It’s an old One-Percenter story. We are asked to believe that taxing corporations will have a disastrous effect on the creation of jobs on which families can  survive.

But CNN Money reports that corporate profits were up 19% in the third quarter, an increase that constituted the largest share of the economy in history. Meanwhile, workers’ wages have fallen to the lowest ever as a share of the economy. There’s no evidence whatsoever that reducing corporate taxes has improved either workers’ share of corporate income or the number of jobs.

When changes in taxation allowed corporations to “repatriate” money earned abroad at something like a 5 percent tax rate, the money was spent in buying back stock or raising the pay of corporate executives, not on job creation.

And over in Twinkie-Ville, an example of the sort of treatment that led workers to refuse to work for less than a living wage:

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal , Hostess’ CEO, Gregory Rayburn, essentially admitted that his company stole employee pension money and put it toward CEO and senior executive pay (aka “operations”). While this isn’t technically illegal, it’s another sleazy theft by Hostess executives – who’ve paid themselves handsomely while running their company into the ground. Just last month, a judge agreed to let Hostess executives suck another $1.8 million out of the bankrupt company to pay bonuses to CEOs.

It’s like the famous old break-room poster:

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves.

President Obama’s re-election was happily received by his supporters and received with stunned disbelief by the big-money gang. So many corporate jets flew into Boston’s Logan airport that parking was at a premium, because everyone wanted to be on hand for the Romney victory celebration. Sigh.

It was a very good month for women in politics and for a political powerhouse organization that flew under the political radar. The organization was Emily’s List, dedicated to supporting pro-choice Democratic women.

Emily (Early Money Is Like Yeast) helped elect 9 out of 10 of the women it supported for Senate and 18 of  the 24 it backed for the House of Representatives.

It was a good month for a little political  fun-poking, with comedians  like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert getting more than a few chuckles at the gob-smacked astonishment of the other side that it could actually lose.

But it was not a good month for those of our fellow Americans who voted for Romney, and can’t come to terms with what his loss means about changing attitudes and values in America. The issue of gay marriage, for example, is simply not an issue for most of us, particularly the young. It is not viewed as an attack on the institution of marriage, but simply an extension of it. Not an issue stout enough to hang an election on.

Flight is one kind of response to unthinkable change, which explains why so many Americans are signing petitions to secede from the union. Been there. Done that. Didn’t work. But I don’t believe it is a constructive response  on the part of the rest of us to make fun of fellow Americans who are clearly caught up in the shifting tides of societal change they find hard to come to grips with. It was an election it was hell to lose.

Organized labor played an important role in the election. Two post- election events are an important sign that non union, low wage workers are a sleeping giant that is at last beginning to stir.

Walmart workers demonstrated their dissatisfaction with part time work and no benefits and workers in fast food restaurants hit the street in New York over the same issues. It takes considerable courage to risk losing one of your part time jobs by taking part in a public job action.

So what does December hold in store? A reform of the Senate’s filibuster rule? I hope so, but I doubt it. Avoiding the “fiscal cliff?” More likely, since the Democrats are in a much stronger position than they were in the debate about extending the debt limit.

The election is behind us but the class war is not. It’s going to be fun to watch as it unfolds in Congress and on the picket lines.

Are you a landlord, living off of land rents and real estate? Happy you, if you are, and you’re not over-leveraged. But if this is not the case are you the owner of a major industrial enterprise or a financial mega-corporation? No?  Oh, sorry about that.

I guess that leaves  a small manufacturing operation with a handful of employees, or a small business, which is great so long as a Walmart or a giant manufacturing operation doesn’t force you out of business, and then you know what, boyo?..

…you’re a member of the working class. If you’re a wage earner with no control of your working conditions or wages, if you can be fired at will with no recourse and deprived of the right to collective bargaining then you are for sure a member of the working class, working for wages, even if you’re a highly paid middle manager for a corporation you don’t own.

Labor Unions are as American as apple pie but over the past thirty years their power has been clawed back by business interests and their political allies. The argument has been, “Well we needed unions once, in the bad old days, but we don’t need them any more.”

In good times, with a little home of their own and a bass boat parked in the driveway even many union members suckered for this argument  figuring they didn’t need union protection or union dues anymore. Sweatshops, eleven-hour days, inadequate wages and wretched or dangerous working conditions are largely a thing of the past. The result is we tend not to notice or care about Capitalism’s continuous attack on the power and even the existence of the union movement. This is not a good thing.

A union is the average hourly worker’s only defense against the economic power of a system that always tries to buy raw materials at the lowest possible price. It’s not dumb, if you’re an hourly wage person, to remember you’re just so much raw material to that system.

The union maid and her guy aren’t opposed to Capitalism. If you stop and think about it, the fact is that just the opposite is true. These folks simply want to behave exactly like all the other links in the capitalist chain of supply and demand. All they ask for is the right to bargain for the price they get for their labor and the conditions under which it is supplied.

Why should they be the only players in the game denied that right?

Most of us are working class and we need the union movement more than ever.

Happy Labor Day!

Moyers gave the keynote speech at the 40th Anniversary celebration of    Public Citizen, the legendary nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in government. The entire speech is too long to repost as a blog entry, but in sum he argues that although most of us pay lip service to the traditional ideals of the American dream we have largely given up the notion that it’s possible for us. The oligarchs have won.

The great American experience in creating a different future together this voluntary union for the common good has been flummoxed by “a growing sense of political impotence, what the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has described as a mass resignation of people who believe “the dogma of democracy on a superficial public level but who no longer believe it privately. There has been, he says, a decline in what people think they have a political right to aspire to, a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions off Americans.

You can understand why. We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by the majority of Americans. We speak, we write, we advocate,  and those in power turn deaf ears and blind eyes to our deepest aspirations. We petition, plead, and even pray, yet the earth that is our commons, which should be passed on in good condition to coming generations, continues to be despoiled. We invoke the strain in our national DNA that attests to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as the produce of political equality, yet private wealth multiplies as public goods are beggared. . . .

. . . And the property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now openly in force; the common denominator of public office, even for our judges, is a common deference to cash.

It is not hard, Moyers says, to understand what Occupy Wall Street is all about. It is about the sign he saw being carried by a woman at an OWS march: “I can’t afford to buy a politician so I bought this sign.”

Moyers goes on to quote from a surprising source:

We know what all this money buys. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want. 

They know that if you don’t contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying, you pick up a disproportionate share of America’s tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You’re compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You’re barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. 

In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives it approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I didn’t crib that litany from Public Citizen’s muckraking investigations over the years, although I could have. Nor did I lift it from Das Kapital by Karl Marx or Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book. No, I was literally quoting Time Magazine, long a tribune of America’s establishment media. From the bosom of mainstream media comes the bald, spare, and damning conclusion: We now have: “a government for the few at the expense of the many.”

Moyers goes on to to say:

But let me call another witness from the pro-business and capitalist- friendly press. In the middle of the last decade, four years before the Great Collapse of 2008, the editors of The Economist warned:

    A growing body of evidence suggests that the meritocratic ideal is in trouble in America. Income inequality is growing to levels not seen since the (first) Gilded Age. But social mobility is not increasing at anything like the same pace

Everywhere you look in modern America, in the Hollywood Hills or the canyons of Wall Street, in the Nashville recording studios or the clapboard houses of Cambridge, Massachusetts’ you see elites mastering the art of perpetuating themselves. America is increasingly looking like imperial Britain, with dynastic ties proliferating, social circles interlocking, mechanisms of social exclusion strengthening, and a gap widening between the people who make decisions and shape the culture and the vast majority of working stiffs.

Hear the editors of The Economist: “The United States is on its way to becoming a European-style class-based society.”

 

Read the full speech here.

There is a move afoot to “repatriate” huge sums of money currently held overseas by US-based multi-national corporations. Under US tax law those funds are not taxed until they’re brought back to the United States.

Congressional leaders and our wealthiest corporations want some help in bringing home the bacon. They are aggressively lobbying to bring those funds home for the modest tax rate of 5.2, rather than the usual 35 percent corporate tax rate.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) explains the effect of permanently deferring taxes on overseas holdings:

“This effectively allows such firms to defer payment of the U.S. corporate income tax on their overseas profits indefinitely, even though they may obtain an immediate tax deduction for many expenses incurred in supporting the same overseas investments. This can produce a negative U.S. corporate income tax—that is, a net government subsidy—for overseas operations. In addition to causing the federal government to lose tax revenue, this structure gives multinationals a significant incentive to shift economic activity—as well as their reported profits—overseas.

The argument for repatriation is that this would bring back billions of dollars to the US, which would then be virtuously employed to create jobs. Sure it would. We’ve been there and done that under a 2004 Bush Administration plan.

As CBPP points out,

“The evidence shows that firms mostly used the repatriated earnings not to invest in U.S. jobs or growth but for purposes that Congress sought to prohibit, such as repurchasing their own stock and paying bigger dividends to their shareholders. Moreover, many firms actually laid off large numbers of U.S. workers even as they reaped multi-billion-dollar benefits from the tax holiday and passed them on to shareholders.” Many economists and scholars believe that if corporations get their way and get another repatriation holiday, history will repeat itself—and once again the corporations and their shareholders, not American workers, families, and children, will be the only winners.”

Of course the political life of the nation ground tediously, mindlessly, on. I just didn’t pay any attention to it. August was a good month to take off, since our Congressmen  were on vacation raising obscene amounts of money from vested interests…none of which were mine.

Apparently joblessness continued at record highs, while the beltway cognoscenti reported that by and large the recession hurricane was over, or at least reduced to a financial depression.

God knows we were depressed here at The Data Port, which is why I tweaked my e-mail program to dump my political mail into the spam file.

The claim that “businesses cause jobs” turned out to be given the lie (I found out only today) by the practice of advertising on job sites like Monster.com that “no jobless need apply.” It used to be the Irish who need not apply.

The one area of American life that I did follow was the stock market. It was specially fun watching the little investors (if they still exist) trying to buy and sell fast enough to stay ahead of the market. It makes to laugh.

And now a short post-labor day quote. Guess who.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

 

Join Us!   Monday, April  4th  at 4 pm  for a Solidarity Rally. Meet at Pancho Villa Park —  -  Downtown Tucson (Broadway & Church Ave. by the statue)  Then,  at 5  pm,  march to Armory Park 221 South 6th Ave. (less than a one mile hike) for hot dogs and other picnic food and probably more rally. This is a family event – bring your kids, your friends, and your co-workers. Bring blankets or outdoor chairs for park.

Please RSVP to Laura Hogan @ (520)388-4139  or to http://local.we-r-1.org/weareone/events/show/32 so we know how much food to bring.

Sponsored by the Pima Area Labor Federation.

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Leonard Pitts’ column in today’s Arizona Daily Star is a commentary on the event tomorrow’s march honors. These excerpts are particularly worth noting.

It will come as a surprise to some that the civil-rights leader was also a labor leader, but he was. He had this in common with Asa Philip Randolph, who suffered long years of privation to establish the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And with Walter Reuther, brutally beaten when he organized sitdown strikes that helped solidify the United Automobile Workers.

These people and many others fought to win the rights now being taken away.

Granted, those rights have sometimes been abused – used to shelter the incompetent or reward the greedy.

But to whatever degree our workplaces are not filled with children working adult hours, to whatever degree an employer is required to provide a clean and safe workplace, break time, sick time or fair wages, that also reflects organized labor’s legacy.

It is instructive that this campaign to roll back that legacy is contemporaneous with a New York Times report on how General Electric earned $14.2 billion in profit last year, yet paid no U.S. taxes. Indeed, the Times says, GE netted a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

What’s it tell you that some of us are on the offensive against working people but breathe scarcely a peep when a giant corporation somehow slips through government-provided loopholes, paying no taxes? If need is a character flaw, what, then, is greed?

Read  Pitts’ column here.

It was reported yesterday that the movement to remove the eight senators eligible for recall had collected the signatures necessary for a recall election on Kapanke.

There is a long way to go to get petition signatures sufficient to initiate  recalls on the remaining seven. Given the reality of challenges to the petitions, legal maneuvering may stall the recalls until the next round of regular elections.

Still, the petition drives may keep progressive activism alive and the nation focused on the GOP attack on unions and be a significant factor in the next round of general elections.

The current petition drive is being fueled by the following TV commercial.

‘nuff said.

Not explicitly commented on has been the fact that Court’s proposal would do away with deductions, among them charitable deductions. The exact effect of this on the health, welfare, and quality of life of all Arizonans has not been calculated, but I can’t help but believe that it would be enormous as it could seriously impact charitable giving.

Slyly unmentioned in this legislation were tax credits, which apparently would be left untouched. Tax credits for gifts to schools (private and public) are direct write-offs from taxes owed. The wealthy can more easily afford them than can the folks who are barely scraping by, and they directly reduce money paid into the general fund…which supports public education.

Was it all good? No, it didn’t go nearly far enough; but it was clearly a giant step in the right direction. All we hear from the advocates of “Boehnercare” is intransigent opposition to reform and the promise to fight it in every way possible.

How helpful is that? Meanwhile the rest of us wait to hear what the Republicans have to offer besides a return to the good old days when 30 million Americans had no health insurance.

So far we’ve heard nothing. Understandably, since it’s always easier to say “no” than to offer substantive proposals.

(Follow The Data Port  on Twitter: @thedataport)