David Cay Johnston talking:
The budget deal a big win for the Paul Ryan Republicans. They will avoid the embarrassment, shame and political damage of shutting down the government, and they will obtain this from the—they obtained this from the Democrats without, as Congressman Pocan pointed out in his statement, touching at all the major issues. The corporate loopholes aren’t being closed. The tax-avoidance techniques of billionaires, who can legally live tax-free if they choose to, are not being shut down. The hedge fund and private equity managers will continue to be advantaged. And we’re going to kick 57,000 poor children out of Head Start, which means we’re going to narrow their economic futures and make all of us worse off in the future. We’re cutting a billion-and-a-half dollars from medical research to save lives. Why? Because the very richest people in America, those who have benefited most from being in this market, don’t want to pay for that kind of services. And by the way, being The War and Peace Report, the Pentagon is getting an extra $20 billion out of this deal. We already spend 42 percent of all the money in the world on our military. More money for the Pentagon? Seriously? While we are cutting off unemployment benefits and cutting medical research, reducing pensions for federal workers? This makes absolutely no sense. It will make us worse off.
there is a war going on in this country, and it’s on the poor. And we have all sorts of ways that we are doing this. We are restricting their access to Medicaid. We are cutting food stamps dramatically in this country, or will be very soon. There is a 90-day fix for doctors who treat people who are on Medicaid. That, I suspect, will not be continued. And why would we be cutting fees to doctors who provide healthcare to people, unless, of course, you just, as Congressman Grayson once said, want them to die?
do we not have enough nuclear submarines to kill us all many times over with weapons against which no one is threatening us? It is just bizarre that we continue to stick to these memes that we’re not spending enough on national defense. We’re spending over $900 billion a year on national defense. Now, add to that that we—most of the world consists of our allies, who have a big military, and this just makes no sense whatsoever.
we started this movement back around the time that the New Deal ended and the era of Reagan, which we’re still living in, began, that it would be more efficient if we just got rid of those lazy, no-good, overpaid federal bureaucrats, and hired private contractors. Well, last year, contractors cost the government as much as $763,000 each. Overall, they cost twice as much as civil servants; and for Pentagon contractors, three times as much. And much of the work that is done by contractors turns out to be of little or no value. If, for example, you go to USASpending.gov, one of President Obama’s major initiatives on transparency, and put in “IRS contracts,” the total amount of money it will show is equal to 500 years of the entire IRS budget. These contractors are ripping the taxpayers off left and right. Why do they stay there? Well, the owners of those companies hire politically connected people, like former congressmen, former heads of agencies, and they make campaign contributions that make sure they keep getting paid, while the poor have their situation worsened.
There are a number of things we could do. I’ve been doing a series of columns on Al Jazeera about this very point. One of the things we can do is stop these, quote-unquote, “free trade” deals. There’s no such thing as “free trade.” Trade has rules. And let me give you an idea how big they are. The super-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership plan, in which members of Congress who want to read any part of it have to show they have no pen or pencil or paper or recording device on them and are then led into a room. In chapter QQ, it’s 30,000 words. Think about how far in you’ve got to be to get to chapter QQ. And these deals have resulted, in every case, in the destruction of American jobs. You know, one way to look at this, however, I suppose, is that the generosity of blue-collar factory workers in America, who have been willing to give up their hold on the middle class so that the rural poor of Asia can have a better life, is something to be admired.
trade, in theory, can make us all better off. I’m not arguing against trade. The deals we have made have been awful. Our trade deal with China has cost us 2.8 million jobs. That’s the equivalent of every job in greater metropolitan Philadelphia. We’ve had over 50,000 factories close simply because of that deal. Our trade deal with South Korea, we were told it will result in more trade. Well, it has: one dollar of exports of goods by us to South Korea for every $25 of increased imports from South Korea. The global capitalist class see to it that these secretive deals are written in a way that they benefit, that workers in America have their wages driven down.
And the Trans-Pacific Partnership is widely believed—and remember, it’s a secret agreement that they want to ram through Congress with no debate—it is widely believed it will cement current U.S. law, while allowing trading partners flexibility to alter their laws. That’s a prescription for absolute disaster. And, by the way, Penny Pritzker is a queen of corporate welfare. That she is out promoting this, that she is treasury—commerce secretary, is itself astonishing, given how much the operations that she owns have benefited and supped with a big spoon at the public trough.
The average pension in Detroit is $19,000 a year. You just go out to suburban Ann Arbor, and it’s twice that much money. Detroit, though, is an example and a canary in the mine of what’s going on in this country. Deindustrialization is making us poorer. It is benefiting the global capitalist class. And we’re going to see more of this. Detroit went from having a large tax base, with factories producing things that helped grow the economy, to being full of vacant land all over the place and abandoned buildings because of the federal government’s trade policies and anti-union policies. We need to wake up and understand and vote for people who will change these policies, or the future is very clear. And you can see it in the cuts to the Head Start program, as a good example, and medical care. It’s the policy of Congress to spend money now in ways that will make us poorer in the future.
— source democracynow.org
David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize while at The New York Times. He is currently a columnist for Tax Analysts and Al Jazeera, as well as a contributing editor at Newsweek. He is author of several books, including The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind.