This article by Vanity Fairraises dozens of questions about how Mitt Romney made his money and how he keeps it from being taxed. This is a clinic in non-transparency. It is a story about off-shore accounts and high-priced accounting gymnastics. It is not a story about investing in straightforward businesses here in America. It is a chapter in the story of how financial services have destroyed respectable businesses over the last few decades.
There is no way Romney would have a chance to win the presidency, except that winning high office these days rarely has much to do with facts. Mitt didn't earn his money anything like the way that an auto worker or a store clerk earns money. If each of us had an army of lawyer and accountants, maybe we would do what Mitt has done, but we don't. Mitt is not one of us. He is Exhibit A on how to play the game by taking advantage of tax loopholes set up only for people like him. Mitt will be spending much of his time in this campaign trying to make it look like he is one of us. Mitt will be pouring gasoline on the culture wars. Mitt will be doing everything in his power to distract us from questioning whether his money is honest money.
Let the circus begin!
Chris Hedges has written a new article on Chief Crazy Horse, titled "Time to Get Crazy." This is an excerpt from the beginning of the article:
The ideologues of rapacious capitalism, like members of a primitive cult, chant the false mantra that natural resources and expansion are infinite. They dismiss calls for equitable distribution as unnecessary. They say that all will soon share in the “expanding” wealth, which in fact is swiftly diminishing. And as the whole demented project unravels, the elites flee like roaches to their sanctuaries. At the very end, it all will come down like a house of cards. Civilizations in the final stages of decay are dominated by elites out of touch with reality. Societies strain harder and harder to sustain the decadent opulence of the ruling class, even as it destroys the foundations of productivity and wealth.
This sets the scene. What is the relevance of Chief Crazy Horse?
Native Americans’ resistance to the westward expansion of Europeans took two forms. One was violence. The other was accommodation. Neither worked. Their land was stolen, their communities were decimated, their women and children were gunned down and the environment was ravaged. There was no legal recourse. There was no justice.
We are now faced with a prospect of electing Mitt Romney, who has no credibility at all, or Barack Obama, whose campaign promises were largely a ruse to get elected:
How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama? What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust? Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection. Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs. Defending labor rights. I could go on.
Hedges could have gone on. Obama has built up a Surveillance State that is surreal in scope. As part of that, he partnered with the telecoms, giving them free license to break the law as accomplices to the federal government. Net neutrality turned out not to be something worth fighting for, unlike the dozens of explicit promises he made in his campaign. Then we have Obama's drone wars and aggressive prosecution of whistle-blowers. We have seen a willingness to prosecute Julian Assange, whose crime is to do what the New York Times investigative reporters do to win awards as journalists, except he helped bring about government transparency faster and in even greater quantity than any newspaper. And what about the war on fossil fuel Obama promised, to be coupled with millions of new jobs centered on sustainable energy?
What did Chief Crazy Horse do when neither accommodation nor resistance worked? According to Hedges, he stepped out of the system and fought, even when it appeared to be futile. Hedges is not advocating violence, but suggests that the Citizens are starting to see the system itself as illegitimate, which is a dangerous situation.
Bernie Sanders continues his fight for ordinary Americans, and this is a dramatic speech in which he makes many important points. At 4:17 for example, he talks of the backdoor bailout, in which the Federal Reserve made $16 trillion in almost no-interest loans, in secret, to big financial enterprises worldwide. If they can do this, why can't the banks make loans to legitimate small businesses who are in desperate need of loans? In the meantime, the middle class is collapsing and those who are wealthy are doing better than ever. "What is going on in America?" he asks. What it seems to be is that we are "moving toward an oligarchic form of government where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political life of this nation." The economic disparity is so incredibly pronounced that the 400 wealthiest individuals in America own more wealth than the bottom half of America--150,000,000 people. The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth of America, whereas the bottom 60% of Americans own less than 2% of the wealth of America (min 7:33). Between 2009 and 2010, 93% of all new income created went to the top 1%.
Sanders reminds us that the people at the top no longer need to settle for owning private businesses. Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, those people can now own the entire United States government. (min 11:00). The six largest banks own the equivalent of 2/3 of the GDP of America, and they write half of the mortgages and underwrite 2/3 of the credit cards.
The working families of America want Congress to start working for them, and not merely for those who make campaign contributions. Sanders characterizes this as a "radical idea." (min 13).
What can we do? Rebuild the crumbling infrastructure, including roads, bridges, schools, railroads and many other aspects of the infrastructure. We spend $300M per year importing oil, but we need to move to energy independence, away from fossil fuels and toward wind, solar and other sustainable technologies. We shouldn't be laying off teachers, but should be hiring them.
The debt is a big problem, but it was caused by unpaid wars and unwarranted tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country. Then, the greed and recklessness of Wall Street exacerbated the problem. Now, a "solution" is suggested to be "social security reform," with is a code-word for "hold onto your wallet." At min 20, Sanders also discusses the "solution" being considered to cut Medicare.
At Min 22, Sanders mentions some of America's billionaires who are threatening to leave the U.S. so that they won't pay taxes. He also mentions the 18,000 American corporations located in the Cayman Islands.
Sanders urges that Americans are now saying "Enough is enough."
"And then they say, you know, 'Free speech. Money is speech,' " he continued. "No, money is power. Don't screw around here. Let's just tell it the way it is: They're buying power. You'll see guys that have a business, and they employ a thousand people and they think they're pretty big stuff, and they'll say, 'Yeah, this ought to be okay, a corporation is a person. We want to function as a full person.' So they say, 'Yeah, Citizens United, that's a good thing.'
" 'You are a dumbass, sir, and I'll tell you why you are. Because the pharmaceutical companies and the military-industrial complex, and the insurance companies, they'll step on you like a big. The $500,000 that you can afford to put into the kitty to induce someone to vote your way? You are a piker.' That's the equivalent of buying someone one drink and thinking you're gonna sleep with them. It doesn't work that way."
"We went 100 years thinking that was a pretty good system and now the U.S. Supreme Court says, 'No, you've been breaking the law, breaking the Constitution.' Silly us. We thought having a democracy was more important than having the most corrupt political system in the world. Now, the United States Supreme Court says, 'No, we prefer corruption over democracy.'
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