By Steve Hynd
Today's must-read is a long essay by Kevin Drum. "Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About" is subtitled "How screwing unions screws the entire middle class" and looks in depth at the history of the Democratic Party's relationship with the labor movement. His thesis is straightforward: from the 70s hippie-left infusion onwards the party and the unions have become ever more disunited, and union power is no longer recoverable. That's bad, because the unions are the only force that have historically fought for income equality and social safety-net measures that benefits everyone, whether they belong to a union or not.
Now, we have a situation where, every year, the richest 1% make hundreds of billions of dollars more a year at the expense of the poorer 80% and where "American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes."
Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.
It doesn't take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they've enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. And if you're not rich yourself, this is a problem. First and foremost, it's an economic problem because it's siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.
Kevin ends by wondering where we can find a new countervailing force to the super-rich, who have agglomerated all political and fiscal power to themselves. "If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade."
I'd suggest he begin looking with USUncut, a grassroots movement with a horizontal structure - a movement of local leadership and flashmob protests dedicated to making the ultra-rich and corporate tax avoiders pay their taxes just like normal Americans.
Enjoying record profits and taxpayer-funded bailouts as the economy slowly recovers from a financial crisis, nearly two-thirds of US corporations don't pay any income taxes, instead opting to abuse tax loopholes and offshore tax havens. According to this study from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office, 83 of the top 100 publicly traded corporations that operate in the US exploit corporate tax havens. Since 2009, America�s most profitable companies such as ExxonMobil, General Electric, Bank of America and Citigroup all paid a grand total of $0 in federal income taxes to Uncle Sam. Tax havens alone account for up to $1 trillion in tax revenue lost every decade, money that could be invested in K-12 education, colleges, public health, job creation and hundreds of other worthy public programs.
If we pay our taxes, why don�t they? If corporations profit here, shouldn't they pay here?
If you'd like to join in US Uncut's first day of action on 26th February then start here.
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