Anti-Zionism Not Anti-Semitism

by Stephen Lendman

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Editor’s Note: The dishonesty of accusing people who oppose Israeli apartheid policies “anti-Semites” is easily disposed by the fact that most of such people support Palestinians, in other words, Arabs, who are clearly and irrefutably semites. In this context, let us not forget that, during the Vietnam War, or some other unpopular war, opponents were taunted with cries of “anti-Americanism.” Those who resorted to such cheap and inflammatory labels conveniently forgot that the protestors and their accusers were both American. But perhaps most conclusive is the fact that several sects of orthodox Jews denounce Zionism and the state of Israel itself, perhaps more vocally than any gentile could.—PG

Ronnie Fraser heads The Academic Friends of Israel (AFI). According to its mission statement, it was established to “fight the academic boycott of Israel and all other forms of anti-Semitism in the UK and the International academic and scientific arenas.”

In 2011, Fraser sued Britain’s University and College Union (UCU). He did so on anti-Semitism grounds. As a member, he claimed its “degrading, humiliating and offensive environment” harms Jewish members. Its policies “violate his dignity.” They breach Britain’s Equality Act, he alleged. “In simple terms,” he said, “the UCU is not a place that is hospitable to Jews.”

His lawyer, Anthony Julius added:

“My client has had enough. He believes that the UCU’s conduct, over so many years now, has limited his options to either resigning or suing. He has chosen to sue.”

UCU rejects the EU Working Definition of Antisemitism. It does so on grounds of “silencing debate on Israel.” Fraser opposes its position. Specific passages UCU rejects include:

  • “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor
  • applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation
  • using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis
  • drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
  • holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.”

More on Fraser’s case below.

He equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Doing so twists truth. Understanding Zionism is fundamental. It’s undemocratic, racist, oppressive and violent. It believes in Jewish exclusivity, privilege and exceptionalism.

antiIsraelJewsIsraeli Jews alone have rights. Muslims are considered subhuman. Jewish ethnocracy is justified. It’s rife with structural inequalities.  Israeli Arabs may vote and hold Knesset seats. Government rulings require a Jewish majority. The Law of Return is for Jews alone. On virtually all issues, Jewish favoritism discriminates against Palestinians. Their rights are systematically denied.

In his book “Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine,” Joel Kovel writes:

Zionism seeks “the restoration of tribalism in the guise of a modern, highly militarized and aggressive state.”  “(It) cut Jews off from (their) history and led to a fateful identity of their interests with antisemitism (becoming) the only thing that united them.”

“(It) fell into the ways of imperialist expansion and militarism, and showed signs of the fascist malignancy.”

Accepting “the idea of a Jewish state,” mixes its twin notions of “particularism (and) exceptionalism.”  They’re “the actual bane of Judaism.”  They give “racism an objective, enduring, institutionalized and obdurate character.”

Doing so turns Israel “into a machine for the manufacture of human rights abuses.”

Consider three former prime ministers. Menachem Begin (1977 – 83), Yitzhak Shamir (1983 – 84 and 1986 – 92), and Ariel Sharon (2001 – 06) were former terrorists. They dispelled the illusion of Israeli democracy, morality, and respect for human rights. According to Kovel, “the world would be a far better place without (the corrosive effects of) Zionism.”

Indeed so. Israel occupies Palestinian land. Gaza’s under siege. Naked aggression is called self-defense. Palestinian self-defense is called terrorism.  Israel considers civilians legitimate targets. Children are treated like adults. Racism is institutionalized. Land theft is policy. So are dispossessions, ruthless persecution, and denying non-Jews their fundamental rights.

Peace is spurned. Conflict, violence and other human rights abuses persist. Palestinians endure cruel and unusual punishment. International laws don’t matter. Israeli war crimes go unpunished. It gets away with murder with impunity. Doing so reflects the worst of Zionist extremism. Many Jews oppose it. They do so for good reason.

In his book “The Hidden History of Zionism,” Ralph Schoenman explained four Zionist myths:

  • “A land without people for a people without a land” promotes the fiction of uninhabited Palestine awaiting its rightful inhabitants;
  • Israeli democracy is illusory; it’s no more democratic than apartheid South Africa;
  • “security (is) the motor force of Israeli foreign policy;” it’s because of false claims about hostile neighboring Arab states; and
  • “Zionism (is) the moral legatee of the victims of the Holocaust. (It’s) the most pervasive and insidious” Zionist myth.

Colonizing Palestine had multiple aims. Stealing it matters most. Exploiting cheap labor was planned. So was dispossessing and dispersing Palestinians, replacing them with Jews, legitimizing ethnic cleansing, and destroying Arab culture and history.

Historical records were falsified. “Palestinians were re-invented as a semi-savage, nomadic remnant.” State terror became policy.  In 1940, Jewish Agency Colonization Department head Joseph Weitz said:

“Between ourselves, it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to (get rid of) all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

The Koenig Report said:

“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

Other Israeli officials expressed similar extremism. In 1937, David Ben-Gurion said:

“We must expel the Arabs and take their place and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places – then we have force at our disposal.”  He and others, earlier and now, reflect Zionism’s dark side. It harms Jews and non-Jews alike. Conflating it with anti-Semitism doesn’t wash.

An employment tribunal ruling agreed. It “unanimously adjudge(d) that:

 Haaretz headlined “British Jewry in turmoil after tribunal blasts pro-Israeli activist for bringing harassment case.”  Ruling on Fraser’s case “was meant to be culmination of 11 years of pro-Israel activism, but ruling that ‘attachment to Israel….is not intrinsically a part of Jewishness’ has caused shock waves in the Jewish community.”

Fraser’s suit had considerable financial backing. Organizations involved have links to “the central British Jewry leadership forums, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council.

Fraser’s case included 10 complaints. At issue was alleged “institutional anti-Semitism.”  UCU is identified with anti-Israeli activism. It supports boycotts, divestment and sanctions. Anti-Semitism charges don’t wash. UCU justifiably denied them. Its Jewish members aren’t harassed.

Fraser’s allegations were ill-conceived. They’re illogical and unfounded. He falsely believes Jews universally identify with Israel. When an organization they belong to levies charges they consider unfair, it constitutes a direct attack on them.

Not so. Zionism and anti-Semitism are distinctive. Conflating them doesn’t wash. It’s a canard. It’s a scheme to divide Jews into good and bad categories. Judge AM Snelson headed the Tribunal panel. He agreed with UCU’s position. So did other panel members unanimously.  They said “a belief in the Zionist project or an attachment to Israel or any similar sentiment cannot amount to a protected characteristic. It is not intrinsically a part of Jewishness.”

It added that Fraser “must accept his fair share of minor injuries. A political activist accepts the risk of being offended or hurt on occasions.”

He was criticized for filing suit. The Tribunal called doing so an “impermissible attempt to achieve a political end by litigious means.”  It expressed a “worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of expression.”

UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said she was “delighted that the tribunal made such a clear and overwhelming judgment. (It) upholds our and others’ right of freedom of expression.”  UCU “remain(s) opposed to discrimination of any kind, including anti-Semitism.”

Fraser accepted defeat. He had no other choice. He won’t appeal. He expressed disappointment. He urged British Jewish leaders to establish “a definition of anti-Semitism that includes belief in Zionism and an attachment to Israel which should amount to a protected right of Jews. It’s what we have been praying for for 2,000 years.”

It bears repeating. Conflating Zionism with anti-Semitism doesn’t wash. Claiming otherwise won’t change things.

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached atlendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.  His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”  || http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html 

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 



Designer Protests and Vanity Arrests in DC

The Mirage of an Opposition
Protest and resistance are two very different things

Daryl Hanna, arrested in DC. Well intentioned, but does "soft-gloves" activism really accomplish timely social change?

Daryl Hanna, arrested in DC. Well intentioned, but can “soft-gloves” activism really accomplish timely social change, or merely the illusion of protest?

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, CounterPunch.org

The scene was striking for its dissonance. Fifty activists massed in front of the White House, some of them sitting, others tied to the iron fence, most of them smiling, all decorous looking, not a Black Blocker or Earth First!er in the viewshed. The leaders of this micro-occupation of the sidewalk held a black banner featuring Obama’s campaign logo, the one with the blue “O” and the curving red stripes that looks like a pipeline snaking across Kansas. The message read, prosaically: “Lead on Climate: Reject the KXL Pipeline.” Cameras whirred franticly, most aimed at the radiant face of Daryl Hannah, as DC police moved in to politely ask the crowd to disperse. The crowd politely declined. The Rubicon had been crossed. For the first time in 120 years, a Sierra Club official, executive director Mike Brune, was going to get arrested for an act of civil (and the emphasis here is decisively on civil) disobedience.

Brune had sought special dispensation for the arrest from the Sierra Club board, a one-day exemption to the Club’s firm policy against non-violent civil disobedience, The Board assented. One might ask, what took them so long? One might also ask, why now? Is the Keystone Pipeline a more horrific ecological crime than oil drilling in grizzly habitat on the border of Glacier National Park or the gunning down of 350 wolves a year in the outback of Idaho? Hardly. The Keystone Pipeline is one of many noxious conduits of tar sand oil from Canada, vile, certainly, but standard practice for Big Oil.

The Sierra Club has an image problem. Brune’s designer arrest can be partially interpreted as a craven attempt to efface the stain of the Club’s recent dalliance with Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest natural gas companies on the continent and a pioneer in the environmentally malign enterprise of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”. Between 2007 and 2010, Chesapeake Energy secretly funneled nearly $30 million to the Sierra Club to advocate the virtues of natural gas as a so-called “bridge” fuel. Bridge to where is yet to be determined. By the time this subornment was disclosed, the funders of the environmental movement had turned decisively against fracking for gas and the even more malicious methods used to extract shale oil. The Sierra Club had to rehabilitate itself to stay in the good graces of the Pew Charitable Trusts and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had lavished $50 million on the Club’s sputtering Beyond Coal Campaign.

Daryl-Hannah-arrested-at-DC-protest

As the cops strolled in to begin their vanity arrests, they soon confronted the inscrutable commander of these delicately chained bodies, Bill McKibben, leader of the massively funded 350.Org. McKibben had repeatedly referred to this as the environmental movement’s “lunch counter moment,” making an odious comparison to the Civil Right’s movement’s courageous occupation of the “white’s only” spaces across the landscape of the Jim Crow era, acts of genuine defiance that were often viciously suppressed by truncheons, fists and snarling dogs.

But McKibben made no attempt to stand his ground. He allowed the PlastiCuffs that tied his thin wrists to the fence to be decorously snipped. He didn’t resist arrest; instead he craved it. This was a well-orchestrated photo-op moment. He was escorted to the police van, driven to the precinct station, booked, handed a $100 fine and released. An hour later, McKibben was Tweeting about how cool it was to be arrested with civil rights legend Julian Bond. But are you really engaged in civil disobedience if you can Tweet your own arrest?

Beyond the fabric of self-congratulation, what’s really going on here? The mandarins of Big Green blocked nothing, not even entry to the White House grounds. It was a purely symbolic protest, but signifying what? Directed at whom? Even Derrida would have a hard time decoding the meaning of a demonstration that so effusively supported the person it supposedly targeted.

Of course, Obama, who was in North Carolina during the designer arrests, had no such problem. He correctly divined the impotence on display. In a matter of weeks, he delivered a State of the Union Address pledging to expedite oil and gas drilling on public lands and off-shore sites, nominated pro-nuke and pro-fracking zealots to head the EPA and Department of Energy.

Predictably, the Sierra Club, which now functions as little more than an applause machine for the administration, praised both the State of the Union address and the dubious appointments to EPA and Energy. Here we have what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the mirage of an opposition.”

Then the coup de grâce: the State Department issued its final report endorsing the pipeline an ecologically-benign sluice toward economic prosperity. This was swiftly followed by an order from the White House to the EPA demanding that the agency withdraw the stern new standards on greenhouse gas emissions from powerplants.

So Obama is set to screw Gang Green on the Keystone XL Pipeline. But, like Pavlovian Lapdogs, the Enviro Pros will lick their wounds, cash a few checks and within two weeks be back to issuing press releases touting him as the Greenest President of All Time. Rest assured, Obama feels terrible about these setbacks and will move decisively to fix them in his third term.

JeffreySt.Clair2Jeffrey St. Clair is the editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book (with Joshua Frank) is Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).



The Big Nausea: Waking Up With an Obama-Ache

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by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

Who will defend the indefensible Obama? Answer: There will be fewer and fewer Obamapologists, as each day passes. “For the monumentally dysfunctional Black Misleadership Class, the winding down of the Age of Obama is cause for frantic repositioning, and for the revising of their own histories.”

“Black folks have been forced to come to grips with the finality of Obama’s second term.”

The Obama Hangover has begun. The drunken delirium that descended on Black America after the pale Democratic caucuses of Iowa endorsed a brown-skinned corporatist just after New Years Day, 2008 – conveying white “viability” on a Great Black Hope – is definitively over. It’s the morning-after in Black America, a scene of economic and political ruin bathed in the searing daylight of Obama’s second term and umpteenth betrayal.

It would be easy to say that the Great Nausea of 2013 was occasioned by Obama’s blunt object assault on Social Security and the whole array of entitlements. However, the First Black President’s obituary is not written in his budget. The onset of post-Obamaism has more to do with the calendar than anything else. Since Election Day, November 6, Black folks have been forced to come to grips with the finality of Obama’s second term – the impending emergence from the dream. There is the sound of a finger snapping. “In a few moments, you will wake up.”

The awakening will be uneven and, for many, dreadful: a dreamscape dissolving into the rubble-strewn nightmare left by the Great Recession, a catastrophe that set African Americans back as much as two generations, but which was notsubjectively experienced as such by huge segments of the Black community. Instead, reality was subsumed by the mere presence of a Black person in the White House.

“The awakening will be uneven and, for many, dreadful.”

It was a narcotic effect so potent in Obama’s first term, African Americans imagined themselves to be better off than five and ten years before – when the truth was exactly the opposite. Black imaginations took flight amid the desolation. Studies by the Pew Research Center – substantially confirmed byother reputable pollsters over the course of Obama’s first term – showed that Blacks were the most optimistic constituency in the country regarding their personal and family prospects and those of African Americans as a group. Moreover, they believed that their condition was improved under the Obama presidency – coterminous with the debacle – when in fact Blacks had been hardest hit of all major U.S. populations. Meanwhile, every other ethnic constituency correctly understood that their economic situation had deteriorated.

Back in January of 2010, I wrote:

“Although African Americans contributed 19 out of every 20 of their votes to Obama’s reelection, there was no escaping that this was the last act in the ritual. One cannot blame the people for having their Mardis Gras – even if it is a five-year bacchanal. However, it is unforgiveable for so-called “leaders” to allow the whole town to burn down during the festivities.

“There’s a lot of historical re-writing to do, if the poseurs are to include themselves in a movement from which they have been effectively absent for four years.”

For the monumentally dysfunctional Black Misleadership Class, the winding down of the Age of Obama is cause for frantic repositioning, and for the revising of their own histories. Black politicians and “movement” personalities who, for four years, could not bring themselves to articulate a single “demand” of the administration in power, now claim to be working on a “Black Agenda” – having discarded the old and unfinished Black historical agenda on peace and social justice in deference to the First Black President. Now that Obama’s days are numbered, these misleaders must hustle to readjust history to show that they have, indeed, been “on the case” since 2008, when the bottom fell out of the Black American economy. They must renew their peace and pan-Africanist credentials, having watched as Obama waged war against international order and deployed AFRICOM to militarily occupy the continent. There’s a lot of historical re-writing to do, if the poseurs are to include themselves in a movement from which they have been effectively absent for four years.

Revisionism becomes the order of the day. Yesterday’s cheerleaders for Obama are now scrambling to find harmless niches of simulated protest from which they can rebuild their resumes as defenders of the people’s interests. Previously compliant members of the Congressional Black Caucus will decide that it’s time to regurgitate, rather than swallow, Obama’s “Satan Sandwiches.”

But some of us have kept a record, and kept the faith. And we will not forget who did what in the Age of Obama.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted atGlen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

 



President Obama, One Corporate Puppet Among Many

By Carl GibsonThe people of the United States should rightly interpret this latest slew of betrayals in government as proof that we live under the thumb of a corporate tyranny, not a legitimate constitutional republic. And we should come together to decide what a functional new government would look like, and reject the assumed legitimacy of our corporate ownership’s puppet government.Source: Reader Supported News 

President Barack Obama in Tucson, Arizona, 01/12/11. (photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)

President Barack Obama in Tucson, Arizona, 01/12/11 (Photo: Jewel Samad/Getty Images)
 
This year, the New Deal turned 80. And those same New Deal programs championed by FDR, a Democrat, defined the bedrock of the American left political achievements for all others who would seek the presidency. Now, the corporate takeover of our government has proven that those New Deal programs can be slowly dismantled by a Democrat president, as the Obama administration fully digs its heels in on an austerity agenda. 

He’s not the one running the show, but rather, his strings are being pulled by Wall Street bankers and hedge fund managers like  Pete Peterson , who is most of the wallet behind the corporate-funded “Fix the Debt” sham campaign. Even one of Fix the Debt’s key spokesmen admitted that their goal was to create an ” artificial crisis ” that would justify gutting Social Security. 

Jack Lew, Obama’s Treasury secretary, is leading the administration’s doublespeak on austerity. In Europe, he’s told political leaders to lighten up on austerity measures. But in America, Lew is telling Congress to endorse President Obama’s proposals to cut earned benefits for vulnerable Americans who need them to survive, even though Social Security doesn’t contribute to the deficit. Lew is also a pawn of the corporate and financial string-pullers, coming from Citigroup before his years in the Clinton administration’s division of budget. He was even guaranteed a bonus by Citigroup if he was able to secure a “high-level” federal job.

The corporations running our government want our public resources, too. The White House is currently mulling a proposal to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority, which FDR’s New Deal established as the nation’s largest publicly-owned power company. Privatization of public resources is one of the key austerity measures being forced by the European Union right now, particularly in scorched-earth economies like Greece and Spain. Privatization of public resources, the selling-off of a public good for corporate profit, means that the people who depended on that service are usually subject to frequent price gouging, while under the thumb of an unaccountable private corporation.

Privatization is especially high on the agenda, considering the 10 oil spills that happened in America over just two weeks’ time and the Senate’s recent endorsement of the Keystone XL pipeline. A large public drinking water supply was tainted with 5,000 barrels of tar sands oil in Mayflower, Arkansas. Yet Bill Clinton, the only former US president from Arkansas, has been noticeably silent on Exxon’s catastrophe even though Little Rock is just 25 miles North of Mayflower.

The silence from both Clinton and Obama on Mayflower is deafening, especially as Exxon has declared the area over the spill a no-fly zone, which has been enforced by Obama’s FAA. Arkansas attorney general Dustin McDaniel, a Democrat, has even privatized oil spill cleanup, allowing a company that investigative journalist Steve Horn recently revealed is notorious for oil spill coverups. And since a loophole in federal law says that Exxon’s spilled tar sands oil is bitumen and not oil, they won’t have to pay for the cleanup. The cleanup and coverup job for Mayflower will be paid for by the taxpayers, while the corporations that created the entire mess draw more record profits. BP did the same thing after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that ruined an entire region’s economy, Deepwater wrote it off on their taxes as a loss, shifting the cost to suckers like us. The corporations who run our state and federal governments don’t care which party is in power, as long as they can still control their agenda.

President Obama is also caving to the meat industry’s demands to privatize poultry inspection, despite mainstream chicken producers like Tyson just recently paying a multimillion-dollar settlement for ammonia accidents. Obama’s quiet signing of the Monsanto Protection Act, which exempts GMO crops from judicial review and was written by a senator who received money from Monsanto, is another indicator of the White House’s subservience to big agriculture.

None of these measures are because corporations are struggling and need help from the government to survive. On the contrary, the Dow Jones and S&P 500 have rallied to zoom past pre-recession levels, and corporate profits are at record highs, precisely because workers’ wages are so low. Yet the only bone Obama has thrown to the poor was a proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9. This would make an unremarkable difference in the lifestyles of low-wage workers. As Elizabeth Warren rightly pointed out, had the minimum wage kept up with executive pay, or even just the cost of living, it would be roughly $20 an hour today.

The left has made plenty of fuss over the president’s latest proposal to gut one of the programs near and dear to Americans of all political stripes. They’ve even promised to offer primary challengers to all Democrats running for re-election who support Obama’s plan to gut Social Security. Obama has been hearing for years from the left about how Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit, and has been quoted saying that he would raise the pay-in cap to ensure the program’s solvency when he was campaigning for his first term. But the corporate owners of our government want our Social Security money to become a treasure trove of poker chips for their next gambling spree, and have finally gotten a Democratic president to begin chipping away at his own party’s key legislative victory of the 20th century.

Instead of following his own words of the past, or heeding the calls of the people, President Obama is meeting with Wall Street bankers to enlist their help in selling his austerity agenda to the American people. While most Americans voted for the lesser of two evils last November, we still voted for evil. And with the revealing of Obama’s latest plans, that evil side is showing its face even more these days. In his “American Dream” monologue, the late George Carlin warned us of our “owners” taking our retirement money, because “they don’t give a f*ck about you.” Turns out, he was right.

The people of the United States should rightly interpret this latest slew of betrayals in government as proof that we live under the thumb of a corporate tyranny, not a legitimate constitutional republic. And we should come together to decide what a functional new government would look like, and reject the assumed legitimacy of our corporate ownership’s puppet government.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carl Gibson, 25, of Jackson, Mississippi, is co-founder of US Uncut, a grassroots direct action movement that protests corporate tax dodgers and budget cuts. His columns are published regularly for Truthout, Bright Green Scotland, Huffington Post, The Mark News, and syndicated to 850 newspapers across America through Daryl Cagle’s Blog on MSNBC and MSN.com.

 



The New Feudalism: Big Corporations and the United States of Ever-growing Inequality

By Richard Clark
••••••••silicon-valley-100

US corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion of cash, not sure what to do with it except hide more of it offshore. They can’t expand production because, after years of rising prices, & falling wages for the bottom 80%, the necessary consumer demand is just not there. Surprise, surprise. So, as technology, off-shoring and productivity continue their unstoppable advance, how many of us will eventually join the unemployed?

::::::::

In Silicon Valley, where one fourth of the population now earn an average of about $19,000 dollars a year, median rent for a decent 1-BR apartment is about $20,000 a year, and that difference adds up to homelessness for many.   So, in the shadow of Google, in the shadow of Oracle, in the shadow of Apple Computer, you have people who are homeless and hungry.

The Valley is still generating successful people on the high end of course–engineers and scientists and the programmers who write code.   But the support positions, like in manufacturing, have largely disappeared.   Most of that work is now done in very low-wage countries where environmental laws and corporate taxes are virtually non-existent.

For every 5 jobs corporations were adding in the Valley, they were building 2 units of housing.   So that jacked up the housing prices to what has become, right beside that of NY City, the most expensive in the country.   People who had blue-collar jobs were getting paid 10, 15, 20 bucks an hour, and when their jobs went away, usually to Asia or Mexico, and they lacked the skills to participate at a higher level, so they had to take jobs that paid $8 an hour, which has been the minimum wage in San Jose for the past 15 years.   But on those wages, you can’t rent an apartment, you can’t buy food, and you can’t handle the expense of driving to work and back.   So, increasingly, you find people living three or four families to an apartment, or you find people moving into homeless shelters, or into tents along the creeks or in parks — mostly where other people, and the police, aren’t going to see them.   The problem remains largely hidden.

In spite of a booming economy and record profits by stock holders and big corporations, inequality in America is now at the greatest level in modern history and shows no signs of abating.   But how to explain this disconnect?   When the market goes up, it often means that corporations are benefiting from the new efficiency and productivity that comes with new computer applications and ever more sophisticated automation.   And this means they can fire workers in order to increase investor profits, and so they do exactly that.   Not surprisingly then, the latest figures show that the number of employed has barely risen, while ever more rank-and-file Americans have simply gone missing from the job market altogether and are no longer even being counted as unemployed.   Most significantly, the Commerce Department reports that personal income fell 3.6% in January — the biggest one-month drop in twenty years — which gives rise to one burning question:   As technology, off-shoring and production efficiency continue their unstoppable advance, just how many of us will eventually be on the road to serfdom and poverty in this new “feudalist,’ corporate-dominated society?

Which brings us to our nation’s capital — rich in alabaster symbols of representative government yet shamelessly cynical in writing laws and bending rules (especially in the tax code) that massively favor corporations and the top 1%.

Corporate profits are at record highs.   But have those companies invested any of those profits in new jobs?   No, of course not.   Why not?   Two reasons:

  • 1.     With wages shrinking and decently paid jobs increasingly scarce, most consumers have ever less spending money in their wallets and so they are buying ever less stuff.
  • Did corporations at least give their workers a bump-up in pay?   Hardly.   Well then surely the corps shelled out a little more in taxes to help refurbish the nation’s infrastructure, which they and their workers use daily.   (I refer of course to the highways, bridges, schools, libraries, and parks.)   Guess again.   The fact is that US corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion of cash, not sure what to do with it except hide more of it offshore.   They can’t expand production because, after years of rising prices, and falling wages for the bottom 80%, the necessary consumer demand is just not there.   Surprise, surprise.

    Not exactly a model citizen. Money is the only thing that counts.

    Not exactly a model citizen. Money is the only thing that counts.

    Now look at this report  just published by the Public Interest Research Group, on how average citizens and small businesses have to pay for the $90 billion that giant companies “save” by hiding profits in offshore tax havens.   Among the 83 publicly traded corporations named, is Pfizer, which for the past five years reported no taxable income in the US, even as it made 40% of its sales here!

    Also Microsoft, which avoided $4.5 billion in taxes over three years by miraculously shifting its income to Puerto Rico.   Yet another:   Citigroup, which maintains 20 “subsidiaries’ in tax havens and has over $42 billion sitting off-shore.   Taxes collected here at home on that $42 billion?   Zero — thanks to Joe Sixpack and other working-stiff taxpayers . . who got stiffed with this bill and many others like it!

    But it’s not only corporations that are stashing their swag offshore.   The Center for Public Integrity in Washington and its International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently got their hands on two and a half million files from offshore bank accounts and shell companies set up around the world by the wealthy.   Among those documents are the names of 4,000 Americans who hid their money in secret tax havens so that the rest of us could pay the taxes on it.

    Here’s how they do it:

    Set up a secret company using one of hundreds of off-shore locations.   The British Virgin Islands, for example, is home to half a million offshore companies.   There you can buy a ready-made shell company or create your own secret company from scratch in about three days, for just over $1,000.   You may be asked to produce documents to establish your identity and they might check your name in a database, to see if you’re a terrorist.   But that’s it.

    So it shouldn’t surprise us to learn  that the United States actually collects less in taxes as a share of its economy than all but two other industrialized countries!   Only Chile and Mexico collect less.   Chile and Mexico!

    So appreciate this:   Right now a powerful group of CEO’s, multi-millionaires and billionaires, are calling on Congress to “fix the debt.”   And their puppet politicians (paid stooges) in both parties are glad to oblige.   But fix the debt by raising more taxes from those who can most afford to pay?   Of course not.   Close the loopholes?   No way!   Shut down the tax havens?   Not a chance!   Cancel the Mitt Romney Clause that Congress enacted, allowing big winners to pay a tax rate far less than that of their chauffeurs, nannies, and gardeners?   Are you nuts?!   –big corps and billionaires are their primary campaign donors!   Why bite the hand that feeds you?

    Instead, our political heroes in Washington are attempting to “fix the debt” by cutting back on services for veterans and the elderly, the sick and poor, and kids in Head Start.

    Marching in lockstep beneath a banner that now stands for “Guardians of Privilege” — GOP — Republicans refuse to raise taxes on the rich, while Democrats have a president whose new budget contains gimmicks that could lead to cuts in Social Security.   Social Security!   Our one universal safety net — and a modest one at that — and still the main source of purchasing power for millions of aging Americans.   This betrayal from a Democrat, the heir of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who pulled us to our feet when the Great Depression had America on its knees.

    As Roosevelt explained at the time,     “This Social Security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.”

    But those were the days when our political system rallied to the defense of everyday Americans.   Now a petty, narcissistic, pridefully ignorant bunch of political whores and Tea Party yahoos have come to dominate and paralyze our government, while ever more millions of formerly proud Americans keep falling into the ever widening chasm that has turned us into the United States of Ever-growing Inequality.

    Warren Buffett, the savviest capitalist of them all, may have written this era’s epitaph, which I’ve here bastardized just a bit: “Yes of course there is a class war, and my class is winning.   Handily”

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    With thanks to Bill Moyers, from whose recent program this article was derived.

    Submitters Website: http://www.TechEditingServices.com

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

    Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I’ve always been more interested in political economics and what’s going on behind the scenes in politics, than in mechanical engineering, and because of that I’ve rarely worked more than 8 months a year, devoting much of the rest of the year to reading and writing about that which interests me most.