Representation Without Taxation

By Charlie Barber
Contributing Writer

“Super rich are paying less…”- Bismarck Tribune, 4/18/11

“2010 was the second year in a row that GE [General Electric Corporation] recorded billions in profits and paid no taxes.”  - ABC News, 3/25/11

“Men are driven on by greed to win wealth in unrighteous ways, and he who has most wealth   always covets twice as much.” - Solon of Athens

“The rich are doing so well in this country:  I mean we never had it so good…It’s class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn’t be.”- Warren Buffet
 
Did Bin Laden pay taxes?

Not openly, one assumes, but his vast Saudi-based family wealth was certainly able to purchase the kind of governments he wanted in Afghanistan and Pakistan while engaging in mass murder and an all out attack on the people of the United States and the world.

In the end, Pakistan could well be relieved, though hardly grateful, that the U.S. rid them of an unwelcome foreign nuisance they did not dare to undo themselves.

Bin Laden’s Al Qaida seems to me a kind of rogue international corporation, which bears an eerie resemblance to GE, Exxon, Goldman Sachs and other massive corporations, whose wealth and power give them undue deference, preference and influence in our three branches of government.

Unlike Al Qaida, of course, GE and other Fortune 500 corporations are not violently anti-U.S. government in a military fashion.  Some of their extremists do provide support for Grover Norquist and other professional “gummint” haters.  But while they often stray from bounds of decency, they don’t defy laws which favor them more than hinder them. 

On the contrary.  many large corporations have secured precisely the kind of government they like from recent Republican Presidents and Congresses - providing security for their far flung enterprises and passing the bill on to the rest of us.  Instead of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Americans now have government “of the big corporations, by the big corporations, and for the big corporations.”

Meanwhile, Republican Congressman Rick Berg has been running around North Dakota misrepresenting government programs like Medicare - telling everyone 55 and over that they can feel free to throw everyone 54 and younger under the bus, ie. our own children and grandchildren.  In pitting generations against one another Berg exhibits desperate determination to cover up his vote for [Wisconsin Republican] Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget proposal, described by Paul Krugman in the New York Times [4/7/11] as “ludicrous” and “cruel.” “‘Ludicrous’ because the budget projections were pure fantasy, ‘cruel’ because it proposed massive spending cuts for programs that mainly help children, the poor and the elderly, while slashing taxes for corporations and the ultra-rich.”

Senator John Hoeven cast his vote in favor of Ryan’s reckless attempt to destroy the elderly middle class on May 25.  He no longer can be considered a moderate by any standard that matters.

As one of the richest in the House of Representatives, Rick Berg doesn’t need Medicare, but he expects us to forget that. Unfortunately, most of the time, we do.

Compared to his fellow Senators, Hoeven may not be among the super rich, but his family fortune puts him well beyond the need of a tax supported health package.  He took it just the same, while voting to deny health care to the rest of North Dakota’s less wealthy citizens.  Hoeven will need all of his photo-op skills in the ensuing years before 2016 to erase such an ugly portrait of hypocrisy.

How could we be so blind to misrepresentations by men and women like Rick Berg and John Hoeven, and so oblivious to successful corporate manipulation of the tax code and gutting of government protections like Glass Steagal? Senator Byron Dorgan repeatedly warned us about this Wall Street danger, and he was right.

The answer is alarmingly simple.  Most Americans hate taxes as much as corporate executives, but don’t always think clearly about them come election time.

We have forgotten that, for all of the propaganda, taxes are necessary for civilization.
 
Only large corporations and the wealthy have the means to provide one set of rules in the tax code for themselves, and another for the rest of us.

Gone are the days when wealthy individuals and corporations paid stiff progressive income taxes to support government under Republican Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and Democratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Nowadays we elect people, mostly Republicans, who promise to lower all taxes, but when elected, lower them in big ways for the rich, but only small ways for the blue and white collar middle class. These Republicans, in Bismarck, ND, and in Washington, D.C., destroy the ability of our government to protect ordinary citizens from a market place which favors the strong against the weak, and the rich against the less well-to-do.

We have traded away progressive taxation for empty promises and cheap imported goods, just like Jack of “Jack and the Beanstalk” traded away the family cow for some beans.  Unlike the fairytale, Republican beans only grow beanstalks for rich people.  Whatever small tax breaks ordinary people get are eaten up by higher prices and insurance rates.  Then these corporations remove jobs from the U.S. at an alarming rate, leaving increasing numbers of Americans unemployed and under employed. 
Ancient Greeks, like Solon of Athens, knew well in 593 BC that it was impossible for a few to become filthy rich without the majority of their citizens becoming filthy poor.

Americans are becoming painfully aware of Solon’s wisdom in 2011 AD.

Economically disenfranchising the middle class and increasing the number of poor in the contemporary U.S. has been operating with a vengeance since the time of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and his “trickle down economics.”  That the major media should be identifying this reality so late in the game is a case of “locking the barn door after the horses are stolen.”

President Barack Obama cannot reasonably be blamed for economic injustices wrought by his predecessors.  Moreover, President Obama’s showdowns with Congressional shills for the wealthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last December, and House Speaker John Boehner this Spring, reveal that continued Republican assaults on “government of, by, and for the people” will not be tolerated in his White House.

Some critics, however, question why President Obama meets with Jeffery Immelt, CEO of General Electric Corporation, while GE cuts jobs and pays no taxes.
One could counter such criticism with a response that Barack Obama is negotiating with Jeffrey Immelt and GE as if with a foreign power, thanks to the success of the Republicans in delivering the United States to corporate empires, but I believe the President is operating at a far more sophisticated level than that.

If one observes the President’s actions as well as his words, it is plain to see that he recognizes large corporations as a potential source of solutions for economic problems, rather than simply a cause of them.

President Obama has challenged the car industry in Detroit, for example, to come up with more energy efficient cars and trucks in return for government support.

Detroit has responded, with General Motors announcing the addition of several thousand new jobs this year, IN THIS COUNTRY! 

Cars that don’t guzzle gas not only provide more new jobs, but also are a direct challenge to the petroleum industry. This is a good thing. 

Throughout American history, our best economic results have taken place when government and industry pulled together, rather than apart. That lesson was forgotten by the 2011 North Dakota Legislature, which took nearly a half billion dollars of State income and handed it out to lucky individuals and institutions around the State. 

That money is not available now for State Government to cope with disastrous after effects of virtually unregulated oil and gas development on the Bakken, and Mother Nature’s Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers. 

The Weather Channel shows us also that there are other States with major weather related problems, but who are running huge deficits. Representatives and Senators in Congress from these States might well question North Dakota requests for federal money, after such a self-centered use of our own enviable budget surplus. 

Although Americans like to fancy themselves that they are independent of governments, individual freedoms and free enterprise have almost always been underwritten by some form of County, State or Federal infrastructure. The cost we in North Dakota are likely to pay for forgetting this wisdom is likely to be reckoned in many more ways than taxes in the next few years.

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