When It Comes to Business Profits, It’s the Plutonomy versus the Realonomy — and the Plutonomy is Winning

By Salvatore Babones

A new report from the International Labour Organization shows that across G20 countries corporate profits are up, up, up. Since the year 2000 corporate profits as a proportion of total national incomes have risen by 2.2% in major high-income countries and by 3.4% in major middle income countries.

Along with corporate profits, executive pay has hit record levels as well.

All around the world the plutonomy — the economy of big corporations and their CEOs — is doing quite well, thank you. But the realonomy — the real economy in which ordinary people live and work — remains stagnant.

And what are all those big corporations and wealthy individuals doing with their ever-increasing wealth? They are sitting on it, mostly by hiding it in offshore tax havens.

“The cash holdings of publicly-listed enterprises in advanced, emerging and developing economies combined, increased from 2.3 trillion USD in 2000 to 5.2 trillion in 2008 and continued to rise further during the crisis, reaching 6.5 trillion USD in 2011,” according to the ILO.

It’s not just ordinary people who are losing. Small businesses are losing, too. The ILO reports that large firms are roughly three times as profitable as small firms. No wonder the large firms are taking over.

Big profits, tax avoidance, cash hoarding, and the decimation of small businesses are not separate trends. They are all part of one big trend. Our small firms are disappearing because big firms don’t play fair.

They don’t have to.

Small companies operating in single countries have to pay taxes on the profits they make. They have no choice. There is nowhere to hide.

Big companies can and do choose what countries they want to claim their taxes in. Obviously, most big companies choose to park their profits in countries where they pay no tax.

[pullquote] If world’s big corporations prefer to sit on trillions of dollars in order to avoid paying taxes, let them. If they won’t invest, we should. [/pullquote]

A small company that pays taxes will never be able to out-compete a big company that doesn’t. So the small companies are disappearing.

The big companies that replace them make more money, but have to keep it holed up in international tax havens to avoid paying taxes on it. Thus the cash hoarding.

A bizarre and tragic side-effect of all this is that rates of business investment have collapsed. All that money just sits offshore in tax haven bank accounts instead of being used to boost productivity through meaningful investment.

In the long term, the solution is to close the tax havens and make sure that big businesses pay their fair share of taxes. We can get there, but it will be a long slog. You can be sure that the world’s largest multinational corporations will fight tooth and nail to maintain their domination over the global economy.

[pullquote]

“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

–Adam Smith

Scottish political economist (1723-1790)

[/pullquote]

In the short term, however, governments can solve the investment shortage by … investing. The world needs investment, and the world needs jobs. Instead of sitting around waiting for a multimillionaire CEO to invest his company’s multibillions, we can just invest for ourselves.

In the middle of a six year (and counting) recession it is ridiculous that governments in North America and western Europe are cutting back on public investment. Greater austerity is not the answer to underinvestment. Investment is the answer to underinvestment.

We should be building roads, harbors, and bridges; parks, playgrounds, and schools. We should be hiring teachers, expanding trade schools, and sending kids to college in order to build our human capital. We should be taxing and spending like there’s no tomorrow.

We should be expanding the realonomy to match the expansion of the plutonomy.

In the advanced economies of the world, the number of unemployed people rose from 29 million to 44 million between 2007 and 2012, according to the ILO. It does nobody any good for these people to be sitting at home wasting away.

If world’s big corporations prefer to sit on trillions of dollars in order to avoid paying taxes, let them. If they won’t invest, we should. The US Treasury can borrow that money back at a measly 0.14% annual rate. The European Central Bank is handing out candy to banks at just 0.50%.

It is lunacy to wait for multinational corporations to borrow this money and invest it to create jobs. The world’s largest corporations are already sitting on $6.5 trillion in cash. Obviously they don’t need to borrow any more.

The world’s governments can and should borrow their way out of recession, put people back to work, and pay off the resulting debt through progressive taxation on those who make the most money out of the whole deal.

If instead we wait for the big companies of the world to come to the rescue and resurrect our realonomies, we could be waiting for a very long time.

Dr Salvatore Babones, an economist, discusses political, cultural and economic questions on his blog inequality.org.

The state killing of Ibragim Todashev

Todashev;s father charges that his son was killed cold-bloodedly "execution style".

Abdul-Baki Todashev insists that his son, Ibragim Todashev, was killed “execution-style.” (The Week/ REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov)

Tom Carter, wsws.org

On May 22, Ibragim Todashev, a key witness in events related to the Boston Marathon bombings, was killed by an FBI agent in his residence in Florida. Todashev, an alleged acquaintance of bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was unarmed and in custody when he was shot as many as seven times, including once in the head.

This extraordinary event, which has been largely buried in the US media, stinks of a cover-up, deceit and criminality. Four or five completely different accounts of the killing have been presented by the government in the space of little more than a week. None of these accounts can be believed.

The killing of Todashev occurred just over a month after two bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing 3 people and injuring 264. Within a short period of time, the public was told that the perpetrators had been identified. Soon after, Tamerlan, 26, was shot and killed by the police. His brother Dzhokhar, 19, was severely wounded while hiding unarmed in a boat.

[pullquote] The media’s limp response to this story amounts to a de facto coverup. [/pullquote]

In the days following the bombings, the city of Boston was placed under effective martial law. In a massive and unprecedented police-military operation, the population was ordered to “shelter in place,” armored vehicles were deployed in the streets and heavily armed SWAT teams conducted house-to-house searches without regard for basic rights.

In the aftermath of the Boston events, it emerged that the elder Tsarnaev—like almost every individual who has perpetrated or attempted to perpetrate a similar act—was long known to intelligence agencies and was possibly connected with them. Detailed warnings had been provided by Russia, and these warnings had been ignored. It also emerged that a close associate of Tamerlan, along with two others, had been murdered on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, a year and a half before the bombings.

It was under these conditions that a person who knew the Tsarnaev brothers and had potentially vital information was located in Florida. Yet before this key witness could be publicly questioned, and before he was charged with any crime, he was shot and killed by an FBI agent under extremely dubious circumstances.

On the day of Todashev’s death, without a lawyer present, and presumably without regard for his Miranda rights, at least four federal and local agents spent eight hours with him in his home, supposedly seeking to extract a signed confession to the murders committed before the Boston Marathon.

Before this interrogation, Todashev told his roommate, who was also questioned, that he feared for his life.

Todashev’s father, at a recent press conference in Moscow, claimed that morgue photos prove that at least some of the shots must have occurred while his son was on the ground, with the shooter standing over him. Speaking in Russian, the father described the shot to the head as a “control shot,” i.e., a mafia-style point-blank shot designed to ensure that the victim is dead.

In the aftermath of the incident, a series of mutually and internally contradictory official stories regarding Todashev’s final moments was released and dutifully repeated by the American media.

First, the line was, as the Associated Press reported it, that “law enforcement officials say [Todashev] was shot…after he lunged at an FBI agent with a knife.” The FBI agent was reported to have sustained “non-life-threatening injuries.” However, it was later acknowledged that there was no knife.

No account has been given as to why officials reported the existence of a knife when there was none. Instead, a series of new accounts was provided, each more incredible than the last. One version, reported by an Orlando television station, had Todashev lunging for the agent’s gun. In another, reported by ABC News, Todashev lunged for a “samurai sword” that was somehow left within his reach.

In a Fox News affiliate’s account, Todashev actually retrieved the samurai sword (not a real sword but a wall ornament) and lunged at the agent with it.

According to the latest account, published in the New York Times, Todashev attacked the FBI agent with a “metal pole” that “might have been [?] a broomstick.”

The “reaching for a weapon” story is a favored and familiar trope in police department “investigations” seeking to justify shootings of unarmed people.

There are other unexplained and contradictory statements. The Washington Post on May 29 reported that for some unexplained reason, right before the murder, all of the other interrogators withdrew and left the FBI agent alone in the room with Todashev.

The New York Times account the next day places another unnamed agent in the room. This agent, according to a high-level official cited uncritically by theTimes, never fired his weapon, supposedly because he was worried about injuring his fellow agent in crossfire. This apparently was not of concern to the person who killed Todashev.

Neither the FBI agent who shot Todashev nor anyone else involved has been named publicly or detained for questioning.

There is a far more likely explanation for Todashev’s killing than the ad hoc and preposterous stories in the media: Todashev possessed information about alleged Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev—perhaps, we strongly suspect, about his relations with US intelligence agencies—that would undermine the official story. At some point in the lengthy interrogation, the agents in Orlando received orders, probably from someone in Washington, to terminate Todashev “with extreme prejudice.”

The killing of Todashev casts even more doubt on the entire official line regarding the Boston events.

Last week, the Russian Federal Security Service claimed that it had provided the American authorities with enough detailed information to prevent the Boston bombings. This fact was acknowledged by US Representative William R. Keating after a trip to Moscow.

Keating, in his statements in Moscow, further acknowledged that the Russian intelligence agencies had asked to be tipped off if the elder Tsarnaev visited Russia. The American agencies have not explained why they did not do so, or why they allowed Tsarnaev to travel in and out of the US to Chechnya without questioning.

As in the case of the September 11, 2001 attacks nearly 12 years ago, the conduct of the American intelligence agencies cannot be explained as a failure to “connect the dots.” That such agencies—funded to the hilt pursuant to the “war on terror”—were entirely oblivious to what was going on under their noses strains credulity. Further, if someone had simply “dropped the ball” within the American intelligence agencies, then resignations, firings or even prosecutions would be expected. Instead, nobody has been named and nobody has stepped down.

Facts are stubborn things. What we know for certain is that a key witness in relation to the Boston bombings has been terminated by the state. This witness, who expressed concerns for his life, was likely in possession of information that someone wanted kept secret.

The killing of Todashev has not provoked any protest from within the political establishment. The media has played its usual filthy and subservient role in the cover-up. With the exception of a single editorial in the Washington Postthat expressed concern that Todashev’s death would “fuel wild conspiracy theories,” there have been no calls in the press nor in any federal, state or local institution for an explanation or investigation as to what happened.

After the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a US citizen and Muslim cleric in Yemen in September 2011, questions were raised about the possibility of assassinations taking place within the US. It appears that this has now happened. Yet another line has been crossed in the march towards a police state.

Tom Carter writes for the wsws.org, a socialist information resource.

Why Obama Will Walk Away Unscathed by the Current Political Scandals

by Pascal Robert, Black Agenda Report

Don’t worry about Barack Obama. He’s far too useful to the rulers of America to be derailed by scandal, or even a combination of scandals. “Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have his presidency threatened.”

This article previously appeared in YourBlackWorld [8].

“He is too effective at assuring the wealth gap metastasizes in growth while poverty is at its highest level since the early Sixties.”

I have a prediction about how the current scandals facing the Obama administration, from Benghazi, to the Associated Press intrusion, [9]to the IRS harassment of right wing groups, will resolve themselves: President Obama will walk away from all of these scandals completely unscathed. The worst that might possibly happen is that Eric Holder will be forced to resign.

In reality, even with all the friction Holder’s presence causes with Republicans, his exit should be no great loss to anyone on the left not plagued with the vapid diversity con game based on the politics of redemption, [10] which requires “brown and female faces in high places filling mercenary government spaces,” so the babies have people to look up to as role models. And this is what we think Dr. King died for?

In the face of Holder’s fecklessness on major issues – from investigating and prosecuting Banks [11] to his enabling of the FBI to infiltrate Occupy Wall Street [12], to his relentless willingness as a tool in the assault on Whistle blowers– [13] his presence won’t be missed.

You may ask, what would prompt me to be so sure that Obama will weather these controversies with minor damage, if any at all? Simple answer: Obama is the most valuable and important tool the guardians of American Empire have to implement the bone crushing agenda that must continue to be leveled against Americans at home and the world abroad for the benefit of the elite.

“Obama is the most valuable and important tool the guardians of American Empire have.”

From increased militarization of the continent through putting U.S. troops in over 35 African countries [14], to creating a new military doctrine that allows America to attack a country and completely overthrow its regime without any perceived threats to U.S. interests out of the pure charade of humanitarian civilian concern as in Libya [15], to international war crimes throughdrone attacks [16] on women and children in countries not in any military theater of engagement with the United States, to sending dog whistles allowing Israel to not only belligerently attack Syria [17] without provocation, risking a World War III scenario [18] via Russia, China, and Iran, but also having his administration publicly give Israel license to attack Iran [19], the Obama administration’s ability to carry out the most deadening foreign policy agenda since the beginning of Bush’s War on Terror marks a profound milestone in American history.

Being able to do all this while having a Nobel Peace Prize, while simultaneously having black and brown folk fawning to have you speak at Black college graduations like Morehouse [20]College makes Obama’s utility as America’s “more effective evil” [21] presidential choice unquestionable.

And that is only the international front. Let’s not mention Obama’s endless neo-liberal assault on public education through his horrid “race to the top” initiative that has caused a national epidemic of public school closings and teacher firings [22] that some are even deeming as racist [23].

Compound that with his other neo-liberal private sector takeover via the beyond problematic Obamacare plan that already may deny millions of poor people coverage [24] while increasing Health Insurance costs over 30%. [25] Obama’s neoliberal government giveaways to private corporations and mercenary foreign policy already make him too valuable to the guardians of American empire to have his presidency threatened by these abuses of power that have been exposed.

“Obama’s endless neo-liberal assault on public education caused a national epidemic of public school closings and teacher firings.”

Furthermore, we cannot forget Obama’s most important role as Wall Street’s personal protector [26], ensuring the banks maintain record profits in the age of austerity [27] after the sequester he demanded [28] chokes the life out of government function and he threatens to cut Social Security and Medicare [29] so that now he can wryly tout a worthless decrease in the budget deficit [30], while America is still mired in recession despite the illusion of recovery [31].

These are the reasons Obama shall be unscathed by these scandals. He is too effective at assuring the wealth gap metastasizes [32] in growth while poverty is at its highest amount since the early sixties [33]. Meanwhile, the Black community, who so blindly fawn over [34] his soul deadening policies, continue to cheer even as he puts Black Liberation heroine Assata Shakur on the FBI’s most wanted list. This is the “hope and change” we got in America’s first Black president.

I’ve used this quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in several articles when talking about Obama and the Black community. I find it relevant even now:

“The majority of Negro political leaders do not ascend to prominence on the shoulders of mass support. Although genuinely popular leaders are now emerging, most are still selected by white leadership, elevated to position, supplied with resources and inevitably subjected to white control. The mass of Negroes nurtures a healthy suspicion toward this manufactured leader, who spends little time in persuading them that he embodies personal integrity, commitment and ability and offers few programs and less service. Tragically, he is in too many respects not a fighter for a new life but a figurehead of the old one.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pascal Robert is an Iconoclastic Haitian American Lawyer, Blogger, and Online Activist for Haiti. For years his work appeared under the Blog Thought Merchant:http://thoughtmerchant.wordpress.com/ [35] He can be reached via twitter at: https://twitter.com/probert06 [36] @probert06 or thoughtmerchant@gmail.com. [37]

Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/why-obama-will-walk-away-unscathed-current-political-scandals

Links:
[1] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/education-public-education/race-top
[2] http://www.blackagendareport.com/taxonomy/term/1439
[3] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/department-war/obama-nobel-prize
[4] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/irs-scandal
[5] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/benghazi-scandal
[6] http://www.blackagendareport.com/category/us-politics/ap-scandal
[7] http://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/www.blackagendareport.com/files/ObamaBlackHat.jpg
[8] http://www.yourblackworld.net/
[9] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/05/obama-looks-to-do-damage-control-on-irs-benghazi-doj-seizures.html
[10] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/peculiar-black-“politics-redemption”
[11] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/01/eric-holder-too-big-to-jail_n_2993401.html
[12] http://dailybail.com/home/rolling-stone-inside-the-fbi-plot-against-occupy.html
[13] http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/obama-war-press-whistleblowers-drones-223724346.html
[14] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/26/headlines/us_army_teams_heading_to_35_african_countries
[15] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/15/irs-ap-benghanzi-not-real-scandals
[16] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/12/pakistan-us-drone-strikes
[17] http://rt.com/op-edge/israel-syria-bombing-crook-894/
[18] http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/05/07/302328/obama-runs-risk-of-wwiii/
[19] http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2013/04/22/Hagel-Israel-has-unilateral-right-to-strike-Iran/UPI-81571366614000/
[20] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/02/morehouse-faces-controversy-over-obama-critics-role-in-graduation-ceremonies/
[21] http://youtu.be/el7YVZXnwdk
[22] https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/16-4
[23] http://socialistworker.org/2013/03/26/behind-the-racist-school-closings-agenda
[24] http://www.salon.com/2013/01/31/obamacare_glitch_may_exclude_poor_from_coverage/
[25] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/26/obamacare-medical-claims-costs_n_2956986.html
[26] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/barack-obama-wall-street’s-perfect-manchurian-candidate
[27] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/austerity-wall-street_n_1690838.html
[28] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/obama-sequestration_b_2758602.html
[29] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pascal-robert/why-nobody-should-be-surp_b_3041532.html
[30] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/the-dwindling-deficit/
[31] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-us-economy-in-crisis-recovery-is-an-illusion/5321394
[32] http://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM
[33] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2302997/U-S-sees-highest-poverty-spike-1960s-leaving-50-million-Americans-poor-government-cuts-billions-spending.html
[34] http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/how-can-blacks-love-obama-so-much-when-theyre-doing-so-bad
[35] http://thoughtmerchant.wordpress.com/
[36] https://twitter.com/probert06
[37] mailto:thoughtmerchant@gmail.com
[38] http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.blackagendareport.com%2Fcontent%2Fwhy-obama-will-walk-away-unscathed-current-political-scandals&linkname=Why%20Obama%20Will%20Walk%20Away%20Unscathed%20by%20the%20Current%20Political%20Scandals

Red State Hypocrites: Inhofe and Coburn

Salon [1] / By Joan Walsh [2]

Oklahoma's James Inhofe: climate change denier and a poster boy for political corruption,and rightwing meanness, this man should be in jail, not presiding over the destiny of a great nation.

Oklahoma’s James Inhofe: climate change denier and poster boy for political corruption and rightwing meanness, this abject bastard should be in jail, not presiding over the destiny of a great nation.

Just a week ago, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe suggested that President Obama might be impeached over the Benghazi non-scandal. Now, Inhofe must watch as Obama declares Inhofe’s state a disaster area and promises Oklahomans “all the resources they need at their disposal.”

Inhofe, of course, believes his state deserves those resources, even though he voted down aid to Hurricane Sandy victims. On MSNBC, Chris Jansing confronted Inhofe about his calling the Sandy aid bill a “slush fund,” and the brazen right-winger insisted the two issues shouldn’t be linked.

“Let’s look at that, that was totally different,” Inhofe told Jansing. “They were getting things — for instance that was supposed to be in New Jersey, they had things in the Virgin Islands, they were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C.; everyone was getting in and exploiting the tragedy taking place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.”

Inhofe’s answer is too dishonest to fully parse. First of all, there was Sandy damage way beyond New Jersey, including in the Caribbean and in Washington, D.C., too. And Inhofe had different objections to the Sandy bill at the time. In a rambling, hard-to-follow Senate floor speech blocking Sandy aid last December, the Oklahoma conservative objected to the bill’s timing — “There’s always a lot of theater right before Christmas time … We shouldn’t be talking about it right before Christmas” — even though it was already going on two months since the storm ravaged the East Coast.

Inhofe was also exercised by the fact that the Sandy bill included what he said was $28 billion for future disasters. But the climate-change denier was particularly outraged that the bill included $3.5 billion to deal with what he called “global warming,” which led to a long rant against cap-and-trade legislation, and then his floor speech unraveled. (Interestingly, Inhofe’s own press operation put the incoherent speech up on YouTube [3], as though it was a proud moment for the senator.)

Oklahoma’s other GOP senator, Tom Coburn, brags that he’s going to seek tornado relief — but insist that the funding is “offset” by other cuts to the federal budget. Coburn is proud that he’s being consistent by placing the same conditions on disaster aid to his own state as he’s demanded elsewhere. Consistent, maybe — but also fundamentally cruel.

Especially in the wake of the sequester cuts, the notion that the federal budget is larded with easily eliminated spending is ludicrous. Would Coburn like to see more kids thrown out of Head Start? More seniors losing Meals on Wheels? The federal deficit is shrinking faster than at any time since just after World War II, but Coburn is going to insist that someone, somewhere, must lose their federal help so Oklahoma can get it instead.

There’s something so typical about today’s GOP in the way Inhofe can dismiss comparisons between tornado aid and Sandy aid while Coburn grandstands for his long-term demand that new spending, even on disaster relief, must be “offset” by cuts elsewhere. Meanwhile, the notion that a new disaster relief bill should include funding to cope with future disasters isn’t lauded as common sense, it’s derided as pork. Like Inhofe, Coburn objected to the Sandy bill’s including funding for future disaster relief. (It should be noted that Moore, Okla., Rep. Tom Cole, also a Republican, voted for the Sandy aid bill.)

Just as modern conservatism helped create categories of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, we now apparently have deserving and undeserving disasters. When tragedy strikes, most Americans tend to want to pull together, but many Republicans look to pull us apart, placing their own constituents’ needs above everyone else’s.

________________________

AlterNet [1] / By Alex Kane [2]

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn Demands Tornado Relief Be Offset by Cuts Elsewhere

May 21, 2013 |

Sen. Coburn: A disgrace as a doctor and a politician, but to be expected from states with extremely benighted constituencies.

Sen. Tom Coburn: A disgrace as a doctor and a politician. His type is to be expected from states with extremely gullible constituencies.

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has consistently balked at emergency funding in the aftermath of disasters–and a powerful tornado that ripped through his home state isn’t changing that. Coburn is making headlines by insisting that any aid to his state be offset by federal spending cuts elsewhere.

CQ Roll Call’s Jennifer Scholtes reports [3] that Coburn said he would “absolutely” demand the offsets. Coburn has also voted for cutting the amount of aid allocated to victims of Hurricane Sandy. A Coburn spokesman told the Huffington Post [4] that the Senator “makes no apologies for voting against disaster aid bills that are often poorly conceived and used to finance priorities that have little to do with disasters.”

Coburn’s callous position was announced as the death toll and devastation in Oklahoma was coming into full view. Yesterday, a tornado tore through parts of Oklahoma City and its suburbs and flattened a hospital and two schools. The death toll currently stands at 24, with at least 240 people injured. An estimated 60 of the injured were children.

One school “was reduced to a pile of twisted metal and toppled walls,” the New York Times reports. [5]Yahoo News! spoke to Stuart Earnest Jr. [6], who witnessed the destruction of the Plaza Towers Elementary school. “All you could hear were screams,” he said. “The people screaming for help. And the people trying to help were also screaming.”

“Numerous neighborhoods were completely leveled,” Sgt. Gary Knight of the Oklahoma City Police Department told the Times. “Neighborhoods just wiped clean.” Emergency crews continued to search for survivors.

President Obama has declared some Oklahoma counties to be disaster areas, which allows federal funding to be start to flow to the state.

CNN reports [7] that more storms part of the same weather patterns could hit more states, putting 53 million at risk. “Tornadoes could strike the Plains, but likely not in devastated Moore, Oklahoma, where the threat of severe weather has diminished. In the bull’s-eye Tuesday are parts of north-central Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and northern Arkansas and Louisiana, according to the National Weather Service,” the news outlet reported.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/red-state-hypocrites-inhofe-and-coburn

Links:
[1] http://www.salon.com
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/joan-walsh-0
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/21/inhofe-tornado-totally-different-from-hurricane-sandy/
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/inhofe
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/coburn-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oklahoma
[7] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Rise Up or Die

By Chris Hedges

Illustration by Mr Fish.

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

What has taken place in these sacrifice zones—in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery—is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

The Department of Justice seizure of two months of records of phone calls to and from editors and reporters at The Associated Press is the latest in a series of dramatic assaults against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is part of an effort to hunt down the government official or officials who leaked information to the AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet. Information concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn., as well as the home and mobile phones of editors and reporters, was secretly confiscated. This, along with measures such as the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, will put a deep freeze on all independent investigations into abuses of government and corporate power.

Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state’s broader efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the state’s Newspeak, and hide from public view the inner workings, lies and crimes of empire. The person or persons who provided the classified information to the AP will, if arrested, mostly likely be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in 1917 to silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office in 2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the first time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama administration against government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.

The government’s fierce persecution of the press—an attack pressed by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy Hammond—dovetails with the government’s use of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S. citizens; of the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution was once illegal—the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of U.S. citizens; and of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures, taken together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.

In the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., in the United States’ second poorest county, the average life expectancy for a male is 48. This is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. About 60 percent of the Pine Ridge dwellings, many of which are sod huts, lack electricity, running water, adequate insulation or sewage systems. In the old coal camps of southern West Virginia, amid poisoned air, soil and water, cancer is an epidemic. There are few jobs. And the Appalachian Mountains, which provide the headwaters for much of the Eastern Seaboard, are dotted with enormous impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals and toxic sludge. In order to breathe, children go to school in southern West Virginia clutching inhalers. Residents trapped in the internal colonies of our blighted cities endure levels of poverty and violence, as well as mass incarceration, that leave them psychologically and emotionally shattered. And the nation’s agricultural workers, denied legal protection, are often forced to labor in conditions of unpaid bondage. This is the terrible algebra of corporate domination. This is where we are all headed. And in this accelerated race to the bottom we will end up as serfs or slaves.

Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred. Rebellion means steadfast defiance. It means resisting just as have Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, just as has Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical journalist whom Cornel West, James Cone and I visited in prison last week in Frackville, Pa. It means refusing to succumb to fear. It means refusing to surrender, even if you find yourself, like Manning and Abu-Jamal, caged like an animal. It means saying no. To remain safe, to remain “innocent” in the eyes of the law in this moment in history is to be complicit in a monstrous evil. In his poem of resistance, “If We Must Die,” Claude McKay knew that the odds were stacked against African-Americans who resisted white supremacy. But he also knew that resistance to tyranny saves our souls. McKay wrote:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”

Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” grasps the dark soul of global capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected to an Indian tribe eradicated by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. “All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.” We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit, cowardice and hubris. Melville’s warning must become ours. Rise up or die.

Chris Hedges ia a veteran journalist and political commentator. Now he’s a radical—at last. Just a few years ago he still saw the world through the eyes of liberalism.