'States Consider Increasing Taxes on Poor, Cutting Them on Affluent'

Mark Thoma excerpts from 'States Consider Increasing Taxes on Poor, Cutting Them on Affluent'.

A number of Republican-led states are considering tax changes that, in many cases, would have the effect of cutting taxes on the rich and raising them on the poor.

Conservatives are known for hating taxes but particularly hate income taxes, which they say have a greater dampening effect on growth. Of the 10 or so Republican governors who have proposed tax increases, virtually all have called for increases in consumption taxes, which hit the poor and middle class harder than the rich.

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The ruling class looks after its own.

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US 76, EU 6

Kenneth Thomas writes that the number of $100 million incentive packages offered in each place beginning in 2010 is US 76, EU 6.

Because of the lack of a framework in the United States, state and local governments spend almost $50 billion per year just to attract investment, and up to a further $20 billion in subsidies not even requiring investment, according to my estimates. This is more than enough to rehire every state and local employee who lost their job since the recession. All other things equal, subsidies make the economy less productive, and these subsidies transfer money from average taxpayers to the far richer subsidy recipients. In other words, they slow economic growth and contribute to economic inequality.

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In other words, Socialism for the rich, and Capitalism for the poor.

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On Brian Williams: How Liars Express Our Values

Ted Rall writes On Brian Williams: How Liars Express Our Values.

You can tell a lot about a society’s values from its lies.

After World War II, Germany abandoned its old values of obedience, conformity, militarism and most recently, Nazism. When veterans of the SS were asked about their military service in the form of that most famous question “what did you do during the war, daddy?” they lied about it. They either claimed that they hadn’t served at all, or that they had served in the regular army, or if there was no way to deny having been in the SS, said they had been nowhere near any atrocities or death camps.

Postwar Germany’s liars projected positive values: anti-militarism, anti-fascism, pacifism, principled opposition to violence.

Here in the United States, our liars lie about the exact opposite things — and their lies reveal an awful set of societal values.

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The ideological superstructure in the USA promotes militarism as do all imperialist states. Military power is essential to maintaining supremancy and hegemony.

It is interesting to note that a former imperialist state, Germany, is using economic power instead. The current battle with Greece will reveal the limits of this type of power.

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Keystone XL, Cold War 2.0, and the GOP Vision for 2016

Michael T. Klare examines the connection between Keystone XL, Cold War 2.0, and the GOP Vision for 2016.

By accelerating the exploitation of fossil fuels across the continent, reducing governmental oversight of drilling operations in all three countries, and building more cross-border pipelines like the Keystone XL, Christie explained, all three countries would be guaranteed dramatic economic growth.  “In North America, we have resources waiting to be tapped,” he assured business leaders in Mexico City.  “What is required is the vision to maximize our growth, the political will to unlock our potential, and the understanding that working together on strategic priorities… is the path to a better life.”

At first glance, Christie’s blueprint for his North American energy renaissance seems to be a familiar enough amalgam of common Republican tropes: support for that Keystone XL pipeline slated to bring Canadian tar sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, along with unbridled energy production everywhere; opposition to excessive governmental regulation; free trade… well, you know the mantra.  But don’t be fooled.  Something far grander — and more sinister — is being proposed.  It’s nothing less than a plan to convert Canada and Mexico into energy colonies of the United States, while creating a North American power bloc capable of aggressively taking on Russia, China, and other foreign challengers.

This outlook — call it North Americanism — is hardly unique to Christie.  It pervades the thinking of top Republican leaders and puts their otherwise almost inexplicably ardent support of Keystone XL in a new light.  As most analysts now concede, that pipeline will do little to generate long-term jobs or promote U.S. energy independence. (Much of the tar sands oil it’s designed to carry will be refined in the U.S., but exported elsewhere).  In fact, with oil prices plunging globally, it looks ever more like a white elephant of a project, yet it remains the Republican majority’s top legislative priority.  The reason: it is the concrete manifestation of Christie-style North American energy integration, and for that reason is considered sacred by Republican proponents of North Americanism.  “This is not about sending ‘your oil’ across ‘our land,’” Christie insisted in Calgary.  “It’s about maximizing the benefits of North America’s natural resources for everybody.”

While North American energy integration may, in part, appeal to Republicans for the way it would enrich major U.S. oil companies, pipeline firms, and some energy-industry workers — the “everybody” in Christie’s remarks — its real allure lies in the way they believe it will buttress the more hawkish and militarized foreign policy that so many in the GOP now favor.  By boosting fossil fuel production in North America, Keystone’s backers claim, the U.S. will be less dependent on imports from the Middle East and so in a stronger position to combat Russia, Iran, ISIS, and other foreign challengers.

Authorization for Keystone XL and related energy infrastructure is important “not just for economic development, not just for jobs and growth,” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared in January, “but also for the enormous geopolitical advantages that it will present to the United States [by strengthening] our hands against those who would be enemies of America.”

Brace yourself. This combination of fossil fuel optimization and North American solidarity against a potentially hostile world is destined to become the core of the Republican economic and national security platforms in the 2016 presidential election.  It will similarly govern action in Congress over the next two years.  So, if you want to understand the dynamics of contemporary American politics, it’s crucial to grasp the new Republican vision of an energy-saturated North America.

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So, while human life is threatened with extinction through run-away climate chaneg, the Capitalist system can think only of retaining its world-wide dominance through the control of oil, coal, and natural gas. All of these contribute to the growing climate catastrophe.

The ruling class would rather destroy humanity than reliquinsh power. Every day, the situation becomes direr.

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Senator Inhofe Sponsors Ukraine Military Weapons Bill Based on Images of Russian Soldiers in Georgia in 2008

Mike Shedlock writes that Senator Inhofe Sponsors Ukraine Military Weapons Bill Based on Images of Russian Soldiers in Georgia in 2008.

According to Ukraine and NATO, there are 5,000 Russian troops swarming Ukraine with more coming in every day.

Thus one might expect Senator Inhofe to have a basket of images to use as justification for US warmongering.

Instead, it turns out the pictures were fake. They show Russian troops in Georgia in 2008.

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Georgia, Ukraine, whatever. All these foreign countries look the same to American politicians.

The US government regularly uses lies to justify its acts of aggression:

• Gulf of Tonkin incident
• The Incubator Babies incident during the first Iraq War
• The WMD in the second Iraq War

An the ideological superstructure is instrumental in these lies by not questioning them, and by promoting them. All of this is done in the name of independent thought. You are allowed only to think thoughts that are politically correct at the time. You may have to change them at a moment's notice:

On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns — after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces — at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.

There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

Nineteen Eighty-four, by George Orwell, Chapter 9

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‘Lone Wolf,’ ‘Self-Radicalized': Islamophobic Buzzwords never applied to White Terrorists

Juan Coles writes that ‘Lone Wolf,’ ‘Self-Radicalized': Islamophobic Buzzwords never applied to White Terrorists.

“Terrorism” has been racialized in the American press and law enforcement community, marked as having to do with Muslims but almost never used to refer to people of northern European background. A few years ago, when a police spokesman said that “We have concluded that event was not terrorism,” likely what he meant is that no Muslims were involved or that no cell or organization was.

Racializing dissent has an old genealogy in American politics. In the early twentieth century, Jewish-American immigrants were suspected of socialism and Italian-Americans of anarchism. In the Red Scare of 1917-1920, workers who joined labor actions were falsely accused of Communism and were targeted for mob violence, especially if they had “foreign names.” African-Americans who had come north to work in factories during the war, filling a domestic labor shortage, were likewise tagged as subversive. Somehow persons of English ancestry with names like Worthington — even if they were blue collar workers– were not assumed to be Communists or foreign agents or radicals. Russian-Americans were deported. In Illinois after the war, a mob attacked Italian-Americans and razed their homes.

Today it is Muslim-Americans who have been stereotyped as radicals, although the vast majority of them are actually pillars of the establishment and they are better off educationally and financially than the average American. But how to characterize Muslim individuals who committed violence, who were unconnected to any radical network and who were clearly simply mentally ill? Initially Islamophobic diction wasn’t deployed in their regard. But over time, those promoting bigotry managed to make it respectable to sweep even these often mentally fragile individuals up into “terrorism.” The buzzwords used were “lone wolf” and “self-radicalized.”

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And so the racist constuction of the Capitalist society continues in order to keep all of us in fear of each other.

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Austerity, fear and bubblethink

Chris Dillow writes that Austerity, fear and bubblethink is ideologically driven.

When intelligent men say something very stupid, ideology is at work. But what is the ideology here?

Part of the answer is that Tim has been sucked into mediamacro bubblethink - a world in which talk of the "national credit card" is taken seriously rather than scorned as sub-literate cretinism. It might be no accident that one of the few prominent politicians to see things as they really are works outside the Westminster bubble.

But perhaps there's something else. As Nick Barlow said the other day, politicians no longer offer any hope. (This might be because of the triumph of neoliberal scepticism about the possibility of successful collective action). What they can do, though, is trade on fear — as Cameron did to the BCC on Tuesday. As Frank Furedi has written, "governments use fear to sustain their authority."

The problem is that, so accustomed has the ruling class become to using fear rather than hope, that they now use it even when it justifies policies which are the exact opposite of those they are advocating.

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The aim of the ideological superstructure is to keep the current ruling class in power. Fear is one of the means that they use. Fear of different cultures, fear of homosexuals, fear of strangers, fear of the other sex. As long as these fears exist, we are taught to rely on the ruling class to protect us from these ‘bad people’.

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The Chapel Hill Shootings & the Troubling Growth of Anti-Muslim Intolerance

Charles Kurzman comments on The Chapel Hill Shootings & the Troubling Growth of Anti-Muslim Intolerance.

If this turns out to be a hate crime, it would mark an ugly turn in the rise of intolerance toward Muslim-Americans. While the actions of a single individual doesn’t constitute a trend, surveys have found that Americans’ attitudes toward Muslims have grown increasingly negative in recent years. A majority still report favorable views of Muslim-Americans, but “unfavorable” responses are on the rise, driven by alarmist media reports about terrorist threats and political campaigns that treat all Muslims as untrustworthy. Survey respondents who watch Fox News or listen to talk radio regularly are 50 percent more likely than other respondents to express negative views of Muslims.

Hate crimes against Muslims have grown too. They still comprise a small fraction of all hate crimes in the U.S. — far fewer than hate crimes against Blacks, gays, and Jews, according to FBI data — but the proportion has risen from 1.8 percent in 2002-2008 to 2.4 percent since then. These figures would no doubt be higher if President George W. Bush had not visited a mosque in Washington days after 9/11, posing with Muslim leaders for photographs and expressing solidarity with Muslim-Americans. Perhaps the positive effect of that gesture is wearing off.

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This is how the ideological superstructure creates racism. The mass media and politicians continually frighten the people by creating scares.

It is good that that the majority of Americans have so far resisted this barrage of propaganda against Muslims.

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Thomas Sankara and Burkina Faso's 'Black Spring'

Ernest Tate writes that Thomas Sankara and Burkina Faso's 'Black Spring'.

Periodic crises and political instability followed by military coups seems to have been permanent features of political life of the country after formal independence began in 1960. Still under the influence of Paris, the first post-colonial regime had been unwilling or unable to deal with the country's immense social and economic problems, leading to mass unrest, labour and student strikes and of course, a military coup.

As a result of the coup, Harsch writes, the army's popularity had increased and came to be seen by many young intellectuals as a possible instrument for social change, a “potential modernizing institution that might help discipline the corrupt bureaucracy, counter-balance the inordinate influence of the traditional chiefs, and generally help modernize the county”.

It was in military college that Sankara came under the direct ideological influence of the college's director, the Marxist academic Adam Toure, a clandestine member of the pro-Moscow African Independence Party that was centred in Senegal, with branches in other former French colonies. It would turn out to be an important step in the future president's political evolution. Keeping his political affiliations hidden in those conservative circumstances, Toure quietly gathered together — outside the classroom — his brightest and most politically inclined students – among them Sankara — for informal discussions on topics such as, “imperialism and neo-colonialism, socialism and communism, the Soviet and Chinese revolutions, the liberation movements in Africa, and similar topics”. (Toure would later serve in Sankara's government as minister of information, only to be jailed for two years in 1984 because of his oppositional activities. He was nearly shot, only being saved because of Sankara's personal intervention.)

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It is interesting to compare and contrast the political development of Hugo Charvez and Thomas Sankara.

Both of them became radicalised through their respective military colleges. The Venezuelan one was overt in its radical agenda and it was based deeply on the country's struggle for independence. Thus the whole class was exposured to these ideas. Thus, the Venezuelan military aligns itself with the Bolivarian Revolution.

The Upper Voltan one had to be secretative. Thus, there was a split in the officer corps that was fatal to the revolutionary regime later on.

The Venezuelan coup failed. This forced Chaverz and others to rethink their strategy, and to end up in the political arena to spread their ideas there instead of forcing people to accept them. By entering into the democratic process, Chaverz gained legitimacy that he used to launch his radical agenda. And this legitimacy has enabled the revolution to survive a coup.

The Upper Voltan coup succeeded. This meant that Sankara did not need to rely on the political process to implement his radical agenda. This destroyed his legitimacy and, eventually, got him killed.

However, both Chaverz and Sankara leave a legacy that continues to inspire their followers to radicalism.

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Created by history

Chris Dillow writes that individuals are Created by history.

The precise mechanisms in these stories differ. Sometimes, the transmission from past to present operates via institutions, sometimes via culture - though of course the two interact. You can read Greg Clark's work (pdf) showing that wealth persists through the generations as individual-level evidence for the latter.

All this suggests that, contrary to simple-minded neoclassical economics and Randian libertarianism, individuals are not and cannot be self-made men. We are instead creations of history. History is not simply a list of the misdeeds of irrelevant has-beens; it is a story of how we were made. Burke was right: society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

One radical implication of all this is Herbert Simon's:

When we compare the poorest with the richest nations, it is hard to conclude that social capital can produce less than about 90 percent of income in wealthy societies like those of the United States or Northwestern Europe. On moral grounds, then, we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent to return that wealth to its real owners.

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This is why it is very important for revolutionaries to study the official and unofficial history of their own country. In order to understand how to get we want to go, we need to understand how we got here.

The Bolivarian Revolution is grounded in the history of Venezuela. There was no template for a successful revolution that can be transferred from one country to another. This was the fatal mistake that Ché Guevara made when he tried to export the Cuban Revolution to the Congo and to Boliveria.

This idea is best captured by Leon Trotsky's Law of Uneven and Combined Development:

Different countries, Trotsky observed, developed and advanced to a large extent independently from each other, in ways which were quantitatively unequal (e.g. the local rate and scope of economic growth and population growth) and qualitatively different (e.g. nationally specific cultures and geographical features). In other words, countries had their own specific national history with national peculiarities.

But at the same time, all the different countries did not exist in complete isolation from each other; they were also interdependent parts of a world society, a larger totality, in which they all co-existed together, in which they shared many characteristics, and in which they influenced each other through processes of cultural diffusion, trade, political relations and various “spill-over effects” from one country to another.

Revolutionaries have to understand and reflect on their own country's history and development as well as the interaction with the rest of the world. Parochialism is fatal to revolutions.

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Privatisation loses in Queensland election

Jonathan Strauss & Marg Gleeson write that Privatisation loses in Queensland election.

The Queensland Chamber of Industry said it would not support any reversal of the LNP’s changes to workers’ compensation. It is crucial that the trade union movement continues to mobilise to ensure that a Labor government acts in the interests of the workers who contributed so effectively to its victory at the polls.

Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk said after the election that the thousands of public servants sacked by Newman would not automatically be reinstated. This is a blow to those victims of austerity. Their cause, and the repeal of the anti-union laws introduced by the LNP, should be taken up by the trade union movement as a priority.

The Newman experience has shown people can exert power. Any government, even one with a huge majority, can be a one-term wonder. Queenslanders are feeling elated at having demonstrated this at the ballot box.

This feeling of empowerment is welcome and understandable. However, unions and social movements need to maintain their own, independent, mobilisation if Labor is to be held to account for their interests. Already the environment movement is calling on the ALP to ban new coalmines and save the Great Barrier Reef.

Labor’s victory was necessary to halt the sale of public assets. It does not provide a political alternative to the neoliberal project. If the demands of the social movements and the social needs of the community are to be met, an alternative to the ALP/LNP duopoly needs to be forged.

In recent years, huge movements of people mobilising against austerity in Europe and Latin America have turned away from the established parties. A mobilised community, with a renewed sense of its power to effect change can build such alternative for change in Australia.

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Even so, this shows the limitations of parliamentary democracy in that the Queensland Chamber of Industry is still able to dictate to the government. Those that control the means of production control the state.

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Greece: Why SYRIZA made the deal with the Independent Greeks (ANEL)

Haris Triandafilidou explains Why SYRIZA made the deal with the Independent Greeks (ANEL).

The swift formation of the coalition between SYRIZA and the Anexartitoi Ellines (AN.EL., “Independent Greeks“) party was met with incomprehension in other European countries. While the indignation of middle-class parties and the mainstream media is to be ascribed to hypocrisy rather than to serious concerns regarding democracy and rule of law, the concerns of numerous SYRIZA supporters in other European countries makes a closer examination of the coalition partner necessary:

AN.EL. was founded by the former ND deputy Panos Kammenos in February 2012. In its founding manifesto, the party pledged itself to popular sovereignty, the protection of the constitution, national pride and parliamentary democracy. Apart from that, the party calls for the abolition of the memoranda, which are perceived as an attack by the new world order. In item 6 AN.EL. pledges itself to equal rights (isonomy), solidarity, justice, meritocracy and equality and commits itself to protecting Greek families and all citizens from the attacks of the market. Its commitment to the values of the Greek Orthodox church and its positive impact on the people and the nation go hand in hand with the protection of religious freedom.

At a press conference a few days before the election, Kammenos had declared himself against the Dublin II Regulation that provides for undocumented migrants being detained in Greece against their will and underlined that every human life is of equal value, independent of its country of origin. “Illegal migrants must be given the possibility to travel to a country in which they can live without being subjected to violence or the methods of Mr Voridis or the Golden Dawn. In Greece this is not possible”, Kammenos stated.

The delegates’ speeches in the course of the party’s founding convention in February 2012 mainly focused on praising the chairman, Greek cultural heritage and the Greek Orthodox religion and condemning Greece’s sell-out to its creditors. The political agenda of the years between 2012 and 2015 shaped and accentuated this seemingly chaotic accumulation of patriotic, anti-neoliberal and Christian Orthodox positions that rarely had matched the right-wing extremist profile pinned on the party.

For example, in June 2013, the party positioned itself clearly against the shut-down of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT). It supported the 595 cleaners who were laid off by the ministry of economy and called for the investigation of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of 12 persons in the Farmakonisi refugee tragedy. Associating Kammenos and his party with the right of the political spectrum is out of the question.

Pro-memoranda and anti-memoranda attitudes have overtaken the political division between right and left. In other words, the self-positioning of AN.EL as an anti-memoranda party results in certain positions being adopted on privatisation and the dismantlement of workers’ rights but also on “side effects” such as dismantling democracy, the state and police violence becoming more and more authoritarian. These positions shape the party’s political profile and the relationship with its voters in a way that cannot be taken back without political losses.

The election of January 25 has led to a unique situation. The avalanche of neoliberalism in the past five years has brought radical changes to the established patterns of political attitudes and the party spectrum. For the first time in European history, a party of the left has emerged as the winner of an election. For the first time in post-war European history, a national-socialist party [Golden Dawn] whose leaders are facing trial for establishing a criminal association and for contract killings is the third strongest force in a parliament.

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In these pre-revolutionary times, it is not unusual for conservatives (like me) to end up as revolutionaries. The key is defining and reflecting on one's core values. In doing so, one can end up in places where one never thought one would have.

This appears to the case with AN.EL, what would have been a mildly reformist agenda in the post-WW II era has become revolutionary because of the neo-liberalism shift in the Capitalist ruling class. In order to be true to their values, they have joined forces with those who would have been their arch-enemies (SYRIZA) in earlier times to defeat the greater enemy: the troika.

It will be an interesting political journey for AN.EL and SYRIZA as well as for Greece.

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