A massive union in the US – the New York Transit Workers Union – has just voted to join the massive and growing protests related to #occupywallstreet in New York.
I’ve seen a few comments about the #occupywallstreet campaign, but the most obvious effort has been with Keith Olbermann, who of course, has been the only ‘mainstreamer’ to comment on the lack of commentary on the situation:
What do you think?
Is the protest being ignored?
We desparately need a discussion about new market models that will actually work in the wake of the post-20th century debt crisis.
Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and now maybe even the US all teeter on the brink of economic ruin in the wake of debt piled on debt piled on debt.
When defaults are finally declared, the resulting cost spiral will inflate the price of everything from shoes to corn to electricity to books to wheels for your car. The shock may be moderate at first, but eventually we’ll all have fewer dollars in our pockets just as we try to survive.
Most of this debt has been accumulated for one thing: the security state.
The security state consists of several expenditures:
In Canada, we’re spending anywhere from $50 to $100 billion PER YEAR on the security state and military infrastructure, and yet we’re officially only fighting in one ‘war’ (Afghanistan). Why are we wasting so much money – OUR taxpayer dollars – on something that’s so incredibly unproductive?
Iceland seems to have gone in the right direction by telling bankers and the IMF to go F*** themselves.
Ultimately, we need a new approach to new market models.
Eric Blair of alt-market.com interviews Brandon Smith in this piece on Alternative Markets at Activist Post where he shares some of these ideas. The basic definition of an alternative market:
… it is essentially any method of trade outside the establishment-controlled economy. It could be based on the barter of goods and skills, or the proliferation of precious metals to break our dependence on the fiat dollar (or Federal Reserve Note), etc. It could be a network of people across a county or state, or, an agreement between two friends.
And some thoughts about why alternative markets are labeled as underground or black markets around the world:
They are desperate, and I do mean DESPERATE, to keep us from developing our own private economies. If we are successful, we will no longer be in the position of dependency on the dollar or the sham economy. When it implodes, we will be relatively unfazed, and certainly not tearing each other apart. Meaning, their rationalization for martial law goes straight down the drain. The thought of that possibility really pisses them off…
But would alternative markets be enough when our governments are out of control, paying their friends and military buddies off with our money?
Probably not. So we will also need a Declaration of Debt Independence. It’s a basic concept that’s about to catch on like wild fire as everyone who’s not in control feels the effects of ‘austerity measures’: you write into your Constitution (assuming you have one) that the government is not allowed to issue debt exceeding a certain percentage of your GDP (which should be redefined to capture the cost of environmental degradation and other borrowing from future generations), but to also identify that no government would ever be allowed to spend more than 3 or 5% of their GDP on defense, security and military spending (I would also suggest that this include prisons and other forms of incarceration).
At no point should any citizen’s government be borrowing money from bankers when they should be living within their means. We should be investing in services for our children, not borrowing from their future in a failing effort to cork our insatiable desire for crap.
Public budgets should be for public good: education, health, parks, trees, the environment, investment in the future, regulation and a sturdy and reliable justice system.
Another alternative market model would be extremely feasible if we owned the Internet, but we’re at risk of losing that too under the guise of security, protection from make-believe hackers and terrorists and porn sharks and other freaks that apparently lurk on every digital corner. At some point in the future, we should expect the ‘Wild Internet of the West’ to be shut down in favour of a controlled Internet that’s no more illuminating and accessible than TV is today.
This would take a lot of work but more importantly, money. I’ve been advocating some form of fund-raising effort for some time and would still be at the front of the line if someone were to say they were ready as well.
I can’t do it alone.
If we move on any of the above – and we really have to – hard times will be on their way, but we must stop living beyond our means and we have to shake off the bonds that are being placed our basic rights to communicate, participate and emancipate our day-to-day lives.
So … who’s on board?
Analysts everywhere are reminding us that the US dollar is collapsing, both because of exploding debt in the US, but also because of substantial instability in this country. Political uprisings in Libya have less to do with instability than rallies like this.
I’ve been warning about the prospect of a collapse in the US dollar for some time and have even invented my own term for the impact that this will have on anyone living outside the US: interflation. The US will continue to export its inflation to other countries, punishing us in prices for their inability to control their spending. It’s the internationalization of inflation that none of us can afford.
The ponzi scheme has to stop. Gerald Calente has described that food and oil prices will continue to skyrocket in the US and that resulting increases in interest rates will crush any opportunity for growth in the American economy.
This situation is what Jeremy Rifkin calls ‘Economic Endgame’, where the US economy (and the global economy by dependency) ping-pongs between states of uncontrollable and unpredictable deflation and growth hitting a wall because any growth translates to rapid expansion in oil prices (which then results in rapid price increases in most other commodities).
Canada, the EU and other countries around the world can avoid this instability by uncoupling themselves and their economies from the influence of pricing everything in US dollars. Once they do, appreciation will translate to real price decreases in their own economies, fueling real and natural rates of growth and consumption without inflation. These growth rates will then translate to real demand for US goods and services, presuming they are willing to make anything any more and not survive on the ‘hand in someone else’s pocket’ economy.
Once again, any politician in Canada would be wise to recommend and run on a platform of price equality and stabilization for Canadians, but that’s very unlikely to happen with our current slate of Harper clones.
Another solution for the US will be to eliminate their outrageous level of defense spending, but right now, it’s the only thing keeping this economy alive.
What’s to love about Ronald Reagan? Apparently, he was this hard-assed conservative that broke the back of communist Russia, but the reality is this: Reagan was a chronic tax raiser and vetoed an anti-apartheid act.
Stephen Harper and other Conservatives trip over themselves to describe what a hero he was, but when you look at his legacy, he was no better than the commies he broke:
1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.
2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.
3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemployment jumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile, income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980′s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.
4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously. Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to 300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.
5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to choose. As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice.
6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.” He wrote in his memoirs that “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president.
7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for conservatives.
8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran. Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign.
9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act. which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.”
10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendancy.
Tax cheats are starting to finally face opposition from the general public … in Britain.
It seems more and more people are getting fed up with corporate cuts, failed business models and bailouts.
Did you hear about this:
That Saturday Vodafone’s stores were shut down across the country by peaceful sit-ins. The crowds sang songs and announced they had come as volunteer tax collectors. Prime Minister David Cameron wants axed government services to be replaced by a “Big Society,” in which volunteers do the jobs instead. So UK Uncut announced it was the Big Society Tax Collection Agency.
Will Canada follow? Will the issue of corporate tax cuts deepen the divide between the Liberals and the Cons? Or will Iggy’s ‘no cuts … yet’ line or Jack Layton’s ‘no cuts … period … unless you throw me a scrap from your table’ fail to resonate with Canadians? Or will we see a new party with stones emerge and put a line in the sand that will address these concerns? But no Tea Party, OK? I can’t stand their message.
Government isn’t bad. It’s wasteful government that sucks. $16 billion on planes, $10 billion on building a security state, $60 billion on a massive marketing campaign (and indirect subsidy to CTV and other media companies via big media budgets). Etc. Etc.
The message with this article is quite clear: if you want to sell in the UK (we Canadians should take note of this), you should pay taxes. Support our infrastructure rather than just use it. Support our population rather than just exploit it:
The UK Uncut message was simple: if you want to sell in our country, you pay our taxes. They are the membership fee for a civilized society. Most of the protesters I spoke with had never attended a demonstration before, but were driven to act by the rising unemployment, insecurity and austerity that are being outpaced only by rising rewards for the superrich. Ellie Mae O’Hagan, a 25-year-old office worker in Liverpool, one of the most economically depressed places in the country, said she was “absolutely outraged to discover that I was paying more than Philip Green in taxes.” She added, “I could see what all the cuts were doing. My brother had been made redundant, loads of my friends were unemployed and I could see it all getting worse, while these bankers get even bigger bonuses. And I thought, Right, you’ve got to do something. So I e-mailed UK Uncut to ask if there was a protest happening in Liverpool. They said, Not yet, so you organize one. So I spent forty-eight hours arranging one. And a hundred people turned up—an amazing mixture of people, who I had never met, and who didn’t know each other—and we shut down both Vodafone stores. Suddenly, it felt like we weren’t passive anymore. We were standing up for ourselves.”
Here are some strategic suggestions for Canadians:
What should US Uncut target? “It’s important to go after brand names that exist in every city in America,” says Tom Purley, a UK Uncut participant. “The key to our success was that it was so easily replicated. People could do it anywhere. It took something that seems like a remote issue and connected it to a place they see every day.” Most of the companies that engage in the worst tax avoidance in the United States are Big Pharma and financial companies, which don’t have stores. But the GAO also named a number of major brands that are exploiting tax havens. They include Apple, Bank of America, Best Buy, ExxonMobil, FedEx (whose president, Frederick Smith, was named by Obama as the businessman he most admires), Kraft Foods, McDonald’s, Safeway and Target. That’s a wealth of potential targets.
I still suggest Bell and Rogers should be targeted first, but companies like Wal-Mart, Kraft and McDonald’s would also be good choices. That said, does anyone have research showing which big companies didn’t pay any taxes in Canada?
It seems 62% of Americans are not impressed with big corporations in the US. Does anyone know of a similar poll / survey being recorded in Canada? I know I want less Bell and Rogers in my life …
According to the survey, a large majority of Americans (62%) want major corporations to have less influence in the United States. While this is down from a peak of 68% in 2008, it remains well above the 52% recorded in 2001. Relatively few Americans would prefer to see corporations gain influence, but the 12% recorded this year is the highest to date.
The American people are becoming increasingly angry about the extraordinary amount of power and influence that corporations have in the United States today. Also, the most recent Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index found that only 26 percent of Americans trust our financial system at this point.
What’s interesting is that distrust of large entities – including corporations – goes back to the origins of the US. The origins of the corporation go back to the East India Trading Company, the very same company that Americans (at the time, colonists) rebelled against during the original Boston Tea Party.
In his book entitled “Unequal Protection”, Thom Hartman mentions the East India Trading Company….
“Trade-dominance by the East India Company aroused the greatest passions of America’s Founders – every schoolboy knows how they dumped the Company’s tea into Boston harbour. At the time in Britain virtually all members of parliament were stockholders, a tenth had made their fortunes through the Company, and the Company funded parliamentary elections generously.”
Giant international corporations are not synonymous with “capitalism”. In fact, they are the anti-thesis of competition, fair trade and market value.
However, I challenge any ‘capitalist’ today to show me where these basic principles exist in the US or Canada. They don’t and as consumers, we’ve all made the mistake of letting it happen.
It’s easy to reverse this issue. We need to start taking power from those that control our lives. Starting with the Usage-Based Billing debate, we need to respond to Bell and Rogers and Canada’s other media monsters with a big F-U and start canceling their services, terminating newspaper subscriptions and boycotting their media and their message.
Americans are showing this distrust towards the corporations that shape their lives and this will come to a head in the US:
As you can see, the gap between those in favor of the size and influence of major corporations and those not in favor has been significantly widening over the past decade.
Not only that, but the latest Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index shows that Americans have very little trust in the financial system at this point.
The following are some of the key findings from their most recent report….
We shouldn’t be surprised by these numbers. American resentment of the Big Bank bailouts is growing and more of these people are seen as cry-baby capitalists, wanting socialism for them and capitalism for the rest of us. Most people are still looking for their own bailouts, but they aren’t coming. The party’s on and you’re not invited.
Continuing to reduce corporate tax rates, give bailouts and focus on big business will only increase the level of resentment that all North Americans have concerning the companies that interact with them on a daily basis. Those parties that distance themselves from this noise will do best in the polls in coming months because Canadians and Americans are sick of the disequilibrium.
A final thought: price increases and more economic instability are right around the corner. As the US dollar collapses, food and oil prices will start to rise drastically and ‘the average Joe and Jane’ will suffer for it. Our current slate of politicians can feign ignorance once again (as they did before), but for the record, we see it coming. There’s an economic shit storm on the way and more bailouts, interest-free loans and other handouts to the biggest in this country will be met with the greatest resistance.
Statistics Canada figures indicate that US corporations had Canadian operating profits of $43.1 billion in 2007. Given that some operating profits are used to cover non-operating expenses like interest, US corporations were repatriating (rather than reinvesting) the lion’s share of what was left.Multiplying $30.4 billion by 35% indicates American tax obligations of $10.6 billion. But the IRS reports credits for Canadian taxes of only $8.3 billion. Therefore, the implied transfer of corporate tax revenue from Canada to the US treasury is $2.3 billion.
In other words, it may be a small sum compared to trillion dollar deficits, but we’re paying for the American military industrial complex with our tax cuts.
Way to go Stevie!
And Jack, Jack, Jack: support Stevie’s new budget and the NDP will be sure to slip into oblivion.
Where has all the money gone?
In 2008, there were a number of bailouts on many levels with a specific intent of stabilizing the US economy.
Unfortunately, foreclosures continue, States face bankruptcy and municipal governments and councilors everywhere face unsavoury choices like how many schools to close or teachers to lay off, how many police or firefighters to fire, or how many pensions to pilfer.
All of this will likely lead to a municipal bond crash somewhere in 2011, as 44 of the 50 states in the US anticipate a large shortfall in 2011 and 2012 and few of them speak about corporate tax increases in lieu of personal tax increases (which are ubiquitous) and drastic reductions in spending, particularly on social services (health, welfare, education, infrastructure).
The United States of America should now be known as the Ultimate State of Anarchy.
Well, our government is at least 20 years behind the times as they still believe that slashing sources of income from foreign nationals – ie. cutting corporate income tax – will somehow result in waves of cash coming back in the form of investment, research and jobs.
In defending their actions, they’re lying to the Canadian public.
Since the Reagan years, Conservatives everywhere have been defending corporate tax cuts as a way to encourage money to ‘trickle down’ to the masses. If you consider getting pissed on by the world’s ruling class ‘trickle down’, then it worked. The disparity between the wealthy and the poor – with the complete elimination of the middle class – is nearly absolute today.
All of these actions designed to ‘balance budgets’ are intentional strategies to marginalize the value of property, eradicate public say into where funds should be spent and continue the process of handing over billions of taxpayer dollars to the world’s A-list.
In Texas:
I would add unprecedented G20 arrests in Canada as one of the biggest stories.
That said, here are the 25 stories from Project Censored:
What are yours?
It’s more than 13 minutes long, but worth every second:
The war on the middle class in the US, Canada and elsewhere is being wages every day against us.