By Richard D. Wolff | May 14, 2011
Source: MR Zine

Democratic senators Ch. Schumer and Max Baucus (right, yeah, the same guy who betrayed us on single payer) explaining defeat on oil company windfall taxes. The votes are merely charades to appease public opinion.

More and more we hear that nothing can be done to tax major corporations because of the threat of how they would respond. Likewise, we cannot stop their price gouging or even the government subsidies and tax loopholes they enjoy.  For example, as the oil majors reap stunning profits from high oil and gas prices, we are told it is impossible to tax their windfall profits or stop the billions they get in government subsidies and tax loopholes. There appears to be no way for the government to secure lower energy prices or seriously impose and enforce environmental protection laws. Likewise, despite high and fast rising drug and medicine prices, we are told that it is impossible to raise taxes on pharmaceutical companies or have the government secure lower pharmaceutical prices. And so on.

Such steps by “our” government are said to be impossible or inadvisable. The reason: corporations would then relocate production abroad or reduce their activities in the US or both. And that would deprive the US of taxes and jobs. In plain English, major corporations are threatening us. We are to knuckle under and cut social programs that benefit millions of people (college loan programs, Medicaid, Medicare, social security, nutrition programs, and so on). We are not to demand higher taxes or lower subsidies or fewer tax loopholes for corporations.  We are not to demand government action to lower their soaring prices. And if we do, corporations will punish us.

Three groups deliver these business threats to us.  First, corporate spokespersons, their paid public relations flunkies, hand down the word from on high (corporate board rooms). Second, politicians afraid to offend their corporate sponsors repeat publicly what corporate spokespersons have emailed to them. Finally, various commentators explain the threats to us.  These include the journalists lost in that ideological fog that always translates what corporations want into “common sense.” Commentators also include the professors who translate what corporations want into “economic science.”

Of course, there are always two possible responses to any and all threats. One is to cave in, to be intimidated. That has often been the dominant “policy choice” of the US government.  That’s why so many corporate tax loopholes exist, why the government does so little to limit price increases, why government does not constrain corporate relocation decisions, etc. No surprise there, since corporations have spent lavishly to support the political careers of so many current leaders. They expect those politicians to do what their corporate sponsors want.  Just as important, they also expect those politicians to persuade people that it’s “best for us all” to cave in when corporations threaten us.

What about the other possible response to threats?  Government could make a different policy choice, define differently what is “best for us all.” In plain English, it could persevere in the face of business threats, and to do so, it could counter-threaten the corporations. When major corporations threaten to cut or relocate production abroad in response to changes in their taxes and subsidies or demands to cut their prices or serious enforcement of environmental protection rules, the US government could promise retaliation. Here’s a brief and partial list of how it might do that (with illustrative examples for the energy and pharmaceutical industries):

• Inform such threatening businesses that the US government will shift its purchases to other enterprises.
• Inform them that top officials will tour the US to urge citizens to follow the government’s example and shift their purchases as well.
• Inform them that the government will proceed to finance and organize state-operated companies to compete directly with threatening businesses.
• Immediately and strictly enforce all applicable rules governing health and safety conditions for workers, environmental protection laws, equal employment and advancement opportunity, etc.
• Present and promote passage of new laws governing enterprise relocation (giving local, regional, and national authorities veto power over corporate relocation decisions).
• Purchase energy and pharmaceutical outputs in bulk for mass resale to the US public, passing on all the savings from bulk purchases.
• Seize assets of enterprises that seek to evade or frustrate increased taxes or reduced subsidies.

Laws enabling such actions either already exist in the US or could be enacted. In other countries today, existing models of such laws have performed well, often for many years. These could be used and adjusted for US conditions.

Of course, it is possible to create a much better basis than threat and counter-threat for sharing the costs of government between individuals and businesses. That basis would be established by a transition to an economic system where workers in each enterprise functioned collectively and democratically as their own board of directors. Such worker-directed enterprises eliminate the basic split and conflict inside capitalist corporations between those who make the key business decisions (what, how, and where to produce, for example) and those who must live with and most immediately depend on those decisions’ results (the mass of employees).

One concrete example can illustrate the benefits of this alternative to the threat-counter-threat scenario. Corporations have used repeated threats (to cut or move production) as means to prevent tax increases and to secure tax reductions. Likewise they have made the same threats to secure desired spending from the federal government (military expenditures, federal road and port building projects, subsidies, financial supports, and so on). In effect, corporate boards of directors and major shareholders seek to shift tax burdens onto employees. Their success over the last half-century is clear. Tax receipts of the US government have increasingly come (1) from individual rather than corporate income taxes and (2) from middle and lower individual income groups rather than from the rich.  In worker-directed enterprises, the incentive for such shifts would vanish because the people who would be paying enterprise taxes are the same people who would be paying individual income taxes. Taxation would finally become genuinely democratic.  The people would collectively decide how to distribute taxes on what would genuinely be their own businesses and their own individual incomes.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and also a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New York.   He is the author of New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge, 2006) among many other publications.  Check out Richard D. Wolff’s documentary film on the current economic crisis, Capitalism Hits the Fan, atwww.capitalismhitsthefan.com.  Visit Wolff’s Web site atwww.rdwolff.com, and order a copy of his new book Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It.

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InterPress Service May 14, 2011

Thalif Deen 

The contempt for the masses is reflected in elite policies safeguarded by pomp, circumstance and lies, plenty of lies.

UNITED NATIONS, May 13 (IPS) – The growing demands for democratic reforms spreading across the Middle East and North Africa – along with the dramatic rise of social media networks – have triggered “a human rights revolution on the threshold of a historic change”, says Amnesty International (AI).

“People are rejecting fear,” as spontaneous political uprisings have ousted repressive regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and authoritarian governments in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria have been jolted by mass protests and street battles.
“Not since the end of the Cold War have so many repressive governments faced such a challenge to their stranglehold on power,” says AI Secretary-General Salil Shetty.

In its annual global human rights report released Friday, the London-based organisation says courageous people, led largely by youth, are standing up and speaking out in the face of bullets, beatings, tear gas and battle tanks.

This bravery, combined with new technology that is helping activists to outflank and expose government suppression of free speech and peaceful protest, “is sending a signal to repressive governments that their days are numbered”.

“Now there are whispers of discontent being heard from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe,” says the report, released on the eve of AI’s 50th anniversary, which falls on May 28.

At the same time, repressive governments in Azerbaijan, China and Iran “are trying to pre-empt any similar revolutions in their countries”.

The 400-page report provides the state of human rights, and specifically widespread abuses, in some 157 countries, including Afghanistan, Angola, Brazil, China, Mexico, Russia, Myanmar, Turkey, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam and Zimbabwe.

The report singles out the specific restrictions on free speech in at least 89 countries, highlights cases of prisoners of conscience in some 48 countries, documents torture and other ill-treatment in 98 countries, and reports on unfair trials in 54 countries.

AI also points out the deteriorating country situations worldwide, including a grim picture for activists in Ukraine, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan; spiraling violence in Nigeria; and an escalating crisis posed by Maoist armed insurgencies in central and northeast India.

Conflicts have also “wreaked havoc” in the Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Russia’s North Caucasus, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Somalia, “with civilians often targeted by armed groups and government forces”.

On the positive side, the report points out the signs of progress, including the steady retreat of the death penalty; some improvements in maternal healthcare, including in Indonesia and Sierra Leone; and the bringing to justice of some of those responsible for human rights crimes under past military regimes in Latin America.

Information wars

But the primary theme of the report is the continuing protests in the Middle East and North Africa where there is “a critical battle” underway for control of access to information, means of communication and networking technology such as social media networks that has fuelled a new activism that governments are struggling to control.

But “as seen in Tunisia and Egypt, government attempts to block internet access or cut mobile phone networks can backfire – but governments are scrambling to regain the initiative or to us this technology against activists,” according to AI.

Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS the unprecedented opportunity for human rights change in the Middle East comes from the courage and creativity of a newly- energised, newly mobilised civil society across the Arab world and beyond.

Social media continues to play a part, but it is that of an instrument, not a strategy, she said.

“Just as the then-cutting edge fax machine played an unprecedented role in the Tiananmen Square protests (in China), cassette tapes in Iran’s anti-Shah movement, and secretly printed and distributed nidat (leaflets) served to mobilise the activists of Palestine’s first intifada, creative young activists took advantage of all the potential of cell phones, Facebook, Twitter accounts and more to build the Arab Spring,” said Bennis.

But those are tools, and when repressive governments, including in Egypt and Tunisia, clamped down, shutting off the internet, closing cell phone service and turning off Facebook, democracy campaigners shifted seamlessly to the old face-to-face methods of organising.

“Word was spread through the mosques, in quiet words passed to neighbours and co-workers, written notes appeared. The mobilisations continued,” said Bennis, who has written extensively on Middle East politics and is author of several books, including “Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict”.

AI’s Shetty says that powerful governments, which have underestimated the burning desire of people everywhere for freedom and justice, must now back reform rather than sliding back into cynical political support for repression.

“The true tests of these governments’ integrity will be to support the rebuilding of states that promote human rights but that may not be allies, and their willingness as with Libya to refer the worst perpetrators to the International Criminal Court (ICC) when all other justice avenues fail,” Shetty said.

He warned that corporations providing internet access, cellular communications and social networking sites and that support digital media and communications need to respect human rights.

“They must not become the pawns or accomplices of repressive governments who want to stifle expression and spy on their people,” he said.

Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies told IPS the challenge to human rights in the Middle East today comes not from dictatorial regimes shutting down access to social media but it comes from their refusal to recognise that the Arab Spring, especially but not solely its victories in bringing down dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, has created an entirely new dynamic in the region.

“The U.S., which for more than half a century scaffolded those dictatorships with money and arms in search of an ultimately elusive stability, is facing an unprecedented challenge to retool U.S. foreign policy in light of these changes,” she pointed out.

So far, she said, the U.S. record is, charitably, mixed.

In Egypt, the Barack Obama administration came late to the realisation that the U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarak regime was indeed destined for the dustbin of history, and they scrambled to retool a position that would at least appear to side with the Egyptian people’s overwhelming demand for freedom, democracy and an end to dictatorship.

They have not, however, reversed longstanding reliance on the Egyptian military.

The military’s continued receipt of the vast majority of the 1.3 billion dollars in U.S. aid to Egypt is helping to create a serious divide between the new government and the still-empowered military, Bennis declared.

(END/2011)

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We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.

By Noam Chomsky

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.

It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.

Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”

There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.

Copyright 2011 Noam Chomsky

The conversation continues here.
________________________________________________________________________

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are a new edition of Power and Terror , The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, Gaza in Crisis , with Ilan Pappé, and Hopes and Prospects , also available as an audiobook.

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It’s built in its DNA—
Nothing except a very strong hand or complete dismantlement can stop the predatory abuses of the capitalist system.

By Barry Grey |13 May 2011

Besides being a compensation vulture, CBS top honcho Les Moonves is one of those "men-behind-the-curtain" that help pollute the American media.

Two surveys released this week show that CEO compensation at major US corporations for 2010 topped the levels reached in 2007, prior to the financial meltdown and global recession.

The Wall Street Journal on Monday published its review of 350 companies listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index, concluding that the median value of salaries, bonuses and long-term incentive awards for their CEOs rose 11 percent over 2009 to $9.3 million.

In 2010, the average annual pay of US workers was $40,500. Thus, according to theJournal’s survey, the typical CEO at a major US corporation took in the equivalent of the combined salaries of 230 American workers.

A separate analysis by the Associated Press, based on a survey of 334 firms in the S&P 500 index, concluded that CEO pay rose 24 percent in 2010 over the previous year, with the typical pay package coming in at $9 million. AP reported that the 10 highest-paid CEOs made $440 million in 2010, a third more than the top 10 made in 2009. These 10 individuals took in the equivalent of the earnings of more than 11,000 US workers.

Pay for workers grew by only three percent in 2010, barely keeping pace with inflation. The average wage was less than one-half of one percent of the amount awarded to the typical CEO.

According to AP, median compensation in 2007 was $8.4 million. In 2008, following the Wall Street crash, it fell to $7.6 million. In 2009, when the stock market hit its post-crash low point, CEO pay dropped again to $7.2 million. The $9 million median figure for 2010 is the highest since AP began tracking CEO pay in 2006.

AP reported that the biggest gains came in cash bonuses, with the typical CEO bonus reaching $2 million, up 39 percent from 2009. Two-thirds of executives got a bigger bonus than they received the previous year, some more than three times as big.

The Wall Street Journal, using a somewhat different sampling of companies, also concluded that cash bonuses rose faster than any other component of pay. It set the increase over 2009 at 19.7 percent.

According to the Journal, median CEO pay in oil and gas was $13.7 million; in telecom, $12.5 million; in financials, $10.9 million; in consumer goods, $10.7 million, in health care, $10.6 million; in technology, $9.7 million.

Oracle's Larry Ellison: sitting pretty atop a mountain of cash.

The newspaper listed the five highest-paid CEOs as Phillippe Dauman of Viacom ($84.3 million, an increase of 150 percent), Lawrence Ellison of Oracle ($68.6 million, a 17 percent decline), Leslie Moonves of CBS ($53.9 million, a rise of 38 percent), Martin Franklin of Jarden ($45.2 million, up 143 percent) and Michael White of Directv ($32.6 million in his first year as CEO).

Among those in the top 20 were Alan Mulally of Ford ($25.8 million) and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase ($23 million).

The Journal’s computation for 2010 compensation did not include payouts on long-term incentives, the vesting of restricted stock or the exercising of stock options. The result is a significant underestimation of the amounts actually taken in by CEOs. Mulally, for example, received a stock bonus of $56.6 million, bringing his total take for the year to more than $83 million.

Ray Irani of Occidental Petroleum received $70 million in 2010 from such incentives; Thomas Ryan of CVS Caremark received $50 million.

Last month the AFL-CIO published its annual Executive Pay Watch, showing an even more massive windfall for CEOs. It reported that the CEOs at 299 US companies took in $3.4 billion combined in executive compensation in 2010, with the average CEO pay coming in at $11.4 million.

This represented a 23 percent increase from the prior year. The sum of the salaries of those 299 CEOs equaled, the report concluded, the combined average earnings of more than 100,000 workers in their respective companies.

These staggering sums coincide with soaring corporate profits and stock prices on the one hand, and near-Depression levels of unemployment, record long-term joblessness, rampant wage-cutting, millions of home foreclosures and growing poverty, on the other. S&P 500 companies saw their profits rise 47 percent last year, and major stock indexes have nearly doubled from their 2009 lows.

The average wage was less than one-half of one percent of the amount awarded to the typical CEO.

This bonanza for the corporate elite is almost entirely derived not from expanded production and hiring, but rather from ruthless cost-cutting. Revenues at S&P 500 firms rose by only 7 percent last year.

The Obama administration, acting in behalf of the financial aristocracy, has utilized the economic crisis to fundamentally and permanently alter class relations in America. Its central preoccupation has been to protect the wealth of the parasitic financial elite and ensure its ability to continue plundering the country’s resources.

No one has been held accountable for the wild speculation and outright criminal practices that precipitated the crisis. No measures have been taken to reclaim the ill-gotten wealth or rein in the banks and corporations. To the contrary, everything has been done to shield the perpetrators and make them richer than ever.

It is essentially in pursuit of this aim, concealed behind homilies on the need to reduce the deficit, that jobs, wages, unemployment benefits, schools, health care, pensions and social programs upon which tens of millions of people depend are being gutted.

The deliberate policy of keeping unemployment high, in order to weaken the resistance of workers to pay cuts and speedup, is reflected in the record cash hoard of nearly $2 trillion held by US corporations, the result of their refusal to use their bumper profits to significantly increase hiring.

The surge in CEO pay underscores the fact that the American capitalist class and its political representatives, beginning with the Obama administration, are pursuing a policy of class war.

This article appeared originally at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/may2011/ceos-m13.shtml

Thank you, wsws.org

By David Rosen and Bruce Kushnick, AlterNet
Posted on May 11, 2011

To join the fight to break up the telecom giants, check out the Web site Break Up the Communications Trusts! and ‘like’ them onFacebook.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the oil pipes defined America. As the 21st century emerges, the information pipes define America and the world.

A century ago, a courageous muckraker, Ida Tarbell, wrote a series of articles that lead to the breakup of Standard Oil, which had become a trust controlling the energy and associated industries to fix prices, restrict competition and harm the nation.

This is the first in a series of articles to be published on AlterNet channeling the approach pioneered by Tarbell and her compatriots. This spirit needs to infuse 21st century journalism with a sense of critical engagement. It targets the telecommunications trust and has three explicit goals:

• Divest the big telecom companies of their wireless subsidiaries to engender meaningful competition.
• Divest cable operators of their content companies and open the networks to real competition, thus furthering democracy.

* * *

The Rise of the Standard Oil Company and The Shame of the Cities. These works culminated in, respectively, the breakup of Standard Oil and good-government reform throughout the country. An insurgent presidential candidate, Teddy Roosevelt — who actually named them “muckrakers” — championed their critiques and helped change American politics and business.

Trusts now dominate the major sectors of the American economy, be it finance and banking, pharmaceuticals and health care, extraction and energy, agriculture and food or communications and the media.

The telecom trust is systematic ripping off the American consumer. Three examples are illustrative:

• * * *

  Making matters worse, 18 states outlaw municipal competition. The trust has had state legislatures adopt regulations prohibiting localities from upgrading their networks even though these corporations failed to do so after being paid billions.

  © 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
  You can also view this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/150752/

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