Consider that the unpaid taxes of 500 companies could pay for a job for every unemployed American -- for a period of two years, at the nation's median salary of $36,000, for all 8 million unemployed!
Furthermore, Citizens For Tax Justice reports that Fortune 500 companies are holding over $2 trillion in profits offshore to avoid taxes that would amount to over $600 billion. Our society desperately needs infrastructure repair, but 8 million potential jobs are being held hostage beyond our borders.
Instead of giving everyone a decently paid job, we end up putting growing numbers of them in jail. Even though violent crime is down over the last 25 years, the prison population has doubled. FBI statistics confirm a dramatic decline in violent crimes since 1991, yet the number of prisoners has doubled over approximately the same period, thanks mostly to drug busts of young black men.
Meanwhile, the prosecutions of white-collar workers have been reduced by over a third, and, through the legislators they now essentially own, corporate leaders are steadily working toward legitimation and 100% tolerance and automatic forgiveness for their crimes.
There exists a common theme amid these signs of societal decay:The super-rich keep taking from the middle class as the middle class gradually heads toward becoming a massive lower class. Yet the myth persists that we should all look up with admiration at the "self-made" takers . . who are ripping our society apart. (Link for the last four paragraphs.)
Ever more Americans are beginning to understand that big corporations and the rich have been doing whatever they can to stop our government from delivering the benefits and services that were once so beneficial to most people. Unfortunately, in 2015, we have not yet had that mass realization which occurred in the 1930s when a majority of Americans realized that they had been, and were continuing to be, bamboozled.
Even after the Republicans persuaded President Bill Clinton to sign the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act (which had been passed in the early 1930s as a means of preventing big banks from gambling in the stock market with their depositors' money), and this then resulted, a few years later, in the biggest financial crisis of the past 80years, in which millions lost their homes and/or their jobs, most people still didn't get it. Even worse, the Department of Justice made no attempt to prosecute the CEOs of these big banks whose business model (as Bernie Sanders tells us) was, simply stated, 'fraud.'
In other words, we seem to be repeating all the steps that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s, yet way too few people understand this yet -- and not much of a constructive or protective nature will be done until they do.
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