"Big Business Is Doing Fine' -- How Are You Doing?

Foreign policy is clearly well outside candidate Romney's grasp. His principal claim to our votes is his economic prowess. He is standing on sand.

"All for one, and one for all"* has always felt iconic to me, like that other French gift to America, the Statue of Liberty. "One for all" perfectly describes the job we elect our president to do. Alas, "all for one" -- the one per cent of the nation -- defines almost precisely adherents to the doctrines of the Republican Party, many of whom cling unabashedly to massive wealth as some kind of divine right. I remember real Republicans. Young as I was, I understood there was something unbalanced when Senators Charles Percy or Everett Dirksen championed the wealthy establishment. But they did understand the essential give-and-take of politics. They would have acknowledged that those elected to serve the public interest should... serve the public's interest.

Not so today's extremists in the no longer Grand Old Party. Call them neo-Republicans. They're indistinguishable from the scary "Birchers" I grew up with. Truly. These really are the same people who felt free to bully kids collecting pennies for UNICEF -- red faced adults yelling "Commie!" at a little girl (me) standing on the doorstep asking for pennies to help kids in developing nations (rather than the traditional Halloween candy). It's no accident that neo-Republicans look a lot like the John Birch Society. The Koch brothers are bankrolling the neo-Reps. Their father co-founded the John Birch Society. Small wonder that Romney would say, "Russia is our Number One geopolitical foe"? Pure Bircher rhetoric, an antediluvian world view.

Mitt Romney's inextinguishable sense of entitlement has led him to embrace (sometimes) far-right extremism. All Romney's very privileged life, he's been blind to the "one for all" idea. He is the poster boy for Wall Street greed. Romney's life-long, utter tone-deafness to the realities of regular people appears to be his principal connecting point with neo-Republican sneers at "one for all."

It's no surprise that Mitt Romney inhabits America's one percent bubble world. How else can one explain what little we do know about his income or about the tax returns he refuses to release or about his still secret plan to pay off America's debt?

Paul Ryan's nonsensical budget, embraced by Romney, simply reverses an idea core to American citizens: government exists to serve the American people. Corporate psuedo-persons have a totally different idea which they are spending billions to sell: trust us, trickle-down works; and, if that doesn't convince you, corporations are people and we're bigger and meaner than you are... and we're taking over.

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution is very explicit:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The People of the United States created the governmental system of the United States (via the Constitution) to be of, by and for the people (paraphrasing Lincoln at Gettysburg). The current, highly ideological Supreme Court has perverted the Constitution and ignored history in order to create the Frankensteinian fiend of corporate people. Mitt Romney is an almost perfect avatar for this fiction, which he treats as gospel. Last month, in Hopkins, Minnesota, candidate Romney said:

Big business is doing fine in many places, They get the loans they need, they can deal with all the regulation. They know how to find ways to get through the tax code, save money by putting various things in the places where there are low tax havens around the world for their businesses.

"Big business is doing fine." How are you doing?

Big business is doing fine because big business has fixed the game: heads I win, tails you lose. Small and middle-sized businesses are NOT doing fine because big business has fixed the game. Heads they win, tails you don't.

Few of us want to pay taxes. As Romney says, big corporations view it as their duty to pay as few taxes as possible. Courtesy of the Citizens United decision, big corporations can now spend as much money as they want selecting the politicians who will do as instructed and allow big corporations to pass along the tax bill to you and me -- real people, not ersatz corporate people. To add additional insult, many of those same big corporations are living off the taxes real people pay. They get direct subsidies or indirect subsidies, or they over-charge us for services and goods as recidivist hustlers in the defense-industrial-prison-security-financial complex. History provides abundant evidence that Republicans will diligently strive to transfer our money to their gilded coffers.

We (the People) pay taxes because taxes are a part of the deal, part of establishing "a more perfect Union." Big corporations apparently are not interested in "a more perfect Union."

In addition to being dead center of the etiquette of Wall Street, Mr. Romney comes from a tradition which has evolved into a full-frontal prosperity gospel. In "How the Mormons Make Money", BusinessWeek details the tax-exempt Mormon empire of which Romney is such a prominent part.

This all leads me to one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs: "Gotta Serve Somebody." In the song, often-prescient Dylan says that, regardless of who you are, what position you may hold, how much you own, how powerful you may be, you do serve somebody. We all make choices between right and wrong. Whom do we choose to serve?

The neo-Republicans have clearly chosen to serve big corporations, not the authentic American people. There is much more to America than greed. Trickle down economics (a.k.a. "voodoo economics") is not divinely inspired. Check out "Parables of the Not-So-Social-Gospel" for one Jesuit's clever and clear-sighted parody on the corrosive consequences of the Romney/Ryan/neo-Rep's cynical version of "All-for-one."

In "The Financial Cliff We All Saw Coming," BusinessWeek (again) -- hardly a radical rag -- reminds us, in detail, exactly how the national debt skyrocketed under George W. Bush. When Bush-Cheney and their neo-Republicans ran up the federal deficit with tax cuts for the richest, it was common knowledge among Republicans and Democrats that these outrageous gifts to the rich would land us in precisely the financial fix in which we now find ourselves. And that was before ruinously delinquent regulation of Wall Street led to the debacle of the Great Recession. BusinessWeek asserts: "There is nothing we know now that we didn't already know a decade ago ... The fiscal crisis shouldn't come as a surprise: The Bush tax cuts had an expiration date because Congress knew they'd lead to big deficits."

At the Democratic Convention, Bill Clinton neatly paraphrased neo-Republicans' cant, "We left him (President Obama) a total mess, he hasn't cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in." No thanks.

Without "One for All," the prescription is incomplete, unbalanced, unhinged. We owe it to ourselves and to America to be Doing Much Better. Mr. Romney and the neo-Republicans are opposed to that agenda.

# # #

*The phrase was originally associated with Alexander Dumas' novel The Three Musketeers and the Musketeers' "un pour tous, tous pour un."

 

Comments

[Yan Tan Tethera]

03:42 AM on 09/17/2012

The reason the big corporations are able to screw the smaller ones is because they have captured Congress and the regulatory apparatus of the executive branch. Big companies LOVE burdensome regulations to keep out upstart competitors. The way out of this is to dismember the government and bleed it white. Remove the power and money from government, and you will reduce the ability of the big corporations to buy its favor. I'd be in favor of a Constitutional amendment limiting government spending to 10% of GDP except in time of declared war.

[RandomJ]

08:24 PM on 09/16/2012

Yeah, and Mittens wants to give the TOP richest 2% more UNFUNDED and UNNEEDED trickle-down tax CUTS, to the tune of $5 TRILLION dollars, who already own MORE than the BOTTOM 90% COMBINED.

The guy who is hiding HIS tax returns is the guy who is hiding what HE will do with YOUR tax returns...

Reason #231 why Mitt Romney WON'T release his tax returns:
It would confirm he is better off today than he was 4 years ago.

[KenGirard]

05:33 PM on 09/16/2012

In Q3 2002, corporate profits after taxes were $590billion. UE was 5.7%
By Q3 2005, they had doubled to $1.238trillion. UE was 5%
In Q3 2006, corporate profits after taxes were $1.368trillion. UE was 4.4%
In Q3 2007, corporate profits after taxes were $1.284trillion. UE was 4.7%
In Q3 2008, corporate profits after taxes were $1.163trillion. UE was 6.1%
In Q4 2008, corporate profits after taxes were $644billion, lowest point of the recession. UE was 7.3%
In Q3 2009, corporate profits after taxes were $1.232trillion. UE was 9.8%
In Q3 2010, corporate profits after taxes were $1.465trillion. UE was 9.5%
In Q3 2011, corporate profits after taxes were $1.477trillion. UE was 9%
In Q2 2012, corporate profits after taxes were $1.648trillion. UE was 8.2%

So, just how much profit do they need to make before they start hiring again?

[neillevine]

04:39 PM on 09/16/2012

Big business got big by providing a lot of jobs. Obama offers government jobs for his twenty five percent of the economy but is stiff arming the remaining seventy five percent of the country. Previously, politicians offered tax breaks and eventually government revenue grew because the total pie got bigger. Obama has his own facts and figures so he does not like this.

[smarti]

10:04 PM on 09/16/2012

what? Big business is ever on the path of reducing costs which primarily means reducing labor costs. Job "creation" is incidental to the goals of "big business" and is only "created" as necessary to the business process based on expectations on return based on demand and profitability. Big business absolutely does not grow "big" by providing jobs as an end goal to the business alone.

Yours is precisely the woefully mis-informed opinion (the mythical oppression of big business vs. the mythical goals of big business) the Republicans hope to exploit to continue to sell off the nation to big business, what will happen if there does become a Romney presidency and the worst of all possible GOP proposals are put into place and big businesses (or small) *still* are not "creating" jobs (here)? Who will you have to blame then?

[Ligero1]

03:59 PM on 09/16/2012

The reason the economy is where it's at is simple: Big Business did not re-hire all the employees that they fired during the 2008 Economic Meltdown. Why didn't they re-hire all those workers? Because they found that they did not have to! Their productivity did not decline with a smaller work force because they simply SQUEEZED their remaining employees to work harder. This is easy when most of your work force is on salary; all you have to do is tell all the remaining employees to work that much harder and to work MORE HOURS. If any of the remaining employees protested, they were reminded that they are lucky they still had a job, and if they kept squawking, that might not be the case. So despite all the layoffs, these companies saw their productivity either stay the same or amazingly, actually IMPROVE. So why hire back all those fired workers now that the "crisis" is over?

In truth, many of these companies faced no "crisis" at all, yet they used the Bush Economic Collapse as an excuse to lay off workers, especially those with seniority and making good money and getting good benefits. Thus they were able to cut payroll and increase profitability WITHOUT any loss of productivity at all. Why would any of these corporations now go and re-hire all those workers?

This is why this country badly needs a renewed labor movement; unfortunately the GOP has succeeded in making UNIONS a four letter word

[mrpotatohead]

12:24 PM on 09/17/2012

In addition to what you describe, the large businesses have made entry and survival of small business very very difficult.

[joecourage]

02:51 PM on 09/16/2012

Thanks for saying what we've been thinking.

[BicycleBabe]

01:10 PM on 09/16/2012

If I thought for one minute that the current state of affairs with regard to Citizens United, etc., was etched in stone forevermore, I would become quite disheartened. I cannot, however, believe that. We, as a thinking country, have GOT to be smarter than that!

[Act out]

12:38 PM on 09/16/2012

Thank you Paula for a great article.