It’s about the Economy!

It’s obvious that this election season is about the economy.  What is not so obvious however is what about the economy.

Have you heard of David Cay Johnston?  He’s written a few well-researched books on the workings of our nation’s economic practices.  His book, Perfectly Legal, is about our tax system and how it has become a “subsidy system for the super-rich in America and how they’ve rigged the tax game on their behalf.”  He also wrote Free Lunch, which is about taxes that we consumers pay to big companies without actually going to the government but are diverted to the company coffers, allowing them to profit at the expense of taxpayer and government.  These are hidden subsidies.

And more recently he’s written, The Fine Print: how Big Companies use ‘Plain English’ to Rob You Blind.  This book reveals how businesses are escaping the rigors of competitive markets by getting the “government to pass rules that raise prices, take away your rights as a consumer, literally put your life in danger, and allow them to, in various ways, insulate themselves from market forces, damaging the economy, making you worse off and explaining why, while wages have been flat for years, corporate profits have gone through the roof.”  [See September 19, 2012 interview with Mr. Johnston at www.democracynow.org.]

Why is this kind of information not getting through to the American people?  Why?  Why do we remain ignorant and uninformed as to what is really happening with respect to corporate tax laws written especially to benefit huge corporations, effectively giving them government subsidies at the expense of tax-payers and consumers?  Do we not care, do we not believe it?  Or, is it that we think that there’s nothing that can be done about it?  Or, is the media industry so much in the hands of these huge corporations that they cannot and will not provide us with old-fashioned honest-to-goodness, in depth journalistic investigation and coverage?

Either David C. Johnston is off his rocker, or this guy’s solid research is a wake-up call, challenging us to face the facts and demand some changes in our system.

In his interview with Democracy Now (democracynow.org) Johnston gives various examples of how we are being ripped off by corporate maneuvering.  For example, he describes how our initial taxpayer investment in the “information superhighway” has been diverted (apparently we paid over a half-trillion dollars in rate increases to cable companies and telephone companies to get this superhighway service throughout the nation and yet we are 29th in internet speed and accessibility—and we’re the nation that invented the internet!).

He speaks of how state capitols have passed laws to reduce citizens’ rights for certain services.  For example: Five states have repealed a 1913 law that had guaranteed Americans the absolute right to have a landline telephone at any address (as long as you pay your bill).  Johnston says: “But basically, lobbyists, corporate lobbyists, have been getting—quietly getting laws and rules rewritten to favor business, destroy competition and act against consumers by taking away your rights.”  Are we getting this!?

He speaks about how our big utility companies are being “hallowed out.”  Apparently we are heading for a huge infrastructure disaster: “If you live in—half the states restructured their electric industry.  Well, the utilities were allowed to pocket tens of billions of dollars of tax money that had already been paid, because nobody paid attention to the accounting on this.”  He goes on to talk about gas pipelines endangering neighborhoods because companies are not being held accountable for safety plans or safety protocols and so-on and so-forth.

His point: economic “redistribution” is a bad word.  Yet, that is exactly what is happening UPWARD to the wealthy, not downward to the poor.  Money, our hard earned money, tax dollars from consumer spending is not going back to the consumer via better government services.  Rather it is being redistributed to large corporations without the taxpayer benefitting at all.  “We have created a–it’s part of how we are creating a privatized set of rules, sponsored by government, to redistribute upward,” says Johnston.

He adds: “From 1961 through 2007, the bottom 90 percent of Americans saw their income rise [a] little tiny amount.  But if you’re in the top top group of America, the plutocrat class, for every dollar that each person in the bottom 90 percent got after taxes, you got $35.50—$36.50.  Your taxes, if you’re in the plutocrat class, fell from a mid-40 percent range down to where Romney is, 15 percent or so.  In 2009, we had six people, according to IRS data, who made over $200 million, who paid no income taxes.”

I have to say: Really!?  If all this is true it is also outrageous.  Yet, Johnston’s careful research says that it is in fact true!

So, it is about the economy.  But there are more of us (middle class, average income earners) than there of them (wealthiest people/corporations)—so why are we allowing them to get away with this?  Why do these facts not affect how we vote and who we vote for?