unapologetically advocates against capitalism and for environmentally friendly socialism.  Whether such an organization is called a political party, alliance or some other name is secondary to what it must do and what it must avoid. 

     What it must avoid is the idea that it can or should compete in the electoral realm on the presidential level at this time. That is a no-win scenario.  What it can do, however, is to unite and train the existing leaders in mass movements and develop an anti-capitalist program and ultimately an anti-capitalist project.  We term this notion of a new, self-conscious and organized Left—inspired by the approach taken by and expression used by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci—to be the “Modern Tecumseh.”[6]  Second, the Left can also help to build a progressive front—perhaps a popular front against finance capital that unites disparate forces—that gains electoral expression in the form of an organization (rather than a third party) that runs candidates within the Democratic Party or, runs them independently if conditions exist (such as in Vermont where the candidacy and leadership of Senator Sanders needs to be supported).

As long as the progressive forces in the USA are on the defensive there will be tactical alliances that take place that are not satisfying but are nevertheless necessary.  These should not be treated as matters of principle but rather as expressions of necessity of the moment.  Further, we on the Left must pay much greater attention to what is transpiring among the people themselves.  The fact that so many on the Left would have focused on Obama’s record and virtually ignored the intense racist offensive against Obama (and its broader implications) demonstrated that many of our friends are out of touch with reality.

Reality, however, is a good and necessary starting point if one ever wishes to build a majoritarian bloc and win power. We fully expect to see an intensification of class struggle in the near term. We need to assert a new culture of organizing capable of meeting the demands it will place on us, and now is the time to begin.

[1] The issue of voting rights remains critical since there are cases before the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge critical features of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, features that were part of the Department of Justice’s arsenal to overturn certain voter suppression legislation.

[2] It is important to note, however, that voter turnout was down in comparison to 2008 except for nine states.  As of this writing it is not clear as to the sources of the decline.

[3] Attacks such as Donald Trump’s insulting demand that President Obama turn over his college transcripts.  The suggestion of such an action is almost unbelievable.  Nothing along those lines would have been tolerated when it came to former President George W. Bush, an individual who was not half the student that was Obama in college.

[4] The right-wing, irrationalist political movement that asserts that Obama was not born in the USA and is, therefore, not the legitimate president of the USA.

[5] To be clear, not all forces in the organized Left or the social movement Left engaged in left/progressive electoral organizing.  We are simply noting that there were forces from within these sectors that did, in fact, choose to engage.

[6] Tecumseh:  Shawnee leader in the first decade of the 19th century.  Recognized that Native Americans would never defeat the USA by fighting as individual tribes or fighting through the creation of a confederation.  He was the advocate for a Native American nation-state, i.e., uniting the tribes and fusing their efforts.  He was killed in 1813 at the Battle of the Thames in Canada.


Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a racial justice, labor and international writer and activist.  He is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, an editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com, the co-author of Solidarity Divided, and the author of the forthcoming “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty other myths about unions.  He can be reached at billfletcherjr@gmail.com

Carl Davidson is a political organizer, writer and public speaker. He is currently co-chair of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a board member of the US Solidarity Economy Network, and a member of Steelworker Associates in Western Pennsylvania. His most recent book is ‘New Paths to Socialism: Essays on the Mondragon Cooperatives, Workplace Democracy and the Politics of Transition.’ He can be reached at carld717@gmail.com.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

10 Steps to Break Up the Wealth of the Super Rich



Books  

Here's what it's going to take to have a society where everybody prospers and get a fair shake, as this excerpt from Collins' book 99 to 1 explains.

The following is an excerpt from 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality Is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It , by Chuck Collins (Berrett-Koehler, 2012).
We must change the rules of the economy so that they serve and lift up the 100 percent, not just the 1 percent. Starting in the mid-1970s, the rules were changed to reorient the economy toward the short-term interests of the 1 percent. We can shift and reverse the rules to work for everyone.

Three Types of Rule Changes

There are three categories of policy changes that we need: rules and policies that raise the floor, those that level the playing field, and those that break up overconcentrations of wealth and corporate power. These are not hard-and-fast categories, but a useful framework for grouping different rule changes.

1.Rule changes that raise the floor
• Ensure the minimum wage is a living wage
• Provide universal health care
• Enforce basic labor standards and protections
2. Rule changes that level the playing field
• Invest in eduction
• Reduce the influence of money in politics
• Implement fair trade rules
3. Rule changes that break up wealth and power
• Tax the 1 percent
• Rein in CEO pay
• Stop corporate tax dodging
• Reclaim our financial system
• Reengineer the corporation
• Redesign the tax revenue system

Rule Changes That Raise the Floor

Policies that raise the floor reduce poverty and establish a fundamental minimum standard of decency that no one will fall below. The Nordic countries—Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland—have very low levels of inequality, and they are also societies with strong social safety nets and policies that raise the floor.

One-third of people in the United States have no paid sick days, and one-half have no paid vacation days. Everyone deserves the right to take time off when sick and have a few weeks of vacation each year. In the rest of the developed world, these are considered basic human rights.

Examples of rule changes include:

Ensure the Minimum Wage Is a Living Wage. The minimum wage has lagged behind rising basic living expenses in housing, health care, transportation, and child care.

Provide Universal Health Care. Expand health coverage so that every child and adult has a minimum level of decent health care. No one should become sick or destitute because of lack of access to health care.

Enforce Basic Labor Standards and Protections. Ensuring basic worker rights and standards can lift up the bottom 20 percent of workers who are particularly exploited and disadvantaged in the current system. These rule changes include the forty-hour workweek, minimum vacation and family medical leave, sick leave, and protections against wage theft. Such rules contribute to a more humane society for everyone.

Rule Changes That Level the Playing Field
Policies and rule changes that level the playing field eliminate the unfair wealth and power advantages that flow to the 1 percent. Examples include:

Invest in Education. In the current global economy, disparities in education reinforce and contribute to inequality trends. Public investment in education is one of the most important interventions we can make to reduce inequality over time. “Widespread education has become the secret to growth,” writes World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. “And broadly accessible education is difficult to achieve unless a society has a relatively even income distribution.”

Reduce the Influence of Money in Politics. Through various campaign finance reforms—including public financing of elections—we can reduce the nexus between gigantic wealth and political influence. Reforms include limits to campaign contributions, a ban on corporate contributions and influence, and a requirement for timely disclosure of donations.

Implement Fair Trade Rules. Most international free trade treaties have boosted the wealth of the 1 percent, whose members are the largest shareholders of global companies. Free trade rules often pit countries against one another in a race to lower standards addressing child labor, environmental protection, workers’ rights to organize, and corporate regulation. Countries with the weakest standards are rewarded in this system. Fair trade rules would raise environmental and labor standards, so companies compete on the basis of other efficiencies.

Rule Changes That Break Up Wealth and Power
We can raise the floor and work toward a level playing field, but we cannot stop the perverse effects of extreme inequality without boldly advocating for policies that break up excessive concentrations of wealth and corporate power.
For example, we cannot pass campaign finance laws that seek clever ways to limit the influence of the 1 percent, as they will always find ways to subvert the law. Concentrated wealth is like water flowing downhill: it cannot stop itself from influencing the political system. The only way to fix the system is to not have such high levels of concentrated wealth. We need to level the hill!

This section examines several far-reaching policy initiatives, the tough changes that have to be considered if we’re going to reverse extreme inequality. Some of these proposals have been off the public agenda for decades or have never been seriously considered.

Tax the 1 Percent. Historically, taxing the 1 percent is one of the most important rule changes that have reduced the concentration of wealth. In 1915, Congress passed laws instituting federal income taxes and inheritance taxes (estate taxes). Over the subsequent decades, these taxes helped reduce the concentrations of income and wealth and even encouraged Gilded Age mansions to be turned over to civic groups and charities.

Taxes on higher income and wealth reached their zenith in the mid-1950s. At the time, the incomes of millionaires were taxed at rates over 91 percent. Today, the percentage of income paid by millionaires in taxes has plummeted to 21 percent. Back then, corporations contributed a third of the nation’s revenue. Today, corporations pay less than one-tenth of the nation’s revenue. The corporate 1 percent pays an average of 11.1 percent of income in taxes, down from 47.4 percent in 1961.

Taxes on the wealthy have steadily declined over the last fifty years. If the 1 percent paid taxes at the same actual effective rate as they did in 1961, the U.S. Treasury would receive an additional $231 billion a year. In 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, 1,500 millionaires paid no income taxes, largely because they dodged taxes through offshore tax schemes, according to the IRS.

As with inequality, the higher up the income ladder people are, the lower the percentage of income they pay in taxes. This is why Warren Buffett’s disclosure about his own low taxes was so important. Buffett revealed that in 2010, he paid only 14 percent of his income in federal taxes, lower than the 25 or 30 percent rate that his co-workers paid. Buffett wrote:

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

The richest 400 taxpayers have seen their effective rate decline from over 40 percent in 1961 to 18.1 percent in 2010.

Between 2001 and 2010, the United States borrowed almost $1 trillion to give tax breaks to the 1 percent. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush were highly targeted to the top 1 and 2 percent of taxpayers. They included reducing the top income tax rate, cutting capital gains and dividend taxes, and eliminating the estate tax, our nation’s only levy on inherited wealth.

Are we focusing too much on taxing millionaires, given the magnitude of our fiscal and inequality problems? Won’t we have to raise taxes more broadly? It is true that taxing the 1 percent won’t entirely solve our nation’s short-term deficit problems or dramatically reduce inequality in the short run. But it will have a meaningful impact on both problems over time. Thirty years of tax cuts for the 1 percent have shifted taxes onto middle- income taxpayers; they have also added to the national debt, which simply postpones additional tax increases on the middle class. Progressive taxes, as were seen in the United States after World War I and during the Great Depression, do chip away at inequalities. These extreme inequalities weren’t built in a day, and the process of reversing them will not be instant, either. But when there is less concentrated income and wealth, there will be less money available for the 1 percent to use to undermine the political rule-making process.

Rein in CEO Pay. The CEOs of the corporate 1 percent are among the main drivers of the Wall Street inequality machine. They both push for rule changes to enrich the 1 percent and extract huge amounts of money for themselves in the process. But they are responding to a framework of rules that provide incentives to such short-term thinking. An early generation of CEOs operated within different rules and values—and they had a longer-term orientation.
There is a wide range of policies and rule changes that could address the skewed incentive system that results in reckless corporate behavior and excessive executive pay. What follows are several principles and examples of reforms that will reduce concentrated wealth among the 1 percent and also reform corporate practices:

• Encourage narrower CEO-worker pay gaps. Extreme pay gaps—situations where top executives regularly take home hundreds of times more in compensation than average employees—run counter to basic principles of fairness. These gaps also endanger enterprise effectiveness. Management guru Peter Drucker, echoing the view of Gilded Age financier J. P. Morgan, believed that the ratio of pay between worker and executive could run no higher than twenty to one without damaging company morale and productivity. Researchers have documented that Information Age enterprises operate more effectively when they tap into and reward the creative contributions of employees at all levels.

An effective policy would mandate reporting on CEO-worker pay gaps. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation included a provision that would require companies to report the ratio between CEO pay and the median pay for the rest of their employees. This simple reporting provision is under attack, but should be defended, and the pay ratio should become a key benchmark for evaluating corporate performance.

• Eliminate taxpayer subsidies for excessive executive pay. Ordinary taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for excessive executive compensation. And yet they do—through a variety of tax and accounting loopholes that encourage executive pay excess. These perverse incentives add up to more than $20 billion per year in forgone revenue. One example: no meaningful regulations currently limit how much companies can deduct from their taxes for the expense of executive compensation. Therefore, the more firms pay their CEO, the more they can deduct off their federal taxes.

An effective policy would limit the deductibility of excessive compensation. The Income-Equity Act (HR 382) would deny all firms tax deductions on any executive pay that runs over twenty-five times the pay of the firm’s lowest-paid employee or $500,000, whichever is higher. Companies can pay whatever they want, but over a certain amount, taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize it. Such deductibility caps were applied to financial bailout recipient firms and will be applied to health insurance companies under the health care reform legislation.

• Encourage reasonable limits on total compensation. The greater the annual reward an executive can receive, the greater the temptation to make reckless executive decisions that generate short-term earnings at the expense of long-term corporate health. Outsized CEO paychecks have also become a major drain on corporate revenues, amounting, in one recent period, to nearly 10 percent of total corporate earnings. Government can encourage more reasonable compensation levels without having to micromanage pay levels at individual firms.

An effective policy would raise top marginal tax rates. As discussed earlier, taxing high incomes at higher rates might be the most effective way to deflate bloated pay levels. In the 1950s and 1960s, compensation stayed within more reasonable bounds, in part because of the progressive tax system.

• Force accountability to shareholders. On paper, the corporate boards that determine executive pay levels must answer to shareholders. In practice, shareholders have had virtually no say in corporate executive pay decisions. Recent reforms have made some progress toward forcing corporate boards to defend before shareholders the rewards they extend to corporate officials.
An effective policy would give shareholders a binding voice on compensation packages. The Dodd-Frank reform includes a provision for a nonbinding resolution on compensation and retirement packages.

• Accountability to broader stakeholders. Executive pay practices, we have learned from the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, impact far more than just shareholders. Effective pay reforms need to encourage management decisions that take into account the interests of all corporate stakeholders, not just shareholders but also consumers, employees, and the communities where corporations operate.

An effective policy would ensure wider disclosure by government contractors. If a company is doing business with the government, it should be held to a higher standard of disclosure. Taxpayers, workers, and consumers should know the extent to which our tax dollars subsidize top management pay. One policy change would be to pass the Patriot Corporations Act to extend tax incentives and federal contracting preferences to companies that meet good-behavior benchmarks that include not compensating any executive at more than 100 times the income of the company’s lowest-paid worker.

Stop corporate tax dodging.There are hundreds of large transnational corporations that pay no or very low corporate income taxes. These include Verizon, General Electric, Boeing, and Amazon. A common gimmick of the corporate 1 percent is to shift profits to subsidiaries in low-tax or no-tax countries such as the Cayman Islands. They pretend corporate profits pile up offshore while their losses accrue in the United States, reducing or eliminating their company’s obligation to Uncle Sam.

These same companies, however, use our public infrastructure—they hire workers trained in our schools, they depend on the U.S. court system to protect their property, and our military defends their assets around the world—yet they’re not paying their share of the bill. In a time of war, the unequal sacrifice and tax shenanigans of these companies are even more unseemly.

Corporate tax dodging hurts Main Street businesses, the 99 percent that are forced to compete on a playing field that isn’t level. “Small businesses are the lifeblood of local economies,” said Frank Knapp, CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce. “We pay our fair share of taxes and generate most of the new jobs. Why should we be subsidizing U.S. transnationals that use offshore tax havens to avoid paying taxes?”

This same offshore system facilitates criminal activity, from the laundering of drug money to the financing of terrorist networks. Smugglers, drug cartels, and even terrorist networks such as al-Qaeda thrive in secret offshore jurisdictions where individuals can hide or obscure the ownership of bank accounts and corporations to avoid any reporting or government oversight.

The offshore system has spawned a massive tax-dodging industry. Teams of tax lawyers and accountants add nothing to the efficiency of markets or products. Instead of making a better widget, companies invest in designing a better tax scam. Reports about General Electric’s storied tax dodging dramatize how modern trans-nationals view their tax accounting departments as profit centers.
The combination of federal budget concerns and a growing public awareness of corporate tax avoidance will lead to greater focus on legislative solutions. One strategic rule change would be for Congress to pass the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act, which would end costly tax games that are harmful to domestic U.S. businesses and workers and blatantly unfair to those who pay their fair share of taxes.

One provision of the act would treat foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations whose management and control are primarily in the United States as U.S. domestic corporations for income tax purposes. Another provision would require country-by-country reporting so that transnational corporations would have to disclose tax payments in all jurisdictions and not easily be able to pit countries against one another.

The act would generate an estimated $100 billion in revenues a year, or $1 trillion over the next decade.

Reclaim Our Financial System.Wall Street and the top 1 percent have conducted a dangerous experiment on our lives. They have destroyed the livelihoods of billions of people around the planet in a bid to control the financial flows of the world and funnel money to the global 1 percent.

We sometimes forget that our financial sector is a human-created system that should serve the public interest and be subordinate to the credit needs of the real economy. Instead, we have a system where the planet is ruled by a tiny 1 percent of financial capital.

As quoted earlier, David Korten writes in “How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule” that the “priority of the money system shifted from funding real investment for building community wealth to funding financial games designed solely to enrich Wall Street without the burden of producing anything of value.”
Communities across the country, as discussed earlier, are shifting funds out of the speculative banking sector and into community banks and lending institutions that are constructive lenders in the real economy.

More than 650,000 individuals have closed accounts at institutions such as Bank of America and moved their money. A number of religious congregations, unions, and civic organizations have followed suit. Now local governments are beginning to shift their funds. In the City of Boston, the City Council has voted to link deposits of public funds to institutions with strong commitments to community investments.

Here are some interventions to break Wall Street’s hold on our banking and money system:

• Break up the big banks. Reverse the thirty-year process of banking concentration and support a system of decentralized, community-accountable financial institutions committed to meeting the real credit needs of local communities. Limit the size of financial institutions to several billion dollars, and eliminate government preferences and subsidies to Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks in favor of the 15,000 community banks and credit unions that are already serving local markets.

• Create a network of state-level banks. Each state should have a partnership bank, similar to what’s been in place in North Dakota since 1919. These banks would hold government funds and private deposits and partner with community-based banks and other financial institutions to provide credit to enterprises and projects that contribute to the health of the local economy. The North Dakota experience has shown how a state bank can provide stability and curb speculative trends. North Dakota has more local banks than any other state and the lowest bank default rate in the nation.

• Create a national infrastructure and reconstruction bank. Instead of channeling Federal Reserve funds into private Wall Street banks, Congress should establish a federal bank to invest in public infrastructure and partner with other financial institutions to invest in reconstruction projects. The focus should be on investments that help make a transition to a green, sustainable economy.

• Provide rigorous oversight of the financial sector. The 2010 reforms to the financial sector failed to curtail some of the most destructive, gambling-oriented practices in the economy. The shadow banking system—including unregulated hedge funds—should be brought under greater oversight, like other utilities, and Congress should levy a financial speculation tax on transactions to pay for the oversight system.

• Restructure the federal reserve. The Federal Reserve has been creating money and channeling it to beneficiaries within the economy with no public accountability. The Fed contributed to the economic meltdown by failing to provide proper oversight for financial institutions under its jurisdiction, keeping easy credit flowing during an asset bubble, ignoring community banks, and then propping up bad financial actors. The Fed must be reorganized to be an independent federal agency with proper oversight and accountability. Its regulatory functions should be separated from its central bank functions, the new regulator given teeth to enforce rules, and individuals who work for the regulatory agency prevented from subsequently going to work for banks.

• Re-engineer the Corporation. The concentration of power in the corporate 1 percent has endangered our economy, our democracy, and the health of our planet. There is no alternative but to end corporate rule. This will require not only reining in and regulating the excesses of the corporate 1 percent but also rewiring the corporation as we know it.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United (2010) decision moves things in the wrong direction, giving corporations greater “free speech” rights to use their wealth and power to change the rules of the economy. An essential first step in shifting the balance back to the 99 percent is reversing the Citizens United decision through congressional action.

There are good and ethical human beings working in corporations and in the 1 percent. But the hardwiring of these companies is toward the maximization of profits for absentee shareholders and toward reducing and shifting the cost of employees, taxes, and environmental rules that shrink profits. The current design of large global corporations enables them to dodge responsibilities and obligations to stakeholders, including employees, localities, and the ecological commons. The corporate 1 percent may pledge loyalty to the rule of law, but they spend an inordinate amount of resources lobbying to reshape or circumvent these laws, often by moving operations to other countries and to secrecy jurisdictions.

At the root of the problem is a power imbalance. Concentrated corporate power is unaccountable—and there is little countervailing force in the form of government oversight or organized consumer power.

Looking at corporate scandals such as those of Enron and AIG, or at the roots of the 2008 economic meltdown, we find case studies of the rule riggers within the corporate 1 percent using political clout to rewrite government rules, dilute accounting standards, intimidate or co-opt government regulators, or outright lie, cheat, and steal.

Changing the rules for the corporate 1 percent is not anti-business and, by creating a level playing field and a framework of fair rules, will actually strengthen the 99 percent of businesses that most contribute to our healthy economy. A new alignment of business organizations reflects this. The American Sustainable Business Council is an alternative to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and advocates for high-road policies that will build a durable economy with broad prosperity.

Communities have used a wide range of strategies to assert rights and power in relation to corporations. In 2007, the Strategic Corporate Initiative published an overview of these strategies in a report called “Toward a Global Citizens Movement to Bring Corporations Back Under Control.” Many strategies are incremental, but worth understanding as part of the lay of the land in rule changes.

• Engage in consumer action. As stakeholders, consumers have leverage to change corporate behavior. Examples include consumer boycotts that changed Nestlé’s unethical infant formula marketing campaigns around the world and softened the hardball anti-worker tactics of companies such as textile giant J. P. Stevens. New technologies are enabling consumers to be more sophisticated in leveraging their power to force companies to treat employees and the environment better.

• Promote socially responsible investing. Shareholders can also exercise power by avoiding investments in socially injurious corporations. In 2010, over $3 trillion in investments were managed with ethical criteria. Companies do change some behaviors when concerned about their reputations.

• Use shareholder power for the common good. For more than forty years, socially concerned religious and secular organizations have utilized the shareholder process to change corporate behavior and management practices. Shareholder resolutions, in conjunction with educational and consumer campaigns, have altered corporate behavior, such as the movement to pressure U.S. companies to stop doing business in South Africa during the apartheid era.

• Change rules inside corporations to foster accountability. There are internal changes in corporate governance that potentially could broaden accountability and corporate responsibility.

These include:

• Shareholder power reforms. Presently, there are many barriers to the exercise of real shareholder ownership power and oversight. Corporations should have real governance elections, not hand-picked slates that rubber-stamp management decisions.

• Board independence. Public corporations should have independent boards free of cozy insider connections. This will enable them to hold management properly accountable.

• Community rights. Communities should have greater power to require corporate disclosure about taxes, subsidies, treatment of workers, and environmental practices, including use of toxic chemicals.

• Require federal corporate charters. Most U.S. corporations are chartered at the state level, and a number of states, including Delaware, have such low accountability requirements that they are home to thousands of global companies. But corporations above a certain size that operate across state and international boundaries should be subject to a federal charter.

• Define stakeholder governance. A federal charter could define the governing board of a corporation to include representation of all major stakeholders, including consumers, employees, localities where the company operates, and organizations representing environmental interests. The German experience with co-determination includes boards with community and employee representation.

• Ban corporate influence in our democracy. Corporations should be prohibited from any participation in our democratic systems, including elections, funding of candidates, political parties, party conventions, and advertising aimed at influencing the outcome of elections and legislation. This would require legislation to reverse the impact of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

Citizens United and Corporate Power

In January 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. It gave new rights of free speech to corporations by saying that governments could not restrict independent spending by corporations and unions for political purposes. This opened the door for new election-related campaign spending and has given birth to super PACs that further erode the power of the 99 percent to influence national politics.

Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) sponsored legislation called the DISCLOSE Act to force better disclosure of campaign financiers, but it has been opposed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other big business lobbies.

Other potential remedies include a push for an amendment to the Constitution to remove the free speech rights for corporations that Citizens United provides. Move to Amend is a coalition organizing such an amendment.

The reeingineered corporation will still employ thousands of people and be innovative and productive. But it will be much more accountable to shareholders, to the communities in which it operates, and to customers, employees, and the common good.

Redesign the Tax Revenue System. This final section of rule changes examines how farsighted tax and revenue policies can aid in the transition to a new and sustainable economy. Present tax rules do not reflect the widely held values and priorities of the 99 percent. Rather, they reflect the designs and worldview of the powerful 1 percent of global corporations and wealthy individuals. The 1 percent devotes considerable lobbying clout to shaping and distorting our tax laws, which is one of the reasons those laws are so complex and porous.
Our tax revenue system should be simple, treat all fairly, and raise adequate revenue for the services we need. Tax rules and budgets are moral documents; we should not pretend they are value neutral.

We’ve already discussed two ways that the tax code has been distorted. The first is how it privileges income from wealth over income from work by taxing capital gains at absurdly low rates. Second, the offshore system gives advantages to the global tax dodgers in the corporate 1 percent who force domestic businesses in the 99 percent to compete on an uneven playing field.

Another example is the way our tax code offers larger incentives to mature extractive industries such as oil and natural gas instead of directing resources to communities and corporations that conserve resources, care for the Earth, and catalyze new green enterprises.

The present tax system not only fails to raise adequate revenue from those most capable of paying but also serves as a huge impediment to progress. Current tax rules lock us into the economy of the past, rather than encouraging a transition to a new economy rooted in ecological sustainability, good jobs, and greater equality.

Conventional tax wisdom asserts that we should “tax the bads” by placing a higher price on harmful activities. Hence the notion of “sin taxes” levied on liquor, tobacco, and now, with increasing ferocity, junk food. Taxing these items raises revenue to offset the societal costs of alcoholism, cancer, and obesity. But sin taxes, like any sales tax, are regressive, requiring lower-income households to pay a higher percentage of their income than the wealthy pay.

There are three major “bads” that our tax code should be revised to address:
1. Extreme concentrations of income, wealth, and power that undermine social cohesion and a healthy democracy

2. Financial speculation, such as the activities that destabilized our economy in 2008

3. Pollution and profligate consumption that deplete our ecosystems
There are several bold interventions that focus on “taxing the bads” of our contemporary era and reversing two generations of tax shifts away from the 1 percent. They cluster around three foci: taxing concentrated wealth, taxing financial speculation, and taxing the destruction of nature.

• Tax inheritances. Levy a progressive estate tax on the fortunes of the 1 percent. At the end of 2010, Congress reinstated the estate tax on estates over $5 million ($10 million for a couple) at a 35 percent rate. Congress could close loopholes and raise additional revenue from the 1 percent with the greatest capacity to pay. The Responsible Estate Tax Act establishes graduated tax rates, with no tax on estates worth under $3.5 million, or $7 million for a couple, and includes a 10 percent surtax on the value of an estate above $500 million, or $1 billion for a couple. Estimated annual revenue: $35 billion.

• Institute a wealth tax on the 1 percent. A “net worth tax” should be levied on individual or household assets, including real estate, cash, investment funds, savings in insurance and pension plans, and personal trusts. The law can be structured to tax wealth only above a certain threshold. For example, France’s solidarity tax on wealth is for those who have assets in excess of $1.1 million.

• Establish new tax brackets for the 1 percent. Under our current tax rate structure, households with incomes over $350,000 pay the same top income tax rate as households with incomes over $10 million. In the 1950s, there were sixteen additional tax rates over the highest rate (35 percent) that we have today. A 50 percent rate on incomes over $2 million would generate an additional $60 billion a year.

• Eliminate the cap on social security withholding taxes. Extend the payroll tax to cover all wages, not just wage income up to $110,100. Today, some in the 1 percent are done paying their withholding taxes in January, while people in the 99 percent pay all year.

• Institute a financial speculation tax. A tax on financial transactions could generate significant funds for reinvesting in the transition to a financial system that works for everyone. Speculative trading now accounts for up to 70 percent of the trades in some markets. Commodity speculation unnecessarily bids up the cost of food, gasoline, and other basic necessities for the 99 percent. A modest federal tax on every transaction that involves the buying and selling of stocks and other financial products would both generate substantial revenue and dampen reckless risk taking. For ordinary investors, the cost would be negligible, like a tiny insurance fee to protect against financial instability. Estimated revenue: $150 billion a year.

• Tax income from wealth at higher rates. Giving tax advantages to income from wealth also encourages speculation. As described by Warren Buffett and others, we can end this preferential treatment for capital gains and dividends and at the same time encourage average families to engage in long-term investing. Estimated revenue: $88 billion per year.

• Tax carbon. Instead of taxpayers paying indirectly for the expensive social costs associated with climate change, taxes could build some of these real costs into purchases and products. Perhaps the most critical tax intervention to slow climate change would be to put a price on dumping carbon into the atmosphere from the transportation, energy, and other sectors. For example, the real ecological and societal costs of private jet travel would greatly increase the cost of owning or using private jets. A gradually phased-in tax on carbon would create tremendous incentives to invest in energy conservation and regional green infrastructure. Proposals include a straight carbon tax or a cap-and-dividend proposal that would rebate 50 percent of revenue to consumers to offset the increased costs of some products and still generate $75–100 billion per year. We could also explore similar taxes on other pollutants, such as nitrates that are destroying our water supplies.

• Tax excessive consumption. Consumption of unnecessary stuff, especially by the 1 percent, is filling our landfills and destroying our environment. A tax on certain nonessential goods, such as expensive jewelry and technological gadgets, would reflect the real ecological cost of such items. It could apply only to purchases that exceed a certain amount, such as cars that cost more than $100,000. Some states currently charge a luxury tax on high-end real estate transactions.

Objections by some in the 1 percent to these proposals will be strong, along with howls of “class warfare” and “job killing.” Some will argue that government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners in the economy. But the reality is that our current tax policy is picking winners every day, and they’re usually in the 1 percent.

For several generations after the introduction of a federal income tax at the end of the nineteenth century, our progressive federal tax system was moderately effective in reducing concentrations of wealth. As we briefly described, during the 1950s wealthy individuals paid significantly more taxes than they do today. Since 1980, however, we’ve lived through a great tax shift as lawmakers moved tax obligations off the wealthy and onto low- and middle-income taxpayers, off corporations and onto individuals, and off today’s taxpayers and onto our children and grandchildren.

This program would reverse these tax shifts and set up signposts to help with the transition to the new economy.

Published with permission from Berrett Koehler, copyright 2012. From the new book 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality Is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It.

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and chair of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality, an emerging coalition of religious, business, labor and civic groups concerned about the wealth gap. He is coauthor with Bill Gates Sr. of Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes.

Monday, October 8, 2012

Five Practical Reasons Not To Vote Republican




 
There is no shortage of reasons not to vote Republican. The litany includes tax cuts for the rich, cutbacks in government programs, obstructing needed legislation, disregard for the environment, denial of women's and other human rights, military escalation.





But the following five reasons have to do with money -- specifically, who's paying for the $1 trillion of annual tax savings and tax avoidance for the super-rich? And who's paying for the $1 trillion of national security to protect their growing fortunes? The Republicans want that money to come from the rest of us.

1. Economic Darwinism -- Republicans want the Poor to Pay
Paul Ryan's proposed budget would take about a half-trillion dollars a year from programs that support the poor. This is a continuation of a 15-year shredding of the safety net by Republicans. The GOP-controlled Congress of Bill Clinton created Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which has experienced a 60% drop in its caseload despite growing poverty, and which, according to the Urban Institute, provides "maximum benefits [that] even in the more generous states were far below the federal poverty level of $1,525 a month for a family of three."

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), another vital program that serves 50 million "food insecure" Americans, would be cut by $16 billion under the House version of the Farm Bill. The average recipient currently gets $4.30 a day for food.

Republicans also voted to end the Child Tax Credit, and favor a tax plan that would eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit.

2. Payroll Tax -- Republicans want the Middle Class to Pay
Encouraged by the steady Republican demand for lower corporate tax rates, big business has effected a stunning shift in taxpaying responsibility over the years, from corporate income tax to worker payroll tax. For every dollar of payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.
It's gotten worse in recent years, as corporations decided to drastically cut their tax rates after the start of the recession. After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, they've paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.

Republicans claim that almost half of Americans don't pay taxes. But when payroll and state and local taxes are considered, middle-income Americans pay at about the same rate as the highest earners. Only about 17% of households paid no federal income tax or payroll tax in 2009. And average workers get little help from people who make most of the money. Because of the $110,000 cutoff for payroll tax deductions, the richest 10% of Americans save $150 billion a year in taxes.

3. Job Shrinkage -- Republicans want Young People to Pay
The jobs that exist for young Americans are paying much less than just a few years ago. During and after the recession, according to the National Employment Law Project, low-wage jobs ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) dropped by 21 percent, and then grew back at a 58 percent rate. Mid-wage jobs ($13.84 to $21.13 per hour) dropped by 60 percent and grew back at a 22 percent rate. In other words, the median wage is falling fast.
Unemployment for workers under 25 stands at 16.4 percent, twice the national average. Half of recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed.
Yet Republicans killed a jobs bill that was supported by two-thirds of the public.
An academic study of employment data over 64 years found that an average of two million jobs per year were created under Democratic presidents, compared to one million under Republican presidents. Similar results were reported by the Bloomberg Government Barometer.

4. Retirement Planning -- Republicans want the Seniors to Pay
There's a common misconception in our country that most seniors are financially secure. Actually, Census data reveals that elderly people experience greater inequality than any other population group, with the poorest one-fifth receiving just 5.5% of the group's total resources, while the wealthiest one-fifth receives 46%.

The senior wealth gap is further evidenced by data during the great 30-year surge in inequality. The average over-60 wealth was five times greater than the median in 1995, as would be expected with a small percentage of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and a great majority of low-wealth people. Further confirmation comes from 2004 Harvard data that shows rising inequality within all age groups, including the elderly. Indeed, an MIT study found that about 46% of U.S. senior citizens have less than $10,000 in financial assets when they die.
For the vast majority of seniors, Social Security has been life-sustaining, accounting for 55% of their annual income. Because of this successful and popular program, the senior poverty rate has dropped from 50% to 10%, and due to life-long contributions from working Americans the program has a $2.7 trillion surplus while contributing nothing to the deficit. Yet Republicans want to undo it.

5. Public Fire Sale -- Republicans want Society to Pay
The common good is threatened by the Republican disdain for public resources. Drilling and mining and pipeline construction continues on public lands, and the House of Representatives has voted over 100 times since 2011 to subsidize the oil and gas industry while weakening environmental, public health, and safety requirements. The "land grab" is pitting corporate muscle against citizens' rights.

Sadly, most of America envisions a new era of energy independence that increases our world-leading consumption of energy while depending on a proliferation of dirty technologies to extract it. Threats of methane emissions, water pollution, and earthquake activity don't deter the fossil fuel enthusiasts.
It gets worse. Republicans are eager to sell public land. Paul Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" proposes to sell millions of acres of "unneeded federal land" and billions of dollars worth of federal assets. His running mate Mitt Romney admits that he doesn't know "what the purpose is" of public lands.

That brings us to the heart of the reasons not to vote Republican. Their reckless belief in the free market, and their dependency on corporatization and privatization to run the country, means that middle-class Americans keep paying for the fabulously wealthy people at the top who think they deserve everything they've taken from society.