The Romney v. Obama economic smack down in Ohio last Thursday failed to deliver half the punch of remarks the men made earlier in the week.
President Obama said the nation must focus on the public sector, which continues to lay off thousands of teachers, cops and firefighters, even while the private sector has recovered sufficiently to consistently add jobs. Romney said he would fire more teachers, cops and firemen.
This gets to the dispute between Democrats and Republicans. The GOP has contended for 30 years that the primary function of government is to serve corporations and the 1 percent, and that when they thrive, the 99 percent may receive hand-me-down benefits. Democrats believe the principal function of government is to serve the majority of people and that when they benefit, the economy thrives for everyone.
For all the fancy talk in Ohio on Thursday, it comes down to this: Do Americans want a government of the people by the people for the people, one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal? Or do Americans want a government of the corporations by the corporations for the corporations, one dedicated to the proposition that the rich are better than everyone else?
For the rich, like Mitt Romney, the proposition that they are better than everyone else is a given. Romney believes that he, the son of a wealthy car company executive and governor, the youth who attended exclusive private schools and wallowed in every privilege, is a self-made man.
That is basic Republican philosophy: Every wealthy person and every successful corporation achieved that all by themselves. They didn't inherit; they didn't benefit from taxpayer-funded infrastructure like roads, schools and patent enforcement; there was no luck involved. They achieved it alone by virtue of their own grit, hard work and dedication.
Anyone can do it, the GOP believes, if they would just buckle down, work hard and follow all the rules. As a result, in Republican world, anyone who isn't rich has only himself to blame.
Therefore, in GOP-logic, the poor and middle class are inferior beings. Government should not serve them. The government, Republicans think, should bow to the successful, who earned service. The government must not, according to the GOP, reward shiftlessness by providing benefits to middle class scallywags who have failed to do what it takes to get rich.
This doctrine of primacy for corporations and the 1 percent has set back the middle class. And the nation's economy. Middle class income has stagnated. Meanwhile, the wealth of the top 1 percent and corporations has skyrocketed, so that now as much wealth is concentrated at the top as was during the robber-baron age immediately before the Great Depression.
A report issued by the Federal Reserve Board early last week showed that both the income and net worth of the average American family declined so drastically between 2007 and 2010 that nearly two decades of accumulated family wealth was wiped out. Seventy percent of those losses occurred in the years while Republican George W. Bush was still president.
By contrast, on the 1 percent end the scale, corporate executives raked it in last year. Forbes calculated that the CEOs of the nation's top 500 corporations got an average 16 percent pay increase. The 2011 paycheck for each: a cool $10.5 million.
Also, corporate balance sheets are back in the black, with profits now shooting above pre-recession levels. Rather than investing in America or creating jobs with that money, corporations are hoarding more than $2 trillion in reserves.
And they are stuffing $10 million checks into GOP super PAC funds to ensure that Romney keeps his promise to lay off teachers, cops and firefighters while cutting taxes even further for the rich and eliminating any and all regulations that annoy corporations.
No air or water pollution controls on factories. No food safety inspections. Repeal the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Law that was enacted to prevent the reckless Wall Street gambling that crashed the economy. Repeal ObamaCare that was enacted to end abusive practices by health insurers.
Romney reiterated last week that he opposes the provision of ObamaCare requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. So if a child is born with asthma and his working-poor parents don't have employer-provided health insurance or the money to buy coverage, too bad for the kid. Let him die gasping for breath. The toddler should have had more grit, hard work and dedication and earned himself some insurance. Or he should have picked better parents. Like Romney did.
Democrats, like Obama, believe in the primacy of the majority, as did the founders of the United States. The revolutionists wrote in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . ." The 1 percent, CEOs, the lucky, the super-smart and the well-born are not more equal. The government was created to serve the needs of everyone.
And when it does, the economy fairs better. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, the great Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman instituted changes that supported the majority, including establishing collective bargaining rights. World War II, paid for by high taxes on the 1 percent, created a massive employment program, after which veterans benefits provided higher education for a generation. The result was lower concentration of wealth at the top and the greatest economic boom in the history of the world.
Then came Republican Ronald Reagan who gave the doctrine of corporate primacy a cute name -- trickle down. America must end his spell of voodoo economics or Romney and the Republicans will continue to stick it to the middle class.
Follow Leo W. Gerard on Twitter: www.twitter.com/uswblogger
It's kind of weird to hear these union guys rail against corporations. Without big corporations - the types that have an advantage over their competition either in terms of economies of scale or in terms of government protection - vampiric unions wouldn't be able to command above market wages. There's a reason why almost no small businesses are union shops.
Small businesses whose ability to compete is stifled and shredded by anticompetitive corporations who can afford to push for legal protections for themselves and laws that skew the playing field in their favour.
"Making this about rich people or big corps is a diversion from the fact that local taxpayers do NOT want to pay for more of these jobs, so they try to get someone else to foot the bill. It is that simple. If you want more police in your town, pay for them yourself."
They can't afford to pay for them themselves; the Corporate Economy is sucking money out of their economies.
To your second question, local taxes pay for police, and fire, etc...not Federal taxes. At one level or another, someone has to pay for the services. The difference is NOT inability to "pay for themselves." The problem is that people always want the other guy to pay so they don't have to. Creating straw men is a great way of avoiding accountability and responsibility. EVERYONE needs to pay. We need tax reform, across the board. But tax reforms would create clarity on how dollars are being spent, and politicians and their special interest groups don't people to know how much is being wasted. Corporations are not the problem...politicians are the problem.
They say they understand, but they don't and with this presidential election nothing will change.......... Nothing.
Any job that can be performed at a desk or a computer can be performed overseas for much less; e.g.:
o computer programmer
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=4ea_1195705444
LiveLeak.com - "30 Days: Outsourcing" (2006) (Part 1/2)
The "star" is Chris Jobin, a programmer whose job was outsourced to India. He traveled to India and stayed for 30 days as an employee of a call center.
o accountant
o architect
o engineer
o radiologist
o car designer
o legal services:
http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/10/0126/outsourcing.html
Outsourcing Firms And Foreign Countries Target More American Service Industries, Especially U.S. Law Firms
In absolutely NO instance should a state be bailed out by the federal government as that is nothing but taxation without representation.
If California (for example) residents want their progressive, wasteful government then so be it. Don't come crying to the states who live within their means when you can't pay your employees.
Federal dollars should NEVER be used to bail out a state. No excuses. If firemen and teachers are so important then those states have failed.
The rest of the nation does pay local and state taxes that are high enough to pay for their own bureaucratic payrolls are being asked to pay for the costs of retaining as many of the bureaucratic union jobs that the local and state governments can afford without raising their own local taxes.
THIS IS JUST NOT FAIR.
US labor costs many many times as much as Foreign Labor according to the DOL website:
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ForeignLabor/ichccpwsuppt01.txt
The additional US payroll tax cost of Extended Unemployment Benefits, National Healthcare Reform, vacations, holidays, sick pay, and social security costs are also added to US company payroll costs and economically preventing the location of new manufacturing jobs into the USA, and/or preventing the keeping of existing US jobs in the USA.
The increasing cost of compliance with existing and future environmental laws is deterring the creation of any new jobs the USA.
The cost of electrical energy that is generated in the USA in compliance with US EPA regulations was at many times the cost for the same amount (kilowatt hour) of electrical energy in most Asian countries and is still about twice the cost of US electricity
50fen/kwh = $0.078666 USD/kwh compared to $0.13-$0.15 USD/kwh in USA
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-11/19/content_12492364.htm
These costs are hindering the US businesses that are economically competing for obtaining manufacturing jobs for US citizens in the USA instead of those businesses having to relocate or create those jobs in/to foreign nations as allowed and economically required by US FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS.
It is all fostered by the government and big business to keep the people from realizing how little say they have in anything.
As long as they can keep us fighting against ourselves over crap that should mean nothing they have thier way with the world!!!
Can this alarming and deplorable trend be reversed? The American voters have to wise up to the situation and figure out how, with the help of elected legislators and politicians who can buck big money. Yes, this is class warfare and the unrich must fight back in self-defense. More transparency in huge political contributions would be a good start.
If you want to get the lowdown and get up to speed, last night Bill Moyer's guests Thomas Frank (boy, he lives up to his name!) and the sharp editors of Mother Jones mag will spell it all out for you. Moyers continues to astonish with his razor-sharp shows all middle class working stiffs should be tuning in to. Acces online (Bill Moyers' &Co.)
I wonder if any set of investors has the guts to challenge the supreme court ruling based on the fact that the money corporations use is in part the invesotrs and the investors do not want their resources used for political non-profits that do not represent their political beliefs.
Just a thought.
- Sadly enough, the answer depends on your party affiliation
"Choose your party well"
The first FREE TRADE AGREEMENT with a third world nation that economically required that US businesses send their US jobs overseas was NAFTA which was signed by President Clinton.
Maybe the US Congress needs to propose legislation to repeal President Clinton's NAFTA, GATT, WTO, MFN trade with China, Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, H-1b visas, and all of his other similar laws.
Maybe the US Congress needs to propose legislation to repeal George W. Bush’s 14 additional FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS (with Jordan, Morocco, and other young democracies of Central America).
Maybe the US Congress needs to propose legislation to repeal President Obama’s multiple new FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS with Vietnam, Brunei, Singapore, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, Chile and Peru and several other Asian and South American nations.
Republicans and Democrats are in favor of FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS to remove US jobs to foreign nations.
Under the US constitutional system, any US citizen or any foreign citizen, foreign manufacturing business, foreign individual or foreign business entity can hire professional lobbyists “to petition the government” and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on wine, food, women, song, corporate jobs/positions for their unemployed children/wives/girlfriends of the congressmen, vacations, cash, prepaid sexual services, and campaign contributions to entice (bribe) as many of our congressmen as required to create whatever legislation that the clients of the “professional” lobbyists want to have created.
The lobbyists must also spend similar amounts on each of the congressmen's multitudes of congressional aides if the lobbyists want whatever legislation their clients desire to be created, because the elected congressmen and senators do not have time to read or study any of the proposed legislation and they just vote however their aids tell then to vote.
Drinking, womanizing, vacationing, power lunches and other similar activities that the lobbyists provide keep most of our elected representatives and senators very busy, and maybe that is why each congressperson needs so many congressional aides to do his legislative job and tell the congressman how to vote on each issue.
There's nothing inherently wrong with Free Trade, and free trade isn't required to produce inequities for workers. For every job that's been eliminated through shipping overseas, 2 have been made redundant through computer technology and automation. It's also ridiculous to suppose that the rest of the world will be content forever to be the Banana Republic to Western Europe and the U.S.
If you want to ensure a fair shake for U.S. workers, then put your shoulders behind international labour practices legislation, and support inflationary policies by the fed and the government. Cheaper dollars means cheaper American labour.
Credit cards and second mortgages gave the illusion of a higher standard of living(as long as home prices kept appreciating)
The middle class were led into a financial game, they were enticed and willingly led by those who never explained the downside risks.
The shadow inventory of future foreclosures is testimony to the ongoing struggle they face.
Neither Presidential candidate will be of any help,the problem is still too big and no convenient solutions are available.