Mass Transit: the new Tea Party GOP Target...

The Tea Party GOP is waging a war against mass transit. Yes, mass transit.  Here is why!

In the week since House Republicans introduced their proposed transportation bill, one thing has become clear: it has virtually nothing to do with fiscal responsibility.

The Tea Party soared to power on the notion that it was the antidote to wasteful government spending. It’s now clear that reigniting the culture wars was a top priority, too. From guns to abortion, the extremist wing of the Republican party has fought to turn back the clock on many socially progressive ideals.

Mass transit is their newest target.

“Federal transportation and infrastructure policy has traditionally been an area of strong bipartisan agreement,” says Aaron Naparstek, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and founder of Streetsblog.org. “Now, it seems, Republicans want to turn cities into a part of the culture wars. Now it’s abortion, gay marriage and subways.”

House Republicans seek to eliminate the Mass Transit Account from the federal Highway Trust Fund. The Mass Transit Account is where public transportation programs get their steady source of funding. Without it, transit would be devastated, and urban life as we know it could become untenable.

And there’s the rub. “The Tea Party leaders and the Republicans who pander to them do not care about cost-effectiveness in the slightest,” wrote blogger Alon Levy in a comment about the bill on The Transport Politic. “They dislike transit for purely cultural and ideological reasons.” To the Tea Party, transit smacks of the public sector, social engineering and alternative lifestyles.

How do we know this is a cultural battle and not an economic one? Because transit spending is far more fiscally fair than spending on roads and highways. Transit riders subsidize roads to a greater degree than drivers subsidize transit. And cities, which are the chief engines behind the American economy, rely on buses and trains to function. “The economic future for states hinges largely on the performance of their metropolitan economies,” determined a recent Brookings Institution study.

Tea Party leaders know all of this. But they also knew that defunding NPR wouldn’t help balance the budget, and they voted to do it anyway. They knew that by law no federal money can go toward abortion services, yet they voted to defund Planned Parenthood too. The Tea Party is superb at disguising cultural battles as the pursuit of responsible thrift. And mass transit exists at the vortex of many of their number-one ideological targets. It’s brilliant, when you think about it.

Defunding transit is how you smack down urbanites, environmentalists, and people of color, all in one fell swoop. It’s how you telegraph a disdain for all things European. It’s how you show solidarity with swing-state suburbanites who don’t understand why their taxes are going toward subways they don’t even use. And it’s how you subtly reassure your base that you’re not concerned about the very poor.

Republicans haven’t pretended to care about cities for decades. In January, none of the candidates showed up to the annual Conference of Mayors. (Two of them didn’t even RSVP.) And even just a month ago, you could argue, as this web site did, that “today cities are more ignored than attacked” by Republicans. But the calculus just changed. The transportation bill sends an aggressive message: “Tea Party to Cities: Drop Dead.”

It doesn’t matter to the Tea Party that Ronald Reagan, in 1982, created the Mass Transit Account that Republicans now want to kill. Reagan was no friend to cities. But even he earned a respectable share of the vote in New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Things hadn’t yet gotten so personal.

That era is over. Over the past couple decades, the GOP has found that bashing “elites” can translate into victory at the polls. And by “elites” they don’t mean folks with Chevy Tahoes and McMansions in the exurbs. 

They mean urbanites, no matter what their net worth. When they tar Nancy Pelosi as a San Francisco liberal, or Barack Obama as a Chicago politician, they’re not just referencing those cities’ stereotypes. 

They’re referencing the stereotypes of city culture itself: full of swindlers and gays and blacks and other suspect types. Calling Obama the “food stamp president” conjures up images of housing projects. Sarah Palin calling small-town folks “real America” states unequivocally that urbanites aren’t real Americans. The offensiveness of that statement still boggles the mind.

The Tea Party plan to decimate transit is no less explicit a statement. “House Republicans are, essentially, declaring war on cities in the federal transportation bill,” tweeted Naparstek. It’s not just that they know they can’t expect many votes from urban dwellers — that at least would be political calculus. It’s that they despise cities in general. They see “smart growth” principles as a U.N. plot, gun control as fascist, and funding for transit not just as wasteful, but un-American. Don’t like it? Get a car like the rest of us.

The House transportation bill will not become law, but that doesn’t make it benign. Like the debt ceiling battle, it could become a political bargaining chip, or reframe the national debate: Maybe cities are getting more than their fair share? Are we overspending on transit? Why should I help fund some far-away bus system? It plants these questions in voters’ minds.

This is why transit advocates are apoplectic, and why Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood (a former Republican congressman) called it “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen in 35 years of public service.” If conservatives have truly decided that transit is next on their culture war hit list, anyone who believes in the importance of cities had better start firing back right now.

 The year to fight back is 2012!

On the Road to Pottersville

 

According to Robert Parry, the goal of the right-wing Republican Tea Bag Party is set on "Turning America into Pottersville."

The Republican presidential race has taken a detour into the "class warfare" that the party supposedly despises, with Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry tagging Mitt Romney as an elitist who got rich by laying off workers. But this spat misses the larger point of what the Right is doing to America, writes Robert Parry.

For many years, it appeared that the Right wanted to take the United States back to the 1950s - when blacks "knew their place," women were "in the kitchen" and gays stayed "in the closet" - but it turns out that the intended back-in-time-travel was to the 1920s, to an era of a few haves and many have-nots, not only before the Civil Rights Movement but before the Great American Middle-Class.

The Right's goal has been less to recreate the world of "Father Knows Best" than to establish a national "Pottersville," like in the movie, "It's a Wonderful Life," where the existence of the average man and woman was brutish and unfulfilling, while the 1 percent of that age lived in gilded comfort and held sweeping power.

That is the message ironically coming from the expensive ad wars of the Republican presidential battle, where frontrunner Mitt Romney has emerged as the personification of the 1 percent and has been attacked by rivals who - while supporting similar policies favoring the ultra-rich - have savaged his career as a venture capitalist, or as Texas Gov. Rick Perry puts it, a "vulture capitalist."

Romney's response has been telling. The former chief executive of the corporate takeover firm Bain Capital went beyond the Right's usual lament about "class warfare," terming the criticism of high-flying financiers who use layoffs to fatten their bottom lines "the bitter politics of envy."

And, if there remained any doubt about Romney's status as the nation's "elitist-in-chief," he added that it was wrong to have a noisy and open debate about the dangers of growing income inequality. He told Matt Lauer on NBC's "Today" that "I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms, and discussions about tax policy and the like."

In other words, keep the rabble from protesting their lot; leave these matters to the well-bred and the well-off, in their think tanks and their board rooms.

For decades, the Right has largely concealed this elitist agenda behind appeals to social conservatism and flag-waving patriotism. Many working- and middle-class Americans, especially white males, have sided with the economic free-marketers because the hated "lib-rhuls" supported civil rights for blacks, women and gays - and also questioned America's military might.

Plus, many Americans have forgotten a basic truth: that the Great American Middle-Class was largely a creation of the federal government and its policies dating back to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. For many Americans in the middle-class, it was more satisfying to think that they or their parents had climbed the social ladder on their own. They didn't need "guv-mint" help.

But the truth is that it was government policies arising out of the Great Depression and carried forward through the post-World War II years by both Republican and Democratic presidents that created the opportunities for tens of millions of Americans to achieve relative comfort and security.

Those policies ranged from Social Security and labor rights in the 1930s to the GI Bill after World War II to government investments in infrastructure and technological research in the decades that followed. Even in recent years, despite right-wing efforts to choke off this flow of progress, government programs - such as the Internet - brought greater efficiency to markets and wealth to many entrepreneurs.

So, not only is Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren right when she notes that "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own," it's also true that government policies enabled large numbers of Americans to climb out of poverty and into the middle-class.

The Dick Cheney example

Oddly, one of the best examples of this reality is the life of right-wing icon Dick Cheney, as he revealed in his recent memoir, In My Time. In the book, Cheney recognizes that his personal success was made possible by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and the fact that Cheney's father managed to land a steady job with the federal government.

"I've often reflected on how different was the utterly stable environment he provided for his family and wondered if because of that I have been able to take risks, to change directions, and to leave one career path for another with hardly a second thought," Cheney wrote.

By contrast, in sketching his family's history, Cheney depicted the hard-scrabble life of farmers and small businessmen scratching out a living in the American Midwest and suffering financial reversals whenever the titans of Wall Street stumbled into a financial crisis and the bankers cut off credit.

After his forebears would make some modest headway from their hard work, they would find themselves back at square one, again and again, because of some "market" crisis or a negative weather pattern. Whether a financial panic or a sudden drought, everything was lost.

"In 1883, as the country struggled through a long economic depression, the sash and door factory that [Civil War veteran Samuel Fletcher Cheney] co-owned [in Defiance, Ohio] had to be sold to pay its debts," Cheney wrote. "At the age of fifty-four, Samuel Cheney had to start over," moving to Nebraska.

There, Samuel Cheney built a sod house and began a farm, enjoying some success until a drought hit, again forcing him to the edge. Despite a solid credit record, he noted that "the banks will not loan to anyone at present" and, in 1896, he had to watch all his possessions auctioned off at the Kearney County Courthouse. Samuel Cheney started another homestead in 1904 and kept working until he died in 1911 at the age of 82.

His third son, Thomas, who was nicknamed Bert (and who would become Dick Cheney's grandfather), tried to build a different life as a cashier and part owner of a Sumner, Kansas, bank, named Farmers and Merchants Bank. But he still suffered when the economy crashed.

"Despite all his plans and success, Bert Cheney found that, like his father, he couldn't escape the terrible power of nature," Dick Cheney wrote. "When drought struck in the early 1930s, farmers couldn't pay their debts, storekeepers had to close their doors, and Farmers and Merchants Bank went under. … My grandparents lost everything except for the house in which they lived."

Finding security

Bert Cheney's son, Richard, ventured off in a different direction, working his way through Kearney State Teachers College and taking the civil service exam. He landed a job as a typist with the Veterans Administration in Lincoln, Nebraska.

"After scraping by for so long, he found the prospect of a $120 monthly salary and the security of a government job too good to turn down," his son, Dick Cheney, wrote. "Before long he was offered a job with another federal agency, the Soil Conservation Service.

"The SCS taught farmers about crop rotation, terraced planting, contour plowing, and using ‘shelter belts' of trees as windbreaks - techniques that would prevent the soil from blowing away, as it had in the dust storms of the Great Depression. My dad stayed with the SCS for more than thirty years, doing work of which he was immensely proud.

"He was also proud of the pension that came with federal employment - a pride that I didn't understand until as an adult I learned about the economic catastrophes that his parents and grandparents had experienced and that had shadowed his own youth."

Like many Americans, the Cheney family was pulled from the depths of the Great Depression by the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, cementing the family's support for the Democratic president and his party. The family celebrated when little Dick was born on FDR's birthday.

"When I was born [on Jan. 30, 1941] my granddad wanted to send a telegram to the president," Cheney wrote in his memoir. "Both sides of my family were staunch New Deal Democrats, and Granddad was sure that FDR would want to know about the ‘little stranger' with whom he now had a birthday in common."

However, Dick Cheney took a different path. Freed from the insecurity that had afflicted his father and earlier Cheneys - caused by the cruel vicissitudes of laissez-faire capitalism - Dick Cheney enjoyed the relative comfort of middle-class life in post-World War II America. He took advantage of the many opportunities that presented themselves.

Most notably, Cheney attached himself to an ambitious Republican congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld. When Rumsfeld left Congress for posts in the Nixon administration, he brought Cheney along. Eventually Rumsfeld became White House chief of staff to President Gerald Ford and - when Rumsfeld was tapped to become Defense Secretary in 1975 - he recommended his young aide, Dick Cheney, to succeed him.

Cheney's career path through the ranks of Republican national politics, with occasional trips through the revolving door into lucrative private-sector jobs, was set. He became a major player within the GOP Establishment, building a reputation as an ardent conservative, a foreign policy hawk - and a fierce opponent of the New Deal.

Demonizing guv-mint

The Right's ongoing campaign to dismantle the New Deal also has hinged on the demonization of "guv-mint," a darkening of attitudes that became more possible when many middle-class Americans lost their memory of how their families had moved into the middle-class.

In the 1960s and 1970s, middle-class white men in particular came to view the government as a force for helping the poor, women and minorities, while putting pressure on white males to change long-established attitudes. Plus, they were told that the government was taking their hard-earned dollars to give to the undeserving.

When these messages - along with a mix of patriotic hoopla and coded appeals to bigotry - were delivered by the personable Ronald Reagan in 1980, middle- and working-class whites rallied to the Right's banner. It was time, they felt, to dismantle many government programs for the poor and to get tough on foreign adversaries.

But Reagan's most important policy was slashing taxes, especially those on the rich. Under Reagan's "supply-side economics," the top marginal tax rate - that is what the richest Americans pay on their highest tranche of income - was more than halved, from 70 percent to 28 percent.

Yet, since the promised surge in "supply-side" growth didn't materialize, one result was a dramatic rise in the national debt. Another less obvious change was the incentivizing of greed. Under presidents from Dwight Eisenhower (when the top marginal tax rate was 90 percent) through Jimmy Carter (with a 70 percent top rate), taxes had been a disincentive against greed.

After all, if 70 to 90 percent of your highest tranche of income went to the government to help pay for building the nation, you had little personal incentive to press for that extra $1 million or $2 million. So corporate CEOs - while well-compensated - were happy earning about 25 times as much as their average worker in the 1960s. A few decades later, that ratio on CEO pay was about 200 times what the average worker was making.

As the Washington Post's Peter Whoriskey framed this historic development in a June 19, 2011, article, U.S. business underwent a cultural transformation from the 1970s when chief executives believed more in sharing the wealth than they do today.

Whoriskey described the findings of researchers with access to economic data from the Internal Revenue Service. The numbers revealed that the big bucks were not flowing primarily to athletes or actors or even stock market speculators; America's new super-rich were mostly corporate chieftains.

The article cited a U.S. dairy company CEO from the 1970s, Kenneth J. Douglas, who earned the equivalent of about $1 million a year. He lived comfortably but not ostentatiously. Douglas had an office on the second floor of a milk distribution center, and he turned down raises because he felt it would hurt morale at the plant, Whoriskey reported.

However, just a few decades later, Gregg L. Engles, the CEO of the same company, Dean Foods, averaged about 10 times what Douglas made; worked in a glittering high-rise office building in Dallas; owned a vacation estate in Vail, Colorado; belonged to four golf clubs; and traveled in a $10 million corporate jet. He apparently had little concern about what his workers thought.

"The evolution of executive grandeur - from very comfortable to jet-setting - reflects one of the primary reasons that the gap between those with the highest incomes and everyone else is widening," Whoriskey reported.

"For years, statistics have depicted growing income disparity in the United States, and it has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In 2008, the last year for which data are available, for example, the top 0.1 percent of earners took in more than 10 percent of the personal income in the United States, including capital gains, and the top 1 percent took in more than 20 percent."

The old New-Deal-to-post-World-War-II notion had been that a healthy middle-class contributed to profitable businesses because average people could afford to buy consumer goods, own their own homes and take an annual vacation with the kids. That "middle-class system," however, had required intervention by the government as the representative of the everyman.

The consequences of several decades of Reaganism and its related ideas (such as shipping many middle-class jobs overseas) are now apparent. Wealth has been concentrated at the top with billionaires living extravagant lives while the middle-class shrinks and struggles. One everyman after another gets shoved down the social ladder into the lower classes and into poverty.

Those real-life consequences are painful. Millions of Americans forego needed medical care because they can't afford health insurance; young people, burdened by college loans, crowd back in with their parents; trained workers settle for low-paying jobs or are unemployed; families skip vacations and other simple pleasures of life.

Beyond the unfairness, there is the macro-economic problem which comes from massive income disparity. A strong economy is one in which the vast majority people can buy products, which can then be manufactured more cheaply, creating a positive cycle of profits and prosperity.

Instead, Mitt Romney - and even his Republican rivals who criticize his personal business methods - are intent to press ahead down the dark road of Reaganism toward some nightmarish Pottersville. Instead of a vibrant debate about whether this is the right way to go, Romney instructs the masses to keep their mouths shut with the only permitted conversations about the nation's future restricted to "quiet rooms."

Christie, a Class Act or a Clown?

EXETER, NH - JANUARY 08: Republican presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (L) looks on as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie speaks during a rally at Exeter High School on January 8, 2012 in Exeter, New Hampshire.With days to go before the New Hampshire primary, Mitt Romney is making a final campaign swing through the state. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was heckled at a Mitt Romney rally in New Hampshire where he was speaking on Sunday, January 8th, 2012. His response to the women who were shouting out to Christie falls within the bathroom humor category of an intolerant, misogynistic, arrogant clown. I do want to apologize to all clowns who do not fall within this category.

On Sunday, Jan. 8., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was speaking at a Romney for President rally in New Hampshire when he was interrupted by some female hecklers. It’s difficult to make out exactly what Christie’s critics were yelling, but it’s something to do with jobs going down. Ever the class act, Christie’s response: “You know, something may be going down tonight, but it ain’t going to be jobs, sweetheart.” He then goes on to insult the women by saying that if they were from Jersey, they wouldn’t be so silly as to think that his policies don’t support job creation. (That’s the way to win New Hampshire voters for Romney at the upcoming primary: insult them by saying that Jersey voters are smarter!)

The video, which does not make Christie look great, wasn’t some hidden-camera “gotcha” depicting a private moment, a la the 2006 “macaca” video that may have cost George Allen his Senate seat. Rather, it was uploaded to the New Jersey GOP’s YouTube account. They seem to think his remark about “going down” is a zinger, something to be proud of, rather than recognizing it as flagrantly demeaning, even misogynistic. How would Christie have responded to male protesters saying the same thing? Probably not by changing the subject to what acts they perform in the bedroom. His handlers should be apologizing for the remark, not promoting it.

It is difficult to hear the exact words of the women who are yelling something about Christie and jobs....possibly that 'Christie kills jobs.' But no matter what they are saying, Governor Romney is seen smiling in the background as Christie yells back his not so subtle sexual innuendo about oral sex. Real class act! Gee maybe Christie's not a clown, just a buffoon!

The Conservative Misconception of Socialism

Today, for the Tea Party Republicans the new 'red scare' in society is the concept of Socialism. Conservatives have created a negative niche by equating 'Liberalism' with 'Socialism.' In order to educate the conservative side of the political scale, Nurse Pam does an excellent job "Explaining Socialism to a Republican."

I was talking recently with a new friend who I’m just getting to know. She tends to be somewhat conservative, while I lean more toward the progressive side.

When our conversation drifted to politics, somehow the dreaded word “socialism” came up. My friend seemed totally shocked when I said “All socialism isn’t bad”. She became very serious and replied “So you want to take money away from the rich and give to the poor?” I smiled and said “No, not at all. Why do you think socialism mean taking money from the rich and giving to the poor?

“Well it is, isn’t it?” was her reply.

I explained to her that I rather liked something called Democratic Socialism, just as Senator Bernie Sanders, talk show host Thom Hartman, and many other people do. Democratic Socialism consists of a democratic form of government with a mix of socialism and capitalism. I proceeded to explain to her the actual meaning terms “democracy” and “socialism”.

Democracy is a form of government in which all citizens take part. It is government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Socialism is where we all put our resources together and work for the common good of us all and not just for our own benefit. In this sense, we are sharing the wealth within society.

Of course when people hear that term, “Share the wealth” they start screaming, “OMG you want to rob from the rich and give it all to the poor!” But that is NOT what Democratic Socialism means.

To a Democratic Socialist, sharing the wealth means pooling tax money together to design social programs that benefit ALL citizens of that country, city, state, etc.

The fire and police departments are both excellent examples of Democratic Socialism in America. Rather than leaving each individual responsible for protecting their own home from fire, everyone pools their money together, through taxes, to maintain a fire and police department. It’s operated under a non-profit status, and yes, your tax dollars pay for putting out other people’s fires. It would almost seem absurd to think of some corporation profiting from putting out fires. But it’s more efficient and far less expensive to have government run fire departments funded by tax dollars.

Similarly, public education is another social program in the USA. It benefits all of us to have a taxpayer supported, publicly run education system. Unfortunately, in America, the public education system ends with high school. Most of Europe now provides low cost or free college education for their citizens. This is because their citizens understand that an educated society is a safer, more productive and more prosperous society. Living in such a society, everyone benefits from public education.

When an American graduates from college, they usually hold burdensome debt in the form of student loans that may take 10 to even 30 years to pay off. Instead of being able to start a business or invest in their career, the college graduate has to send off monthly payments for years on end.

On the other hand, a new college graduate from a European country begins without the burdensome debt that an American is forced to take on. The young man or woman is freer to start up businesses, take an economic risk on a new venture, or invest more money in the economy, instead of spending their money paying off student loans to for-profit financial institutions. Of course this does not benefit wealthy corporations, but it does greatly benefit everyone in that society.

EXAMPLE American style capitalistic program for college: If you pay (average) $20,000 annually for four years of college, that will total $80,000 + interest for student loans. The interest you would owe could easily total or exceed the $80,000 you originally borrowed, which means your degree could cost in excess of $100,000.

EXAMPLE European style social program for college: Your college classes are paid for through government taxes. When you graduate from that college and begin your career, you also start paying an extra tax for fellow citizens to attend college.

Question - You might be thinking how is that fair? If you’re no longer attending college, why would you want to help everyone else pay for their college degree?

Answer - Every working citizen pays a tax that is equivalent to say, $20 monthly. If you work for 40 years and then retire, you will have paid $9,600 into the Social college program. So you could say that your degree ends up costing only $9,600. When everyone pools their money together and the program is non-profit, the price goes down tremendously. This allows you to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Health care is another example: If your employer does not provide health insurance, you must purchase a policy independently. The cost will be thousands of dollars annually, in addition to deductible and co-pays.

In Holland, an individual will pay around $35 monthly, period. Everyone pays into the system and this helps reduce the price for everyone, so they get to keep more of their hard earned cash.

In the United States we are told and frequently reminded that anything run by the government is bad and that everything should be operated by for-profit companies. Of course, with for-profit entities the cost to the consumer is much higher because they have corporate executives who expect compensation packages of tens of millions of dollars and shareholders who expect to be paid dividends, and so on.

This (and more) pushes up the price of everything, with much more money going to the already rich and powerful, which in turn, leaves the middle class with less spending money and creates greater class separation.

This economic framework makes it much more difficult for average Joes to ”lift themselves up by their bootstraps” and raise themselves to a higher economic standing.

So next time you hear the word “socialism” and “spreading the wealth” in the same breath, understand that this is a serious misconception.

Social programs require tax money and your taxes may be higher. But as you can see everyone benefits because other costs go down and, in the long run, you get to keep more of your hard earned cash!

Democratic Socialism does NOT mean taking from the rich and giving to the poor. It works to benefit everyone so the rich can no longer take advantage of the poor and middle class.

There is a misconception spread by conservatives that lower taxes will lower individual costs. By spreading this misconception, the rich pay less tax, the middle class pay more while social services, that benefit everyone, get cut. The rich get richer while the poor and middle class have less money and less services. What is that called? It is called 'trickle down economy' and time and time again it has been proven not to work.

Is Your State Giving Corporate Welfare?

David Cay Johnston, a Reuters columnist, expresses his opinion about some employers being allowed to keep state income taxes, particularly in Illinois in "Paying taxes your employer keeps."

Hard earned income taken as a state tax is being given to some employers, not the state of IL

Painful as it feels to have a lot of hard-earned income taken from your paycheck for taxes, a new Illinois law does something Americans may find surprising. It lets some employers pocket taxes for 10 years.

You read that right — in Illinois the state income taxes withheld from your paycheck may be kept by your employer under a law that took effect in May. Continental Corporation, the big German tire maker; Motorola Mobility, the cell phone maker; and Navistar, the maker of diesel trucks for industry and the military, are in on the deal. State officials say a fourth company is negotiating a similar arrangement.

Chrysler and Mitsubishi arranged deals with the state in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009; Ford got one in 2007, since revised to let it keep half of its Illinois workers’ state income taxes. (See chart below.)

Instead of paying for police, teachers, roads and other state and local services that grease the wheels of commerce, Illinois workers at these companies will subsidize their employers with the state income taxes they pay.

Diverting taxes from public purposes to private gain

The deal to let employers keep half or all of their workers’ state income taxes represents a dramatic expansion of a little-known trend in the law: diverting taxes from public purposes to private gain.

Throughout the United States, big box retailers like Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Cabela’s, and in some cases entire shopping malls, often negotiate deals to keep sales taxes that customers pay at the cash register, using the money to finance construction of their stores. This gives them a huge advantage over retailers without such subsidies, while reducing revenue to local governments, which in turn creates pressure for higher taxes.

The pipeline industry

COMPETITION BETWEEN STATES

The pipeline industry, a collection of legal monopolies with rates that are regulated, gets to include the federal corporate income tax in the rates charged customers even though nearly all pipelines are exempt from the federal corporate income tax because they are organized as master limited partnerships. Evidence in one federal court case showed that collecting this tax, plus state income taxes, and then pocketing the taxes increased ultimate net after-tax profits by 75 percent.

The Illinois deal shows how competition between the states, and with other countries, helps big corporations wring subsidies from state governments even as the states are being forced to fire teachers and other public workers because of a weak economy that has cost jobs and tax revenue.

Why would the state let companies do this? Most big companies pay little or no state corporate income tax, because companies arrange to take expenses in higher tax states and profits in states with little or no corporate income tax. So the only way to finance incentives without the state writing a check is to let the companies pocket their workers’ state income tax.

Corporate Socialism

The Illinois deal also shows how government, rather than the market, picks winners and losers. While America promotes the dream of a free market and competition, this sort of corporate socialism has been around since before the founding of the republic and has played a key role in the rise of many industries, including railroads, aircraft, as well as computer hardware and software.

Warren Ribley, director of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, said “it’s a fair question” as to whether taxpayers should be subsidizing businesses. He said elected leaders and the public should debate the issue.

“In the meantime,” Ribley said, “I am out there competing every single day with states and countries across the entire globe and I have got to have the tools and I have to use the tools provided by the General Assembly,” as the Illinois legislature is formally known.

State Representative Jack Franks, a Democrat from the northern end of Illinois, said the deals “are fundamentally unfair” to taxpayers and other companies.

“Our current governor had the genius idea of giving to Motorola and Navistar and others, he said to retain their business here, yet he is allowing Navistar to fire up to 25 percent of their workforce and still get millions from the state” by holding onto the income taxes of employees.

Money diverted from state needs to private corporate coffers

OTHERS LIKELY TO FOLLOW

The Illinois law lets companies retain all of the income taxes withheld from the paychecks of workers whose hiring expands the payroll and half of the taxes for existing workers whose jobs are retained.

For Continental the deal means $22 million over 10 years diverted to its coffers from the state income taxes withheld from worker paychecks to help pay for a $224 million expansion of its Mount Vernon tire plant in southern Illinois. The deal will retain 2,500 jobs and create 400 more rather than prompt the plant to move to Mexico, Brazil or another state.

The hourly tire workers, under a two-tier pay scale that means lower wages for new hires, make either $19.35 an hour or $16.31 an hour. For a year that is pay of just under $34,000 to $40,000.

Based on a 3 percent average Illinois state income tax rate for people in that income range, and assuming Continental’s 2,500 hourly workers remain at the higher wage rate and 400 new workers are hired at the lower wage rate, the annual diversion of their income taxes would be as much as $1.9 million of the average $2.2 million annual benefit from the deal. Taxes paid by supervisors and managers, and expected higher wages in future years, account for the other $300,000 per year or so for the next decade.

Failure to create or retain jobs

Navistar is getting the deal even though its application shows it plans to reduce its workforce of 3,100 to about 2,200.

Ribley said companies that got earlier deals in which they avoided the state corporate income tax and then failed to create or retain jobs as promised have actually paid back the benefits.

The three companies that got the deal are not named in the law enacted in May, but the language of Public Act 97-2 defines them by describing the industry, employment level and other specifics that show how the law was tailored to benefit just them.

Here’s a prediction: other states soon will also authorize diverting income taxes withheld from worker paychecks to their employers, if some have not done so already — unless, of course, voters speak up on behalf of competitive markets and against this sort of corporate socialism.

WATCH:

The message to employers from the State of Illinois is to hold out for corporate welfare. The message to the voter from the state of finances in Illinois is to fight against corporate socialism.

A Protest Needs a Concise Message

Marshall McLuhan coined the famous aphorism "the medium is the message" in his book, Understanding Media. He defines the term medium as "any extension of ourselves." and acknowledges that "the medium of language extends our thoughts from within our mind out to others." If the medium is the message then the framing of an issue is very important. How an issue is framed, and therefore, how an issue is spoken will determine what message is being delivered to others.

The Need for a Concise Message

That is the very point that Ted Rall, a political cartoonist, commentator, and author wrote about and posted on his website on September 26th regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement. He finds that there is no concise message for people to latch onto. That may be the reason why, according to Rall, the Occupy Wall Street protest appears to be fizzling out.

#OccupyWallStreet, in its second week as of this writing, is and was important. It is the first major street protest inspired by the economic collapse that began in 2008. It is also the first notable public repudiation of Obama by the American Left. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the Canadian “culture jammer” magazine Adbusters asked people to converge on lower Manhattan’s financial district in order to protest corporate greed in general and—in a reflection of the influence of social networking culture—to develop one specific major demand after they gathered.

Occupy Wall Street now seems to be fizzling out.

For me and other older, jaded veterans of leftist struggle, failure was a foregone conclusion. From the opening words of the magazine’s updates to the participants, which it referred to as “dreamers, jammers, rabble-rousers and revolutionaries,” it was evident that yet another opportunity to agitate for real change was being wasted by well-meant wankers.

Michael Moore complained about insufficient media coverage, but this non-movement movement was doomed before it began by its refusal to coalesce around a powerful message, its failure to organize and involve the actual victims of Wall Street’s perfidy (people of color, the poor, the evicted, the unemployed, those sick from pollution, etc.), and its refusal to argue and appeal on behalf of a beleaguered working class against an arrogant, violent and unaccountable ruling elite—in other words, to settle for nothing less than the eradication of capitalism.

Don’t just occupy Wall Street.

Occupy Main Street. Get ordinary people interested and involved. After all, college kid, it’s not just your struggle.

While a lack of political education should not preclude a person from participating in politics, organizers of a movement seeking radical change should make sure they don’t waste the whole time strumming a guitar and flirting. Zuccotti Park should have offered daily classes and study groups to reduce the odds that an attendee will sound like a moron when she gets questioned by a journalist.

A protest is a stage. All over New York City and around the country, people are watching on TV. Ideally, you want viewers to drop what they’re doing, to come join you. At bare minimum, you want them to approve of you. To identify with you. Maybe even send a check.

Back in July, Adbusters wanted the “one simple demand” expressed by Occupy Wall Street to be “that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington.”

What do we want?

A bipartisan blue-ribbon commission to study the extension of campaign finance reform!

When do we want it?

As soon as the committee completes its work!

Unsurprisingly and rightly, that uninspiring (and easily satisfied) demand has been set aside in favor of something better but hardly worth taking a rubber bullet for: “a vague but certain notion that the richest percentile of the country remains fat and happy as the going-on-five-year-old recession continues to batter the middle and working class,” as The New York Observer put it.

Occupy Wall Street should have demanded something majestic, reasonable and unobtainable, in order to expose the brutal nature of the system. Something like the nationalization of all corporations, equal wages for all workers, or the abolition of securities exchanges.

Some organizers also called Occupy Wall Street “Days of Rage”; along with organization and focus, rage is what is lacking.

How to Frame an Issue

Rall's analysis of the NYC revolt of Wall Street leads to a discussion of how to frame an issue. An expert on the importance of framing an issue is George Lakoff, a linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Lakoff's application of cognitive linguistics to politics has led to a dialogue on how to best get a messages across. Lakoff explains how language influences the "terms of political debate."

Language always comes with what is called "framing." Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like "revolt," that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame.

If you then add the word "voter" in front of "revolt," you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like "voter revolt" - something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the campaign people themselves.

Lakoff made this point during the Wisconsin union-busting controversy. Many of the issues involved in the Wisconsin stand-off, are at the heart of New York's Occupy Wall Street protest.

The Wisconsin protests are about much more than budgets and unions. [...]

The media, with few exceptions, is failing to get at the deeper issues. [...]

What is standing in the way of having the real story told? It is the frame of collective bargaining itself, which only points to the parties that are doing the bargaining and what they are bargaining over.

The real point of collective bargaining is the idea of fairness inherent in democracy. Without unions, large corporations have an unfair advantage in hiring individual workers: Workers have to take what is offered, a fair wage for work done or not. Unions help to even the playing field, enabling workers to have a fair chance against wealthy, powerful large organizations — whether corporations or governments.

But public employees’ unions, in bargaining with governments, are raising deeper issues in which wealthy corporations and individuals play a huge role. The public employees’ unions are aware that the top one percent of Americans have more financial assets than the bottom 95 percent — a staggering disproportion of wealth. The wealthy have, to a large extent, amassed that wealth through indirect contributions to them by governments — governments build roads corporations use, fund schools that train their workers, subsidize their energy costs, do research they capitalize on, subsidize their access to resources, promote trade for them, and on and on.

Meanwhile, over the past three decades, while corporations and their investors have grown immensely richer on the public largesse, middle class workers have had no substantive wage increases, leaving them poorer and poorer. Those immensely wealthy corporations and individuals have, through political contributions, have managed to rig our politics so that they pay back only an inadequate amount into the system that has enabled them to become wealthy.

The real targets of the public employees’ unions are the wealthy free riders who, in a fair political economy, would be giving back more to the nation, and to the states and communities they function in.

That is the obvious half of what the Wisconsin protests are about. The other half concerns the rights of ordinary people in a democracy — rights conservatives want to deny, whether gay rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, retirement rights, or the right to the best health a nation can provide to all its citizens. Unions, through their political contributions, support the basic freedoms, protections, and resources we all require to have a decent life and live in a civilized society. If those unions are destroyed, American life will become unrecognizable in a remarkably short time. [...]

If Democrats are not talking out loud about these deeper issues, then they are, by their reticence and silence, helping conservatives destroy unions, defund the Democratic party, and take over the country.

The real issue is whether conservatives will get what they really want: the ability to turn the country conservative on every issue, legally and permanently. Eliminating the public sector unions could achieve that. Collective bargaining rights are the immediate issue, but they are symbolic of the real issue at stake. That is the story the media should be telling — and that Democrats everywhere in America should be shouting out loud.

There are common threads to the Wisconsin and New York protests. The issues in Wisconsin were being framed by the conservatives. In NYC, the issues are not being framed. The media's limited message about the Wall Street occupation is either taking the conservative view that this is a rag-tag group of youth or it searching for the reason why the protest is happening. It is evident that a message needs to be conveyed to the public and to the media by the protestors in Zuccotti Park. The issues are real. But without framing a cohesive to-the-point message, the media will not pick up on the issue and public support will be difficult.

BREAKING NEWS!!!

Via Redditt.com

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City and the call to action, adopted last night by an enthusiastic consensus.

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, formerly divided by the color of our skin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or lack thereof, political party and cultural background, we acknowledge the reality: that there is only one race, the human race, and our survival requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their brethren; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.

They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give CEO’s exorbitant bonuses.

They have perpetuated gender inequality and discrimination in the workplace.

They have poisoned the food supply, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.

They have continuously sought to end the rights of workers to negotiate their pay and make complaints about the safety of their workplace.

They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.

They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.

They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.

They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.

They have sold our privacy as a commodity.

They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.

They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.

They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.

They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.

They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.

They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.

They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty book keeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.

They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.

They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.

They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.

They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.

They have participated in a directly racist action by accepting the contract from the State of Georgia to murder Troy Davis.

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

This is a beginning. The movement is forward.

Occupying Wall St.

An NYPD officer looks with scrutiny at the photographer taking his picture during the
Occupy Wall Street protests, 09/24/11. (photo: Peter Harris)

This is a protest against Corporate Greed. Have you heard about the "Occupy Wall Street protest?" Probably not. The mainstream media has had limited coverage this protest. Is this the start of a new social movement? Is this the start of a revolution? Is this the frustration of a society where the rich get richer, the poor and middle class get the shaft, the control of monetary policies are in the hands of large corporations, the politicians are being bought for the corporate good not the people's needs and the banks and money makers are the new Robber Barons?

A report from a front that may soon be shut down.

Before you read on, watch this: a video from the base camp of the #OccupyWallStreet protest that is now in its seventh day. It's called "Nobody Can Predict the Moment of Revolution." (The video was produced by Martyna Starosta and her friend Iva.)

Danny Schechter from Supported News reports that this is a 2011-style protest.

These are the faces of a wannabe revolution, more than a protest but not yet quite a major Movement. The spirit is infectious, perhaps because of the sincerity of the participants and their obvious commitment to their ideals.

Occupy Wall Street is more than a protest; it is as much an exercise in building a leaderless, bottom-up resistance community with a more democratic approach to challenging the system where everyone is encouraged to have a say.

But saying that also leads to a conflict between my emotional identification with the kids that have rallied in this small park/public space on Liberty Street to exercise some liberty, with a despairing analysis that wishes this enterprise well but harbors deep doubts about its staying power and impact.

This privately-owned park, devastated by debris on 9/11 and then rebuilt by a real estate magnate who named it after himself, is also a place that is under 24-hour surveillance from a hostile New York City Police Department which has put up a fence on one side of the park, brought down a spy tower from Times Square to track the participants from on high, and sprinkled infiltrators into the crowd.

By the time I left, late on Saturday afternoon, the police had arrested 70 people who had joined a march that went from Wall Street to Union Square, New York's traditional gathering place for political rallies for nearly l00 years.

You can watch it all on a live stream.

In many ways this is a 2011-style protest modeled after Tahrir Square in Cairo. It is non-violent, organized around what's called a "General Assembly" where the community meets daily to debate its political direction and discuss how it sees itself. There are no formal leaders or spokespeople, no written-down political agenda and no shared demands. They focus on using social media. Twitter is their megaphone.

They have no sound system. When participants want to make an announcement, they yell "Mic Check," which is repeated by the whole crowd. They also repeat the announcement a few words at a time so everyone can hear it.

This bottom-up anarchist sensibility and ideology conflicts with the mass mobilizations of old where an organization issues a call and a coalition of groups carries it out.

I ran into some of yesterday's movement leaders: Leslie Cagan, who ran United for Peace and Justice and organized the massive anti-Iraq War protests and marches in New York and Washington before and after. She was as intrigued as I was about this gathering of the committed. She found the focus a bit vague, but seemed willing to give it a chance to grow and learn by making its own mistakes.

Other 60s activists like Aron Kay, known as the "pie man" for all the famous and infamous people he pied in the face to protest their crimes and misdemeanors - including Andy Warhol for dining with the Shah of Iran - was also showing his solidarity by turning up and squatting in the park.

Lower Manhattan on a Saturday is usually a Mosque-less Mecca for tourists visiting Ground Zero, a crime scene if there ever was one. It is a symbol of a national failure to defend this country as well.

It's also the place where the 911 Truth Movement shares its findings weekly with visitors about what "really happened."

Just a few blocks away is another crime scene: Wall Street, which symbolizes an ongoing economic failure. In this past week, access has been limited and in this free country of ours protestors could not parade in front of the NY Stock Exchange, another privately-run financial institution. That led Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism blog to opine, "I'm beginning to wonder whether the right to assemble is effectively dead in the US."

Many banks like Chase doubled their security forces and put up fences to protect themselves from the people the NY media have labeled "kids and aging hippies."

The panic in the exchange is mirrored in the insecurity in the streets where surveillance cameras, private police forces and NY cops defend the bastions of privilege.

The police went on the offensive Saturday with mass arrests of activists. Scott Galindez filed this report on Reader Supported News, "While the live feeds were up I witnessed a very powerful arrest of a law student whose parents were recently evicted from their home. He dropped to his knees and gave an impassioned plea for the American people to wake up! There are reports of police kettling protesters with a big orange net, at least five maced, and police using tasers."

There were also reports of the use of mace, tear gas and pepper spray which hit two old women. We are so used to these storm-trooper tactics that most expect them. There had been fewer arrests last week, although the police seem to now have identified key organizers and are singling them out.

On Saturday, police gave out a notice saying that it is now illegal to sleep in the park. They then put up a sign on a park wall. I watched a member of the police command, a "white shirt" named Timoney, march into the park and gruffly order the communications team that spends most of its time tweeting out the latest news to take down some large umbrellas the activists were using to protect their computers from rain.

The police consider these "structures" and prohibit them. Earlier in the week, they arrested people for using tarps to protect their gear. (They don't see the irony in that term given the way the TARP law bailed out the banksters.)

Many of the people in the park believe the end may be coming with the police eager to end what they see as a Woodstock on Wall Street, complete with topless teens and long-haired militants. This assemblage clearly affects their macho Identity as upholders of law and order as they define it. The probably agree with the right-wing Red State website that calls the protesters a "menagerie."

I wouldn't rule out mass arrests once a provocation, theirs or the protesters', provides the pretext.

Will the Occupy Wall Street collectives be able to continue to occupy a zone that has been occupied for years by the greedsters of the finance world?

More importantly, will the issues they are trying to draw attention to, however symbolically, be taken up by others?

Will it take more cracked heads, or even a police killing, to move New Yorkers to support a campaign to rein in Wall Street?

Where are the unions and New York's progressive democrats and organizations? Why aren't they in the streets?

Why don't they realize that economic justice issues are essential to transforming this oligarch-driven country?

I have been calling for years for more protests on Wall Street to put the issues of Wall Street crime on the agenda. But with media barely covering this "occupation," with the activists being denigrated for their youth and inexperience, will this one have the impact I was hoping for?

It seems unlikely.

The reality is that the so-called "grass-roots" movement of the Tea Party was actually a well organized corporate funded operation which began with Anti-Tax Tea Party rallies in many states across this country on April 15, 2009. It's message of no more taxes was identifiable to numerous people. There was a cohesive message and a united front that was picked up by the media. The NYC protest, although extremely important, is disheveled in organization. It has no visible leader. It has no cute tag lines. It has little momentum. It's message is against the influence of corporate money in politics. This protest is not picking up people momentum.

The Wall St. Journal observed that "Wall Street has survived much worse than some ragged protesters trying to occupy it."

CNN Money stated that "Occupy Wall Street is a "leaderless resistance movement" spearheaded by activist magazine Adbusters. Organizers want people to swarm into lower Manhattan on September 17 and set up camp for two months, then "incessantly repeat one simple demand."

On the other hand, Allison Kilkenny of The Nation is extremely critical of a New York Times article about the protest in her article, "Correcting the Abysmal 'New York Times' Coverage of Occupy Wall Street." Kilkenny criticizes the depiction of the protestors as "scatterbrained, sometimes borderline psychotic transients" while not reporting the "more serious aspect of the protest—the “scores of arrests” that occurred and the fact that protestors were maced.

Michael Moore on Keith Olbermann acknowledging that people across this nation need to go out and protest. He suggested that people all over the country need to bring the Occupy Wall Street movement to their communities. WATCH:

A man interviewed in the Olbermann video, stated the obvious: "This is a difficult story to tell...and that it's still an unfolding story. And, I think, until there is a compelling narrative of why people have decided to peacefully occupy Zuccotti Park, I think it is very hard to communicate that story to everyone else., I think it is very hard to communicate that story to everyone else."