TIMES
EAGLE
NORTH
COAST
MARPRIL 2002
In a dark time the eye begins to see
VOL23NO6 50CENTS
~Theodore Roethke
JOHN HOWARD
THE WAR ON TAXISM
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
"I've killed more people than (Unabomber Ted)
Kaczynski because I’ve been paying a lot of taxes the
past fifteen years, and he hasn't."
~EXENE CERVENKA (Lead Singer Punk BandX)
American history boiled to the bone might be
encapsulated as war and money rather than about rights,
liberties and equality — and the reduction might be further
compressed if it is argued that the wars have all been fought
for money, which would reconfigure the pursuit of wealth as
the total fabric of the USA's 'Manifest Destiny’.
This perspective of history is obviously an injustice to
those who have struggled and often been jailed, bled or died for
the larger beliefs relevant in the Bill of Rights.Yet the very fact
of the intensity of the strife for equity and justice within our own
Constitution gives legitimacy to the claim that for the powerful
elite money is the only mainspring of the nation’s history.
If indeed this narrow view of history has any credence,
it must be realized that a select few have from the very beginning
profited from the collective effort of the many. In this context the
term freedom is misapplied — both politically and economically;
“free enterprise” is a misnomer, for the fact that throughout the
country’s 226 year history the wealthiest Americans have for the
most part accumulated and maintained their wealth at govern
ment expense — essentially through sales and subsidies, which
can also be defined as the blood and taxes of the majority who
generally make possible but seldom share in the abundance
Newt Gingrinch, if anyone remembers him, used to say
“the engine that pulls the train must be refueled.” By that he
meant the New Tories of wealth and business should not share
tax obligations with the common folk. “Affluent taxpayers must
receive breaks because they invest money and create jobs for
others,” Newt explained disingenuously — as if it hadn't been
said before.
In reality those “affluent taxpayers” rarely invest in any
thing except their own stock portfolios, and they not only do not
pay their fair share of taxes, they gorge on public money which
people like Gingrinch and the current President G.W Bush call
welfare when it is distributed among the poor and investment
when extorted by the rich. At the same time our political lords cut
off welfare to single mothers and downsize workers they initiate
special tax breaks to favored corporations that amount to billions
of dollars. They cut the taxes of Big Business (which invests a
portion into the welfare of favored politicians) and the rich (who
are shareholders in most of these same corporations) and spoil
them with billions more in subsidies they claim are essential to
the free market, which is regarded as a natural force. Public
services and poverty programs are gutted to make up the short
fall. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the poor
subsidize the rich. That is national tax policy
Corporations are, after all, inherently socialist rather
than capitalist. Big business does not compete for sheer love
of competition in an unfettered emporium of commerce, which
is the myth of capitalism. The almighty free market is in truth the
savage battleground to dominate the American economy in the
bitter ruthless goal of winner take all.
The New Tories quote Jefferson, twist him into a laissiz
faire philosopher. (Gingrich again: “When Jefferson said Every
generation needs a revolution' he wasn’t making an argument for
chaos He was making an argument for the creative replacement
of the old order with a new order ")
But old Tom’s intent was to replace a repressive and
corrupt colonial government with a truly revolutionary guarantee
of power to the people. The New Tories' purpose is to return the
USA to the vertically organized and patronage dominated 18th
century that the American and French revolutions blew asunder.
Attempting to reestablish an old order of privilege and power
based on wealth and property in this new millennium runs
counter to Thomas Paine’s vision of a decent and happy life
for ordinary Americans who are assumed to be rulers rather than
ruled.
The plutocrats who control the major corporations claim
the economy defines the nation more than its ideology: money,
they say, /s the nation’s ideology What they mean by their strict
definition of the “economy" is their own personal domination of
the national wealth In theory, everybody has an equal chance to
make a buck and live the American Dream, but of course some
are more equal than others. Narrow monetary policies that
singularly benefit the upper layers of society draw money from
less well-off levels which keeps them less well-off and always
under pressure to pay what is demanded Releasing public
money (most of it pried from middle-class and blue collar labor)
to business and the wealthy elite is considered sound investment
and essential to the economy. Providing public funds to the poor
is regarded as uneconomical and a severe drain on the national
treasury
Corporate culture is conditioned by commercial and
public falsehoods that coerce the people to buy and pledge
allegiance to America Inc , which transform the American public
from a democratic citizenry responsible for its rights, liberties and
pursuit of justice and equality to pre-adolescently avaricious
consumers for whom only money and material possessions
count (Ralph Nader says that a civic culture has been swarmed
over by a corporate culture.)
The pattern of corporate dominance is as true for the
USA today as it was for the Nazis and Fascists early in the 20th
century: wage slashes and huge government subsidies and tax
cuts The Nazis and Fascists maintained their grip on power by
enriching their industrial patrons while tyrannizing the populaces
of their nations
Corporations receive rebates on taxes they never paid,
and resent government “intrusion" into their affairs, criticizing
regulations regarding their methods of business, however they
do not think government tax breaks or subsidies should be
curtailed.
The rupture between corporate profit and national econ
omic growth is seen in the dependence of the private sector's
profits in looting the public treasury, pillaging the natural environ
ment and reducing social services instead of developing new
technology and enlarging markets through expansion of goods
and services. Hundreds of millions of dollars are appropriated
from important areas like health care and housing The private
plunder of the public domain extends to natural resources —
land, seabeds and timber are stripped or despoiled without
regard for longterm consequences.
Eliminating millions of laid-off workers from employment
necessitates huge welfare costs which the wealthy who eliminate
the jobs are not paying, leaving it upto already overburdened
middle and working class taxpayers to pay.
The U.S. gloats in its reigning superpower status and
acts in the old Roman way, inflicting its immense capacity for
war upon the world, which is its main offering to the New World
Order. But it is a defective colossus. Its economy is coming
undone, the imperial fabric tearing apart due to its own internal
rapacity and the hundreds of billions of dollars of public money
wasted on the military at the expense of its own internal civic
disintegration in the holy names of Defense, National Security
and now this new War on Terrorism, which must be paid for.
Taxes will be raised from the humble and underfed, more money
will be looted from already prostrate social programs, and heavy
borrowing from other more cash-fattened nations will probably be
essential to prop up and replenish our hugely expensive military
machine.
The domestic decline of the United States is primarily
the responsibility of the armed might that has bestowed its
celebrated victories, the military/industrial complex that one of
its most fortunate and celebrated benefactors, President Dwight
D Eisenhower, warned the nation about when he left office four
decades ago. This giant interlocking mafia of corporations and
the military machine they built fashioned an American overseas
empire The nation was itself created and forged by war and an
insatiable appetite for military power “War is the ultimate form of
economic competition," Brooks Adams wrote at the beginning of
America’s reach for global supremacy.
But the Pentagon's bloated budget has soared to a huge
black hole into which everything is eventually drawn and disap
pears, such as the nation's wealth and resources, with neither
replaced Now, at the start of the 21st century, amidst the flaring
testosterone of a new war and claims that it justifies the huge
new $72 billion budget, the largest raise in two decades, the
infrastructure of American society has declined further and ever
larger numbers of the nation's useful citizens sink into poverty.
The malign neglect of the huge and growing underclass
that lives abandoned and without hope in the nation’s crumbling
inner cities and impoverished rural areas will eventually ravage
the society more than foreign terrorists can ever hope to achieve
and will certainly give rise to domestic terrorism if only for the
purposes of survival
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