How Do You Get 19,000 Corporations Into One Building In The Cayman Islands?

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

  The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire happened exactly 100 years ago in a nine-story building near New York’s Greenwich Village. The outside fire escape starting at the ninth floor did not reach the ground. Two stairwells on the inside had doors to the fire escape but they were all locked to prevent workers from stealing scraps of material. Two elevators ran to all floors, but because of the rapidity of the fire they were quickly inoperative. The two stairwells were soon blocked by fire.
  In the end, 146 workers died, mostly very young Jewish and Italian immigrants as young as 14.  Many jumped out the ninth story windows to die on the pavement.  Some jumped down the elevator shafts, hoping to land on the elevators stopped on a lower floor. The business reaction to the fire?  George Olvany, representing the Real Estate Board of New York, said changes to the fire code “would force expenditures on precautions that were absolutely needless and useless.”
  In 1892, during a recession conflict between labor and management, labor called a general strike in the coal fields of Tennessee, the copper mines of Idaho, and the railroads of New York. Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills at Homestead, Pennsylvania soon were struck by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Andrew Carnegie was an absentee owner so his plants were managed by Henry Frick. Frick wanted to cut wages but the unions refused to go along.  Carnegie instructed Frick to conduct a “lockout” and to deal with the workers individually, thus attempting to destroy the union. Frick had a 12 ft. fence three miles long built around the main plant. The fence was topped with barbed wire and had hundreds of peepholes for rifles.

Gatling Guns, The Police Powers Of The State, And Carnegie’s Remorse

  The workers chased Frick’s guards out of the plant, armed themselves, and surrounded the property. Many industrialists used the Pinkerton Detective Agency in their fights against unions, so Frick hired a private army from Pinkerton to take back the plant. Hundreds of “Pinkertons” armed with Winchester rifles arrived by barges via the Monongahela River adjacent to the plant. Workers tried to dynamite the barges and pumped oil into the river in an attempt to burn the barges while exchanging gunfire for over 14 hours. Three Pinkertons and nine workers were killed in the battle. The Pinkertons surrendered.  But the governor ordered the state militia to battle the strikers. Armed with Gatling guns and the latest in weapons, the militia drove the workers out and brought in locked railroad cars filled with strikebreakers from other states. Later the union strike committee was charged with treason and murder but the state couldn’t get a jury to convict them.
  Carnegie later expressed his views about the Homestead Strike: “This is the trial of my life… Our firm offered generous terms..It is a test to which workingmen should not be subjected.  It is expecting too much of poor men to stand by and see their work taken by others…the pain I suffer increases daily. The Works (plant) are not worth one drop of human blood…Nothing in all my life, before or since, wounded me so deeply.”
  But the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 in the coal fields of Colorado between John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (encouraged by John D. Sr.) And the United Mine Workers of America has been described by Historian Howard Zinn as “the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history.”  I would say, at least to this point. With over 300 million guns in the hands of 300 million citizens, we won’t know for awhile.

  Through Colorado Fuel and Iron the Rockefellers employed over 7,000 miners and controlled 71,837 acres of coal land. In the Ludlow strike of 1914, 19 people were killed when the Colorado National Guard was called out to put down the strike. The Rockefellers owned the governor, more or less (mostly more). The day-long disastrous fight occurred in a tent colony of 1,200 miners and their families. Two women and 11 children were burned to death when the Guard set their tents on fire. Three union leaders were killed, along with one Guard, two strikers, and a passerby. The strike itself lasted 14 months.  The coal companies hired strikebreakers from Mexico and even Southern Europe to break the strikes.
  Mining coal in Colorado was twice as dangerous as anywhere else.  Safety regulations were ignored by East Coast owners, much like the Massey Coal Mine owners (recently cited for 166 safety violations at four mines) are negligent in West Virginia today. Miners were not even paid for shoring up tunnels and roofs in the mines. In 28 years of mining over 1,700 miners were killed on the job. After Congress was forced to investigate the strike, the eight-hour day was approved and several child labor laws were passed. If you visit Trinidad, Colorado you can tour the Ludlow Tent Colony which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2009.

When Will The Pitchforks Turn Into Guns?

  We are rapidly approaching the huge income gap ratios between the rich and poor that existed before and during the three “incidents” I have described. In 2009 the richest five percent possessed 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent owned just 12.8 percent. The 400 richest people in the U.S. are worth as much as the poorest 57 million households. When will we reach the tipping point of militant social unrest? In a letter to the Tribune, an unemployed Dan Healy of Elk River described his recent job interviews: “The look on the face of the human resources rep tells you that you have no chance–you’re over 50…What are we going to do? ..A little too young and not enough to retire.” With the current attacks on unions led by Tea Party-Republican politicians, I wonder how long it will be until the pitchforks turn into the 300 million guns squirreled away in homes across the land. We now have over 27 million unemployed and under-employed in this country looking for lousy jobs because all the good ones have been shifted overseas. These people are now in the simmering stage. The unemployed and starving Arabs in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, and Libya are now demonstrating what happens when food prices double. Someone must pay.
  When the top 25 hedge fund managers in the U.S. average $1 billion in income each year and pay only a 15 percent capital gains tax because of laws passed by “The Best Congress Money Can Buy,” something may be about to give.  When the rich are not paying their fair share because of tax dodges, tax havens, and regressive laws, how long will firefighters, police, teachers, and other union members continue to give up pensions, health insurance, and wages to balance budgets? How long will corporations, The Business Roundtable, and the Chambers of Commerce be able to duck their responsibilities to the country, state, and cities in which they live? Didn’t the Supreme Court just decide corporations were people?

It’s Time To End Corporate Welfare

  Remember when the great budget balancer Ronald Reagan always pointed out the welfare queens driving away from the public welfare trough driving new Cadillacs? Perhaps now he would look at the General Electric Company that gave him his start in politics and point out that now all the welfare king-executives are driving Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis, some with $50,000 steering wheels.
  According to a New York Times article, our largest corporation had world-wide profits of $14.2 billion and U.S. profits of $5.1 billion in 2010. How much did GE pay in U.S. taxes? Not a Rockefeller dime.  In fact, GE claimed a tax benefit from the government of $3.2 billion! How many firefighter, police, and teacher pensions went up in smoke to pay the $3.2 billion claim?  GE employs 304,000 world-wide with 975 experts in its tax department.  This department is often proclaimed as the best tax law firm on earth.  The GE tax return to the Internal Revenue Service for 2010 contained 24,000 pages. I wonder if a first-year auditor was assigned to examine its return.

  GE did report a tax liability of 7.4 percent on its American profits, or about $400 million. But we will probably never see a penny. That dough is well hidden in shelters and overseas tax havens. GE manufactures MRIs. Sometime I would like to ask GE why an MRI image in Fargo runs about $1,100 while in Tokyo you can get one for $98. Maybe its because GE spent $200 million lobbying Congress over the last decade.
  By the way, GE owns the NBC network.  The fact that GE didn’t pay a dime in taxes in 2010 wasn’t covered by NBC News until three days after everyone else had. Over the last five years GE had $26 billion in profits–but received a tax benefit of $4.1 billion through fancy accounting! That news wasn’t covered by NBC. That’s what happens to the “news” when corporations own the networks.  At one time back in the 1950’s the corporate share of tax receipts was about 50 percent of all federal taxes paid. In 2009 that share had been cut to 6.6 percent.

Leona Helmsley Had It Right: “Only The Little People Pay Taxes”

  Economist Geoffrey Colin Powell has described a tax haven as well as anybody: “A tax haven has a tax structure established deliberately to take advantage of, and exploit, a worldwide demand for opportunities to engage in tax avoidance.” There are about 72 recognized tax havens in the world and in 2008, 83 of our 100 largest publicly traded companies used most of them. These tax havens charge 0 taxes.
  Remember all the big banks we bailed out in 2007? Tax cheats always start with subsidiaries to hide money. According to a Government GAO report Morgan Stanley alone had 273 subsidiaries in tax havens. Citigroup had 427, with 90 in the Cayman Islands alone. Bank of America had 115, with 59 in the Caymans, JP Morgan had 5, and Wells Fargo 18. Of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., 45 of them have subsidiaries scattered around the globe anchored in tax havens.
  Halliburton of Dick “deficits-don’t-matter” Cheney fame officially employed 10,500 employees in the Caymans, but they all worked in a very-crowded mailbox. That’s what a tax haven can do for you. These 10,500 workers were scattered around the world in Halliburton projects but they all worked out of that mailbox. Halliburton escaped paying any benefits, including unemployment insurance, because their subsidiary was Cayman-based!
  TransOcean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 workers and millions of fish and birds, moved to the Caymans from the U.S. for tax purposes as did 19,000 other U.S. corporations.  It later got a better deal from the Swiss, so it is now incorporated in Switzerland, the land of tax havens and secret bank accounts. Experts in banking estimate that we lose well over $100 billion in federal taxes to tax havens alone. Hidden money may account for another $100 billion.
Many Caribbean islands are tax havens, including Anguilla, Antigua, Barbadoes, the Bahamas, Aruba, Belize, Bermuda, the Caymans, and dozens of others.

It’s Time The Rich Pay Up

  Now the CEOs of globalized firms are saying that the destruction of the American middle class does not matter because their firms will continue to make money from four poor people from India and China who are lifted to the middle class while one American is dropped into poverty. According to an article in the January Atlantic Monthly, members of an investment committee of a major U.S. corporation agreed “that’s not such a bad trade.”  I guess there is a new world order.
  Bob Herbert, who just left the New York Times, put this attitude in perspective: “Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power, and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us to an era of perpetual war and economic decline.  Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone.”

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PULL QUOTE: “With the current attacks on unions led by Tea Party-Republican politicians, I wonder how long it will be until the pitchforks turn into the 300 million guns squirreled away in homes across the land.”