Tag Archives: corporations

Posted on by

Mitt Inserts Foot In Mouth – Again

Over the weekend, Romney had a remarkable weekend of opening his mouth and letting stupid stuff come out. Not that this is any surprise. But at this point, he might be giving Joe Biden a run for his money…

On Friday, Romney talked, in Michigan, where he was willing to let the auto industry go belly up, about the fact that he likes cars. Has two of them. And then, he volunteered that his wife owns two Cadillacs. Apparently, it never dawned on the guy that the people he wants voting for him can’t afford one Cadillac.

So, on Sunday, he headed over to a NASCAR event – should be simple, right? Shake a few hands, smile a bunch, get out of town. Except, we’re talking about Romney.

No, when he was asked about NASCAR, he said he didn’t follow it as much as avid fans, but “I have some great friends that are NASCAR team owners”. Don’t we all?

He topped off the gaffe-fest when he walked by a bunch of NASCAR fans wearing plastic ponchos to ward off the rain. Via The Maddow Blog:

In case it seemed as if Romney’s NASCAR visit wasn’t awkward enough, this was pretty remarkable, too: ”The crowd initially booed Mr. Romney, who occasionally struck a discordant note, as when he approached a group of fans wearing plastic ponchos. ‘I like those fancy raincoats you bought,’ he said. ‘Really sprung for the big bucks.’”

Yup. He taunted NASCAR fans because they were wearing inexpensive ponchos. I guess they didn’t have enough corporate sponsorship for him.

You’d have thunk that by now, he would have clued into the whole idea that he’s sounding less like the average guy and more like the rich, self-entitled corporate raider he has always been. Not a very voter friendly persona. But what lies at the heart is simple.

He doesn’t see a difference.

To Romney, everyone is rich. Everyone has four cars. Everyone has investment income. It’s why he says things like “I’m not concerned about the very poor”. He thinks they have a safety net. He doesn’t realize the whole problem is that they’re in the safety net. If you need that safety net, something has already gone wrong.

He thinks corporations are people because he thinks like a corporation. Plain and simple. It’s why he can’t connect with people – he just doesn’t see the difference.

We’ll see more of these gaffes in the upcoming weeks. But if he keeps this up, he may give Santorum a real opening.

Posted on by

Corporations Are Building Socialism 2.0

The word “socialism” gets thrown around a lot these days, usually by folks on the right who have no real concept of what it means. So we can start from solid ground, here’s the short version:

Socialism is a societal structure where the government owns the resources, means of production and end product of all industries, and where all goods and services are directly supplied or sold to the end user by the government. From beginning to end, all products and services are controlled by a central government, and the benefits of such a structure are spread to the subjects of that government, with those at the top of the structure usually benefiting more than those below, by virtue of their control of the government. While often presented as a representative form of government, in reality, control of socialist structures usually resides within an elite group, while the vast majority share the available resources.

So, if you want to buy a car, you buy it from a government authorized dealer. The price is set by the government, and the car was built in a government-run plant. The materials to build that car came from government owned and operated mines and factories, and the money you are using to buy that car was paid to you by the government for your government-run job. You go to a government-run grocery store and purchase groceries that were produced on government-owned and run farms. And all the while, those at the highest levels of government live at levels far exceeding yours. And you have no chance of changing it.

You get the picture.

Now – for all those who want to claim that the President and Democrats want to push the country into socialism, I have news for you. We’re already seeing Socialism 2.0. Not because of the President or the Democrats. No, it’s a bit more insidious than that.

Take that last set of examples I just made, and substitute “corporations” for government, and you’ll have exactly the situation we see now. Of course, the argument will be made that corporations are not the same as government. And to that, I say “Wake Up”.

The only significant difference between the two is that they are one layer of complexity removed. Corporations are not the government, but they have worked tirelessly to ensure they control the government. When they profit, it is kept at the upper echelons of the corporate structure. When they fail, they rely on the common populace to pay for it. How different is that from “socialism”.

Need more proof? Big business and the right want to eliminate government as much as possible. In other words, they want to remove that layer that separates the corporate structure from socialism. They are already writing law after law to their benefit. They control politicians with infusions of cash. They are swaying elections with unlimited ability to fund efforts with complete anonymity. They control the media. And they want to give less and less say about how things work to the average citizen.

Ever heard the phrase “Methinks he doth protest too much”? It applies here. The more they rail about socialism, the more likely it is that they are trying to divert your attention from the fact that socialism is exactly what they want. They simply want to supplant the current government with their own structure. That government is what is keeping them from having complete control of the resources and production of all goods and services.

Voter disenfranchisement, elimination of unions, deregulation of the financial industry, dismantling the EPA, getting rid of the Department of Education – they all have one goal: remove controls and dilute the power of the populace to have a say in their lives, and move all control to corporations.

For all those that want to claim that the Occupy Wall St. movement is an attempt to drive us to socialism, I ask you to simply look at what corporations are trying to do, and explain how their ultimate control of everything, including government, is not the 21st century incarnation of socialism.

Posted on by

Economy: Why Don’t They Get It?

With all the talk about #OccupyWallSt, the question that keeps coming to mind is – Why don’t they get it? I’m not talking about the corporate fat cats who gorge themselves while families struggle to make ends meet. Those guys have a system that’s bought and paid for to ensure they stay just as fat and sassy as they are now.

And I’m not talking about the people in Zucotti Park protesting. They get that the only way to change the system is with massive popular support, growing daily until Washington and Wall St feel enough pressure to change.

So who doesn’t get it? The average American.

Over the past few days, I have been trying to explain the whole Occupy Wall St. idea to a number of people, and they just don’t understand it. They can’t grasp that a group of people can protest against corporate takeover of politics without having a specific set of demands. They don’t understand that true representative democracy isn’t about pushing your individual agenda forward, but figuring out what is best for all. And they don’t seem to understand that in a movement that is less than three weeks old, you aren’t going to have all the answers from the get go.

But what does that have to do with the economy? A lot, as it turns out.

Many have tried to paint this protest as a group of ne’er-do-wells trying to get rid of capitalism. But it’s quite a bit more sophisticated than that. To quote Tim O’Reilly (founder and CEO of tech publisher O’Reilly Media) from his Google+ post this afternoon:

I was hoping to get on camera to voice my support for some of the key ideas behind this protest – that many of the companies in our financial sector have started extracting far more value from our society than they provide to it, and that we need businesses to remember a more honest form of capitalism, where companies make money by providing sufficient value to customers that they are happy to pay for it, where the gap between the amount extracted in profits to owners doesn’t so far outstrip the amount paid to workers in the business that those workers need to go into debt to pay for ordinary living expenses, where government protects all its citizens, not just those who can afford lobbyists, and where society as a whole feels the virtuous circle that can only happen when companies create more value than they capture for themselves.

That’s where the rubber in the protest hits the economy road. This isn’t about destroying capitalism. It’s about making it honest, and frankly, sustainable.

When these corporations reserve the wealth for themselves, by turning huge profits, then taking the profits offshore or using those profits to pay less taxes than the receptionist at the front desk, they are bastardizing capitalism. As O’Reilly points out, true sustainable capitalism delivers more value than it retains.

Why? Because that value is then transferred to the consumer in terms of wages, which are then used to – wait for it – spend on goods produced by these corporations. Which generates more revenue and the cycle perpetuates.

Where else does it affect the economy? The taxes that these companies avoid paying are what we use to improve infrastructure, to pay for services like police and firefighters, and to keep us safe. Every penny they take out of this country is a penny lost to the American people, and countless opportunities lost in terms of improving this country.

Instead, what these companies are doing is pulling the money out, and either hanging on to it – then paying their executives hundreds to thousands of times more than their employees, or they use it to circumvent the one process that we as Americans have to exercise our will – the political process. When a company, hiding behind PACs and interest groups can funnel millions of dollars anonymously to exert their power on the political system, especially to ensure they pay even less in taxes and get subsidies to take their money out of the country, they damage the economy. That’s money that they made from the American people, and instead of supporting those people and delivering value back, they retain the value for themselves.

But this is a death-spiral plan. The more they retain, the less the average American has to pay their bills and purchase their products. It’s ensuring they have a smaller and smaller customer base, just to reap short-term profits. They are killing the American economy so they can retain the spoils for themselves. It will inevitably run up against the law of diminishing returns. At some point, they will no longer have enough money to stay afloat, having given too much to executives and fat cats, and not enough back into the economy in terms of wages and taxes. And then, they’ll cry that they are about to go out of business, and need to be bailed out.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. Within just a few months after banks were given a bailout, they began paying their execs exorbitant bonuses again. Meanwhile, the economy continued to flounder. What additional value did these execs and account reps create? All they did was make bets on the economy. They produced nothing. They created nothing – and they kept the spoils for themselves.

Until corporations can be removed from the political process, and until they can be held accountable for their actions, rather than hiding behind the anonymity of “personhood” in terms of campaign donations, they will continue to exert undue force in politics. And the economy will continue to suffer for their short-sightedness.

And this is what these folks who pooh-pooh the protest don’t get. This isn’t about left or right. It’s about correcting practices that continue to damage our economy on a daily basis. They side with the corporations, even as those same corporations are killing their standard of living for their own benefit. At some point, if the economy continues to falter, they’ll start to understand. Because humans learn more from pain than pleasure. We have a need to hit bottom to learn the hard lessons.

Or maybe, just maybe, they’ll start to understand that the way things have been doesn’t work. That cutting taxes doesn’t create jobs when the people with the money don’t spend it on jobs. That politics of the people, by the people and for the people doesn’t work when a corporation can pretend it’s a person and spend without limit. And when corporations can hide behind anonymity so that their contributions can sway the political process without repercussion.

Every day, the folks in Zucotti Park hold a General Assembly – a gathering to decide on the most important issues for that group, in a truly democratic process. They want all Americans to have that same ability to be heard. Maybe, if they hang on, more Americans will want it for themselves.