America has the greatest inequalities, highest mortality rate, most regressive
taxes, and largest public subsidies for bankers and billionaires of any developed capitalist
country.
In this essay we will discuss the socio-economic roots of inequalities and the
relation between the concentration of wealth and the downward mobility of the working
and salaried classes.
How the Billionaires become Billionaires
One of the most likely sources of billionaire wealth is through tax evasion in all of
its guises and forms.
Contrary to the propaganda pushed by the business press, between 67% and 72%
percent of corporations had zero tax liabilities after credits and exemptions … while their
workers and employees paid between 25 – 30% in taxes. The rate for the minority of
corporations, which paid any tax, was 14%.
According to the US Internal Revenue Service, billionaire tax evasion amounts to
$458 billion dollars in lost public revenues every year – almost a trillion dollars every two
years by this conservative estimate.
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The largest US corporations sheltered over $2.5 trillion dollars in overseas tax
havens where they paid no taxes or single digit tax rates.
Meanwhile US corporations in crisis received over $14.4 trillion dollars
(Bloomberg claimed 12.8 trillion) in public bailout money, split between the US Treasury
and the Federal Reserve, mostly from US tax payers, who are overwhelmingly workers,
employees and pensioners.
The recipient bankers invested their interest-free or low interest US bailout funds
and earned billions in profits, most resulting from mortgage foreclosures of working class
households.
Through favorable legal rulings and illegal foreclosures, the bankers evicted 9.3
million families. Over 20 million individuals lost their properties, often due to illegal or
fraudulent debts.
A small number of the financial swindlers, including executives from Wall
Street’s leading banks (Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan etc), paid fines – but no one went to
prison for the gargantuan fraud that drove millions of Americans into misery.
There are other swindler bankers, like the current Secretary of Treasury Steve
Mnuchin, who enriched themselves by illegally foreclosing on thousands of homeowners
in California. Some were tried; all were exonerated, thanks to the influence of
Democratic political leaders during the Obama years.
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Silicon Valley and its innovative billionaires have found novel way to avoid taxes
using overseas tax havens and domestic tax write-offs. They increase their wealth and
corporate profits by paying their local manual and service workers poverty level wages.
Silicon Valley executives ‘earn’ a thousand times more than their production workers..
Class inequalities are further reinforced by ethnic divisions. White, Chinese and
Indian multi-millionaires exploit Afro-American, Latin American, Vietnamese and
Filipino workers.
Billionaires in the commercial conglomerates, like Walmart, exploit workers by
paying poverty wages and providing few, if any, benefits. Walmart earns $16 billion
dollar a year in profits by paying its workers between $10 and $13 an hour and relying on
state and federal assistance to provide services to the families of its impoverished
workers through Medicaid and food stamps. Amazon plutocrat Jeff Bezos exploits
workers by paying $12.50 an hour while he has accumulated over $80 billion dollars in
profits. UPS CEO David Albany takes $11 million a year by exploiting workers at $11
an hour. Federal Express CEO, Fred Smith gets $16 million and pays workers $11 an
hour.
Inequality is not a result of ‘technology’ and ‘education’- contemporary
euphemisms for the ruling class cult of superiority – as liberals and conservative
economists and journalists like to claim. Inequalities are a result of low wages, based on
big profits, financial swindles, multi-trillion dollar public handouts and multi-billion-
dollar tax evasion. The ruling class has mastered the ‘technology’ of exploiting the state,
through its pillage of the treasury, and the working class. Capitalist exploitation of low
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paid production workers provides additional billions for the ‘philanthropic’ billionaire
family foundations to polish their public image – using another tax avoidance gimmick –
self-glorifying ‘donations’.
Workers pay disproportional taxes for education, health, social and public services
and subsidies for billionaires.
Billionaires in the arms industry and security/mercenary conglomerates receive
over $700 billion dollars from the federal budget, while over 100 million US workers
lack adequate health care and their children are warehoused in deteriorating schools.
Workers and Bosses: Mortality Rates
Billionaires and multi-millionaires and their families enjoy longer and healthier
lives than their workers. They have no need for health insurance policies or public
hospitals. CEO’s live on average ten years longer than a worker and enjoy twenty years
more of healthy and pain-free lives.
Private, exclusive clinics and top medical care include the most advanced
treatment and safe and proven medication which allow billionaires and their family
members to live longer and healthier lives. The quality of their medical care and the
qualifications of their medical providers present a stark contrast to the health care
apartheid that characterizes the rest of the United States.
Workers are treated and mistreated by the health system: They have inadequate
and often incompetent medical treatment, cursory examinations by inexperienced medical
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assistants and end up victims of the widespread over-prescription of highly addictive
narcotics and other medications. Over-prescription of narcotics by incompetent
‘providers’ has significantly contributed to the rise in premature deaths among workers,
spiraling cases of opiate overdose, disability due to addiction and descent into poverty
and homelessness. These irresponsible practices have made additional billions of dollars
in profits for the insurance corporate elite, who can cut their pensions and health care
liabilities as injured, disabled and addicted workers drop out of the system or die.
The shortened life expectancy for workers and their family members is celebrated
on Wall Street and in the financial press. Over 560,000 workers were killed by opioids
between 1999-2015 contributing to the decline in life expectancy for working age wage
and salary earners and reduced pension liabilities for Wall Street and the Social Security
Administration.
Inequalities are cumulative, inter-generational and multi-sectorial.
Billionaire families, their children and grandchildren, inherit and invest billions.
They have privileged access to the most prestigious schools and medical facilities, and
conveniently fall in love to equally privileged, well-connected mates to join their fortunes
and form even greater financial empires. Their wealth buys favorable, even fawning,
mass media coverage and the services of the most influential lawyers and accountants to
cover their swindles and tax evasion.
Billionaires hire innovators and sweat shop MBA managers to devise more ways
to slash wages, increase productivity and ensure that inequalities widen even further.
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Billionaires do not have to be the brightest or most innovative people: Such individuals
can simply be bought or imported on the ‘free market’ and discarded at will.
Billionaires have bought out or formed joint ventures with each other, creating
interlocking directorates. Banks, IT, factories, warehouses, food and appliance,
pharmaceuticals and hospitals are linked directly to political elites who slither through
doors of rotating appointments within the IMF, the World Bank, Treasury, Wall Street
banks and prestigious law firms.
Consequences of Inequalities
First and foremost, billionaires and their political, legal and corporate associates
dominate the political parties. They designate the leaders and key appointees, thus
ensuring that budgets and policies will increase their profits, erode social benefits for the
masses and weaken the political power of popular organizations.
Secondly, the burden of the economic crisis is shifted on to the workers who are
fired and later re-hired as part-time, contingent labor. Public bailouts, provided by the
taxpayer, are channeled to the billionaires under the doctrine that Wall Street banks are
too big to fail and workers are too weak to defend their wages, jobs and living standards.
Billionaires buy political elites, who appoint the World Bank and IMF officials
tasked with instituting policies to freeze or reduce wages, slash corporate and public
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health care obligations and increase profits by privatizing public enterprises and
facilitating corporate relocation to low wage, low tax countries.
As a result, wage and salary workers are less organized and less influential; they
work longer and for less pay, suffer greater workplace insecurity and injuries – physical
and mental – fall into decline and disability, drop out of the system, die earlier and poorer,
and, in the process, provide unimaginable profits for the billionaire class. Even their
addiction and deaths provide opportunities for huge profit – as the Sackler Family,
manufacturers of Oxycontin, can attest.
The billionaires and their political acolytes argue that deeper regressive taxation
would increase investments and jobs. The data speaks otherwise. The bulk of repatriated
profits are directed to buy back stock to increase dividends for investors; they are not
invested in the productive economy. Lower taxes and greater profits for conglomerates
means more buy-outs and greater outflows to low wage countries. In real terms taxes are
already less than half the headline rate and are a major factor heightening the
concentration of income and power – both cause and effect.
Corporate elites, the billionaires in the Silicon Valley-Wall Street global complex
are relatively satisfied that their cherished inequalities are guaranteed and expanding
under the Demo-Republican Presidents- as the ‘good times’ roll on.
Away from the ‘billionaire elite’, the ‘outsiders’ – domestic capitalists – clamor
for greater public investment in infrastructure to expand the domestic economy, lower
taxes to increase profits, and state subsidies to increase the training of the labor force
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while reducing funds for health care and public education. They are oblivious to the
contradiction.
In other words, the capitalist class as a whole, globalist and domestic alike,
pursues the same regressive policies, promoting inequalities while struggling over shares
of the profits.
One hundred and fifty million wage and salaried taxpayers are excluded from the
political and social decisions that directly affect their income, employment, rates of
taxation, and political representation.
They understand, or at least experience, how the class system works. Most
workers know about the injustice of the fake ‘free trade’ agreements and regressive tax
regime, which weighs heavy on the majority of wage and salary earners.
However, worker hostility and despair is directed against ‘immigrants’ and against
the ‘liberals’ who have backed the import of cheap skilled and semi-skilled labor under
the guise of ‘freedom’. This ‘politically correct’ image of imported labor covers up a
policy, which has served to lower wages, benefits and living standards for American
workers, whether they are in technology, construction or production. Rich conservatives,
on the other hand, oppose immigration under the guise of ‘law and order’ and to lower
social expenditures – despite that fact that they all use imported nannies, tutors, nurses,
doctors and gardeners to service their families. Their servants can always be deported
when convenient.
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The pro and anti-immigrant issue avoids the root cause for the economic
exploitation and social degradation of the working class – the billionaire owners
operating in alliance with the political elite.
In order to reverse the regressive tax practices and tax evasion, the low wage
cycle and the spiraling death rates resulting from narcotics and other preventable causes,
which profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical billionaires, class alliances need to
be forged linking workers, consumers, pensioners, students, the disabled, the foreclosed
homeowners, evicted tenants, debtors, the under-employed and immigrants as a unified
political force.
Sooner said than done, but never tried! Everything and everyone is at stake: life,
health and happiness.
— source petras.lahaine.org by James Petras 2017-10-06