"After reviewing decades of literature on these code sections, I cannot fathom any rational basis for giving multinational companies an exception to the cash hoarding rules, which discriminates against purely domestic firms.
"Some of the multinational corporations say they will bring home what could be more than a trillion dollars if Congress will give them an 85 percent tax discount. [I would note that such an offer also constitutes extortion.] The companies frame this as creating jobs. But as I showed in [earlier columns], unless there are strict rules, the money can be used to buy back company stock while destroying jobs.
"I would give the corporations a choice: one year to invest in physical plants, research and development, and jobs here in America for Americans, or be hit with the accumulated earnings tax retroactively. This includes their overseas profits, which we might give them a break on, but not the 85% that they desire.
"Immediate imposition of this levy on the $5.1 trillion [now being held out of the American economy] would decrease this year's debt by 765 billion dollars. That doesn't quite eliminate the deficit, but it's more than half. Much more than we would realize via any austerity measure such as 'sequestration.'"
The Hazards of Austerity
In an interview with Reuters on September 7, 2010, entitled "Nobel Laureate Stiglitz Says EU Austerity is a Wrong Bet," Nobel Economics Laureate Joseph Stiglitz said the following: "If that [austerity in the EU] happens, I think it is likely that the economic downturn will last far longer and human suffering will be all the greater." He went on: "Historical evidence shows that increased state spending rather than austerity measures can help economies emerge from recession.... [Yet], in spite of all that evidence there is a drumbeat, particularly from many of the economists who were responsible for the crisis...to focus on austerity."
The 2008 Wall Street disaster (a self-inflicted auto-da-f????) is presented by the mainstream media as the underlying cause of the push for austerity in our own country. The real reason for pushing this program of "shared suffering," however, is the nearly universal reduction of taxes for corporations and the wealthy among the Western Democracies since 1990. The "shared suffering" will hardly touch the rich at all. [See: European Union Statistical Office, Eurostat, published June 28, 2010 at the Deutsche Welle website, http://www.dw--world.de]. Instead, the cost cutting will be applied to social and infrastructure programs that help the poor and maintain the middle class.
It is this insidious class warfare by the rich, with the twin purposes of neutering the middle class and increasing the wealth of the plutocrats (the ownership class), that tells us what this is really all about. Shall we be ruled by our duly constituted (if imperfect) governments, or shall we be ruled by crypto-fascist corporations over whom we have no control or method for redress of grievances?
The Power of the Strike in Building Up the Middle Class
While the protests in Wisconsin and the rest of the nation over the last two years have given Americans good reason to remember unions and collective bargaining, our unions themselves seem to have forgotten in their own operations the hard-won lessons of the American labor movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The negotiations (capitulation) by the leadership of the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the ports of Oakland and San Francisco--following the one-day April 4, 2011 solidarity strike with union workers in Wisconsin against the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA)--were a disaster. Called by the AFL-CIO, the negotiation was the result of arbitration over PMA's lawsuit in Federal Court against Local 10 for the one-day strike. The settlement was agreed to by Local 10's governing council without a vote by the membership.
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